On the celebrity golf circuit, does Rush Limbaugh play conservatively? Is he liberal in his use of drivers? When he hits it badly off the tee, does the ball go far right?
Limbaugh just wants you to know he plays it straight down the middle -- or tries to -- when he's on the course.
"Golf is an escape for me, from talks about tax cuts and radio deregulation," said Limbaugh, who hosts a politics-heavy national radio talk show when he isn't traveling the celebrity pro-am scene.
Limbaugh, who says he has an 18-20 handicap, played in both the Bob Hope and at Pebble Beach earlier this year, and he will be a featured player in celebrity golf's premier event, the $500,000 American Century Championship, July 15-20 at Lake Tahoe. Limbaugh will mix it up with such stars as Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, John Elway, Mario Lemieux, Dennis Quaid, Dan Quayle, Jesse Ventura and Troy Aikman.
If politics are the last thing Limbaugh wants to talk about on the course, he always knows what the athletes in his group are feeling.
"They don't want to talk about their sports," he said. "They don't want anything from me."
And who does?
"The politicians," he said. "They're always trying to clue me in."
If Limbaugh wants to blend in on the course, his mission is just the opposite on the radio.
"There's a lot of noise out there," he said. "You have to stand out. My radio program is a performance."
And his golf game is a work in progress.
*
The first words out of Jonathan Kaye's mouth after beating John Rollins with an eagle in a one-hole playoff last week in the PGA Buick Classic were exactly these, when asked whether it was a good feeling:
Said Kaye: "Yes, it is. I've been seeing my name on the Golf Channel, 'most money without a win,' so I get that off my back, anyway."
You were expecting maybe something warm and fuzzy with the possibility of weepy?
Kaye, 32, has come close before -- he has been second five times -- but if you want to talk about coming close in another area, he has done that too. As a collegian at Colorado, Kaye was a passenger in a car driven by a friend on the way to a tournament when the car flipped and rolled five times and he walked away, even though he wasn't wearing a seat belt.
Another time, Kaye was driving in Mexico and a truck sped up from behind and struck his vehicle, sending Kaye to the hospital for two weeks.
