Arrogant PGA is big loser

•	Court gives 'legs' to hobbled golfer
•	Hawai'i golfers split over court cart ruling
	Join a discussion on the Supreme Court decision allowing Casey Martin the right to ride his cart in PGA events

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Writer

Maybe now the people who run the PGA Tour will finally pull their collective head out of the sand trap.

Having gone for the buzzard on Casey Martin v. the PGA Tour Inc., perhaps they'll wake up and figure out what yesterday's 7-2 decision by the U. S. Supreme Court reaffirmed.

It is that Martin is a remarkable individual whom the PGA would have done well to embrace from a golf cart in the beginning, and not try its darndest for three years to unseat.

Here's somebody who is the kind of courageous symbol the PGA should have celebrated, even if it meant allowing him to ride between shots, not someone it should have tried to coldly run off.

That's the sad part of this whole saga, that it took several courtroom rebukes, a public relations black eye and the hundreds of billable hours by its legal army to demonstrate something the PGA Tour should have realized when it first laid eyes on Martin.

The perseverance that has seen him through 28 years of life with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a painful, degenerative circulatory ailment, also earned Martin his Tour card in 2000 and helped see him through every legal hurdle the PGA could throw in his hobbled path.

Martin's condition, even with a golf cart, causes him greater fatigue than even those who walk the course, doctors have said. And it can't have been easy trying to make a living amid the disapproval of the PGA, the court actions and the accompanying media spotlight. Most who embark on golf as a career struggle just handling what's between the ropes.

Yet, with the same dedication to purpose that has seen him through his struggle with a withering right leg, Martin has not only persevered through the distractions but triumphed.

The rare ailment, which doctors say causes blood to pool in Martin's lower leg and makes walking exceedingly painful, has him fighting a battle to hold off eventual amputation.

In earning a scholarship to Stanford and playing the Nike Tour, he long ago proved he was no quick-buck artist looking for a shortcut. Martin was the last one who wanted to be different and ride in a cart. But when it came to a decision of riding what he has come to term, "the buggy" or not being able to play at all, it was the choice he had to make.

It is a decision that made much more sense than the ill-advised one by the PGA, which fought Martin and the Americans With Disabilities Act at every turn.

Here was an opportunity to embrace Martin and the inspiration he can be. Yet, in sticking to the same rules-must-be-rules mindset that once excluded non-white golfers, the PGA inflexibly refused to accommodate Martin.

Finally, their stubborn arrogance for both Martin and the law has caught up with them.