i just knew I would catch it over Snead. His problems with image were that Hogan was there post WWII and he blew a US open on, what was it?, the last hole with bad putting. In fact he had a sort of a name as a bad putter by PGA tour standards. He couldn’t have been too bad but that was the story.
One amazing thing about Snead was his staying power. He was a top-notch golfer in four decades and shot his age or better so many times he lost count. He not only shot his age he massacred it shooting a 60 when he was 71 and a 78 at age 83.
I guess I wouldn’t want the travel, the limelight. The “can’t pick my nose on the 18th hole because the TV cameras are going to catch me.” The "which really nice hotel bed will be “not like mine” this week (though I understand a lot of those guys rent houses). Sure Tiger or Phil’s money would be nice (and Phil seems like a nice guy - I would find Tiger’s moods difficult to tolerate). Plus, the groupies would be threating, Brainiac4 doesn’t have many groupies as a Senior Manager at a Fortune 100.
But at Zach Johnson’s former level, its a grind. His wife probably doesn’t make it to most touraments because of the additional travel costs (and the baby). He’s away from home as much or more than a long haul truck driver.
And, while playing golf is fun - I’m not sure it would still be fun if I were playing in 45 degrees, rain and wind off the ocean at Pebble Beach for money - particularly if I was positioned in the tour at the “may not get a card next year” level of winnings. The nice thing about me playing golf is when its too hot, too cold, too wet, my wrists hurt or my back hurts, I don’t have to golf.
(Football might not be bad - to be a football wife - assuming the football player was a good guy of course - short season, half of it at home. The injuries would be tough. And there would still be the groupies. The baseball/basketball/hockey season is long - but at least half of it is at home. Golfers don’t get the luxury of playing near home often - and the season is nearly endless.)
To the extent that anyone believes God favors him over anyone else, that person is arrogant.
I have no idea. You’ll have to ask God. I assure you it happened, though.
And yet, he chose to help a guy win a golf tournament, and to let the infants die.
I never said that anyone’s faith was stupid. Stop putting words in my mouth.
He said Jesus was looking after him on the golf course. Is that not asserting that he was on Zach’s side? Did Johnson not win it? Is that not the reason he even made the comment?
Clearly I disagree. He said Jesus was with him. Why Jesus would give any thought at all as to who wins a golf tournament is beyond me, and extremely insulting to all the people who went without his oversight. You now, the losers. And the people who died from hunger. Or were slaughtered by their countrymen. Or who suffered in countless other ways, all the while not feeling Jesus’ presence at all.
I am not intolerant of Zach Johnson. I am disgusted by his arrogance. Any athlete who thanks God for his win is an arrogant fool in my book, regardless of how deep his faith is. It is not his faith I take issue with, it is his elevation of himself to the status of one who deserves special attention from God.
But isn’t it just another kind of arrogance to presume someone else’s motive and mindset based on nothing more than our own? Many people of faith will thank God whether or not they win.
I presume you mean that any time any infant dies, it reflects a decision by God not to intervene, thereby making it illogical that God chose to intervene in favor of some other, less dramatically important issue. This is a logically invalid argument. It assumes that the death of an infant is always, per se, an unfortunate event. It also assumes that the meaning of what Mr. Johnson said was that Jesus was actually doing something to help him win the tournament. Neither statement is necessarily true. It is impossible to judge how “bad” a death is in the case of any person, even an infant, because you cannot know what the lack of death would have brought (see, as an example of this important philosophical point, the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”). And just because Jesus is looking over someone, offering moral support or propping him up with extra courage does not mean the same thing as Jesus intervened to make Zach Johnson win the tournament.
Even if this is true, so what? It is arrogant to presume to know what the purpose is in anything an omnipotent, omniscient God does. So the arrogant person is the person asserting that there is something wrong with this case.
You said, “To assert that he even cares about a sporting event is beyond stupid.” He asserts this because of his faith. It is his belief that God, more specifically God as Jesus, cares about how Zach Johnson does in life. Thus, you are indeed asserting that his faith is “stupid.” Actually, you asserted his faith is “beyond stupid,” whatever that means.
Perhaps you could explain your antipathy towards those who believe that God is willing to treat them specially? Do you really consider the entire Jewish faith “arrogant?” How about those that practice Islam (which also involves an assumption that those who practice the faith are treated better than those who do not)? Or, here is a better idea: Take the debate about what God does or does not do in the way of intervening in people’s lives to Great Debates where it belongs, and leave the issue of Zach Johnson and the Masters (sans debate about God’s motives) here in the Cafe. :dubious:
Maybe. Of course, “whatsoever you do to the least of these” and all that. And let me make clear that I don’t think you are arrogant. (And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t express it here.) I’m just saying that there are other less sinister ways of looking at all this, and there was nothing about the man’s character, to me anyway, to suggest any sort of nefarious motive. I found him to be humble and honestly quite, well… sweet.
You presume wrongly. If God chooses to let an infant die a particularly horrible death, all the while intervening in the results of a sporting event; an event which, by the way is way heavy on millionaires, then such a God is unworthy of anyone’s worship.
I presume nothing about his purpose, only his actions.
I thought you meant “his faith” was Christianity. However, if you mean “his faith” is “how he manifests his belief” then I am still not maligning his faith, only one aspect of it. Unless you contend that the totality of his faith can be summed up as “Jesus walks beside me when I play at the Masters.” Do you?
It means that, taking stupid as a benchmark, this has moved to the other side. In other words, if some things can be more or less stupid, all the way up to stupid, this has moved beyond that.
I am not sure that “antipathy” is the right word. “Disdain” might be closer to the mark. However, when I consider the scope of the universe as we understand it, and the truly staggering amount of suffering that goes on in this infinitessimally tiny part of it, I find the idea that He Who Created It All gives two shits about who wins a sporting event to be arrogant and stupid.
Asked and answered, but I’ll do it again. If believing themselves to be God’s favorites constitutes the entirety of Jewish faith, the yes, the entire faith is arrogant. Is it so constituted?
Had you not responded, and continued to respond, the matter would have died. Clean up thine own house, and whatall, yaknow?
The debate is not about God’s motives, at least on my part, but about any human presuming to know God’s motives. It is hard to believe that you still do not grasp that. :dubious:
You, sir, choose to assert that a belief is “stupid” because it presumes to know something. Your assertion is based upon a belief on your own part that God wanting to do A instead of B is somehow “wrong.” This means you are asserting a belief that you know what it is a “god” should or should not be doing, and that any belief that is contrary to your own is “stupid” and makes a person “arrogant.” That, it seems to me, is the hight of arrogance in and of itself. You arrogate to yourself the judgment of what God should or should not be doing.
I’m not going to debate this further; you are obviously quite set in your ways, and your arrogant opinions are obvious to all, nor are you likely to change them even if shown that they are, indeed, arrogant. I’ll simply ignore your rants in the future, which will probably make you quite happy.
You persist in asserting that I am concerned with God’s motives, while having been shown time and time again that such is not the case. I am beginning to be suspicious of your motives, quite frankly, based on this continual mischaracterization of my position.
Again, and for the third time, not “any belief.” One specific belief. About what a human thinks, not what a *god should or should not be doing *
For any God to be comprehensible to me, he would not concern himself with the fortunes of sportsmen, while turning a blind eye to the torture of infants.
To borrow a page from your playbook, anyone who disagrees with you is ranting? Piffle.
Actually, looking at wins is the ONLY way to judge how accomplished a golfer is. This is the whole damn point to the debate, one that has been going on since the mid-70’s, by which time a professional golfer could live a comfortable life through managing top-20 results on a regular basis without actually winning anything. Yes, such a golfer is, by definition playing well. But such a golfer is not very accomplished, because the whole point to competition should be to win, not just to do well. Suppose that you were a baseball team which regularly managed to finish in second place in your division, year after year after year, but never managed to make the playoffs? We concede that the team is playing good baseball, but would we consider the team “very good?” No, bluntly speaking.
The Vardon trophy isn’t necessarily indicative of great golf, just steadily good golf. For one thing, the minimum number of rounds can eliminate golfers who aren’t golfing regularly on tour (Nicklaus almost always failed to win the Vardon for this reason alone; by comparison, Billy Casper won the thing like 6 times in the 60’s). But in the case of Furyk, 2006 was a pretty good year for him. However, one year does not a superstar make. I guess we can say about Furyk that he plays very good golf (after all, he IS among the top golfers in the world, which puts him in like the 99.99999th percentile ), but that when compared to such golfers, he has yet to prove that he is among their elite.
It’s that last bit that always hangs on his name, similar to Watson failing to ever win the PGA Championship, or Trevino’s failure at the Masters (about which he was so petulant he at times refused to go to it). The silly part about this is that so few players can claim a lifetime slam, yet there are several who have a significant number of major championships won. Faldo falls into this group, IIRC, with 6 majors, but no US Open or PGA chamionship; was he a very good golfer? Or just someone who capitalized on a couple different types of venue?
Snead, as I recall, finished tied for third at the age of 62!! in the 1974 PGA Championship. No other golfer has a comparable result. Just another of Slammin’ Sammy’s great results.
), but that when compared to such golfers, he has yet to prove that he is among their elite.