OUR SUBJECT THIS week is a man who threatened to destroy the delicate balance of our relationship with elite sport.
Ken Weyand played in last week’s Dubai Invitational on the European Tour and shot 53-over par across four rounds, finishing just the 72 shots behind winner Tommy Fleetwood and 39 off Jens Dantorp, who finished second-last.
He didn’t break 80 across any of those four days and his card featured so many colourful squares it looked like a game of Tetris: 10 double bogeys, two triple bogeys and one galling quadruple bogey on the final hole of a round that would otherwise have been in the 70s.
Ken Weyand was an unlikely topic of discussion in Dubai 😬
— National Club Golfer (@NCG_com) January 15, 2024
🔗 https://t.co/qQ4CKlNNdb pic.twitter.com/7D9KOuI0On
Weyand played four rounds as there was no cut but he didn’t quite go full Costanza in blithely turning up somewhere he wasn’t welcome, because he was invited to play.
The Telegraph‘s James Corrigan brushed away The Mystery of Weyand midway through the tournament. He is a 54-year-old club professional at the exclusive Grove XXIII course in South Florida, where members include Michael Jordan. MJ was invited to play in Dubai by tournament sponsor Abdullah Naboodah, but didn’t show. Naboodah is apparently friendly with Weyand as well, and so extended an invite.
“I don’t care if he’s Ken from Barbie – it shouldn’t happen”, posted European Tour stalwart Eddie Pepperell.
Weyand rocked up to Dubai and for the price of widespread mockery and 337 strokes he earned $8,000 in prize money and his first official world ranking. As of today, Ken Weyand is the 4,129th best golfer in the world.
This column won’t be engaging in cheap ridicule of Ken Wayward. If you told me this was the 4,129th best sports column on the planet, I’d take it.
Plus, there are many serious points to be made about Weyand’s involvement in the tournament. Firstly, it came at the expense of first reserve Matthew Jordan, who is a legitimate professional trying to make his way on the European Tour. Secondly, handing out world ranking points at an event that can pad out its field with guys playing golf according to cricket scores makes some of the arguments against LIV ring pretty hollow, and add validity to their carping that the ranking system is a stitch-up.
But it’s not all bad. While Weyand’s involvement is another small blow to the credibility of the European Tour, he also flattered its players by reminding us just how good they are.
The level at which even the little-known Tour players are operating at is absurd, but it doesn’t take long for the rest of us to discard this fact when they are competing against each other. It takes a Weyandesque intrusion from a foreign place like The Real World to remind us of their abnormal quality.
This is an extension of The Gus Ceasar Principle in Fever Pitch, in which Nick Hornby was struck by a kind of horror at seeing Ceasar graduate from being the outstanding footballer in his school and London borough to Arsenal’s first team, where he struggled to the point of becoming a supporters’ punchline.
“To get where he did,” wrote Hornby, “Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation… and it still wasn’t quite enough.”
No group of sportspeople are more undervalued in their country than Olympians who don’t medal, given many of them practice these mysterious and complex sports of which the general population have little understanding. All Olympians would benefit from a fleet of Ken Weyands.
We should build a kind of citizens assembly of the physiologically average and the competitively disinterested to try their hand at each event at the Games immediately before the professionals compete, to give us all a clear indication as to how much better they are than the rest of us.
Give an accountant a pole vault and pop a barista on a bobsleigh and we would soon have a great appreciation for the talents of those doing these sports full-time. A World Benchmark time would be a much more useful reference point than a World Record.
And why stop at the Olympics? The League of Ireland would lose a lot of its snide detractors if clubs briefly opened up spots to the best player on your five a side team. The League is dismissed in some quarters but it’s filled with guys who were the dominant player in every single one of their underage teams growing up.
The only class of people who should feel threatened by this are the columnists and the sportswriters, for whom Ken Weyand must not be treated as anything less than an existential threat.
Weyand’s competing in Dubai was a disenchanting of the entire ecosystem, in which we envoys of the Real World are allowed criticise and dismiss the performances of the pros. When Ken Weyand – who is one of the better golfers among the rest of us – finishes 71 shots behind Rory McIlroy, it exposes as ridiculous the notion we can write mean things about his final-day three-putt on 14 or his errant tee shot on 18. Who are we to criticise Scottie Scheffler’s putting or Viktor Hovland’s chipping?
This is why Ken Weyand and his ilk can never return, as it takes only one imposter to reveal a million of them. We must re-enchant the world of professional sport: it must remain hermetically sealed so that only the very best compete on the rarified plane of their talent. For when there is no general reference point for their quality and when their brilliance is allowed to appear mundane, the rest of us can criticise, sneer, and bemoan.
Our only hope is to judge them against their own standards, and for that, best to pretend there are no other such standards out there.
