COLUMN: Is Reed a villain? Maybe

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By: 
Pete Temple
Express Sports Editor

     If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t truly know for sure whether Patrick Reed, winner of this year’s Masters golf tournament, should be considered a villain.

     I only know what I’ve read. And considering the state of national media these days, where the goal (from all perspectives) seems to be to persuade rather than to inform, it’s hard to know what’s true.

     I won’t go into it all here; you can Google “Patrick Reed controversy” or something similar, and there are dozens of accounts of his past, particularly during his college golf career – all alleged, all denied – which may or may not have actually happened.

     The one that sticks with me, however, is that Reed is estranged from his parents, that they were not invited to his wedding, that his wife allegedly had them removed from the golf course by police during a U.S. Open. Sports Illustrated detailed that one some years ago, and again, there are many Internet accounts about Reed and his parents.

     My problem, now that I’ve been a parent for more than 15 years, is that I tend more to see things like this from a parent’s perspective. And I cannot imagine the pain of having an adult son who puts so much effort into keeping his parents out of his life.

     So for me, it was easy for me to cast Reed as the villain in the Masters. Sports are more fun for me when there’s a “bad guy,” and this guy fit the bill comfortably.

     I spent most of Sunday afternoon watching the final round and hoping Reed would bounce a ball off a nearby tree, have it carom off his head and knock some sense into him. Also hoping he would lose.

     As so often happens when I watch sports, this tournament didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. At the very least, I found myself hoping, in the aftermath of the Masters, that Reed would acknowledge that his parents had at least a little to do with his success.

     Instead (and this is a fact), when Reed was asked in the champion’s press conference if it was bittersweet not to be able to share the most triumphant moment of his life with his parents and sister, he replied, “I’m just out here to play golf and try to win golf tournaments.”

     Is it wrong to hope he has won his last one?

     

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