Golf is already roped into steroids, lets find a way to install instant replay

Call me blind, call me naive. Sorry Gary Player, I just don’t see steroids as a problem in golf. Not now, not in the foreseeable future.

Tour pro Charley Hoffman agreed with me, as we trolled the fairways at the Viking Classic Pro-Am at Annandale (actually he was in the fairway, I was looking for my ball O.B. around some little girl’s lemonade stand).

“I think the PGA Tour was pressured into it,” he said. “I don’t think steroids are being used out here. It’s not a problem.”

Actually, he said something way funnier off-the-record I can’t use (maybe I’ll tell it to Connie Chung), but those sentiments seem to be widespread on tour, and not just because no man likes peeing in a cup.

Now that everyone is on the steroids witch hunt in all sports, and congress is going after athletes so ruthlessly you’d think they were war criminals - and the PGA Tour now has its own, hazy policy, we can begin the movement for instant replay in all sports.

It already began in baseball after the blatant miss-call in Colorado that gave the Rockies a birth in the playoffs, which has columnists everywhere screaming for video confirmation.

For the record, I can’t see anything wrong with using replay in baseball. It’s not like the brief delay would be disrupting any kind of “rhythm". Games are played at a deathly pace already. “Athletes” lounge in the outfield sucking on tobacco juice and adjust their jock like it might not be there in the morning. Beer-bellied managers, wearing spikes for some reason, must get paid per second on the field considering their crippled stroll to the mound to relieve their pitcher.

Like steroids, some attention-starved writer is eventually going to call for instant replay in golf. I’m just trying to think of how it will happen. Maybe a player places their golf pall a centimeter too far ahead of their ball mark on the green, so we have to “go upstairs". How often do players tee off ahead of the markers? If Michael Baumberger can already get golfers disqualified as a result of his armchair officiating, the need for replay in golf can’t be that far-fetched.