Tell Us How You Really Feel, Boswell

But of course I'm right on the same page as he writes An Improper Send-Off:

Golf is the game of sportsmanship and proper manners, the sport that exemplifies respect for others. We even use it to teach values to kids, to instill the idea that conscience defines character.

So this is a week for golf -- at least the crass, ungrateful, traveling-circus PGA Tour version -- to hang its head in shame.

It's no accident that all of the world's four major championships are run by organizations other than the PGA Tour. The tour keeps pumping its own Players Championship to join the elite. But it'll never happen -- not as long as the tour humiliates itself, shows its true colors and drives itself down the scale of social respectability with disasters such as the one it is perpetrating in Washington this week.

I should just bold the entire column, really. I don't know what it is about greater Washington and sports sometimes--I mean it only took us forty years or so to get the Senators back Nationals in town. And here we have Lobbying Central USA, where you'd think there'd be an automatic connection between networking and the PGA, but Tim Finchem picked up where Bud Selig left off.

Not that every PGA golfer is distinguishing himself:

Sergio Garcia, the defending champion of the Booz Allen Classic, did not come back to Avenel yesterday even though his picture is the only one on the cover of the tournament program. The first rule of decent behavior (and marketing) in pro golf is that the defender comes back, even if he has to play nine holes from a litter before withdrawing. If you take the big check one year, you show up the next. You don't claim the classic dubious excuse -- a bad back -- when you played in the U.S. Open the previous week. Of course, Sergio's back will be healed when the U.S. Open returns to Congressional in 2011.

But Garcia's absence is the rule this week, not the exception. Nobody's showing up for the Booz. The '04 champion, Adam Scott, also withdrew. Even modest drawing cards such as Chris DiMarco, Aaron Baddeley and Geoff Ogilvy pulled out, even though their names had been used to advertise the tournament.

Hey, Garcia's the Anna Kournikova of golf, so what the hell.  We have some stand-up guys nevertheless, including Paddy Harrington and Tom Kite, the latter explicitly shaking his head in disbelief that the Tour is kissing us off with a lame date in the fall that, amazingly, hasn't generated much sponsorship. Boswell accurately describes the new season-ending travesty, wherever it ends up being played, as a "four-event, end-of-season tour gimmick."  Hello, LPGA.