Sports & Entertainment

Last week Tiger Woods came to the Congressional Country Club (CCC) to promote the third annual AT&T National, a tournament that he founded to honor his father, Earl Woods, as well as our country's troops and veterans.

Tiger announced that he will play on the historic blue course on June 30. He told me that our capital city "is a great golfing town. This is a great sport town in general. We want to come back and play here as long as Congressional wants us. I mean, this is such a great golf course and such a special area, that of course you want to come back. It is a very historic golf course and one that players love to play." Read more...

The recent kerfuffle over comments made by Miss California Carrie Prejean in response to openly gay blogger Perez Hilton is a prime example of why Hollywood should never attempt to insert itself into politics. Quite simply, Hollywood elites like Hilton stink at it, and have no bearing on what goes on outside their twisted, rose-colored view of how the rest of the country lives and functions.

Perez Hilton clearly has an agenda that is out of America’s mainstream, on any level. He crafted his own little box of entrapment, and sprung it on an unsuspecting contestant more worried about her next dance routine than some curveball question. What did it accomplish, other than elevating Perez Hilton’s agenda and no one else’s? Why not ask about the military junta forming in the jungles of the Congo or the next diagnostic platform for chem-bioterrorism countermeasures? It’s a pageant, not a science fair or mortarboard. Read more...

“Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame,” singer John Cougar (née Mellencamp) alerts us in the Huffington Post before pointing fingers and laying blame of his own. As can be expected, the targets range from the predictable — Wall Street, record companies and “bean counters” — to the absurd — “The Man” and Ronald Reagan.

That Reagan remains a bête noire for the left is nothing new, but blaming Reagan for the current state of music is taking tortured logic to the extreme. Read more...

Every once in a while, ordinary citizens — people far removed from the political process — become a part of the national conversation.

For example: During the 2008 campaign, for better or worse, Joe the Plumber became a voice that brought media attention and (to be sure) scrutiny.

A new voice has emerged. For years, everyone has known him as Coach K, even while I, as a graduate of the University of North Carolina, have called Mike Krzyzewski many other names not always fit for print. Read more...

(Full disclosure: I am reviewing the book written by my oldest son, Seth Davis, When March Went Mad: The Game that Transformed Basketball, published by Times Books on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 NCAA college basketball national championship game between Indiana State University, led by Larry Bird, and Michigan State University, led by Ervin "Magic" Johnson.)

So, first, how do I justify reviewing my son’s book in my own political blog? Read more...

The reactions of organized professional tennis to the United Arab Emirates’ refusal to enter an Israeli athlete in its Dubai tennis tournament says wonders about modern anti-Semitism.

Imagine if they didn’t accept James Blake or Serena Williams because they don’t like blacks: Would organized tennis accept that and continue participation, deploring the discrimination on its way to playing for money? Not likely. Read more...

The pioneering New York psychiatrist Edward F. Edinger suggested that sports form the primal matrix of a people. In our case, the Super Bowl will form a template image in time of who we were and what we wished to become back then. And that is why the ads are so important. They are the organic and unpretentious poetry telling of the moment between winter’s end and rebirth; last night’s costing $100,000 a second. Read more...

The left's disdain for Wal-Mart is not exactly a secret. When it was recently announced that Bruce Springsteen — who will perform on The Mall this weekend for an Obama Inaugural event — would release a greatest-hits CD exclusively at Wal-Mart, many of his fans on the left howled. As I noted in a piece for National Review today, fans accused him of selling out. On a discussion site at backstreets.com, one poster said, "It makes me so upset. This goes against EVERYTHING he is about. How could Bruce do this?!?!!?!?"

Well, he did it by being a capitalist, as the number of T-shirts and tickets sold at each concert demonstrates. Read more...

God doesn't know we're here. No one knows we're here.
— Henry Gale

Whenever I see one of those pretentious bumper stickers — are all bumper stickers pretentious? — that says “Kill Your Television,” the TV show “Lost,” beginning its end-run next week, comes to mind. Because in our time, some of the best writing and troupe acting — “The Sopranos,” “House” — is on television. And “Lost,” directed by the young visionary J.J. Abrams, is at the top of the pack.

In “Lost,” there is no false distinction between highbrow culture and low theater. Any episode may contain references to both Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Likewise, Catholic priests travel in harmony and consort with Taoist Immortals and Tibetan Dakinis. Read more...

It can’t be the most auspicious of Solstice turnings when in the prequel of the president-elect his friends are already starting to go to jail. And this pre-president, already compared before the start to Kennedy, Roosevelt, Lincoln and Jesus. But on this very beautiful and cold night in the White Mountains I am glad of one thing. Although a fine wordsman, he is not being compared to Robert Frost.

I’ve always had problems with Frost, especially because his house is near my house. Because of that “darkest evening of the year” thing, often illustrated on tourist novelties up here by an old Yankee riding along on a horse and sleigh through a heavy snow, with bells silenced at the edge of the forest, so as not to alert the packs of dogs, wolves and coyotes who start to get hungry starting now. Read more...