Give a guy from Bushwick several hours to day-drink and a chance to yell on Rory McIlroy’s backswing, and it’s going to happen. Garrulous and unseemly noises always seem to break out whenever golf and New Yorkers are adjacent. The organizers of the Ryder Cup have nevertheless brought the famously contentious event to Bethpage Black this weekend for the first time.
Robert Redford ruled the golden-boy category, whether he was twirling a Colt revolver or directing a camera’s glance. He sure looked like one of life’s winners. As others have pointed out in their remembrances of the actor and director, he was a “quintessential leading man” who possessed “near-iconographic physical beauty.” But the sheen was slippery, as he was well aware.
Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue’s intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead.