There's only one thing that can be more frustrating than chasing a dimpled ball through a pasture with sticks: watching someone else play golf on TV.
Those overstuffed, supercilious announcers never tell you what course the golfers are playing, how many yards they have to the green, what club they're using or how many divots of flying sod, mega-mulligans and bunker sand storms it would take your average weekend hacker to survive the same 18 holes.
And while I'm at it, why don't they use some of those NFL computer tricks to make the ball and cup actually visible? After spending most of a weekend looking for my own ball, the last thing I want to do is lose one on TV.
However.
For all its plaid-pants pretentiousness and condescending country-club whispers, TV golf showed me something two weeks ago that is nearly as rare these days as a wooden-shafted mashie niblick.
Honor.
You could see it in the chagrined, crooked smile on Greg Norman's face after he blew his ''insurmountable'' lead and lost the Masters Tournament - again.
You could hear it in Nick Faldo's choked up voice as he accepted his victory by first offering emotional, sincere sympathy for Mr. Norman's astonishing collapse.
The sports pages called it one of the Great Moments in Sports. I would see that bet and raise it to one of the Great Moments in American Culture.
It demonstrated that graceful defeat can be a victory in itself. It demonstrated that winning with humility does not make you a loser. It demonstrated just how rare it is these days to see such examples of personal honor.
In the rest of the wide world of sports, honor is a synonym for chump. The concept of honor was fouled out of the NBA long ago; pro football did a sack dance on it; and it never came back from the Major League Baseball strike.
Once upon a time, sports was a ritual for reinforcing our code of honor. But these days, the athletes who get the most attention and endorsement celebrity are the ''colorful'' Dennis Rodmans and John McEnroes who elbow their way into our living rooms by breaking all the rules, taunting opponents and humiliating the lowly blue-collar referees who dare to get in their way.
Sports is vastly overrated as Most Valuable Player in our culture. But the games we play, and how we play them, offer a revealing metaphor for the real world where we work.
It's not such a giant leap from the overpaid brats and bad boys of pro sports to the slash-and-grab CEOs of business.
An April 11 report on executive pay by the Wall Street Journal said that ''CEO compensation at about 30 major companies soared to 212 times the average U.S. worker's earnings in 1995, from a multiple of 44 in 1965.''
At the top of the list was General Electric Co.'s John F. Welch Jr., with total compensation of $22 million in 1995. Since 1993, GE has downsized about 5,000 local workers out of jobs.
One that didn't make the Wall Street Journal list was the salary of Choicecare CEO Dr. Dan Gregorie, who took a 61 percent pay increase in 1995, from about $436,000 to more than $702,000. A Choicecare spokesman said that Dr. Gregorie's salary is still too low.
Meanwhile, as Cincinnati's largest HMO, Choicecare has been a leader in a managed-care crusade to bleed costs out of health care until some doctors and patients beg for mercy.
I'm all in favor of people getting wealthy - it's the American dream. But news like this worries me. Business bosses who gain from other people's pain are handing sloshing cans of gasoline to the bonfire-builders of class warfare.
Such salaries spread an epidemic of downsizing anxiety that could scare us back into the tar pit of regulation, taxes to ''punish the rich,'' socialized medicine and other stupidities.
Such as re-election of President Clinton.
There's only one thing more frustrating than watching impotent Republicans stand around tongue-tied and red-faced, embarrassed by CEO greed like someone who brought a glutton to a smorgasbord:
Watching a man who is genetically dishonorable play president on TV like a weekend hacker, while he shaves the truth to brag about his pro score.
Unless we restore honor to our highest office, we won't see more than an occasional glimpse on a golf course. Corrections: Last week I said Marge Schott was the first woman owner of a baseball team. As several readers pointed out: Wrong. In an April 14 column on HMOs, I said the average total compensation of the top 10 officers at an Ohio HMO was $2.1 million. Wrong again. It was closer to $1.2 million.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
