Within minutes of his big win at the Masters this weekend, Patrick Reed became the subject of online outrage over a regrettable hot mic incident back in 2014 for which he has publicly apologized.
In a moment highlighted by Twitchy, Huffington Post senior editor Paige Lavender posted then quickly deleted a tweet congratulating Reed on his $1.98 million win on Sunday. The reason her congratulations couldn’t stand: Reed is a “terrible” “bigot”:
So what is Lavender virtue-signaling about? Reed once muttered a gay slur upon missing a putt during the WGC-HSBC championship in China that was caught by the Golf Channel’s live broadcast.
“Don’t f*****g three-putt you f*****g faggot,” Reed said to himself, a comment that was immediately rebuked by Golf Channel announcer Frank Nobilo, who described it as something that “could be interpreted as being homophobic.”
In a piece for Golf, Eamon Lynch put the spotlight on Reed’s comment, and though he noted that Reed had apologized for it, Lynch turned the incident into a broader discussion of “golf’s ugly issues of bigotry“:
Reed later tweeted an apology, saying his passion to play well got the better of him. Golf can do strange things to men, though a cynic might note that Reed’s Ryder Cup captain Tom Watson has suffered putting woes for 25 years and has yet to be overheard berating himself with homophobic slurs. But then such moments reveal the character of professional sportsmen. …
While there have been several prominent gay women on the LPGA Tour, there isn’t a single open homosexual on the PGA Tour, and not many more even within the broader golf world. If I wander down a fairway at Augusta National, it is tantamount to a Pride parade. But then the Tour has never reflected the country at large, even beyond the demographics of gender, race and sexuality. If you rely on the PGA Tour’s image of its “family,” you might conclude that families contain no cheats, drug abusers, wife beaters or other degenerates.-pga-tour-issue-open.
As Twitchy points out, Reed should expect the criticism from the Left to continue, particularly with these images recirculating: