Golf Vic Vol 60 No 1

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Cartoons: Paul Harvey

by Martin Blake

@martinj_blake

NO, LEISH, WE’RE BETTER THAN THAT

It’s not every day you hold the high moral ground. In my (limited) experience, it’s not something you give up voluntarily. Which is why Marc Leishman is wrong about Presidents Cup crowds in Melbourne later this year. Leishman said after the World Cup of Golf, where he and Cameron Smith were runners-up last year, that he’d like to see Australian crowds treat the Americans playing at the Presidents Cup in November a bit like the way the parochial (and that’s putting it kindly) Yanks treated the International team at Liberty National in 2017. There’s a history here, of course, and I don’t doubt for a minute that it was tough for Leishman and the other Internationals back then. You may remember that Audrey Leishman, Marc’s American wife, drew some attention by blogging about all this afterward: “There were many times last week that I thought about what the kids were seeing,’’ she penned. “The crowds booing for good shots and cheering for missed putts. The drinking at 7am? Screaming ‘Big

Easy’ to [assistant captain] Ernie Els and begging for his autograph and then yelling at his players. Heckling a wife for her beauty and then her husband for his play. I was thankful my boys weren’t there to see the way people were treating their daddy. Their hero. My parents could simply turn the television off.” It’s true that American crowds can be some of the most unfair in all of sports and, quite frankly, are responsible for some of the most banal barracking that blights golf. Gems such as: “In the hole.’’ (Often uttered from beside the tee on a par four hole, with the player plainly not in range). “You da man!’ ’ (That particular one probably starting to peter out into the land of cliché, mercifully so). But it can be much worse. At Liberty National in 2017, as an International player teed off, one patron yelled out: “Get in the water!’’

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