June 3, 2011

Golf Summit

From the Washington Post:
After months of public anticipation [really?], President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) have settled on a date to play golf together: Saturday, June 18.... 
Boehner is widely considered the much better player, having started playing when he was in his 20s. Later in life, as a successful businessman, he joined Wetherington Golf and Country Club outside Cincinnati. Obama didn’t really become a regular player until he became president, when he started using golf outings to maintain a level of normalcy to escape the intense life inside the presidential bubble. Of late, however, Obama has been improving his game as Boehner’s has deteriorated. 
According to Golf Digest, Obama is now a 17-handicap. That means that he usually shoots about a 90 on a course with an overall par of 72.

Not really. Handicaps are calculated, or at least they were 17 years ago when I wrote an article for Golf magazine on them, using only the better half of your last 20 rounds. And the handicap makes up only a majority of the gap (85%?) -- the idea is that the lower handicap golfer should win the majority of bets (because he's better), but at least it should be interesting. 

If somebody lists their handicap without a decimal point, they probably don't maintain an actual handicap. 
Boehner’s handicap has drifted up from about 5 or 6, before he became the GOP leader in 2007, to an 8.5, according to an official handicap site. Boehner has not broken 80 at his home course, Wetherington, since last May — at which point his campaign for Republicans to win the majority in the November midterms shifted into high gear.

On the other hand, the Christian Science Monitor reported in January that Boehner "hit the links some 120 times last year."

That's a lot. Considering that the guy lives in Washington and Ohio, that means about four months of the year are too cold for golf, and it rains a lot the rest of the year, so he must have been playing golf over half the days when the weather is reasonable. I'm glad he's got a job that's not too demanding.

Guys always tell you that you should play golf to become rich and powerful, but my sneaking suspicion is that a lot of guys become rich and powerful in order to play more golf.

50 comments:

Anonymous said...

HAPPY GILMORE time.

Anonymous said...

Boehner has always had a reputation for wanting to take it easy. Joe Scarborough called John Boehner “not a hard worker” and “lazy” a few months back.

eh said...

Nero fiddling etc etc.

OT

NYT: As Catholic Schools Close in Major Cities, the Need Only Grows

...the continuing contraction of Roman Catholic education in the urban settings where it has been most needed....To grasp what is being lost, one needed only to look through the roster in the graduation program for Rice. With a student body that is 98 percent black or Hispanic, with 80 percent of its students requiring financial aid, virtually every graduating senior was bound for college: Penn, Cincinnati, Holy Cross, Fairfield, Iona. Four of the Rice men had received scholarships in excess of $150,000.

(I wonder if the part about 80% of the students not being able to pay had something to do with the school having to close? Never mind.)

An article that I have some sympathy for because I went to parochial school, where I do think there was an atmosphere of no-nonsense discipline and an expectation of academic performance that I did not feel in public school. I have some basis for comparison because I later attended a public high school (which did me no harm).

On the other hand, well, you can see what this article is trying to suggest: if we did things differently -- in this case, had more Catholic schools -- many of the black and Hispanic kids who drop out would instead graduate and go to Penn.

eh said...

"hit the links some 120 times last year."

Which is an average of more than 2x weekly, for those keeping track.

Anonymous said...

They'll be discussing matters such as the GOP touching the Medicare third rail in order to set Obama up for re-election.

I means seriously, with the economy tanking and jobs nowhere to be found, why would the GOP make Medicare the main facet of their campaign? That's the one thing that would ensure having Obama until 2016. Unbelievably, some morons at National Review are also talking about 'taking another look' at Social Security.

Something is going on.

Anonymous said...

120 rounds per annum would be a lot for me. And I make no pretense of trying to change the world.
Gilbert p.

glib, facile n snarky said...

You heard it here first, people. EH has outed Uncle Ben the patron saint of rice the world over.

Anonymous said...

Not related to golf but your college football article.

I remember this incident: http://deadspin.com/5376552/alabama-father-pleased-daughters-domestic-dispute-wont-interfere-with-football-season

"Alabama linebacker Courtney Upshaw and his girlfriend both agreed to dismiss charges filed against the other after a lover's spat this summer. No one is more excited about this than the girl's father who exited the courthouse shouting, "Roll Tide!""

College football fans regard black players as demigods, creating enough good feeling to shed even the biggest social taboos. Fathers, frat guys, etc. in the South are even supportive of black players rampaging through sorority houses.

DCThrowback said...

John Boehner is now 61 years old. His children have grown. I can imagine he has more time for golf now. I am not sure if his wife stays in OH while he's here in DC during the week. Assuming you're a geographic bachelor...that would provide plenty of time for sporting pursuits like golf.

Further, back when I used work near the Waterfront in DC, Boehner was a frequent visitor to the "Cantina Marina", a bar on the river known for it's cheap Coronas and shrimp tacos (and attractive waitstaff). You can help maintain a good tan on its patio seats if you were so inclined. Further, because it is outdoors, you can smoke to your heart's content.

Which brings to the real reason these guys are probably headed out; to light up a nice Marlboro Red away from prying eyes.

Big Bill said...

1. Why do black people celebrate Black Flight? These kids are desperate to escape regular black folks and live among white teachers and learn white culture. It is an international thing. Black Flight plagues Africa and the Caribbean: tens of thousands of the black elite desperately flee to America and Europe to avoid their own people (and get rich). So sad.

2. Why does the Catholic Church keep taking black folks out of their own communities, leaving the neighborhoods more impoverished and empty rather than improving the communities? It is obvious why the Catholic school "business model" is collapsing as the article reports. It is fundamentally an extractive industry. The Catholics find the best and brightest families, the children with the greatest potential, then segregate them, educate them for jobs that are nonexistent in the ghetto, suck from the families what wealth they can, and then when the kids are educated, send them to colleges far away and transplant them in relatively well-off white neighborhoods. Catholic Schools gut the neighborhoods they prey on of all talent, initiative and morality.

The neighborhood gets weaker, more corrupt and lazy until the church has stripped it clean of all human capital and (like oil drillers who have stripped an oil well) they can no longer economically extract human beings profitably in their schools.

3. Why does the Catholic Church go in for racist trappings at Rice, particularly when it will drive away whites, Asians and Mexicans? I speak of the Uhuru/Kinte cloth regalia shown in the photo you linked to, the red, green and black sacral robes that every student is wearing at the graduation ceremony.

I imagine that if the coming of age ceremonies at my child's school was shrouded in pseudo-African regalia and my own children were expected to ear such stuff, I would move them elsewhere to a less exclusionary school.

Anonymous said...

it looks like Annie Le's killer was sentenced.

as an asian man, i felt no sympathy for her and actually felt that she deserved it (because she was engaged to a white guy.)

i feel bad for Raymond Clarke.

Anonymous said...

for me, it was revenge by proxy.

aklsdklsdkjsdkl said...

Virulent racist hate directed at undocumented people, who are blamed for every problem they have nothing to do with. This racist hate is cloaked in concern for the law, by people who break the law regularly in ways big and small (most strikingly to me in the flouting of drug laws).

Kevin Best said...

Spend all day trying to hit a little ball into a little hole just seems odd to me.

Take HBD seriously said...

This is OT, but I wanted to share with the Steveosphere after seeing some posts and comments on "game":

True story: Good looking guy here, in shape, high IQ, successful, etc.

Tried Game for years, couldn't get it to work. The problem may have been I didn't even want girls. I liked the "idea" of feeling like I could get them, but the social interactions were as painful for me as they were for them.

Went and got some Adderall to get an edge in school (in a post-graduate school with an even gender balance and approx 135-140 average IQ). Haven't hooked up with any girls yet as I've been too busy studying, but I have friends for the first time since high school and have been getting closer in my courtships (have long telephone conversations with pretty girls, unheard of just six months ago after years of working out, reading Game and Roissy, keeping a journal and working on "internal game", etc.). My confidence is through the roof. People call me and seek out my company in a way they didn't earlier in the year.

Advice to "gamers": Forget reading, working hard, learning about human nature, etc. Try drugs. In the political realm, forget about men's rights and fighting back feminism. Seek drug legalization an to change the taboos against human improvement through chemical means.

Kylie said...

Don't tell me. Let me guess.

If Boehner beats Obama, his victory--and Obama's defeat--will quickly disappear down the memory hole. If Obama beats Boehner, we'll hear mention of it--nothing too gushing, just the occasional aside--unto perpetuity, or until the MSM folds, whichever comes first.

josh said...

Maybe our dear Congressthing Weiner should take up the sport. Fresh air,exercise and the company of his manly fellows may do him a world of good.get his mind out of the gutter,so to speak.

Anonymous said...

I was at Costco to get some ice cream when I spotted a Korean girl with a White guy ahead of me. I wasn't too bothered because she was below average looking. It's really only the pretty ones who go with white guys that I hate and scheme against.

Anonymous said...

Now we know where he gets that tan!

Mr. Anon said...

Boehner strikes me as nothing but a teery-eyed version of Bob Dole. He even sounds like Bob Dole.

I wonder how much of Boehner's life has been expended in explaining to others how to pronounce his name.

Boehner and Weiner are emblematic of Congress today. They're all a bunch of dicks.

glib, facile n snarky said...

"'with 80 percent of its students requiring financial aid, virtually every graduating senior was bound for college: Penn, Cincinnati, Holy Cross, Fairfield, Iona. Four of the Rice men had received scholarships in excess of $150,000.'"

How much money would that be for private school from kindergarten to 12th grade + the $150,000 for college had one or more of these 4 been part of the 80%?

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of money educating someone else's brat. What could possibly make such a huge investment in a relatively small number of people worthwhile other than to show you could send a Mexican or an African American (assuming these weren't 1st gen African immigrants, it being a Catholic school & all) to Penn?

In other words, I'm not quite converted rice.

Anonymous said...

Boehner is the very incarnation of congressional hack, GOP variety.

Gordon Gekko said...

Golf is a good socializer. It teaches men how to join up with relative strangers, relax and develop the art of small talk. That's why so many events from business conferences to medical conventions will have golf scrambles as social mixers.

How someone plays, not just their overall score, also gives insights into one's personality. How do they perform under pressure? How do they handle a run of bad luck? How much self-control and consistency of character do they have in general? How robust is their ego and how fast is their wit?

It can be a better bonding method than hanging at a bar or sitting around a table playing cards.

josh said...

Re Anonymous(man,that guy posts a LOT of comments!)and the football player. Looked it up here: www.funcrunch.com/kendall-grzyb-5218/ The girl is very good looking,tho,theres something "off" about her. What a sickening situation. The dad blames the daughter. This girl must be one nice piece of work!

Anonymous said...

"Alabama linebacker Courtney Upshaw and his girlfriend both agreed to dismiss charges filed against the other after a lover's spat this summer. No one is more excited about this than the girl's father who exited the courthouse shouting, "Roll Tide!""

There goes Western civilization.

Was the Dad wearing the team cap and jersey while saying that?

Fathers, frat guys, etc. in the South are even supportive of black players rampaging through sorority houses.

As I said in the previous thread, having a negro football star plowing your daughter/sister is a great honor.

Anonymous said...

From the smoke-filled back room to the links.

Progress.

Anonymous said...

"Which is an average of more than 2x weekly, for those keeping track."

A lot of golfers play 36 holes, 2 rounds in a day. Carts make that possible, and good players, which Boehner evidently is, play fast.

Thripshaw said...

If Boehner has put in his 10,000 hours, we can expect to see him on the pro tour real soon now.

Right, Mr. Gladwell?

glib, facile n snarky said...

"It's really only the pretty ones who go with white guys that I hate and scheme against."

What I'm against is the pseudo-intellectual white guys who are too good for a white chick who is, unbeknownst to him, his intellectual equal fawning over some Asian bimbo who doesn't have a clue about anything not extremely concrete in nature. These guys blindly accept the myth that all Asians are superior to all whites (not much for observation or thinking when outside the classroom it seems), the exception being a handful of scrawny, neurotic, overrated nerds like Woody Allen.

Well, what can I say, nerd boy, you've greatly increased your chances of getting laid while simultaneously undermining our democracy and the quality of our academic institutions. Hope it's worth it to you.

barbra's black hoodie said...

"How do they handle a run of bad luck? How much self-control and consistency of character do they have in general? How robust is their ego and how fast is their wit?"

This is golf you're speaking of. Gekko's brains aren't very convoluted, are they?

I dare say a competitive game of poker would be much more revealing. It's faster paced and much more dependent on luck and seeing through another player's bluff.

Know when to hold 'em.
Know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away.
Know when to run.

-Kenny Rogers

Anonymous said...

I'm glad he's got a job that's not too demanding ... a lot of guys become rich and powerful in order to play more golf.

Could be. Here is an evidence that ~66% of CEOs of the biggest firms work less than 40 hours a week. And only 5% of them work more than 50 hours a week.

Anonymous said...

What Gordon Gekjo said ..... And it's fun to drink beer and play golf with your buddies. In fact, some of the most fun.


Dan in DC

Anonymous said...

A Roman Emperor considered it expedient to convert to Christianity. A chasm would develop between the Christians now essentially Indo-European in their power base and the Jews. Indo-Europeans, whose religions are basically tripartite and whose real religion if they have one is Hinduism, started redefining Christianity, and the old tripartism became the new Trinity.

The attempt to reconcile Indo-European culture with Semitic religion would cause many a problem and Christians began to see Jews as the enemy. Christianity as a monotheistic religion was compromised and it was no surprise to see a new heady monotheism develop in lands adjacent to the old Jewish domain.

And let us not forget that Islam too was essentially Jewish in its origins. All the prophets of Islam bar the last were Jewish just as the same Christian prophets were. Christianity and Islam went head on into conflict but the Jews would find refuge in Muslim lands.

But three brothers, and that is what these religions are, will constantly shift their alliances. Where once the Christians despised the Jews and the Muslims it is now the Muslims who do the despising and the Jews are embraced by the Christian world. Why?

Anonymous said...

Wandering around the north side of Chicago and seeing a huge number of white men with oriental women and some babies. A few white women with black men, but not many. Are white men rejecting white women or are white women rejecting white men?

Svigor said...

Weird thread.

none of the above said...

glib:

Or maybe the white guys dating Asian girls just, you know, like the girls they're dating, for reasons unrelated to HBD or stereotypes (true or not) about intelligence.

After all, what you want from a girlfriend in terms of intelligence isn't related to grades, it's about whether or not she's bright enough to be interesting, shares enough of your interests, etc.--all stuff you can determine by talking with her.

Racial IQ averages are useful to know mainly in two places:

a. When you're talking about performance of large groups separated by race.

b. When you're trying to work out how smart someone is with little or no interaction.

When you're dealing with an individual, you can evaluate how smart they are better by talking with them, learning about their interests, or working with them than by looking at the IQ of their racial group. There are a lot of ways your guess can go wrong (which is why they invented IQ tests), but you'll learn a lot more about my IQ by chatting with me, browsing my bookshelves, finding out what I studied in school, or finding out what I do for a living now, than you could get by saying "Ah, white, expected IQ is 100."

Turambar said...

Could be. Here is an evidence that ~66% of CEOs of the biggest firms work less than 40 hours a week."

It's Italian companies.

And only covers Monday through Friday.

glib, facile n snarky said...

"Or maybe the white guys dating Asian girls just, you know, like the girls they're dating, for reasons unrelated to HBD or stereotypes (true or not) about intelligence."

The stereotypes aren't true. I've had the refreshing experience of observing two honors student males go ahead and date blond coeds who weren't expecting 3 digit salaries upon graduation without being the least concerned with what their nerdy, intellectual friends though of them. Yet I've also known a white male who was hypersensitive about issues of IQ and race get away with wagging his Asian girlfriend around as if he'd won the HBD sweepstakes or something. Fact is, she was no more a prize than the blonds my friends dated. I got more than a little tired of his constant comparison of the two races to the detriment of whites and wondered later if he was judging me for ending a relationship with an Asian who wasn't quite ready to let go.

Unfortunately, I also had to deal with some flak out of a couple of Asians over the same relationship. My choice to end a relationship had little to do with a deliberate intention to stay within my own race/culture from there on and was no one's business. These people got into my private life despite the fact that I hadn't invited this kind of emotional intimacy. The circumstances of the breakup were typical and uneventful. No one would've taken notice if the guy had been white.

I've also encountered the "once you go Asian you don't go back" meme on iSteve. Frankly, it makes me a little nervous that I'm no longer living in a free country when I'm interacting outside the narrow confines of my own culture. Are white males allowed to end relationships with Asian females? Or does the whole community of Asians and whites who are dating/married to one shame the guy until he marries the girl or moves away the way they tried to shame me?

Polistra said...

I'm reminded of the 2-dimensional sports/politics graph you posted a few days ago. Any politician or commentator who wants to be popular among rich Republicans should take up golf and be seen playing it.

Boehner obviously knows the data in that graph.

Anonymous said...

Why aren't they playing basketball instead? Take it from me, a liberal arts graduate: there must be a hidden meaning behind this! [/humor]

Unknown said...

If the President still swings like he did in the videos published last year, then no way he's a 17--more like a 30.

headache said...

Lotsa trolls here today.

headache said...

Apparently Bush's nickname for him was "boner".

Gordon Gekko said...

I dare say a competitive game of poker would be much more revealing. It's faster paced and much more dependent on luck and seeing through another player's bluff.

Because poker depends upon luck far more than one's own ability, it is less revealing of a person's true interaction and behavior in the real world than golf is.

Poker may be show how a person would act in the very unlikely event of a particular abstract negotiation like selling a company.

Golf would show more generally how a person would act over many years and situations required to build and manage a company.

Truth said...

"Or does the whole community of Asians and whites who are dating/married to one shame the guy until he marries the girl or moves away the way they tried to shame me?"

It's just you...or maybe it is the whole community; after all, the world revolves around you.

too cool for you said...

Gekko and the commenter pretending to be Truth.

Stop beating a dead horse in the hopes that you'll sound snarky after the 10th try or so.

And, uh yes, a normal person who has the misfortune to find himself/herself in a community of geeks can definitely become the only focus of attention. Observe the Gek and you'll see what I mean.

MM from Georgia said...

A reporter asked Boehner if he thought Obama was a socialist. No, he didn't think so, replied Boehner, which shows me a "get along by going along" attitude.

Dahinda said...

What makes you think that people don't play golf year round in the Midwest? Just because it is cold it doesn't really stop most golfers. I have seen people on the course in January!

Truth said...

"Why aren't they playing basketball instead?"

David, that post is unreally funny. It reminds me of something said by one of Al Sharpton's protegees in Arizona. He was a high school kid who was pilloried for not wanting to join chior. He was asked "why not?" and he responded, "I can't join choir, the piano's racist!"

So the administrator asked him what he meant and he said "the white keys are bigger than the black keys!"

Anonymous said...

>David, that post is unreally funny.<

There's more where that came from. Google around under "little white balls" and "big brown balls". I would kindly suggest, however, that you set your Adult Content Filter to the "on" position beforehand.

Speaking of humor, Joe Biden claims a handicap of 6.3.