The knock on the Old Course is that it’s beautiful to play (indeed it is), it’s chock full of history and therefore an Open there automatically has some magical undertones (it does), but from a photographic perspective it is, in local parlance, pure shite. Sacrilegious as it may sound, that, too, is the absolute truth. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, with the flat terrain and the unfortunate placement of TV cranes, scaffolds, and grandstands, it’s one of the ugliest golf courses for pictures, once you get past the first and 18th holes. And with its classic out-and-back layout, the fairways are always roped to one side (the outside) only, leaving too long of a throw to opposite holes and to most greens. But hey, you do what you can, right? Someone once told me that a photographer’s job is to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. And so it is here.

The real challenge of the week, though, was to produce this Gigapan image of the 18th hole. It was photographed from the balcony of the MacDonald Rusacks Hotel with a big assist both from the hotel’s management and Golf Digest Director of Photography Christian Iooss. More specifics can be found on my Sunday blog post, but here it is:

Well it’s been a while since the last post but that doesn’t mean life hasn’t been busy–on the road for eight straight weeks of baseball for Sports Illustrated, portraits for S.I. and Golf Magazine; golf for S.I. and Golf World, a portrait shoot for Nike, and even a little bit of golf instructional thrown in for Golf Digest. I hadn’t seen Tiger Woods in almost 2 months, since The Players Championship, but last weekend we were both outside of Philadelphia at Aronimink Golf Club for the AT&T National. I was enjoying myself immensely, what with being back on the east coast, in a city I really enjoy, and better yet on a beautiful, old-school golf course that’s the antithesis of the housing-developments-with-fairways that the Tour loves to frequent these days. As for Tiger? I think it’s pretty safe to say that, work-wise, I had a better week than he did.

And so we wait eagerly; Kim and his entourage of three close friends (two of whom, his caddie and personal assistant, live with him) and three dogs lounge around the living room of what might be the ultimate bachelor pad, complete with the obligatory giant flat screen televisions, a shuffleboard table, and downstairs, a not-so-obligatory “movie room” with a $60,000 sound system and four queen-sized beds. As “SportsCenter” blares in a continuous loop, my assistant, Will Rutledge, and I fret about, marking time by coming up with one shot after another, setting lights, finding angles, pulling Anthony off of his bean-bag chair for five minutes of shooting here and there. We’re all waiting for the piece de resistance, but for different reasons.

Fortunately, Kim is a great guy who, in addition to taking the whole car delivery thing in stride, had no problem letting us stick around–I’m beginning to think he wants the car in the shot as much as we do, and my suspicions are confirmed when I overhear him on the phone with the truck driver: “You’re where? How long? Look, I need it here tonight for a Sports Illustrated photo shoot!” He’s extremely gracious, offering us the run of the house, but I’m content to try and keep out of the way lest we overstay our welcome. When the car does arrive some four hours behind schedule, via a giant yellow car carrier, Kim is like a kid on Christmas day. The light is fading fast, but we’ve already given up on that–Will has spent the past two hours rigging strobes and a suspending an overhead crossbar camera mount in the driveway, and by now I’m more hoping than resigned that we’ll have to shoot this in the dark. After what seems like hours, the car is backed off the truck, and Kim hops in. He motions for the others to do the same–he bought this particular car, he says, because all four of them could fit in it–and guns the engine. The car disappears around the corner of a quiet (well, until now at least) Dallas residential street. We’ll get our wish. It will be dark by the time they get back.

For the photographically inclined, the technical details:

I’m a huge proponent of the philosophy that “if you bring everything, you forget nothing,” and so we showed up for the shoot loaded for bear. I threw everything I had into the car, and rented a few things that I didn’t. But I’m also of the mind that just because something is on the truck, doesn’t mean you have to use it. The various shots from this assignment drew on a couple of different approaches, from using every single light, stand, and reflector we had (the car shot), to a couple of strobes in an outdoor setting (the pool shot), to an added, single continuous light source (the theater shot), to simply taking advantage of existing light and backgrounds (the individual portraits).

The car shot: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 24-105mm lens mounted on a 12′ crossbar some 15′ in the air with the car parked underneath. Lit with Profoto heads in Elinchrom Octabanks on two sides and bounced fill in the front and back. Camera tethered to a MacBook Pro and fired remotely.

The movie theater: Available light augmented by a Profoto head with a beauty dish and 40-degree grid aimed at Kim, using only the modeling light as an ambient light source. Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 16-35mm lens.

The pool: 2 bare bulb Profoto heads balanced for ambient exposure. Polarizer. Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

Shuffleboard and the living room shots: All available light, which was abundant thanks to a wall of windows at the rear of the house. Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 50mm 1.4 lens (shuffleboard) and 16-35mm (living room).

Hallway portrait: Canon 5D Mark II, 50mm 1.4 lens, with a single Profoto head bounced off of a warm, terra cotta-colored wall at camera right, balanced slightly above ambient exposure, which was utilized for fill light.

Tight portraits: Ambient window light against a textured, painted wall in the dining room. Canon EOS 5D Mark II and 85mm f1.2 lens, pretty much wide open.

…and if you’re curious:

• Yes, I like to move around. Arlington has some great angles from up in the concourses and mezzanines, and there are little, if any restrictions on where we can go. And the people are friendly. It’s a great place to work.

• The portraits of Ken Griffey, Jr. and Ichiro Suzuki were shot in the dugout during the game.

• The image of Ichiro at the plate was shot with an old Nikkor 500mm f8 mirror lens with a Nikon F to Canon EF mount adapter available here.

• Yes, there is a certain amount of luck involved in getting a bat-on-ball picture. But at the same time, let’s not forget what Louis Pasteur once said: “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

• The last two images, of Casey Kotchman being tagged out at home plate by Matt Treanor, were made with remote cameras: one with a 70-200mm lens (at about 135mm) in the inside-first base well, and the other with a 300mm lens in the outside-third base well. If you look carefully, you can see the latter camera in the shot from the first base angle.

* Not-so-subtle reference to “Bull Durham,” for those not familiar with the greatest baseball movie ever made.

I’m not a golf course architecture aficionado by any means but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 15 years of walking golf courses while covering the pros it’s this: any golf course that has Jack Nicklaus’ name in the slot next to the words “Course Architect” ought to have the following warning posted before the first tee, in the same manner as those ski slopes with the double black diamonds:

“Warning: This golf course was neither conceived nor designed with the thought that anyone actually enjoys playing golf and walking from shot to shot, or from a green to the next tee. If you play this course and do not take a cart, you are an idiot and you deserve any health problems that result from your poor decision-making skills, including your untimely death.”

For the players at this week’s Cap Cana Championship, this was not a problem. This is the Champions Tour, after all; part of the entitlement package of playing on a tour that a colleague of mine (I’ve long since forgotten who, but I wish I could remember) once called “Day Care for Millionaires” is that you get to plop your over-50 year-old bones in a cart as much as you want. But the press is still the press, regardless of the tour we’re following or the course we’re on. Hoofing it on foot would have to do.

Manuel De Los Santos on the driving range followng Saturday's second round.

I didn’t have to go far to get my favorite image of the week, though. Returning to the media center following Saturday’s second round, I found an e-mail from my editor at Sports Illustrated, Miriam Marseu, asking me to try and get some “on course” portraits (that’s golf-photo speak for long-lens, available light, waist-up shots)  of Bernhard Langer for a feature. Play had finished for the day, but I reasoned that those kinds of shots are best found on the driving range, anyway, so I figured I’d stroll the hundred or so yards over to the practice area and see if he was out there.

He wasn’t. And that was a good thing, because what I literally stumbled upon was something that I wouldn’t have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. Instead, I found Manuel De Los Santos, a 25 year-old former baseball prodigy who took up golf after he lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident at age 18. Standing on one leg and taking full, powerful swings that sounded so pure–those of you who’ve hung around professional golfers practicing know exactly what sound I’m talking about–he muscled shot after shot down the range with a stroke that torqued his entire body from the start of the swing to its finish, taking a brief hop as he made contact, and spinning into his follow-through to finish perfectly balanced on the the tips of his toes in a manner that defied credulity. In between shots I turned my head to see that Corey Pavin had stopped practicing for a minute to watch, and was shaking his head in disbelief.

Golf carts are a staple for players on the Champions Tour, as Fred Couples (and caddie Joe LaCava) can attest...

But you can’t make your game story pictures on the range, and so for the rest of the assignment, a hike was in order. I was able to receive a major assist from Sports Illustrated’s Miguel Saavedra, who flew down to help out. He knew what he was in for; I’d told him that I was two weeks removed from some minor surgery and under doctor’s orders not to carry or lift anything over 20 pounds, so he was going to be doing a lot of schlepping. I should note that the physical outlay for a golf photographer is nothing to sneeze at; walking 18 holes a day (and this on a Nicklaus course–see above) with a load easily in excess of 50 pounds is not exactly a walk in the park, regardless of whether your GPS tells you you’re somewhere in the middle of paradise. But for some reason he thought this sounded like fun and agreed to leave the office for a couple of days and come along. On so many levels beyond the physical help, I was glad he did.

Eventual winner Fred Couples gouges out an approach shot on the third hole.

I know enough Spanish to get by–barely–but I’d never fully appreciated the enormous difference having someone fluent in the language to translate and communicate could be. Let’s start with my favorite subject: food. There was surprisingly little to choose from at our resort/hotel (there, I said it; I won’t sugar coat to make you think we stayed at a Motel 6). But the front desk staff highly recommended a little place called La Yola which, they said, was a 10-minute walk down the road.

(As a brief aside, one thing I did learn last week is that in the Dominican Republic, everything takes ten minutes. How far to the hotel from the airport? Ten minutes. How long until the shuttle gets here? Ten minutes. How far is it to the golf course? Ten minutes. You get the idea.)

Inspired by dreams of fantastic food and a nice leisurely beach-side stroll on a beautiful star-lit evening, Miguel, myself and S.I. writer Damon Hack headed out down the path, as instructed. They don’t mark things very well in Punta Cana, so when, ten minutes later, we arrived at a gated entry way leading to a massive, multi-winged, thatch-roofed edifice with towering floor-to-ceiling windows, dimly glowing lights and soothing music echoing back to the street through the walled-in parking lot, we knew we had arrived. We wandered in, past a couple of parked cars, through an open foyer and into an atrium surrounded by glassed-in rooms and filled with tropical foliage. Walking between the rough-hewn tree trunks that provided frames for the buildings and shade for the walkways, I began to get an uneasy feeling. The place was empty. Were we looking for dinner? Or Colonel Kurtz? I half expected a stoned-out-of-his-gourd Dennis Hopper to greet us with a couple of Nikon F’s hanging around his neck.

And then we walked past the kitchen, on the other side of a wall of windows. It was enormous and pristine, and stocked with every gleaming stainless steel appliance that would make a foodie like myself drool on sight, which is what I started doing. The staff of four or five was busy cleaning away–which I thought odd, considering we had a reservation and all, and that they certainly wouldn’t be closing up for the night.

Miguel must’ve found it odd, too, because he stuck his head in the door and said something to the people inside. I think I saw most of them smile, if not laugh outright, but when he pulled his head out the door he was doing neither.

“Dude,” he said, “this is someone’s house.”

The emphasis he placed on that last word reflected enough incredulity for the three of us.

The kitchen staff was very accommodating and sympathetic to our plight; one of them even gave us a ride to our actual destination. Had we walked it, it would have been–you guessed it–about another ten minutes down the road…

The next day Miguel suggested at breakfast that we ought to try something different. After all, we were in a beautiful location, and as we’d discussed before, the location was the story. And it was Saturday, which meant we still had a full day of shooting on the course to follow tomorrow. Why not take a chance at the ultimate “sense of place” picture and rent a helicopter for half an hour? Why not, indeed. I mean, we’re in a foreign country, it’s Saturday morning, we have no idea where to get a helicopter from, and we need it sometime in the next four hours or so.

Aerial view of the Punta Espada Golf Club, Cap Cana, Dominican Republic.

For Miguel, this meant about 10 minutes of chatting up the hotel concierge, a phone call or two, and an appointment for one o’clock that afternoon. That meant we could still go to the course, shoot a couple of holes of scenics, and be back in time to meet our ride to the helipad. The helicopter ride was as much fun as they ever are; it was a Robinson 44, which is about as close as you can get to putting a couple of lawn chairs under a big propeller and slapping a tail rotor on it, and to tell you the truth I was secretly relieved when we were told that it would take several days and piles of paper work to get the necessary government approval to take the doors off. And it was a good thing they stayed on, too–our pilot, Felipe, practically fell out of his seat when, about 700 feet above the Caribbean, he asked–and we told him–who we were taking pictures for.

As we flew back inland, I listened over the headset as Miguel briefly recounted our previous night’s restaurant hunt to Felipe, and inquired as to the identity of the house’s owner, who’s name he’d gotten from the staff.

Felipe broke into a wide grin. “He’s only the wealthiest man in the country.”

On Sunday, a funny thing happened at what was supposed to be a glorified exhibition of golfers in their golden years out for a walk in the park: a real, bona-fide golf tournament broke out, with a final threesome of Fred Couples, Nick Price, and Corey Pavin slugging it out in a shootout that rivaled anything I’ve ever witnessed on the golf beat. I mean, I was happy enough to have been granted a paid weekend in paradise without a care other than bringing back a couple of nice pictures. Who’d have thought I’d get to witness some quality competition as well?

These photographs of Tiger Woods are available for editorial licensing. Click here to view lightbox.

Sure, it’s a little bit surprising that the hiatus was so brief, and you can’t blame the cynics who wonder what happened to what everyone thought would be an extended recovery and rehabilitation period, but can you really blame him? Just a look at the venues for this year’s major championships should be reason enough; there is no way to think that a man who has his sights set on surpassing Nicklaus’ record of 18 would miss the chance to play on three courses where he has won majors, and won big, in the past–Augusta, Pebble Beach, and St. Andrew’s.

Then there’s Augusta itself. Why the Masters? As this Mike Peters cartoon suggests, not for nothing did Team Tiger seek out the man who shoveled information to the press during Bush 43’s “Mission Accomplished” campaign to orchestrate this comeback. Augusta is without a doubt the most restrictive place in terms of media coverage–credentials needed to have been applied for months ago (sorry, TMZ, Radar, E!, and the rest); no one is permitted inside the ropes; and the general fear of transgression resulting in credential revocation is a constant back-of-mind concern. “Normal” rules of golf coverage don’t apply here, which makes The Masters the perfect spot for the return of a personality bigger than the game itself and a brand and image that needs to be tightly guarded, protected, and controlled.

I’m going to leave the hand-wringing over what this means about overshadowing the Masters as a tournament and whether Tiger’s presence there is fair to the event or the players to people who write about (and worry about) this stuff for a living. But what does it mean for photographers? For the moment, not much. The same rules and restrictions that make Augusta an ideal cocoon for Tiger’s return also make it a manageable place for golf photographers to work. Nothing ever changes there, and I can’t see how this year would be any exception. That which we’ve often cursed may this year have become a blessing, although my brethren might be cautioned to exercise a bit more care around Steve Williams on the 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th and 16th holes. Of course that doesn’t mean that the rest of the year–especially Tiger’s first tournament after Augusta–isn’t going to be an absolute freaking zoo, but for now? Same Augusta, same rules, different year. Simple as that.

As for me, unless someone has a better idea, I plan on spending my Masters Sunday either in the third base photo well at The Ballpark in Arlington as the Rangers play the Mariners or, barring that, on my sofa with Jake in my lap, an ice cold Shiner Bock in hand, and the high-fructose musings of CBS’ resident Augusta sycophants dripping from my television set. And if it’s the latter, I really do hope that now that he’s old enough to appreciate it, Jake gets to watch the greatest golfer ever to play the game win a Masters.

Of course, I’m going to have to choose my words a little more carefully than I had originally planned the first time he asks me, “Daddy, who’s Tiger Woods?”

I joked with friends that I should have gone out and bought a lottery ticket after calling Ryan to set up our shoot. Ryan is a fantastic guy, one of the refreshing few on tour who is a genuine pleasure to work with and who understands what a photographer needs from a shoot and is willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen. As we’d worked together before a few years ago, I knew all of that, but that still didn’t stop my jaw from hitting the floor when he a) actually answered his phone on the second ring and b) asked, “What day works best for you?” If you haven’t guessed already those are not two things you often experience when trying to work with a professional athlete.

Thursday was my first look at TPC Scottsdale in a year. It always amazes me how the infamous 16th hole there grows–the skyboxes and bleachers seem to multiply exponentially. But this year Golf World writer Geoff Shackelford was concentrating on a different hole–the far more strategic 17th, and my task for that day was to make an image showing not just action but the layout of the hole and illustrating the decision making process which faced the player on this drive-able par 4. It didn’t hurt that as the day went on the harsh desert light settled down a bit so that by the time Phil Mickelson approached the tee, most of the tee box was in shadow, allowing him and his wisely-chosen bright blue shirt to stand out.

Friday and Saturday were my days to work on a new project for Golf World involving the Gigapan process (more on my work with that here). The high resolution and user-interactive potential of the images made from it make it a natural for the 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale, one of the most crowded, and certainly the loudest and rowdiest, holes in all of professional golf. Thanks to the benevolence of a security guard who bore a striking resemblance to the Sopranos’ Big Pussy Bonpensiero, I was able to find a perch in the penthouse skybox overlooking the green, and came away with this 17-gigabyte monster of a panorama, comprising 720 individual images stitched together:

Sunday was back to the golf–enough lounging around in the corporate tents! TPC Scottsdale is a hard course to shoot, with few clean backgrounds and even fewer shortcut opportunities when chasing leaders around the course, and I never like to only devote one day to actual game coverage but in this case I didn’t have much of a choice. After a relatively peaceful front nine of following the two lead groups all hell broke loose, with Hunter Mahan, Y.E. Yang, and Rickie Fowler puling away from the pack and putting themselves in positions to win. Naturally, they were all playing in separate threesomes. So after much running around I settled on Mahan, who did me the courtesy of hanging on for the win.

Favorite images from the 2009 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo.

A lot has changed in twelve years, and I’m not just talking about the skyline of the Strip–although it never ceases to amaze me how things change, and how quickly the concrete and glass jungle foliage can spread in that city over the course of a year–let alone a dozen of them. Professionally, in the way I and Sports Illustrated cover the event, things have come a long way as well.

I made my first trip to the Thomas and Mack Center in 1998. At the time, I was one of the S.I’s traveling lighting technicians, and former S.I. staffer Layne Stewart invited me to come along. From the second I set foot in the arena, and took in the sights and, just as noticeably, the smells, of the NFR, I was hooked. This was something different. The people were engaging, the athletes were accommodating, and the organization was happy to have us there. In short, it was everything you’d hope any major sporting event could be, but never thought you’d see. Over the next three years, I spent two long December days hauling more than a dozen Speedotrons up into the catwalk in an annual ritual of the hardest, most meticulous arena lighting job I’d ever have to do during my tenure as a lighting assistant for the magazine’s photographers.

I can’t remember how, or why exactly, it happened but after a few years of lighting and assisting, I began to contribute regularly as a photographer to Sports Illustrated, and the NFR shooting assignment fell to me in 2000. Ever since then, S.I. Picture Editor Jimmy Colton has had the confidence in me to send me out to Las Vegas year after year without a specific assignment, the only instruction being to come back with a two-page spread image to run in the magazine’s “Leading Off” section.

I don’t want to give the impression that that’s an easy thing to do by any means. But at the same time I always want to give my clients a little more than they’ve asked for. So at the Rodeo I’ll try to do something other than just straight action–maybe I’ll try a few portraits; maybe a remote camera in a unique position. Sometimes those things run; more often than not they don’t; the limitations and expense of magazine real estate tend to create distinct boundaries; despite Jimmy’s love for the NFR and his tireless advocacy for including its images in the magazine, if one picture is all we’ve planned on, that’s usually all the space we’re going to be given.

Behind the scenes with 2009 World Champion Bareback Rider Bobby Mote.

The advent of a viable online component, however, has given us the opportunity to expand our coverage a bit. This year I proposed the idea of a portrait series of the winning cowboys, tied in with my ongoing “Manual Labor” portrait series, and, with the help of my friend Ann Bleiker (who has worked in so many capacities with the NFR and its participants over the years I’ve lost count), arranged to spend some time going behind the scenes with Bobby Mote, the 2009 World Champion Bareback Rider. SI.com provides an outlet for projects like these that was previously unavailable.

We don’t light the building anymore; with digital imaging technology being what it is these days strobes have become almost obsolete. And the week-long assignment has turned into a weekend. But that won’t ever keep me from heading to Vegas if the magazine will send me, and from always trying to get as much out of the trip as possible.

Robert Earl Keen and the Robert Earl Keen Band, Gruene Hall, New Braunfels, Texas, February 2008.

I guess the picture to the left is what started the ball rolling, so to speak. It was shot at Gruene Hall, a rickety, crumbling, one-of-a-kind dance hall in the truest Texan sense of the term, with a little point-and-shoot camera one February night as some friends and I took in a Robert Earl Keen show. It’s probably not much to look at but for some reason I recall getting home very late that night and immediately wanting to download this picture and see it on the screen. And I remember getting up the next morning, wanting to do nothing more than get it processed in the computer, working painstakingly to bring whatever I could out of this crappy, high-speed digital file to try and reflect the essence of the performance that I had seen the night before. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a kid developing Tri-X in the high school yearbook darkroom again–I thought I had…something! I knew it! And I couldn’t wait to see what it was. As I looked at the image the next morning, the portrait guy in me promised myself that some day, somehow, I was going to find a way to make a portrait of someone in this place.

Fast forward six months or so. Glossy magazine, an offshoot of the Austin American-Statesman, is doing a feature story on Texas musicians, one of whom is Robert Earl Keen. Would I be interested in shooting him, and did I have any ideas on how and where to shoot it? That picture, that show, that night popped into my head again. Did I ever.

Robert Earl Keen, New Braunfels, Texas, July 2008

A brief disclaimer: I really enjoy, and appreciate, Robert Earl Keen’s music. It’s raw, it’s honest, it’s funny, and it’s deep. It’s It’s also bluesy, folksy and a little bit country, which means that it’s an acquired taste, especially for a born-and-bred New Yorker and child of the ’80s. But I don’t tell you that to try and convert or convince you; I tell you that to give you a little bit of my perspective on the shoot.

You see, I spend a good amount of time working for Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest. Which is to say that I spend a good deal of my photographic life shooting pictures of extremely talented people who can do other-worldly things with the gifts that have been bestowed on them–people who awe us on television with their abilities, and whom we in turn lionize (and sometimes, canonize) in our newspapers’ sports pages and the glossy spreads of our magazines’ feature wells. I must confess, however, that for someone who documents these people as they work and gets to meet and work with them in person, this is a bit of a letdown because, to be honest with you, a good many of them turn out to be assholes who couldn’t care less.

You see, disillusionment is pretty much included in my job description. And so it was with great trepidation that I waited in Gruene Hall one hot morning in July, having positioned the cameras, loaded film backs, and set the lights. I’d done this too many times and met too many people whose talent I genuinely admired, who I was truly looking forward to meeting, and who disgusted me in the end with their arrogance and attitude. I was prepared for the worst. Call me jaded, but I’ve just found that it’s the best way to ease any disappointment.

What a pleasant turn of events it was, then, to discover that the man who is so easygoing on stage, who spins yarns about his old college landlord and tells corny jokes and forgets lyrics as he finger-picks his way through his old, folksy classics, and laughs and jokes and jams with his band as they meander through a set-list that is written half an hour before each show and changes by the minute was…exactly like I imagined, and hoped, he would be. Easygoing. Serious. Cooperative. Thoughtful. Engaging.

In a word: Genuine. And that’s all you really need to know.

Photographed from the MetLife Blimp Snoopy One, Tiger Woods and Steve Williams walk down the 14th fairway at Medinah CC during the final round of the 2006 PGA Championship.

Peace. Serenity. A whole gondola to yourself, two thousand feet up. No jostling with other photographers. No running to get into position ahead of everybody else. No snarling caddies. No spectators grabbing you, shoving you out of the way, spitting on you or threatening you with bodily harm. No F-bombs dropped on you by the fans, or by the man himself. No drinks being poured on you, umbrellas jabbed in your back. No interns with clip-on ties telling you you can’t shoot from the same exact spot you were in just a threesome before. No cops with pistols, security guards with earpieces, or officious volunteer course marshals with logoed shirts, optimistically-waisted Dockers and an extremely misplaced sense of empowerment. Nope. Just you and the blimp pilot circling the skies over suburban Chicago on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with Tiger and Stevie walking between the shadows in the fourteenth fairway on their way to another major championship.

Yep. It’s enough to make you want to sit back, take a deep breath, and crack open one of those bottles the blimp guys keep suspended in the cargo net above your head. Until you realize that’s not exactly beer in them.