Tucson Weekly: Fancy Pants (February 12

The Golf Tourney Is A Great Place To Observe Pimp Fashions.
By Tom Danehy
THE 1998 TUCSON Chrysler Classic golf tournament hits town next week, and I, for one, can't wait.
I love the golf tournament, and not just for the rain it brings. (Two or three years ago it brought snow, which was way cool.) Actually, there are lots of reasons to love the golf tournament, at least one for each of you out there.
Danehy Some fun things to do at the tournament:
Check out the people in the gallery. You'll just be walking along and see somebody dressed like a pimp in a '70s blaxploitation flick. And it'll turn out to be somebody's 68-year-old Uncle Vern in from Duluth. Neon yellows, hideous greens, flamboyant fuschias. And those are just the colors on the faces of the people eating in the press tent.
There's free rides. A couple years ago, my son and I spent two hours just riding back and forth on the tram between the club house and the non-valet parking lot. It was more fun than watching guys take 10 minutes to line up a putt on a green so neat you could iron on it. In all fairness, it was only slightly more fun. That is, until we convinced the guy who was driving to take a corner kinda fast and do a side wheelie.
Yeah, Disneyland in Tucson! And not a placard-carrying Baptist in sight.
There's free stuff. They have all these booths set up near the clubhouse, designed to get you to try stuff you'd never ever consider trying had you not been blinded into temporary insanity by all the senior citizen pimp pants.
One time they were letting people make free long-distance phone calls on a cellular phone. I stood nearby and listened in. The first 17 people I eavesdropped on had the exact same conversation with their respective callees:
"Yeah, this is me. I'm calling from the golf tournament in Tucson."
(Pause) "I don't know, I just wanted to say 'hi.'"
(Pause) "No, it's free."
(Long pause) "It's mostly cloudy, but it's still real bright. It must be all those pants. Okay, bye."
Then they'd hang up and invariably walk away saying, "Wow, I've got to get one of those."
Tiger Woods won't be there. Rarely has a golf tournament had a better selling point. No self-righteous blathering to fill up the sports pages with empty, well-rehearsed quotes. No ridiculous arm-pumping after sinking a four-foot putt. No uneasy feeling like you're trapped in somebody else's Nike commercial.
I hate the fact that one of the biggest stories leading up to the tournament was that this guy had decided at the last minute to skip the Tucson Classic. Who cares? He had his blast of fame and he handled it very badly. Maybe when he gets the chance to mature, he might turn out okay. I hope so. In the meantime, let him play in those million-dollar sure things in Singapore and stay his sorry butt out of Tucson.
Who knows, he might be walking around the Old Pueblo and run into a real black person. And then what? He'd have to whip out his genealogical charts just to make sure no one calls him "brother."
On Tuesday, February 17, there'll be something called the Air-Touch Cellular Shoot-Out. This I would pay big money to see and even bigger money to participate in.
How many times have I been driving along in rush-hour traffic, fantasizing about getting in a shoot-out with someone using Air-Touch Cellular service, usually the dickhead in the next lane who keeps weaving back and forth?
This year's tournament is sponsored by Chrysler, a product you've actually heard of before. Almost everybody has ridden in a Chrysler. Back when I was growing up in L.A. in the late '60s, almost all of the LAPD cars in the ghetto were Chryslers.
Those last two statements have nothing to do with each other.
You can smell people. I'm not talking like funk or anything. I'm talking perfume that is sold by the fractions of an ounce. On men and women.
You have to be wary of guys who wear cologne. I remember when I first saw Play It Again, Sam. Woody Allen (before he went criminally insane and decided to have a daughter with his daughter) is putting on some cologne and the guy who was playing Humphrey Bogart's ghost said, "What are you doing that for? Men aren't supposed to smell good for women. It's the other way around."
I thought back and remembered that my father hadn't used cologne. Heck, he used to eat braunschweiger and my mom still stayed married to him for 40 years until he passed away. I kicked Brut that very day.
You walk around that golf tournament and you'll smell all kinds of fragrant people. It's weird. Then you'll see some of those guys wearing sweaters tied around their shoulders. That's too much. You wanna pick those guys up and drop them in a scene from Brooklyn South. See how long it takes them to soil their clothes.
In all sincerity, there are lots of great things to see and do at the golf tournament. What I like most about it is that it allows the Tucson Conquistadors to continue their great work with the young people of our community. Over the years the Conquistadors have helped thousands of young people in a wide variety of athletic pursuits.
A Little League team will defy the odds and win the state championship and suddenly have a few days to come up with the thousands of dollars necessary to travel to the regionals. A local group tries to start an after-school program to get kids interested in sports. An athlete wants to pursue a dream.
These are the kinds of causes which the Conquistadors can and do assist. They're a great part of our community. I'd have told you that at the beginning, but you might have fallen asleep, hit your head on the table and then sued me. That's why I had to talk about the pimp pants first.
See you there.

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