Don’t Bemoan Your Namelessness – The Doug Barron Story ①.

Doug Baron.
You may have heard his name before, and yes, he’s a golfer. The first time I saw him was in August 2019 at the PGA Tour Champions Dixie Sporting Goose Open.

The PGA Tour Champions is a golf tour for senior players aged 50 and over. At the time, Bapsae Kim Yong-jun was commentating on the live broadcast for a Korean golf TV channel. Does he know how to do broadcast commentary? Yes, I heard that he was good at it. He’s even self-effacing. Nowadays, I’m dropping flies because there’s no one calling me, but if there’s a position for a golf commentator anywhere, please recommend me.

With my experience as a tournament committee member on the Korean Tour, I can clearly explain the rules of golf, which is where commentators are weak. However, like American commentators, I sometimes mix in humor, so producers who only broadcast very carefully may not like it. I digress. Let’s go back to Doug Barron.

It’s the last day of the tournament, with just a few holes left, and Kim Yong-jun is calling the action. The broadcast cameras alternated between Doug Barron and Fred Couples. That’s right. Fred Couples, the grizzled old man. He had 15 wins on the PGA Tour, including the Masters Tournament.

He’s also won 13 times at the PGA Tour Champions, and you can tell just by watching his swing from a distance. How smooth his swing is. He was that way as a youngster, and it hasn’t changed since coming to the Senior Tour. And who is Doug Barron? No one knew who he was back then. Certainly, Bapsae Kim had never heard of him, and Doug Barron was a nobody at that tournament, too, who came through the Monday qualifier (called Monday).

Doug Barron took a one-stroke lead with three holes to play. The par-4 16th was a short hole that could have been one-temperature. But he came up just short. With his chances gone, Doug Barron had only two holes left to play, the 17th and 18th, when the Couples, who had already finished their match and were waiting in the clubhouse, went to the driving range. They realized it could go to overtime. 메이저사이트

“I think Doug Barron, who has never won a championship, is going to get nervous and make a mistake and it’s going to go to overtime,” Bapsae Kim said to himself. Couples, who was nine shots off the pace going into the final day, was a little red in the face.

Was it because he hadn’t won on the Senior Tour in quite some time? Maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t won in a long time. The 17th hole is a long par-3 with a tricky green. If you miss, you’ll make bogey. Doug Barron turned pro in 1992, but hasn’t won in 28 years.

When he stepped up to the tee on hole 17, he was a complete unknown. Not only on the PGA Tour, but also on the Confederation Tour (a secondary PGA tour). He couldn’t even keep his seeding (eligibility to play on the tour) consistently when he was on the PGA Tour. He lost his seed several times and had to play the Cuscoole again. Coursework is short for qualifying school. It’s a competition to qualify for the golf tour. It’s not just one or two rounds, but often a dozen or more. The number of players who make the cut is so small that it’s a miracle to make it through. It’s not uncommon for a player to lose their seeding after a poor performance on tour and be pushed down, and then have to play the Cuscoole.

For seven years prior to joining the Senior Tour, Doug Barron couldn’t even get a full seed on the second tier and would occasionally qualify. He didn’t even have a full Senior Tour seed. It was only a few weeks before the PGA Tour Champions that he made his debut at the age of 40. When Doug Barron finished tied for the lead on the first day of the tournament with Miguel Angel Jimenez, the bird didn’t think much of it. After all, how many times has a no-name player played well one day and disappeared from the leaderboard the next?

Doug Barron was a different story. In a twist of fate, he finished round two in the lead. Midway through the second round, he made his first bogey of the tournament, and then his shots seemed to falter for several holes in a row. “That’s the way it is,” he said quickly.

At that point, lightning struck and the tournament committee suspended play. The tournament committee relies on live weather reports, but they also have lightning detectors. If a cloud with lightning in it is far enough away, the detector will beep, and the game will have to be stopped. In this case, the air horn is sounded with one long, loud blast. Players must stop playing immediately upon hearing the air horn. If a player takes a shot after the long, single blast of the air horn? They are disqualified. I know someone who has. The officials, scattered across a large golf course, count to “one, two, three” on their radios and then simultaneously blow their air horns. Oops! What was I talking about? Before I knew it, we were out of ground. We’ll continue the Doug Barron story next time.