Bishop’s dismissal long overdue for PGA

Former PGA of America president Ted Bishop. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

Last week, in a tweet, Ted Bishop called Ian Poulter a “Lil Girl….Squealing like a little girl during recess.” (He was wrong in so many ways, including grammatically, but I won’t quibble about the missing apostrophe in “Li’l.” There are far greater issues to address here.)

Back in January, I called Ted Bishop “the most dangerous man in golf.”

One of us was right and there is no prize for guessing who it was.

When Bishop was promptly punted from his position as the president of the PGA of America, it was a move that was long overdue. And it wasn’t all about his ill-advised, demeaning, unfair and sexist tweet about Poulter, which came in response to published criticism by British golfer of Nick Faldo.

It was the tipping point, the last straw that led the PGA Board to impeach, depose, trash … you pick the verb … a rogue. But they waited too long to cut loose their loose cannon.

Why was Ted Bishop “the most dangerous man in golf” in my opinion? Obviously, it predated the Poulter bashing, and his hard-headed opposition to the anchored putter, and his embarrassing grandstanding during the Ryder Cup … I could go on.

No, it was because, as the PGA Merchandise Show wrapped up in Orlando in January, he sat on stage with Mark King, then the CEO of TaylorMade, and Joe Beditz, head of the National Golf Foundation, and basically trashed the sport, saying it was increasingly irrelevant and needed fundamental change or it was doomed. (It should be noted that in the late 1980s, Beditz’s NGF proclaimed that increasing demand for golf meant that a new course had to open every day in the U.S. for a year to keep up. A few years later, the number of golfers started to decline. Courses closed. The golf boom of the 1980s had peaked. Oops.)

The Orlando episode was a knee-jerk Chicken Little embarrassment, whose motivations, to me, remain suspicious and confusing.

In what other industry — and make no mistake, golf is an industry, generating more than $14 billion annually in Canada alone — would its leaders do this?

Can you imagine the president of a major car company taking centre stage at the automobile industry’s biggest gathering and saying: “Our product is deeply flawed. It is fundamentally unsound and may never recover. Young people don’t want to buy our cars because they are boring, too slow and cost too much. Older folks aren’t driving as much as we expected, either. We’re screwed.” Would that president be able to keep the job?

Like all industries, golf has had ebbs and flows throughout its 600-year history. Golf is a living, breathing thing, and like most things, has its cycles. Just in the past century, golf booms have occurred in the 1920s, the ‘60s and the ‘80s. As each boom ebbed, participation declined and courses closed or were plowed under. Just check any golf course reference book and note the number of courses labeled “NLE” — No Longer Exist. And yet, every time, golf has rebounded to greater heights. And it will do so again. And again.

As for Bishop, who most likely is a good husband and a loving father to his daughters (one of whom is a PGA club pro), he has been set adrift on a lonely ice floe, and rightly so. At 60, he may retire voluntarily from his position as the head pro at The Legends Golf Club in Indiana.

But I doubt it.

The man has astounding hubris and, like many of his ilk (think Rob Ford), has yet to take full and complete responsibility for his actions. Any of his actions. He combusted from the heat of his white-hot ego but, despite being flambéed, refuses to accept that reality. He is golf’s equivalent of Monty Python’s Black Knight. (“Look, you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left!” “It’s only a flesh wound.”)

Did Ted Bishop deserve to be fired solely on the basis of the Poulter incident, particularly with less than a month to go in his presidency? Perhaps not. Did he deserve to be removed from his position based on his track record? Absolutely. All the PGA of America Board needed was one more reason to axe him and the president conveniently provided that.

As we wash our hands of the Bishop brouhaha, we should resurrect the words of Mark Twain and apply them to golf: “The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

The same cannot be said of Bishop’s role as one of golf’s most prominent and problematic personalities, and that’s a damn good thing.

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