Smoking at The Open

First topic message reminder :

It was not a pretty sight seeing Darren Clarke desperately drawing on a fag to get his nicotine fix at The Open.
Not a good image for young golfers, can you imagine a cricketer or a boxer having a sly puff during a match.
He was smoking at his work place, how do the R&A [EPGA] get round that law?

If kids are stupid, vascillating or suggestable enough to start smoking simply because a wizened, fat and boozy Irishman wins the Open, then I'd have to despair about the young generation. He's hardly a poster boy for Embassy or Benson and Hedges.


Give them some credit, I think they can handle seeing the occasional smoker. In fact the more you brush something under the carpet or make it shady or underground, or make it verboten, the more kids are likely to do it.

I'd also say that kids are more likely to look up to far more glamorous public figures than golfers?!? The entertainment industry attracts a greater interest with much less to look up to than golfers...

Given the shiversome sycophantic celebrity obsessed gutter press there is no shortage of wretched, hateful people who do an awful lot worse than toke on a fag.