JOHH HUGGAN

THE GREAT – and now, sadly, late – Dan Jenkins always used to greet me the same way when I bumped into him at the four major championships. “Well,” said the Texan, one of the game’s most gifted and humorous wordsmiths, “what’s pissing you off this week?”

So let me tell you. Stuff heard on television. Unlike, ahem, hard-working and ever-literal journalists, people in jackets talking to us from the confines of the cathode ray tube get away – too often unchallenged – with all kinds of utter nonsense and falsehoods. For maybe the one-millionth time, that thought struck me the other night as I watched what used to be called the Colonial Invitational. I forget what it is now.

Anyway, the culprit was Craig Perks, a former Players champion and now a talking-head on America’s Golf Channel. In a misguided attempt to perpetuate the myth that modern golf at the professional level has much in common with, say, the 1990s, the New Zealander was heard to utter the immortal phrase: “Nothing has changed here over the years.” Apart from the fact that the players are hitting 4-irons off the tee rather than drivers that is. Heaven forbid that elephant in the fairway should come up.

Indeed, whenever the subject of distance off the tee is mentioned, commentators tend to chortle good-naturedly as yet another strapping behemoth hits an 8-iron onto a green from around 230-yards or so. Never does anyone break ranks to point out how this is not necessarily a good thing.

One week earlier, as the US PGA Championship at Bethpage was marked by crowd behaviour that should have resulted in mass ejections from the premises, one contributor on the aforementioned Golf Channel claimed the galleries were “unbelievably knowledgeable.” To be fair, he failed to identify the part of the human experience on which that intelligence is actually based. It cannot possibly have been golf. Even worse, as PGA of America President, Suzy Whaley, made her post-championship speech, she described the fans as “tremendous.” To no one’s surprise, this piece of verbal embroidery did not provoke guffaws on television.

Earlier that same day, the syrupy-sweet host of the CBS network broadcast, Jim Nantz, commented on Harold Varner, who played alongside eventual champion Brooks Koepka in the final round. Varner, said Nantz, has “never won on Tour.” Apart from the European Tour that is, at the 2017 Australian PGA Championship. Yet again, Nantz’s blatant display of insularity and ignorance went uncorrected.

Back on Golf Channel, a Uriah Heep-like host attempted to insinuate himself into Whaley’s good graces by “congratulating” the three club professionals who performed well enough to make the halfway-cut. Which is the same as saying 17 of those worthy gentlemen missed out on the weekend’s play. Or, to put it another way, 85 percent failed rather miserably. Whatever, such a “feat” is – in the real world – hardly worth mentioning in positive terms.

Then there was Kerry Haigh, the Englishman in charge of setting-up the fearsome Bethpage Black course for what was the 101st playing of the US PGA Championship. On the eve of the event, Haigh claimed that “we try and bring out whatever the architect had in mind.” What tosh.

It will come as no surprise to hear that Haigh was not asked to explain why so many of the “fairway” bunkers were actually located yards into the rough. Did the original architect get it wrong when it came to fairway-width? And who then was responsible for the plodding, defensive golf played by so many of the world’s best on a course set-up to all but eliminate the most exciting aspect of the game at the highest level – the risky recovery shot? Just wondering.

Okay, you get the point. Golf on television is, in many ways, a make-believe dimension populated by story-tellers with agendas that do not include truth-telling. Instead, the viewing audience is fed a mixture of fairytales and outright lies. The dominant mission seems to be the creation of a world that does not really exist, one those in charge of television seem to imagine the wider populace wants to see. Every player is thus a “terrific guy.” Every course is in “immaculate condition.” Every event is “impeccably run.” And every sponsoring company does “great work” in the community, even if it manufactures/provides a product people merely want rather than actually need.

That all of the above is an insult to our collective intelligence is apparently neither here nor there. Television is all about image and to hell with reality. Remember that next time you are subjected to the sort of mindlessly inane hyperbole that drives at least one viewer to distraction. I’m off now to get help.