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Golf legend and eight-time major winner Tom Watson has laid into two of
golf's most hotly-discussed issues of 2012, the return of the sport to
the 2016 Olympics and the upcoming ban of long-handle putters.
Despite the general consensus from golfing world that the sports return is a good thing, Watson is not keen on the idea.
"I
still think of Olympics as track and field and not golf to be honest
with you," he said. "I don't want to pour cold water on it, but I don't
think it should be in the Olympic Games."
"We have our most
important championships [the four majors]. You have golf in the
Olympics. You have diluted the importance, in a sense, of the four major
championships."
"I probably had a pie-in-the-sky way of looking at the Olympics as being clean and pure," he said.
"I like to trust people and trust they are doing things for the right reasons.
"When the professionals go to the Olympics, they go for the wrong reasons ... I'm probably talking like a dinosaur."
However
when it comes to golf's plan to ban the belly putter - due to come into
effect in 2013 - he agrees with the officials, although even that
approval is somewhat mixed.
Watson agrees that a broomstick stroke "is not a stroke of golf. That's not a stroke but it makes it easier to play."
"My
son Michael, with a conventional putting stroke, he couldn't make it
from two feet, but he went to a belly putter and he makes everything,"
Watson said. "The game is fun for him now, so there lays the danger. Do
we take the ability for people to have fun away?" |