Credit my buddy Jay Flemma for the quote of the week in trying to separate Tiger Woods from golf.
At the end of the day, Woods is just a man, but golf is an institution.
I couldn’t agree more. Golf will survive no matter what happens to Tiger Woods or any famous individual in the world of golf. The game, the institution, will draw me back to the course every time despite how poorly I may have played or dejected I may have been the previous round.
For years HOG has been a one golf geek show. A couple of years ago I had two additional contributors. One was a golf fitness guy and the other was a lady on the Futures Tour trying to make it to the LPGA. The lady written a few posts which turned out to be plain copy and pastes from her own blog. She wanted me to offer her autograph as prizes for site contests. At that point I checked out her professional record, and she’d won a grand total of $668.00. I won more than that on $2 nassaus against my hacker friends last year. The fitness guy’s posts were decent, but mainly I was being used to drive traffic to his site so he could sell his products. I canned ’em both and that experience soured my thoughts on having other writers for a while.
Fast forward to 2009. My backlog of reviews to write is insane. I’ve got about 20 books to read and review. At two books a year, I’m booked for the next 10 years plus. I’ve got about 100 different golf gadgets in my queue, a dozen golf clubs and at least six boxes of golf balls from various companies. And somehow I got on the barbeque sauce mailing list. In my kitchen cupboard I have over 21 bottles of barbecue sauce waiting to be consumed and evaluated. Yeah I get it, golf and BBQ sauce.. WTF?
Introducing 4Checker, a.k.a. Golfer In Kilt
Over at The Golf Space I’ve gotten to be pals with Stefan/4Checker/Golfer In Kilt. He’s a mid handicap player from Texas who has a passion for golf and is very active on the site. He has written a few nice pieces as a contributor at The Golf Space and is a faster reader than I. So I’ve now added him as a HOG contributor to help with the book review load, and the task of evaluating gear or items which would be more suitable to a mid handicap range. Being a 1 handi myself, I really am not the right guy to evaluate game improvement clubs. Most of them I’d just hit to the left!
4Checker’s first HOG piece is already posted before this introduction. It is a book review on the book Golf On The Edge. Check it out and give him a warm HOG welcome!