A punctured leg is not an expectation when playing golf. But that’s what happened to one unfortunate golfer when a brawl broke out January 27, 2012 at the Golf Club at the Eagle Mountain Lake Resort in Tarrant County, Texas. A threesome, thinking the foursome in front was playing too slow, asked the course marshal to allow them to play through.But the foursome didn’t take kindly to the request and a fracas broke out. 48-year old Clay Carpenter, a member of the threesome was stabbed in the leg with a broken golf shaft, which punctured his femoral artery. He nearly bled to death.
The cops are investigating but Carpenter says the incident left him incapacitated, telling the Star-Telegram newspaper he’ll “have to use a brace on [t]his right leg forever.”
Golden but silent civility.
A few days ago, political commentator Kathleen Parker wrote what seemed a self-evident exercise in obviousness, waxing familiarly on civility-as-manners, The Golden Rule, and the now commonplace F-bomb. Still, she did write that “Civility is golden.”
Maybe Parker’s doing what Carl Herman tries do with his “hobby” of “waking people from the tranquilized obviousness of human relations.”
Parker says civility is in the eye of the beholder, which unhelpfully means we’re left to our own devices. Civility must come “from within, each according to his own conscience.” If we’re less mannerly today, then we only have ourselves to blame.
But Parker, who is married to a lawyer, adds – - – don’t constrain free speech. “Better that incivility be revealed in the light of day.” Except that inconsistently, she recommends the media “reward the coarsest among us with scant attention.”
Slobs on the fairways.
Like airplane travel, there was a time when the game of golf was only for those elite enough to have the time or rich enough to pay for it. But with deregulation, competition and lower prices, air travel became just a Greyhound Bus in the sky. And golf got so overbuilt it leveled away from“snobs to slobs.“ A buddy jokes that at his “home course,” it’s cut-off jeans, tee shirts, Joe Six-Pack, and occasionally, a drunken fight on the back nine.
So much for “the gentleman’s game.”
Like putting lipstick on the pig of lawyer civility, proper etiquette seems more pretext than purpose, more myth than means. And someone named M.I.A. flips us the bird during the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show.
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Credits: Broken golf club, By Curt via Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution at Flickr;Vincent Willem van Gogh 022.jpg, The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
