Perspective from the 19^th Hole 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 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.

With attribution, I borrow this blog headline from a great article the Washington Post carried this morning by one of sports great writers of time, Rick Reilly.

He says betters – yes, they are betting on pro golf even as shots are being played – are ruining the sport.

He’s right.

So, he says do what the Masters Golf Tournament does:  Ban cell phones on the course.

Good idea!

I have another:  Ban beer and other hard drinks.

It’s time for those who administer pro golf do something more than think about new tournament schedules as they have been doing recently.

Take action to save the game!

One more idea.  Don’t schedule high-end tournaments to avoid abhorrent fan behavior that was displayed in two recent cases in New York – the U.S. Ryder Cup last year and the U.S. Open this year as Wyndom Clark survived hours of taunts, even on his backswing, to win his second U.S. Open Title.

Without further ado from me, I choose below to run Reilly’s column in total because it is so well-written.

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Pro golf can get ugly. Remember lime-green pants from the ’70s? John Daly’s haircut from the ’90s?

But the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in golf was on Sunday at the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in New York: Bros with a live betting app on their phones, cold White Claws in their hands, tried to can-open his head.

I’ll drop $1,000 on Wyndham Clark to lose and then keep screaming at him until he does.

They heckled him all day, chirped at him, messed with his mind.

“Don’t choke, Wyndham!” they yelled. “The bogeyman’s coming!” they yelled. They rooted for his ball to go into the bunker or the rough or out of bounds. They cheered when his ball trundled off the greens. They yelled at him as he drew the club back. Some of the Jabronis got thrown out for it.

“We were playing 9, which is parallel to 1,” J.T. Poston, who finished tied for fourth, told reporters, and when Clark “hit his drive on the first tee, we could hear fans yelling for it to go in the fescue. That was different.”

“They definitely didn’t want me to win,” Clark admitted afterward. He won anyway.

True, years ago the Aussie Greg Norman and Scotsman Colin Montgomerie got heckled at U.S. Opens. And last year at the Bethpage Ryder Cup on Long Island, idiot-patriot American fans crucified Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy, playing for Europe. No, Clark is an American. Playing on an American course. Trying to win the American Open.

Some people don’t like Clark because he can be abrasive. I get it. What happened at Shinnecock didn’t feel like that. These mooks probably don’t know the first thing about Clark. But he was the leader all week, so the weekend odds on him to win wouldn’t buy a bowl of soup. The thing to do was bet on somebody down the leaderboard — Scottie Scheffler, Sam Burns, Poston himself — and then get on the course and ride Clark until he broke.

An Irish fan living in New York named Desmond McGoldrick posted online about the “horrible behavior” at Shinnecock on Saturday, with an “infestation of young men” who were “betting on players making putts, and when they missed, yelling obscenities at them.”

I’ve been working on a golf book for the past two years, and I can tell you the phone-app wrecking of the sport is getting worse. Jabronis have realized they can’t do anything at an NFL or NBA game to improve their chances of cashing in, but they sure can at a golf tournament, where the traditional cocoon of silence before a shot is just waiting to be trashed.

Remember Bryson DeChambeau at the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst in North Carolina, getting ready to swing, and some moron yells, “Hey, Bryson! I’ve got a hundred bucks on you to shoot over 70.5 today!”

There are countless ways you can bet on golf now, right in the palm of your hand, and right next to the actual athletes competing. You can bet player versus player for the day. You can bet player versus player on that hole. With the PGA’s ShotLink data measuring every shot, you can even bet who will hit it closest to the pin.

At the Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in 2023, former tennis professional Mardy Fish had the lead on NBA star Steph Curry standing on the final tee box. Just as Fish was about to swing, a fan broke the quiet by yelling: “Hey Fish, f— you! You suck.”

Ohh-kay.

Fish reset, took the club back and this time the guy got him at the top of the backswing with a screeching birdcall. Fish’s ball went flying into the trees.

“He said he bet on Steph to win,” Fish recalled later. “And you start thinking about it, and you’re like surprised this stuff doesn’t happen more often with all the betting nowadays.”

Curry did win that day, which means a fan being an absolute swine pays nicely now in golf.

Fans are carrying mini-casinos in their pockets, and they’re itching for action. This slope is already slippery; if something isn’t done, it’s going to turn into a cliff. If you’re a Vegas whale, what’s to keep you from putting a million bucks on Scheffler to win and a few $500-a-day hecklers on the course to torture his opponents?

“It’s going to keep happening in golf with the whole DraftKings and betting live going on,” golfer Jon Rahm said a few years ago. Golfers need to try not to be affected, he said, but the PGA Tour “needs to at some point also protect the players.”

That point has arrived, and there’s a way to do it.

Ban the phones.

The Masters figured it out: Fans are not allowed to bring phones on the grounds. Makes for a heckler-free, bro-free experience. You can still bet before you leave your hotel, but it’s not as fun when you can’t chug, bet, chug on every hole.

“Not possible,” you say. “People have their admission tickets on their phones now.”

Doesn’t seem to hurt the Masters attendance any.

Believe it or not, people still know how to use a printer.

“Okay, so why hasn’t the PGA Tour done anything to try to slow this down?” you ask. “Is it because both DraftKings and FanDuel are ‘Official Betting Operators’ of the PGA Tour? To the point where TV golf coverage now runs on-screen updates of players’ odds to win? Which means they’re in bed with the bookies?”

Bingo. You win a free White Claw.

Someday, a golfer who doesn’t have the titanium guts of Wyndham Clark is going to lose a major because of these fools.

Don’t think so? Bet me.