A 30-second video showing President Donald Trump driving a golf cart onto a green at Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, N.H., has sparked quite a debate.
Nobody's arguing whether the president should or should not be playing golf; instead, the commenters on Twitter took their sides based on what they think is proper etiquette on a golf course.
Golf purists, as we all know, are sticklers for rules, and especially etiquette.
To them, seeing Trump drive his cart onto a green, the tightly mowed area of a golf course where players try to putt the ball into a hole, is tantamount to stepping into a mud puddle and then marching into grandma's house without so much as wiping your feet.
Bad manners, no matter what your political beliefs are.
In the video, Trump drove his cart -- which had a President Trump placard on it -- about halfway across the green to meet a playing partner and retrieve a club.
Trump is shown driving off the green, apparently oblivious to his breach of etiquette, and chatted with several guests, one of whom was filming his affront to golf etiquette.
Normally, presidents are given a pass on the golf course.
Bill Clinton was known to use a mulligan here or there and nobody seemed to care.
Gerald Ford hit his share of errant shots, especially during the Bob Hope Desert Classic, injuring unsuspecting spectators for years.
Dwight Eisenhower, the most fanatical of all presidential golfers, was a frequent visitor to famed Augusta National Golf Course, home of the The Masters, where a tree on the 17th hole a tree was named after him because he kept hitting it.
So, columnist David Whitley of the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel took a somewhat whimsical outlook to Trump's breach of etiquette.
"You didn't have to be a CNN anchor to be outraged," Whitley wrote. "Golf has a lot of arcane rules, but one that everybody understands is that you don't drive a 700-pound golf cart onto the delicate turf of a green.
"Most of us have a hard enough time making putts under perfect conditions. It gets really tricky when you have to roll it through tire tracks, even if they are left by the most powerful man in the world."
Whitley issued this warning to Trump:
"Sure, he can drive his cart into the clubhouse dining room if he wants to. But just because you own the joint doesn't mean you should treat it like a motocross course."
Whitley wants Trump to set a better example for young people who aspire to play golf.
"If he doesn't, we may have to endorse a candidate in 2020 who wants to build a wall around greens to keep the bad drivers out."
Fake news
• Headline on satirical website TheKicker.com: "Umps go to video replay to see if they're slowing game down too much."
• Headline on TheOnion.com, another satirical web site: "Stephen A. Smith reveals he still meets up with Skip Bayless to argue."
Down goes Tiger
Comedy writer Alex Kaseberg, after the pilot avoided injury when a one-man blimp crashed and burned near the U.S. Open last week at Erin Hills: "However the blimp, the Spirit of Tiger Woods, was totaled."
SPORTS QUIZ
The Eisenhower Tree no longer stands at Augusta National Golf Course. What happened to it?
ANSWER
The Eisenhower Tree, a 65-foot Loblolly pine that often disrupted the golf game of President Dwight Eisenhower, was removed in the winter of 2014 after it was severely damaged during an atypical ice storm in southern Georgia.
Sports on 06/26/2017