OK, the headline is a little misleading. Yes, I will be hanging out today with David Aardsma’s father, David Aardsma, but so will about 100,000 others.
This is a day off from baseball (kinda and sorta, because I’m still finishing off a Mariners feature for Monday’s newspaper). Instead of Peoria, I’m headed to Scottsdale to watch the final round of the Waste Management Phoenix Open golf tournament.
David A. Aardsma, father of the Mariners’ closer, is the senior vice president of sales and marketing for Waste Management, the tournament sponsor. Look for him on the 18th green at the end of the tournament helping the tournament winner hold that giant cardboard check.
So “technically” I’ll be right there with Aardsma’s dad in a sporting event like no other. This isn’t your laid-back golf-clap kind of crowd. This event draws the largest crowds of any golf tournament in the world and they behave more like college football fans than anything else.
Oh, you’ll see a few dweebs wearing their slick Ping sirt, slacks and, yes, golf shoes. At this event, anyone wearing a shirt with buttons is way overdressed. The rest are in t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops cheering the good shots and booing the bad ones — usually with a drink in one hand — and making sure the reputation of the boistrous, rowdy crowds here is upheld.
This is the home of “The 16th Hole,” the par-3 surrounded by grandstands that make it the Fenway Park of golf. They can pack more than 20,000 around that hole, and it’s such a popular place that it even has its own souvenir tent selling 16th-hole hats, shirts, buttons, etc.
It’s a fun-loving crowd that doesn’t think twice about cheering or jeering or ordering another beer. Just picture 20,000 Ryan Divishes and you get the idea.
They sing college fight songs of various players and chant “USA! USA!” whenever a golfer from the victorious Ryder Cup team walked onto the 16th tee box. It’s the “Dawg Pack” quadrupled.
During a lull in the action last year, everyone in the general-admission grandstand started a chant directed at the hoidy-toidy folks in the corporate boxes across the way.
“Corporate sucks! Corporate Sucks!” the few thousand in our grandstand chanted.
A few seconds later, it was thrown back in our faces: “We get free drinks! We get free drinks!”
That’s when the creative leadership in the GA section got the last word: “We don’t need a bailout! We do’t need a bailout!”
Just then, Chris DiMarco walked onto the tee and missed the green to the left, and everyone booed.
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