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You won’t find a bigger — and more entertaining — psychological and verbal feud sizzling across the sports world right now than the one between PGA golfers, Brooksie Koepka and Bryson DeChamboz.
The firestorm erupted on Sunday when DeChamboz made some wise-crack while Koepka explained to a reporter how he played during the PGA. Today the two lovebirds unleashed verbal punches on Twitter at each other’s cheekbones for all the world to see and treasure and wonder about.
But what’s really going on here? Lots of people don’t like each other. It’s a widespread sociological phenomenon that’s been festering since the fracases between Cain and Abel. But why do these two guys irk each other so much?
Let’s start with this: they’re in each other’s way. They both want to be the number one golfer in the world and there’s no one or nothing that’s going to stop them from pursuing that like zealots. They want the same thing yet only one person can have it.
Importantly, neither of them is that top PGA guy right now. So they’re both agitated about falling short of their ideal situation. That’s the subtext and underlying reason why both guys aren’t pleased.
When chasing the same prize, knowing only one of you can win, fierce competitors, who tend to have a shallow and insecure streak, often do everything they can to shake any potential rivals off their games. That’s what this trash talk comes down to.
They’re looking for any edge that they believe will help them become the world’s number PGA one golfer. If seizing that advantage means acting immature and being viewed as a jerk, they’re willing to pay that price. To be the best at what you do, they believe you have to be willing to upset people, turn them off, blow them off, not care about them, belittle them, whatever. If you’re in their path to glory, you’re roadkill to them. Not saying I believe you have to be this way to be top dog, but some people do.
Both these guys want to make the other squirrel guts on Nowhere Avenue so they will have slain one more guy. No more need to trample on that has been to get to the zenith of the golf kingdom. So there’s selfishness and questionable ambition and classlessness and jealousy and insecurity and Darwinism at play here. In other words, all that’s bad about humans.
But there’s more to it than just this avalanche of me-first antics. There’s a philosophical contrast going on of the deepest kind about values and how a person should go about life and striving to be the best.
Boz believes in taking a different path to the top than Brooksie. For him, golf is a 400-level physics class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wants to outthink everybody else through intellectual strategy, telescopes, machine learning, and virtual reality videos littering his practice range area.
Armed with all these tools, he believes he can become the best. Every moment of his day is spent obsessing on what protein nutrition manual he can read or engineering club-velocity concept he can apply to make his swing faster than everybody else’s.
Then there’s Brooks. He loves to play the role of the cool raw talent who doesn’t even like to play golf that much and doesn’t believe that practicing all the time makes anyone any better. In his view, golf junkies such as Boz are fools and idiots and dolts.
They’re wasting their lives away overthinking and over practicing golf when it really comes down to innate natural talent, taking home the trophy, and then going to the Bahamas with your girlfriend. Either you have it, as Brooksie insists he does, or you don’t. He doesn’t care one iota about the have nots.
Nothing irks Boz more than a guy who thinks this way – completely the opposite of him. Everything Boz stands for and believes in gets dismissed as folly by Brooksie. I don’t know about you but if I’ve ever taken a stand in life and committed whole-heartedly to something I believed in and someone went around telling me I was a fool and wasting my time, I didn’t dig that person a whole lot.
Tell a guy he has no talent and you hurt him. Tell a guy his entire value system is absurd and you’ve sliced a pitchfork through his aorta.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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Right on. Two of the biggest assholes in golf. Give me Cantlay. Theegala. Gooch. Schauffele. Hoge. . Matsuyama. Homa. Na. Real golfers. No prima Donna’s.