Beyond Wubba Batson, Or The Search For Good Golf Spoonerisms

Golf is fine. It is a fine sport and it is doing fine. Climate change is conspiring against its continued existence, the game's inherent conservatism is something of a drag and a sport-spanning personality deficit is not helping much, but golf is doing well. The British Open ended in an exciting three-way playoff, Zach Johnson played great and won and then gave a memorably earnest interview, and everything is fine. It's fine.

But there is still the matter of that personality deficit—which, to be fair, applies more to American players than their European counterparts, who count a large number of paunchy party dads among their number. There is a natural samey-ness to golfers that is the natural result of the sport's demographics and geographics and general vibe, and it has mostly ever been thus. That most American pro golfers could credibly be mistaken for other American pro golfers is not necessarily their fault—they mostly are the same person, although to be fair some of them are from Texas and others are from Florida, and those are different places. (None of them are from places other than Texas or Florida, except for John Daly, who is from 1991 and a blessing forever.)

And yet there's something sort of frustrating about the way that so many players on the tour so stubbornly look and act and fundamentally are pro golfers, with reasonable names and haircuts and faces that look like various slightly different police sketches of a junior banker wanted by the authorities for some sort of boat-related crime. More importantly for the purposes of those dedicated to being stupid on the internet, there are at first glance very few decent spoonerisms to be found on the tour. "Wubba Batson" can play in any league, but it is not long before an aspiring spoonerist is talking him or herself into "Wiger Toods," and that's no place to be.

And I went ahead and said so, because I walk in truth and because Twitter is right there and because it seemed unfair to deprive the general public, starved as it is for valuable content, of my most important thoughts.

I guess Wubba Batson is probably the best PGA spoonerism. I haven't thought about it too much to be honest.
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) July 20, 2015

I did not intend this as a challenge. I do not believe that I intended it as anything at all. But, as tends to happen on Twitter—which, when it works, is the greatest engine for collaborative comic idiocy the world has ever known—it was taken as such. These were the results:

[<a href="//storify.com/david_j_roth/beyond-wubba-batson" target="_blank">View the story "Beyond Wubba Batson" on Storify</a>]

And so I must stand at least some of the way down. Shatty Peehan is a pretty strong spoonerism. Many of those are pretty strong spoonerisms. Golf, once again, is fine.