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© St. Petersburg Times
published April 13, 2002

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Something must be done. Now. The situation is desperate.

Write your congressman. Schedule a telethon. Build a better ball. Start a petition. Tax the whales. For goodness' sake, sue somebody. This is important.

America, for some reason or the other, has forgotten how to play golf.

It happened before we realized it. One night this was the drivingest, puttingest nation under the sun, and the next morning we didn't remember which end of the 7-iron to hold. We have become a nation of shankers, of yippers, of slicers, of dippers.

For instance, have you seen the leaderboard at Augusta National, where people are shocked to see they are playing this year's Stuttgart Open? It looks like the lunch counter at the United Nations. There are golfers from Fiji and Spain, from Ireland and South Africa, from Argentina and Denmark. The highest ranking American is Phil Mickelson and, let's be honest, there is a movement afoot to deport even him.

Vijay, meet Padraig.

Retief, say hello to Sergio.

Angel, do you know Thomas?

And does everyone know all the words to We Are the World?

Hey, we all knew Arnold Palmer was leaving the Masters. We just didn't know the rest of the Americans were going with him.

There are, of course, two ways to look at this. The first is to applaud it and say it's just grand. Small world, short putt, that sort of thing. We all eat at the International House of Pancakes, don't we? Four of the seven guys on top of the leaderboard are in the top 12 of the World Rankings. They don't play with wooden sticks and rocks.

The other way, of course, is to shake our heads sadly and wonder what happened.

And why can't our pampered rich kids beat their pampered rich kids?

Sigh. You knew this was going to happen. Once the government started pouring additional funds into improving our half-pipe snowboarding team, our beach volleyball team and our lower-long-distance-collect-calling research, something had to suffer.

This is what happens. Vijay Singh hammers the field, followed by the entire European Ryder Cup team in second place through seventh. It was like watching the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, only in this version everyone was holding putters.

Don't get me wrong. International players win the Masters all the time. In the past 22 years it has been done a dozen times. But have Americans ever been rare on the leaderboard? Have we become England watching other countries win our Wimbledon all of the sudden?

Something needs to be done. For one thing, we could use a lot more millionaires. We could use more little tykes getting Big Berthas for their birthdays. We could use a society that was a little longer, and a little straighter, and putted just a little better.

Maybe we should send kids to the rain forests of Borneo, for instance, instead of camp. That's where Singh, a native of Fiji, refined his game and, presumably, learned to play in the rain. It makes you wonder. When they did the facelift on Augusta National in the past year, did they somehow make it look more like Fiji?

What else do you do with rain besides Singh in it? Vijay, the 2000 Masters winner, punked the back nine Friday. He shot 30 coming in, suggesting that if the organizers here wanted to put a little more muscle into the course they were going to need to mix steroids with the fertilizer.

Maybe we should scour the accounting classes of our universities. That's where Ireland came across Padraig Harrington, who is threatening to put the green into the green jacket.

Maybe we should check out every fresh-faced kid we can find in case there is another Sergio Garcia out there. Not that Garcia doesn't appear to be a simply wonderful kid himself. He was asked about Palmer's exit, and he marveled at the cheers he heard. "I was getting, what do you call it, chicken pops?"

No, Sergio, we call it goose bumps. But maybe we should check out Spanish breakfast cereals, too, just to see if there is something called Chicken Pops.

Maybe we should send them to Denmark, where they could resist the urge to join the great athletes of the badminton tour, the way Thomas Bjorn did, to become a great player.

Maybe we should send them to South Africa, where perhaps they will be hit by lightning like Retief Goosen.

The point is, we have to do something. The world is running up the score on us.

You wonder how this is going over in the deep, deep offices of the Augusta National bosses who, frankly, lead the world in stodge. For years they considered anyone from as far away as South Carolina to be foreign and now, just like that, Hootie Johnson needs an interpreter. He has a whole mess of you're-no-longer-invited letters to write.

In the meantime, there are a few phrases you might want to learn:

Die Azalee, for instance, means azalea in German.

El Amen Corner means Amen Corner in Spanish.

Gron kavajen means green jacket in Swedish.

And double bogey? Sadly, Americans know exactly what that means.

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