Jailhouse Scottie

 The coppers sprung Scottie Scheffler yesterday in time for him to lay down a splendid 66 in the second round of the PGA Championship, and, boy, what an ordeal that must have been for the poor lad. Arrested! Handcuffed! Thrown in a holding cell! Spending hours agonizing over whether or not he'd make his tee time!

Oh, the torment. Oh, the ... the ... uncertainty.

"I was just so confused at what was happening at the time," Scheffler told the assembled golf  media later. "I didn't know what time it was. I didn't know what was going on."

To which certain folks in America who aren't lucky enough to be good at golf (and, let's face it, aren't of either Scottie's pigmentation or economic class) no doubt chuckled mirthlessly and said: "Welcome to our side of the street, bud."

Truth is, the non-Scotties of America have days like Scottie's on the regular, only they don't get sprung to play a round of golf on some neatly manicured patch of exclusivity. They face the same confusion. They face the same uncertainty. And that's if they're damn lucky.

Lotta times, they never make it to a holding cell. Lotta times, if they do what Scottie did and they run up against the wrong cops with the wrong assumptions about certain types of people, they wind up holding down a slab in the morgue instead.

Here's what happened, in the predawn hours outside Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville yesterday: A vendor employee was struck and killed by a shuttle bus while crossing one of the main drags outside the club. Scheffler wheeled onto the scene of the accident a short time later, intent on driving into the club. 

Louisville police had stopped traffic at the scene. Scheffler, however, decided to drive around on the median instead. A Louisville police officer grabbed Scheffler's arm through his car window  (a perhaps unwise move). and, according to the LMPD, was dragged along the ground briefly before Scheffler finally stopped.

He was then pulled from the car, handcuffed and hauled off to the hoosegow, charged with second-degree assault of a police officer, third-degree criminal mischief, reckless driving and disregarding the instructions of an office directing traffic.

Scheffler claims the whole thing was "a big misunderstanding" and that he didn't understand what he was being asked to do. To which the Blob says what about a cop telling him to stop didn't he understand?

Or maybe he should have just stopped, rolled down his window and asked one of the police officers what was going on. Isn't that what a normal person would do?

Of course, Scottie hasn't been a normal person for quite some, which is the crux of the issue here. As someone who's good at hitting golf balls where they're supposed to go, he gets treated like royalty everywhere, and it's only human nature after a time to take such privilege for granted. So when he rolled up on the accident scene yesterday morning, why would he not assume the rules (or even a police officer's instructions) didn't apply to him, Scottie Freakin' Scheffler?

This is not to absolve him for what he did, or to maintain absolutely that was his mindset. Maybe it was; maybe it wasn't. But for once, he ran into someone who either didn't know Scottie Scheffler from a Scottish terrier, or didn't give a tinker's damn if he did know. And so Scottie got treated the way everyone else gets treated -- or perhaps  better. 

Boo-(bleepin')-hoo, is all I've got to say about that.

Except for this: If Scottie Scheffler thinks he had a bad day, he should ask how the day went for the family of the poor guy who got splattered all over the street in the shank of a rainy Kentucky morning.