Golfers need to develop thicker skin
Davis Love III should be glad he never had to deal with Robin Ficker.
Never heard of Ficker? He was the guy who used to stand -- never sit -- just behind the visitor's bench at NBA games in Washington and verbally harrass selected opposing players for four quarters. The man barely stopped to take a full breath.
He was loud, he was obnoxious, and he was a fixture. He was the cost of doing business in the NBA in D.C. And if Ficker ever showed up at a PGA Tour stop, they wouldn't have to worry about Love needing to scan the crowd for minutes at a time trying to figure out who he was. Some voices carry.
Different sports call for different codes. They ask for silence before a serve in tennis, but 50,000 people can be screaming in Mariano Rivera's ear as he tries to fashion the perfect October playoff pitch. Is one athletic feat really more difficult than the other? No, it's just different evolutions of what is accepted as fan etiquette.
And so when Love fell apart (by his own admission) due to a heckler's words during a match-play championship the other day, he reaffirmed a couple of sports' basic truths: 1) Golf has just about the most stringent, keep-your-voice-below-a-whisper fan rules in all the land; and 2) Its heroes thus are the thinnest-skinned laddies you would ever fear to meet.
How did golf get so precious? At what point did the sport disassociate itself from the rest of the sentient world? Quiet on a golf course, that's basic. But silence from a paying crowd? That's not only insane, it's inconceivable.
It's time for golf to reassess its own codes -- which, again and for the hundredth time, the sport is well within its rights to establish in the first place. But if there is no allowance for the encroachment of the great unwashed, then there is no PGA Tour. Or, to put it another way: The fans buy the tickets, the fans are going to have a few things to say about the rules, too.
One obnoxious fan does not a rules makeover engender -- but, look, Davis Love didn't get mugged on the course. He didn't even get heckled on his backswing. A man, presumably a Tiger Woods fan because he was wearing a Woods-logo cap, let out a "Whoop!" after Love missed a par putt on one hole. He began shouting "No Love!" as the golfer addressed his ball on another teebox.
He may not make the Golf Fan Hall of Fame, but, hell, who does? I've seen Woods back off a ball at Pebble Beach because a fan was adjusting his camera bag on his shoulder. I've seen Woods dispatch his caddie (or another assistant) to go after offending photographers. At some point, if you're rich enough and bothered enough, you can pay someone else to be indignant for you.
Still, it was Woods who offered Love the best advice after the incident, which ended with Love searching out the offending fan in the crowd and ordering him removed -- thus becoming one of the few athletes in recent memory to be so open about wanting to get rid of the paying customers. Woods, after all, spends most every minute of every day being stalked in that friendly, not-so-friendly way that fans trail around after the famous.
"If you're a baseball player and you're on the mound, you don't ever want to look up in the stands if somebody is yelling at you, because (then) they know they've got you," Woods said. "You just keep your head down, keep moving along. Of course it annoys you, but you don't ever show that it annoys you."
Presumably, it annoys the right fielder of a visiting team to be harassed by the bleacher bums for nine straight innings, but it comes with the territory. The difference here is that golf, for longer than any sport might reasonably have imagined to do so, has been able to pretend such territory does not actually exist. It has much to do with the traditions of the sport, yes, but at some point it also has to do with the will of the paying fan.
What Davis Love experienced the other day was perhaps an indication that that will is beginning to change. Love declared the match-play incident part of a societal deterioration of good manners and respect, up to and including "not holding the door open for a lady when you're supposed to." Like the start of the Indy 500, maybe?
But perhaps what really is at work here is that we're moving slowly into an era in which golf, brought along in broad popularity recently by the likes of Woods, may be growing more reflective of sports fandom in total, with all of its enthusiasms and its occasional faults, and its once-in-a-while crashing bores. Maybe the insulation around golf is fraying around the edges a bit. Maybe the folks who foot the bill want to watch the entertainment the way they want to watch it. If it's only some crowd noise, a little "Noonan!" now and then, the PGA Tour is going to have a hard time legislating it out of an exchange that makes multimillionaires of so many of its practitioners.
The golfers won't like it, and in other news, been there, done that. Time to hit up the corporate sponsors for some thicker skin -- and then play through it.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com
