Interesting Take on Max Golf Interview

[nijmegen]

From http://www.nypress.com/static/billboard.cfm


William S. Repsher
Nineteen Eighty... Fore!


While it’s great news that Eddie Van Halen is purportedly holding up well in his cancer fight, the real news is more troubling. No, the real news is not the question mark hanging over the possible return of David Lee Roth to Van Halen; it is how we learned of Eddie’s positive attitude toward his condition: via an interview in the August issue of Maximum Golf magazine.

Maximum Golf? Am I the only one who saw that and thought, “Another nail in the coffin of rock and roll”? I could picture Eddie, with his modified shag that makes him look like an angry, middle-aged housewife, chainsmoking despite the cancerous outbreaks he’s experienced over the past few years, decked out in his golfing togs—but, mind you, sitting in an electric cart, since that hip-replacement surgery most likely keeps him from walking 18 holes.

It’s no secret that plenty of famous (and aging) rockers hit the links every chance they get; Alice Cooper is apparently almost good enough to turn pro. I, perhaps living my life in reverse, used to golf, in high school. Yes, I was one of those dorks on the high school golfing team. Within the cocoon of our nerdy little golf world, the sport was great fun and a nice refuge from the ills of our teenage world. But outside it, we were universally recognized as “dicks” and “homos” by a majority of the high school, especially by the kind of rough-housing jocks who served as archetypal targets for the Columbine losers.

We were forced to wear white short-sleeved knit shirts to school on game days. (I see corporate drones dressed like this on casual Fridays and involuntarily shudder at the memories.) We kept our clubs in our geometry teacher/coach’s classroom. When the van came to take us to our match, we invariably had to wrestle our clubs from the cro-magnon grips of white-trash yard apes in coach’s sixth-period remedial class who were using our clubs as informal air guitars and pool cues.

Adding insult to injury, we were a bad team, with the coach getting hammered on martinis in the clubhouse while we got our working-class asses beat all over the course by snooty Young Republicans with country club memberships. In that context, perhaps, our love of the game took on a certain rebel stance. The problem was, we were rebelling against the rebels, the cool kids in school who wouldn’t be caught dead on the golf team. The only thing unifying the jocks and the stoners was their derision of staid school institutions like the golf team. Ironically, most of those hammy, short-sighted jocks ended up as avid golfers, and the stoners got stuck working in factory (or sometimes jail) jumpsuits that made our knit shirts look like the height of fashion.

These thoughts flashed through my head when I learned that Maximum Golf had scooped such august “rock” publications as Rolling Stoneand Spin on the Van Halen story. Maybe those magazines should station a reporter at courses in the greater Los Angeles area. And on those days when the sun gets a little too hot, they could stake out high-end hair replacement salons, where they could perhaps score an exclusive with David Lee Roth as he tries to fight the inevitable and avoid turning into your perverted Uncle Shecky.

[Mikey Metalhead]

I fell asleep 3 times trying to read your post, someone summerize it for me [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

[Burning Tires]

Well,

It sounds to me like this writer needs to get over his high-school angst and bad memories. It isn't Eddie's fault that golfing is such a painful subject to him.

Has anyone considered that the same legal restrictions keeping VH and DLR from getting together presently are keeping them from putting a story in Rolling Stone or on MTV? Maybe the golf article was a roundabout way for Eddie to get some news to the fans, since it isn't technically about the band.

[RanAround]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Burning Tires:


Has anyone considered that the same legal restrictions keeping VH and DLR from getting together presently are keeping them from putting a story in Rolling Stone or on MTV? Maybe the golf article was a roundabout way for Eddie to get some news to the fans, since it isn't technically about the band.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Excellent point! I have wondered if the legal restrictions could be what has kept the band from putting out any kind of news.