Change of Heart: Tiger and Bartcop

Often I take my eye off of things for long periods of time, and sometimes when I again check in, I find that the situation has changed radically, for reasons that are not presented. That has happened most recently with the attitude of Bartcop, a weblogger, toward Tiger Woods, the by now heavily iconic golf player.

Bartcop is a longtime runner of a progressive weblog augmented by a radio show that he operates out of what he concedes is the badly askew state of Oklahoma, the Tophat of Texas and a place that regularly gets knocked about due to its unfortunate location in the heart of Tornado Alley. For years, despite various adversities, including his own prickliness, Bartcop has managed to keep going his own highly distinctive brand of progressive thought, and he does this partly by indulging in a large number of comical fetishes, and one of those has to do with Tiger Woods.

Several years ago Bartcop would invariably rake Woods over the coals, though not anywhere near the extent to which he did GWBush, Karl Rove, and many others of that ilk. And the odd thing was that he would carefully keep hidden just what he had against Woods. Even when people as baffled as me would ask Bartcop directly, he would find all softs of clever ways to veil his motives, and eventually all I could come up with is that Tiger Woods had little to nothing to say of an ethnic and political nature, one way or another. But I also thought that Bartcop did this with a gigantic amount of tongue in cheek, and it was always interesting and amusing to pick up on every one of the occasional short posts that he devoted to Woods, just to watch Bartcop keeping up that most mysterious and illogical of his dislikes.

Just now, however, I find that while I wasn't looking, that situation has completely reversed itself. Or at least I think it has.

After a tournament just concluded and that he won, Tiger Woods has been fined by the PGA for criticizing a referee who had put him and his opponent "on the clock," to avoid slow play in the closing moments of that tournament, when the two players were engaged in a dramatic competition to determine the winner. The other player, a man named Harrington, is apparently a naturally methodical, slow hitter of the little white orbs, and Tiger Woods complained that his opponent had been unfairly thrown off his game by being forced to adhere suddenly to a time limit that till then was not present, and as a consequence Harrington had trouble with three difficult shots and he lost.

I was surprised to see Bartcop strongly taking Tiger's side in this, and he said that Tiger should tell the PGA to "screw themselves," and that if they pushed him too hard, Tiger should threaten to quit the PGA and instead to start his own "Tiger PGA." And Bartcop was confident that Woods could do this, because in his eyes Woods is golf's only bonafide star, and he essentially is pro golf.

And Bartcop lavished all this praise without any mention of all his unrelenting former animus toward the man.

I am still astounded. What could have happened in the meanttime to change Bartcop's mind?

This complete reversal of attitude goes on the top of the pile of mysteries that I am waiting to see revealed one of these rare days.