Given Saudi Arabia’s execution of 81 people in a single day in March, I am not following the PGA tour lately.

So I missed the Scottish Open, and I will break my fast next week, I guess, for the British Open.

I paid for my beliefs. That darlin’ Ulster lad, Rory McIlroy, whom I love (his Ma looks like a real person and he has a beautiful little daughter) won the Scottish Open Sunday.

He was behind by one at the 17th and had won by one once he’d finished the 18th.

Back on the 7th hole, he’d hit a 427-yard drive. If you look at his finish, I haven’t been that flexible since I was eighteen months old and could insert my foot into my mouth (literally, not figuratively, which I still do frequently.)

Here are other comparisons to a 427-yard drive:

–Paul Bunyan getting tired in the desert one day and dragging his axe behind him. The trail it left we call today The Grand Canyon.

–In 1963, Warren Spahn’s Braves beat Juan Marichal’s Giants 1-0. Both men pitched 16 innings.

–Mom Angela Cavallo, in 1982, lifted a 1964 Chevy Impala to free her teenaged son, who was pinned underneath. He survived.

On the 17th hole, he hit a 5-iron cut–look at the difference in the finish–and look where it wound up. Birdie.

The young man looking bereft after that shot was leading at the time. He knew just what was about to happen. The same must have occurred to Custer that hot day in 1876.

On the 18th, McIlroy hit a two-iron, a club that’s faintly terrifying (the clubhead, at the end of the shaft, seems no bigger than a soup spoon) into the teeth of a howling Scots wind. It was a low screamer, the kind of shot Lee Trevino learned to master growing up in Texas winds.

Birdie.

My rough-tough father-in-law, the ex 49er, was once asked what the toughest sport was. Because of the combination of physical skill and emotional self-control, he took no more than two seconds.

“Golf.” he said.