This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

About golf, there’s a lot to consider writing today:

1. Reactions to the start of the “exhibition” LIV events
2. Realities of the great competitive environment and result at the Canadian Open last weekend
3. And, owing to an idea from my Golf Week on-line magazine, “top U.S. Open Meltdowns,” it’s possible to remember those bad results.
4. And, what I’ll do later this week, after the Open starts, is to focus on the great competition we have ahead for the next few days – and it will be good to focus on golf, not politics.

Mostly, for today, I’ll pick #3, but not before offering this quote from an article in the Washington Post by long-time sportswriter Rick Reilly.  His comments on the first LIV exhibition overseas are worth considering and I cannot help but repeat them because, (a) they are sanguine, (b) they are written very well, and (c) I agree with them.

So, here is the way Reilly started his story:

“LIV Golf, Saudi Arabia’s effort to sportswash its murderous human rights record by buying off pro golfers with stupid money (Phil Mickelson: reportedly $200 million), is working.

“The inaugural event of this LIV and Let Die Tour, with a massive $25 million total purse, finished Saturday at the Centurion Club north of London.  LIV has already signed up nine majors’ winners, with more big-name defectors to come.

“These LIV golfers know the Saudis butchered Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.  They know the Saudis jail dissenters, criminalize homosexuality and oppress women.  And in response, the players have sent a message loud and clear:  We don’t care. We want bigger jets.

“It’s hilarious to hear Mickelson and the others try to justify working for blood money.  Well, sure, he knows the Saudis are “scary mother——s,” as he told his biographer, Alan Shipnuck.  But he also says:  “I’ve also seen the good that the game of golf has done through history.”

“Right.  Nothing relieves the downtrodden people of a despotic nation like a well-struck 6-iron.  Remember when Kim Jong Il shot 34 one day and the North Korean people suddenly weren’t starving?  Yeah, neither do I.”

So, with that, on to the U.S. Open meltdowns, which I mention now, though my thoughts, as of Thursday, will trend what promises to be another great competition.

Anyone who has followed golf for a few years probably knows the meltdown Golf Week would cite as the most significant one.  Yes.  It was Mickelson’s debacle at Winged Foot in New York in 2006.

“Gunning for his third consecutive major championship and his first U.S. Open win, Mickelson had the gift box wrapped in 2006.  All he needed was to tie the bow.  Mickelson shared the third-round lead and arrived at the par-four 72nd hole at Winged Foot’s vaunted West course one shot clear of the field.  A par would win and a bogey would tie.

“He made neither.  Having only found two fairways all day, Mickelson nonetheless hit driver—and sliced it way left, in the vicinity of a hospitality tent.  Eschewing the safe chip back into the fairway, he tried to slice a 3-iron onto the green, but his effort plunked a tree and dropped 25 yards in front of him.

“His third shot plugged in a greenside bunker.  He blasted out—and found the rough.  A fifth shot left him 10 feet from the cup, from where he putted in for double bogey, handing Geoff Ogilvy a one-shot win.  Mickelson summed up his nightmarish sequence succinctly and accurately:  ‘I am such an idiot.’”

Moving on, here’s the quick list of other major meltdowns in the Open, each of which I remember:

• Retief Goosen survives a putting debacle at Southern Hills (2001)
• D.J. Johnson soars to a bloated 82 in a Pebble Beach collapse (2010)
• Colin Montgomery’s miscue costs him a major (2006)
• “Two-Chip” T.C. Chen goes from record-breaker to scorecard-wrecker (1985)
• Arnold Palmer makes history—of the wrong kind (1966)
• Sam Snead self-immolates with a final-hole snowman (1939)

It’s a perverse fact about golf that some who watch hope for meltdowns.  I am not one of those, I say with appropriate modesty.

I hope for great golf and, when someone wins, I hope they do so “by winning,” not “by someone losing.”

So, starting Thursday, I’ll be watching TV to see if “someone wins.”

Should be a great experience.

And, I also hope it will have the same kind of great golf as occurred in the Canadian Open last week.  There, Rory McElroy won over Tony Finau and Justin Thomas.  All were in the final threesome and each produced incredible shots.

At one point, Thomas, one of my favorite golfers, produced six birdies in a row.  Yes.  Six! 

Then, he didn’t play the last two holes well.  McElroy did.  So did Finau.  Great golf!