CLEAR ‘CUT’ LOSERS
Francesa hits rare golf trifecta of betting misery
WHAT are the odds against the nearly impossible? So astronomical that you’d risk your every cent betting against it?
Here’s the deal: Before each of the three American golf majors, I allow you one shot to pick the winner from the world’s highestrated golfers. Alas and curses, your first pick — to win the Masters — doesn’t even make the cut. Rotten luck, but try again.
Then you pick from the best competing for the PGA Championship. Not only doesn’t he win, but also he doesn’t make the cut. Hey, what’s going on? That’s crazy.
What power do you possess to make the best, as if on reverse demand and command, so bad?
Ahh, but one more chance: You pick a winner from the same top players to win the U.S. Open. But he, too, doesn’t even make the cut!
You’re possessed! Or as Ralph Wiggum from “The Simpsons” said, “Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”
But let history show that last week that near-impossibility became a reality. Oh-for-three on winners — no big deal — but all missed cuts? Nah! Can’t happen. But it did. Who is this soothsayer of colossal doom?
That’s the best part: The guy sells himself as an expert professional tout, someone whose “picks have value,” though evidence exists only to the extreme contrary. But his legacy as a self-deluded, boastful blowhard is now solidified — in faux stone.
Ladies and gentlemen, and whatever you choose to call yourselves of all ages, welcome back the self-anointed know-it-all who never was and never left, Mike Francesa!
That’s right, Sitting Bull, now heard as a gambling tout on a podcast — despite his claim that he’d never sink so low as to host one — touted Brooks Koepka to win the Masters, Scottie Scheffler to win the PGA and Cameron Smith to win the Open. Win? They all missed the cut! Didn’t even make it to the third round!
Do the math? You do the math. What’s incredible to the third power?
Even by the high standards set by @BackAftaThis — the Twitter handle that for years has chronicled Francesa’s bombastic, bogus boasts and self-important lies and immodest, dead-wrong, expert-ascending
predictions — its creator had never encountered anything quite so impossible from Francesa.
This one threatens the best of Francesa’s worst. Among them:
His all-knowing declaration that Michigan’s defense, the best he’d ever seen in college football, would completely shut down Ohio State in their 2019 game. Ohio State would have trouble making a first down against this unequaled Michigan defense!
Michigan lost, 62-39 — the most points the Wolverines ever allowed.
Then there was his take-itfrom-me tout of Lenny Dykstra as an investment genius with “a Midas touch” — just before Dysktra was arrested, then convicted of fraud.
And who can forget his meteorological wisdom in dismissing the arrival of just a little, passing rain shower — a few drops known as Hurricane Sandy.
And though he’s mostly out of sight and out of mind, to have ignored his expertise in picking golf’s major winners — all missed cuts, for crying out loud — would be a disservice to both Francesa and “Believe It or Not” history.
Hey kid, go ahead. Try this at home. Can’t be done!