While there are no working scribes today with the chops of Darwin, Dobereiner or Herb Wind, there are a good number of honest, skillful writers on the national scene who occasionally expel their deepest thoughts without regard to consequences.
Whitten's scathing dismissal of Turnberry last year comes to mind as well as David Feherty's angry diatribes - though transparently packaged as high comedy.
In my view, the gaping hole in American golf writing is on the regional and local level, where poorly composed, stilted pap gets passed off as journalism under the indifferent eye of sports editors who view "the golf guy" as little more than an annoying nuisance.
Oddly, it was my experience that the managing editor and publisher generally took far more interest than the sports editor in my byline - primarily because they played our game. Most everyone else in the newsroom would rather eat glass than write or read about golf. I had one idiot call me up just before going to press to let me know he corrected all my "spelling errors." As it turns out, I had written a course review and used the word "penal" several times - which this genius copy editor had changed to "penile." Luckily, we caught it just before the final layout was completed.
One of the other components of this dearth of honest opinion is that big tournaments are often assigned to a regular beat writer because the golf column is written by a lowly “correspondent” (or “stringer”) - which is a euphemism for underpaid chump who is technically an independent contractor and not an employee.
This explains why tournament press conferences are repetitious exercises where writers who only cover golf once a year struggle to ask cogent questions about a game they do not understand on any more than a rudimentary level.
In short, they don’t know enough about the subject to even attempt an edgy column because 99% of the writers have never devoted more than a passing thought to the game beyond playing in the yearly pressroom scramble tournament in tennis shoes and borrowed clubs.
With the plum assignments covered by senior writers, the “golf guy” is usually left to write 300 word pieces about high school golf and/or course openings where a stampede of subsistence level hacks crowd the 'Press Day' buffet line after a shotgun start and then prostitute themselves as a P.R. arm for whichever course coughed up a tee time and some Swedish meatballs.
Most of the local NorCal golf writers hated me. It did not start out that way, but after 12 years I stepped on a lot of sensitive toes. I pissed off the Sierra Club, Mayor Brown, the PUC and any golf management company or private club that treated juniors badly or tried to take advantage of the public.
Many thought I was arrogant, opinionated and bored my readers to tears with hopelessly pedantic recitations of my highfalutin opinions of this course or that ‘game improvement’ product. Nobody likes a loose cannon who refuses to ride the gravy train.
The difference between me and those other stiffs was that I didn’t have to be nice to anybody. In my view, you either write exactly what you think for the benefit of your readership, or admit to that Armenian in the mirror that you are in the game for the freebies and just another shameless leech whose affections can be had for cheap rent.
If you only make $100 a column and your recreation depends on alms from local G.M.’s or others with the power to fork over comp tee times or demo clubs to the local golf scribe, you cannot exactly piss in their Cherrios about poor conditions and overpriced green fees.
And believe me, the editor does not want to get a bunch of complaints from a local course or business who buys ad space in a rag already bleeding red ink. It gets even worse when free papers spring up in competition whose entire revenue stream is derived solely on ad sales based on phony circulation numbers. My sports editor used to lament that he sometimes received "more mail and calls about your stupid golf column than all the important sports put together." Sorry. Really . . . .
So in answer to the question, the reason there are no more bluntly honest writers (at least on the local level) is that even if they knew enough to evaluate (and fairly criticize) what is before them, the consequences both personally and for the newspaper make it easier to take the path of least resistance and play the game.
Unless, of course, the writer is a congenital twat who writes for the readership - and the readership only. To idiots like me, to do otherwise would have violated the sacred trust of those who turned to my byline for the truth as I saw it, regardless of who liked it or who it pissed off.
In golf, that is rare these days.