Golf goes on without Tiger ... let me count the ways

There have always been young guns in golf, celebrating the perks of extreme youth and outlandish talent. 
 

It’s not hard to imagine the young Arnold Palmer and Champagne Tony Lema and Lee Trevino and Ernie Els (in a ragged chronology) partying well and hard and storming the gates of The Willard, a stone’s throw from the White House.

But did Red Smith and Herbert Warren Wind tell the tales? Dan Jenkins did, some, and it’s easy to imagine him right in among them.

 I can attest that Jenkins, born in 1929, tweets now … and who could have dreamed such a sentence would exist?

But it was a little different then.

There were newspapers, and magazines, hard copies that you could spread out on the table and turn pages by hand. In 1964, when the first U.S. Open was played at Congressional in Bethesda, Md., in suburban D.C., sportswriters worked on manual typewriters.

And it was journalism, real journalism, but what a guy wrote about (and they were all guys then) was all between the ropes.

In ’64, a personal computer existed maybe in science fiction. Cell phones? Beam me up, Scotty. Laptops, USB ports, digital cameras, digital anything … not part of the culture.

Three TV networks, only one of which covered golf at a time … no ESPN, no Golf Channel.

By 1997, when Els won the Open at Congressional, the phrase “social network” had not entered the language. The word “blog” had not been invented. Twitter? Uh, what? “Facebook” was just another word for a yearbook that lined up mug shots in rows.

This is NOT a lament for the old days. I tweet, I blog, I “friend,” and I push my work on the people in my social network.

Come on. How cool is this?

I can go online and see a video of Ben Crane, Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler and Hunter Mahan cavorting in ways another generation would not have been able to fathom (find it under "Oh Oh Oh" on YouTube; I'm using the technology -- I didn't say I'd mastered it).

  

Tour rookie Andres Gonzales, playing in his first U.S. Open this week, has a sizable band of followers based more on his native wit than his golf game. Gonzo's Amigos, his fan club, is a brand new Twitter account.

The kids aren’t cooler these days … wouldn’t you have killed to have hit the streets with a young Arnie when he’d had a few pops? There are just more ways to see them, to hear them, to know them, and they are embracing it all in unprecedented ways.

The down side, for a player, is there’s no hiding. Ask Tiger Woods. Did serial adultery not exist on the Tour in 1964? Of course it did. Red Smith wasn’t interested, or didn’t write like it.

Never in golf history has the absence of a player from the U.S. Open been squinted at quite so thoroughly as the missing Tiger.

It’s all right. The kids are all right. The game’s all right.

And we have so many ways to confirm it for ourselves.