WordGolf.com blogger Spencer Hux: Genocidal madman, or golf loving victim of a complaint generator?

After spending literally minutes trying to come up with some pithy and interesting way to present this next item – in an effort to fish for people to write in with comments like “Boy, Bill, you sure are pithy and interesting” – I realized that straightforward was the only way to go.

A bit of background: WorldGolf.com blogger Spencer Hux is a fantastically nice young guy who has worked as a caddie and golf coach.

“I love everything about the game and I am hoping to begin a career in the golf business while continuing to write as much as possible,” Spencer said when he started at WG.

Spencer is great to have because he will talk and write about golf all day long if you let him, which is nice, as it frees up guys like Chris Baldwin and myself to write about all sorts of things and just throw the word golf in the middle of it all, as if we’re fooling anyone.

So basically, until a couple days ago, that was my opinion of Hux. Young, nice guy, good writer, loves golf.

Then came the manifesto.

Way back in February, Spencer wrote a blog titled “Vijay Singh more likely to cry on the golf course than average man.” In it, he takes Singh to task for asking that Phil Mickelson’s driver be tested after Lefty whomped him off the tee at the FBR Open.

Over the next 10 days or so, comments rolled in, some agreeing, some disagreeing. Spencer got called a racist, a religious argument broke out, and then everyone moved on to other blogs. Normal stuff.

Then a few days ago, reader “J-Dub” sent in a sprawling 1,600-word diatribe against Hux that rocked our world. Some highlights:

“This is an open letter, which you are welcome to use as you wish. I want as many people as possible to know that Spencer Hux always gives noncommittal answers to questions.”

“Hux is a mythmaker, an illusion builder, or to put it less politely, a trickster. He vehemently denies that, of course … And Hux’s vanity is surpassed only by his empty theorizing. (Remember his theory that shambolic brutes should be fêted at wine-and-cheese fund-raisers?)”

“He argues that flippant propagandists of one sort or another have dramatically lower incidences of cancer, heart attacks, heart disease, and many other illnesses than the rest of us. I take the opposite position, that I have reason to believe that Hux is about to use both overt and covert deceptions to wipe out delicate ecosystems.”

“I have a plan to summon up the courage to shelter initially unpopular truths from suppression, enabling them to ultimately win out through competition in the marketplace of ideas. I call this plan “Operation shout back at Hux’s propaganda".”

“It seems ironic that his purpose is not to enlighten, but to deceive, given that he craves more power. I say we should give Hux more power – preferably, 10,000 volts of it.”

Now, while this message caused us to cancel all flights arriving to and departing from WorldGolf.com headquarters, this intrepid reporter decided to go to the ends of the Earth to investigate it. Or at very least, type a section of it into a Google search and see if anything came up.

This is the section I ran through Google: “a mythmaker, an illusion builder, or to put it less politely, a trickster.”

The results:

– A diatribe against Henry Gale, a character from the show “Lost":

“Henry’s most progressive idea is to nourish lazy ideologies.”

– A tirade against both “Myopic Rhino” and “Rabbi Pouya Larjani” at a games forum:

“Mr. Myopic Rhino’s dream is to rule the world, or failing that, annihilate it".

– An attack on both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at some German forum:

“Lord Vader is always demanding money, sympathy, and the punishment of his critics.”

Finally, my search took me to another forum, this one inhabited by happy little computer nerd types, who helped set everything clear:

” … there are automatic complaint generators which will do much ado about nothing - you just put in a noun into an HTML form and it will generate a generic complaint, a la mad-libs,” wrote Big Daddy J.

A final search found all you could need to know about complaint generators.

So, it was fun while it lasted, but we’ll be deleting these types of things from now on. We hope we’ve put “Operation shout back at Hux’s propaganda” to rest. If you get any type of enlightenment at all from this, please let it be the following:

Spencer Hux = Nice young guy, loves golf, good golf blogger. Has no interest in wiping out delicate ecosystems.

–WKW