Golf media takes colorful sound bites Sabbatini and Poulter for granted

Rory Sabbatini and Ian Poulter have become the PGA Tour’s court jesters for their ironic combination of girlie fashion sense and heroic “I can beat Tiger” statements.

Sabbatini imposed a media boycott at the Mercedes Championship after press jumped all over his Target World Challenge withdrawal and string of Tiger challenges over the last year.

Now Poulter is furious about being “misquoted” at GolfWorld, where in an interview he used his overconfidence normally reserved for putting pink pants on in the morning to suggest he and Tiger would be sharing major titles in the near future.

All Poulter did was dream big (haven’t you ever bet one of your buddies you could probably score with the prettiest waitress at Hooters?). Forgive him for simply being hopeful. If anything, he should be Barack Obama’s VP candidate.

But instead, he gets grilled as an overzealous pretty boy and is universally ridiculed.

Neither case of the media jumping all over these two surprise me at all.

One thing was made perfectly clear when I covered the 2007 U.S. Open last year at Oakmont: Sabbatini and Poulter are accessible to the media to a fault.

When you’re a reporter scouring the grounds for quotes that won’t be in the media notes, Poulter and Sabbatini are your best friends. They never met a question they didn’t like, and they’ll say things for the sake of making sound bites, sometimes with a little grin that makes you wonder if they even wholly believe what they’re saying.

Other players like Steve Stricker, Jim Furyk and Fred Funk are accessible too, but they know when to draw the line, and once you’ve heard one or two robotic answers in a row, you know it’s time to move on.

But Poulter and Sabbatini will give us all day, so we jump all over them until we’ve asked every insinuating question we can think of and until one accidentally proclaims that Tiger is in fact, Satan.

The whole process reminds me of Mean Girls. Even golf writers crave a cat fight.

As a reporter, you are grateful they understand what you need to do your job, and you can mold entire columns out of two minutes with these guys, especially when Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are only giving one-on-ones to the TV folks.

But based on Sabbatini and Poulter’s recent tongue-lashings at the media for taking what they say out of context, it looks like its back to hunting down Fred Funk even more ferociously.