Designated Drivers
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay that usually has nothing to do with the cartoon above, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.—————————————————————————
Thanks for dropping by, Jazz Pickles. Today I’m going to talk about golf and it won’t be a fluff piece, so if you’re a big fan of this activity some call a “sport” and you cry easily, you may want to skip this post.
Let’s start with the topic of sports in general. Many creative or intellectual types think of sports as stupid and ignore all of them outright. I’m not in that camp but I’m not above being able to poke fun at we sports fans.
For instance, there’s a hilarious mockumentary series on Netflix called Cunk on Earth which pretends to be a show about the history of civilization as you might see on the History Channel. In the first episode, the host says that after the ancient Greeks invented theater, they invented theater for stupid people called, “sports.” I laughed out loud at that.
But as I write this, I’m watching Wimbledon. For you Greek intellectual types, that’s a tennis tournament that’s played on Buckingham Palace’s front lawn, I guess. Otherwise, they’d probably play on a hardcourt and be able to keep from sliding around like kids in their socks on a hardwood floor. But it’s fun to watch on grass, too, and that’s the thing about sports. If you enjoy watching people do things that fewer than 1% of us can do, you can enjoy watching professional tennis even if you’ve never played. Watching gifted athletes do amazing things with their bodies can be like enjoying watching dance even though you have no sense of rhythm and terrible coordination. I think this is true of most sports, but I would not include golf in that group.
Unless you’re some kind of sports diagnostic genius, I doubt you could tell the difference between the swing of an average golfer and that of a tournament champion. Whether it's a tee-off or a ten-foot putt, every player looks exactly alike on every shot so there is no beautiful movement of the body to admire. The only visible difference between one player and the next, aside from the color of their clothing, is where the ball lands. And when everyone in a tournament is a pro, they all land in pretty much the same vicinity.
You can pray to break the monotony by hoping someone’s shot ricochets off a tree or clocks someone in the gallery on the head, but rooting for that is like rooting for a crash in NASCAR. (Another activity I do not consider a “sport.” Driving in circles is something Shriners do in a parade, not athletes. Sure, driving a car that fast for that long is skilled, physically taxing work but so is eight hours of brain surgery and that’s not a sport.)
The whole setup of golf is a recipe for boredom. When watching it, you’re not going to spontaneously shout, “Wow! How did he make that shot while falling backward?!” For this reason, I advocate for a slightly different game I would call “adversarial golf.” Only two players compete against each other at a time and the one not shooting is allowed to wave, hassle, or block the player shooting, as long as they don’t physically foul them, as in basketball. This small rule change would separate the players who can make a good shot after two minutes of concentration and practice swings in front of a reverently silent audience with those who can hit the green while their opponent is waving his arms and jumping in the air in front of him.
Now, to be honest, I still probably wouldn’t watch that but at least I could understand why others do.
Time now to enjoy Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week without having to watch him draw them in real-time…
Her name was later changed to Highmaintenancelocks.
At least she’s not asking you when you’re going to have pandas.
How else are you supposed to move a three-quarter-ton tractor? Oh…
I just wish it acted glad to see me when I got home.
What time are we expecting the cows to come home?
We’ve all learned in recent years that the only real question is how much money and power does he have?
We hope you’ve enjoyed these past few minutes spent with us. If you like what we do and want to help us keep our site free of ads and paywalls, please consider doing so via one of the links below. We’ll be as grateful as the winner of the first professional adversarial golf championship.
Until next week, keep your elbow straight and your head down. Unless you’re playing a sport of some kind.
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