Rooting for the Washington Generals, Part XXIV
So here’s what you need to know about Brendan Jones: He’s from Australia, he’s 33 years old, he carries 200 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame like most normal humans, and — I like this part best — he’ll be fine. He won’t get sucked into and blown out of the Tiger Woods Vortex. He’s an actual guy living a pretty great golf life. Actually, he’s probably closer to the attainable dream for most people than Woods could ever be.
The fact that you’ve never heard of him? Just another detail.
Jones is the guy who drew the short straw and had to face Woods in the Accenture Match Play Championship near Tucson on Wednesday. Because Tiger has spent several months healing up and learning the names of his children, his re-emergence on the golf scene has had the attendant publicity of a coronation, or (to select a more contemporary example) a presidential inauguration. If your industry was so utterly dependent upon a single recognizable figure, you’d probably react the same way.
And sure, sure, Tiger, Tiger – but what about the other guy?
Well, the other guy’s fine. Not only that, he’ll happily accept the also-ran label placed upon him for being paired with Woods, collect his $40,000-plus check for showing up, and mosey on back overseas, where he will continue making scads of money playing a game for a living. Not a real problem, no, in Brendan Jones’ golf life right now.
Jones is an eight-time winner on the Japan Golf Tour, with lifetime earnings there north of $5 million (U.S. currency). He did time on the Nationwide Tour, winning nearly $300,000 in 2004, and in the only year he gave significant attention to the PGA Tour, 2005, he made the cut in half the tournaments he entered, and won $498,817.
(By the way: This is the part about pro golf that sometimes makes it so inscrutable. Even in a sport in which the players rise and fall according to weekly performance, it is possible to record a 50 percent failure rate and still pocket half a million bucks. Not sure my 50 percent failure rate will accrue quite the same total out here in the world beyond.)
If you’re keeping score, Jones is ranked 64th in the world among professional golfers. In other words, he isn’t threatening to become Tiger Woods anytime soon. But when Jones joked on Tuesday that he might ask Woods to spot him a couple of holes per nine, he laughed right along with everybody else.
You know why? Because 64th in the world of pro golf is a fairly lovely place to be. And long after Woods’ fanatics have forgotten his name, Brendan Jones will be merrily playing 18 holes somewhere very green and nicely tended, and getting paid a small fortune to do it. Tell me the part again about the tough luck for Jones.
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February 26th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
[...] So here’s what you need to know about Brendan Jones : He’s from Australia, he’s 33 years old, he carries 200 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame like most normal humans, and — I like this part best — he’ll be fine. He won’t get sucked into and …Continue Reading [...]