Tiger Woods, Stephen Harper and the Yips

Why I Still Love Television

Inside Television 598
Publication Date: 3-7-12
By: Hubert O’Hearn

In all this time we’ve spent together over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever told you why it is I write about television. It was back in the winter of 2000 and I’d had a good run of it as the newspaper’s golf columnist. I used to love getting emails from the sharp young sports editor Claire Stirling when she would tell me that I’d busted up the newsroom in laughter. Making reporters laugh is no easy trick. Usually ihe only humour they find is in their paycheques.

Well, the snow started to fly and fill the fairways so there was no real need for weekly golf-based insanity, but I was asked what I would like to write about. Oh I had lots of ideas but then I thought like a subversive and realized that if I wrote about television I could write about whatever the hell I wanted.

Take a week like this one. You may define the beginning of spring by the calendar, the crocus or the red red robin comes bob bob bobbing along. Good for you. To me it’s The Masters and in anticipation of it I bought my first bag of barbecue coals this year. You can have all those poets in their wrinkly suits blathering on about baseball. I say tthat Thye Masters is the only sporting event that in its sepulchural beauty and inevitable human crisis become catharsis that makes an Easter Sunday church service look like a floating crap game played behind the lube rack in a gas station. Do stick around for the movie.




If you want to know who I think will win, I’m not picking Tiger. If I thought he could still get around Augusta at 1.6 putts per hole or less, I might go with him, however in even recent weeks that putter go off like a frightened squirrel in his hands and The Masters’ greens are no place for a man entering the Tom Watson yip years of his career. Who I do have a good feeling about are two Brits: world number one Luke Donald and Lee Westwood. Armed with my pseudo-expert opinion you should now rush to find an off-shore betting site and bet your pension on Steve Stricker.

Getting back to Tiger and the yips, as I make a segue with all the sublime subtlety of a boxcar bashing through a plate glass window, the other player who seems to have lost his mojo is Stephen Harper. This of course is utterly delightful to me although perhaps not so hot for Canada which is still stuck with the man for another three and a half years. 

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What is most fascinating to me is that I never knew how much of a fan Harper is of Thomas Mulcair. What, you mean you hadn’t noticed? Since becoming Leader of the Opposition less than two weeks ago, Mulcair has received welcome wagon gifts from Harper in the form of a listless, cranky budget; bizarre attacks on an environmental watchdog agency founded by known closet-Bolshevik Brian Mulroney, and complete financial incompetence at the Department of National Defence. (How Peter MacKay keeps his job as Minister of Defence is a better mystery than the lines on the Plains of Nazca.) Could a new Leader of the NDP possibly have a better time?

As this is television, here’s the scene I’d love to see. Instead of yelling at Harper during Question Period, were I Mulcair, I would leap across the aisle, give Harper my best bro hug and gently say in a good stage whisper, ‘I love you man.’ The visual would be fantastic plus it would destroy Harper forever. You see, the only way to eliminate a tyrant is by making people see him not as fearsome, but a butt of jokes. Then they go away forever for that is something their egos cannot handle.

Fore! Be seeing you.