Myrtle Beach: Where the weathermen don't have to be right

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. - Here’s a question: Can anyone working in America today besides a weatherman be so consistently wrong and still keep his job?

Think about it. How often has your local “meteorologist” been wrong, and I mean dead wrong , on his “forecasts"? And how often have you feared that a bad call at work might lead to some, I don’t know, trouble with the higher ups? Trust me, whatever you do out there, if you were wrong as often as weathermen, you’d be out of a job.

Yet night after night they keep coming back.

OK, they’ve got a better excuse than you and I: Nature. “Can’t predict nature,” is the anticipated cop-out (which, of course, calls into question the very need for a meteorologist in the first place). “We have the data we have.”

Yes, I’m a little pissed. I arrived here to play golf in Myrtle Beach four days ago, at the time of a months-long drought that was really the talk of the town. My first night, the weatherman laid it out: Big rain was coming for Wednesday, extending into Thursday morning. “And man,” he said with an pitch of gravitas, “do we need it.”

No doubt the state of South Carolina does. I don’t. I’ve come here to play golf. The drought can play on.

Wednesday came: A brief, hard shower, but sun for the most part. Thursday I squeezed a round in, but not much sun. Then Friday, the alls-clears day according to the man on the boob tube, it rained. And rained. And rained. I played a very wet 27-holes at Sandpiper Bay Golf Club not far from North Myrtle Beach, and had the course essentially to myself. Now the same weather man says we’re in for it through tomorrow. More rain. Heavy rain.

“And man do we need it,” he said tonight. You know this feeling, whenever weather conspires against golf: I wanted to kill him. Or at least talk to him in a stern fashion.

As I write this it’s night and the rain is beating an incessant tattoo on the rooftop, against the widow leading out onto Ocean Drive. It almost sounds like the surging surf, though that’s on the other side of the condo, out of earshot.

Damn the weather.