Maybe Payne Stewart was right: Autographs are senseless

I went to Muirfield Village Golf Club this morning to pick up my media credentials for the upcoming Memorial Tournament. It’s a beautiful, sunny day in Columbus and there were plenty of people on the premises to catch a practice round and Jack Nicklaus‘ clinic later in the afternoon.

I didn’t walk the golf course, so I don’t know how many of those in attendance were out on the course watching play. But there were several hundred fans in the bleachers around the practice range watching players hit balls. To me, that’s crazy, but I understand that most people don’t get a chance to personally watch Vijay Singh warm up. What makes even less sense to me are the adults crowded around the range’s exit waiting for PGA Tour players to sign autographs.

Yeah, I know, some of those guys are selling the merchandise to collectors, so there’s money involved.

And I understand little kids who want a sports hero to sign something for them, because it’s a brush with someone famous.

But what importance is there in having a man write down his name? Why would anyone possibly care? Why would people pay money for it? It’s ink in the form of someone’s given name. It could literally say anything.

The folks at the Memorial have built a temporary bridge from the scoring room to the range, about 30 feet above the ground, so the players no longer have to walk through the crowd to get to the range. But this isn’t because the Memorial people don’t think autographs are pointless, they just don’t want the public to bother the golfers.

Memorial officials always have kept the public at arm’s length from their guests. About a decade ago, I was standing outside the men’s grill at the Memorial as the players were eating. I was waiting to interview Fuzzy Zoeller about a golf course he’d just designed. While I waited, I heard Payne Stewart say it was his favorite tournament because the fans were kept so far away from the players. He was so crazy about it, he took a placemat from the grill room and wrote a petition on it saying that every tournament on the PGA Tour ought to be just like the Memorial, then he tried to get other players to sign it. Now, maybe those autographs would be worth something.