About Time IOC Quit Horsing Around

Golf will return as an Olympic sport in 2016, which means the robber barons that head the International Olympic Committee are capable of doing something right when they aren't playing now-you-see-it, now-you-don't with sitting presidents, turning a blind eye to censorship, and holding the Game's hostage for television revenue that would make Donald Trump blush.

Why it has taken so long to re-admit golf as an Olympic sport is beyond me. After all, the game was born in Scotland, grew up in the U.S., and now is a handsome, multilingual, worldwide ambassador growing itself all over the world.

Golf was last an official Olympic event in 1904, but was dropped because at the time only about 871 people played the game on the six or so courses that were available worldwide. It just didn't seem right to give a sport of so few an enormous stage for so many.

Dropping the sport from the Olympic menu made sense -- until it didn't, starting about 30 years ago.

That's when golf went through a sonic boom, and replaced tennis as the solitary sport of choice among the non-country club set.
Not so ironically, it was also about this time that a doe-eyed, 3-year-old named Eldrick "Tiger" Woods appeared on TV's "The Mike Douglas Show" with his African-American father to show off his putting skills.
That was something we'd never seen before.

Since that time, the topic of re-admitting golf to the Olympics has come up, and been shot down. Apparently, there was real concern by the IOC that golf was an elitist game and not available to all the masses.

And didn't that make perfect sense, because we all know how assessable so many of those other events contested at the Olympics are to the common folk.

In fact, one of my greatest pleasures in life is saddling up my horse and galloping over to my dock, where I board my sailboat and tack port and starboard to the archery, er, place, before finishing up with a vigorous game of badminton.

And, buddy, when I want to cool off from all that everyman action, I head over to the swimming pool and put some time in synchronizing my swimming. Why you should see the all diversity there, bro! My gosh there is every shade of white!

Yeah, thank God the IOC is trying to keep the Games relevant to the masses.

But could it be this time they finally got one right when they voted golf in, 63-27? After all, if anybody should understand elitism it's the snobs at the IOC.

Thankfully, it looks like they finally view golf as something beneath them.

Good grief. I gotta go feed my horse.