Fifty-nine is the new 63? Are you kidding?

I'll bet the sports writer Edgar Thompson who wrote this piece for the Palm Beach Post recently, has never shot anything close to the magical 59 he seems to disdain in his article.

Among other silly things he says, he wrote, "59 is the new 63 - an exceptional round of golf, not an extraordinary one," but what does the word "extraordinary" mean?

It means going beyond what is usual, what is ordinary. For pro golfers, shooting in the 60s is ordinary and usual, but if Mr. Thompson honestly thinks shooting a 59 is "usual" and "ordinary," he needs to pay much closer attention to the game of golf. In truth, I think he was probably just trying to be clever, but in do so he has perhaps exposed himself as clueless about golf.

Any golfer can shoot a good score on any day. This happens all the time. Heck, I recently shot an 82 on Tullymore in Stanton Michigan, and had I not tried to hit a nearly impossible second shot on 18, I had a good chance to shoot a 78 for the first time in my life. This is a difficult golf course with an insane slope rating, and I'm a bogie golfer, but I would argue that my doing this was akin to Stuart Appleby shooting a 59 on Greenbrier's Old White Course.

An 82 was an extraordinary round for me, and Appleby's 59 was an extraordinary round for him. It's all relative and a function of the fickleness of golf. But there is no way a 59 is not extraordinary. No way. Very, very few people have ever done it. You could maybe count them on two hands. In fact, hitting a hole-in-one is far more ordinary than shooting a 59 will ever be.

Get a grip, Mr. Thompson, and write about things you know, like being clueless. Now that would be extraordinary.