Did any of you know that there was apparently a “Duel and Jinsha Lake” yesterday? It’s a mano-e-mano, one to one matchup between the world number 1 and world number 2.
World number 2 gets 2 million USD. World number 1 gets 1 million USD. I know, there’s something a bit wrong here, so I am guessing world number 3 gets…?
Anyways, Jinsha lake is located somewhere in Henan, China. Which is somewhere in China. Anyhoos, I managed to accidentally catch the game on TV as I came back from lunch. A couple of calls to clients moved all my meetings two hours later and I managed to catch the majority of the so-called Duel.
Which.Was.A.Waste.Of.Time.
Not so much that Tiger lost, I think -4 to Rory’s -5, but the way they lost it. They didn’t give a crap. It was exhibition. They got a couple of million bucks just to show up, and even though the commentator said it was for ‘pride’, I am not buying it. 2 million bucks is more than they will get if they won a regular tour tournament. Heck, it’s larger than a major event’s purse! All they need to do was play 18 holes. It’s equivalent to a consultant working on a project for 3 months to get 300,000RM, or work 3 days to get 600K RM. Which one would be better?
Tiger played like I’ve never seen before. Without a damn. He just wasn’t locked in. When he hit a bad shot, he didn’t care. When he hit a good shot, he didn’t care. No fist pumps, no anger, no slamming of clubs, no clenched fist. It was like his mind was on Mickey Mouse playing the ukelele. You could see how disengage he was, when rory would talk to him facing him, he never looked back at Rory, just stare into the ground ahead and talked back a bit. After a while, I think Rory said, “Darn it Tiger, just play along a bit or we will lose this stupidly easy paycheck, will ya??!?”
Rory? Heck, I don’t know, he was playing well, but he was just walking about, not really caring much as well and I think purposely missing a few putts to keep it close. He was a lot better than Tiger, granted.
The only interesting thing was their conversations to each other as they sauntered along, collecting a few thousand bucks with each step they took. Rory was talking about the weather and Tiger was saying it was a hell lot better than the hellhole called Malaysia last week (not in those words)…and he was saying he was literally dripping as he addressed the ball in KL. (in those exact words).
Another interesting bit was this humongously irritating on-course chinese interviewer, who literally stopped Tiger and Rory while they were still playing and asked stupid questions like: “How do you think you are hitting it?” “How is the weather?” “What color underwear are you wearing?” He was classic hilarious. The look on Tiger’s face when he was first accosted as he was walking to his second shot, as if “WTF is this china man?” The very next hole, the hole he swung his driver dramatically out of his hands in a hook shot, he strode off to his ball fuming. And this annoying chinaman interviewer hops in front of him and says: “What do you think of your shot?” Tiger at that moment was a milisecond away from slamming his Nike club into the head of this guy but stopped himself with two sentences: “2 Million prize money. 100 billion losses in PR”. He smoothed his face and smiled forcefully and through visibly grinding teeth said, “I don’t know, I havent seen it yet.”
Ah, the beauty of insensitive and utterly clueless chinese interviewers!