Today’s Touch: Golf is fun

There’s an old saying in golf that says the game was so named that way because all the other four-letter words were taken.

But thanks to four “boys” and their musical styling, they are trying to bring a three-letter word back to golf: fun.

In 2011, Ben Crane and the other Golf Boys – Rickie Fowler, Bubba Watson, and Hunter Mahan – stole some of the spotlight from their European counterparts who were dominating the humorous side of social media (and are still ahead, although only slightly) by releasing “Oh, oh, oh.” A music video – okay, I use that term loosely – that features the boys dressed in hilarious costumes gallivanting around a golf course.

Amazing.

Fast forward to earlier this week, and the boys were back.

Fully clad in their identifiable ensembles, but this time, backed by a real artist who wrote the lyrics and recorded the music, each of the boys took their turns spitting their verses and name-dropping no less than 12 PGA Tour stars (“Took a vacay on Sang-Moon Bae,” “couldn’t hit the side of a Ricky Barnes”).

In an era of a struggling identity not only for golf, but for the PGA Tour, this was refreshing.

Rory McIlroy quit, then tried to cover up the real reason why he did it. Vijay Singh used deer-antler spray, and was likely suspended for his actions. And the anchored-putter debate rages on and on.

Not like you would see Hogan and Snead and Byron and Hagen doing this (imagine, though?) but there is a whole generation of golfers who don’t really know who Hogan, Snead, Byron, and Hagen are. The technology in their pocket is golf’s competition, and instances like this are what will keep the interest of the YouTube generation.

For three minutes, golf was back to just being a game. and just being fun.

It’s the reason why most want to play in the first place.

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Hitting the Links – 

Plans for an insane, mini-golf-esque, (but real) golf course in China were revealed (Yahoo! UK)

GameGolf launches crowd-funded campaign with some pretty famous backers (The Next Web)

Thankfully, spring is around the corner (Tribune)

Weeksy breaking stories and taking names (ScoreGolf)

As I said on Twitter this morning, Sports Illustrated Michael Bamberger has been killing it lately. Here is his exclusive conversation with Rory McIlroy after his sudden W/D last week (Golf.com)

I think this tournament should play a back-to-back with the “Jam” Open (Calgary)

Pocket knives and golf clubs now allowed as carry-on luggage! (Bloomberg)

More on Shaw Communications being named official title sponsor of the new Champions Tour event in Calgary (Canadian Golfer)

And this, wow. This is a fun hashtag (TaylorMadeGolf)

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