And AWAAAAYYYY we goooo....

U.S. Open underway....

Having trouble reconciling my love for the game with my tediously pissy America-hating politics.

Herewith, my picks:

1 Emma Goldman - HUGE off the tee
2 Ernesto "Che" Guevara - high strung, but when he
gets hot, look out!
3 Hugo Chavez - consummate grinder, always in the hunt
4 Noam Chomsky - course management second to none
5 Paul Wellstone - can work it either way, a must for
this course

Regarding golf and politics: as the only patron of Peninsula Golf Resort to have an antiwar bumper sticker on my vehicles, I've felt a little self-conscious parking amongst the impeccably shined up Ram 2500 4x4s (a lot of truck for hauling your golf clubs to the course), most of which ornamented with those little WWJD fish and, typically, two to four magnetic ribbons expressing one jingoistic sentiment or another.

But nary a comment has been made, and my tires have never been slashed or deflated. And! This weekend I saw an anti-Bush sticker (the one that spoofs "W The President" with "F the President"). This may be an indication that the tipping point has been reached. I dunno.

Finally, and I'll shut up about golf, I did rather enjoy this refreshing take on the whingey world of touring golf pros. It's from Salon. You know the drill. Watch the little movie first.

Two choice paragraphs for those who are too lazy to do even that:

Touring pros, dour and unsmiling as they walk the course, rarely kick back to express outward enjoyment of their play. P.G. Wodehouse analyzed the breed well: "I have sometimes wondered if we of the canaille don't get more pleasure out of [the game] than the top-notchers. For an untouchable like myself, two perfect drives in a round would wipe out all memory of sliced approach shots and foozled putts, whereas if Jack Nicklaus does a sixty-four he goes home and thinks morosely that had he not missed that eagle on the seventh he would have had a sixty-three."
...
A low-decibel peep is enough to get a pro glaring into the throngs behind the ropes. Nastiness may result. Woods, as tightly wound as his Nike golf balls, is so touchy about noise that his caddy-manservant, Steve Williams, has taken crowd control to new depths: snatching or kicking cameras out of photographers' hands, even before his master is over the ball. As in U.S. foreign policy, preemptive strikes are in order.

In addition to silence, motionlessness in the gallery is required. Caddies routinely yell at spectators to stand still while their man is about to putt, lest his sightline be ruined by a human being's muscle twitch 50 yards away. Pros who flub shots often gaze pointedly at spectators with accusatory frowns: "See what you made me do?"