KEY POINTS:
Sometimes a sport throws up a personality so different, so charming, so - let's be honest - sweetly daft, that almost everyone else retreats to the shadows.
Boo Weekley, currently playing in the PGA tour opening tournament of 2009 probably has spent most of the past couple of
months up a tree somewhere, draped in camouflage, chewing tobacco and patiently awaiting the arrival of an unlucky deer while he strokes his rifle.
Hunting, not golf, is Boo's passion. "I want to play golf for 10, maybe 12, years," he says. "Whatever it takes to get enough money and then I'm done. I love to play golf, but my heart is really in fishing and hunting."
Boo, on the other hand, does take his day job seriously and entertains the whole time. Remember his gallop off the first tee on the Sunday of the Ryder Cup last September? While everyone else was trying too hard to put on a game face in Louisville, Weekley just pretended he was playing at Kentucky Derbies.
Earlier that week he had even managed to upset the usually phlegmatic Lee Westwood by encouraging the local fans to give it some and then give it some more. Asked if he regretted his actions he grinned and said: "Hell, no, I'm just trying to have some fun. No disrespect intended to anyone."
Nor was there. Weekley, at 35, is the sort of man-child you expect to have mending your fence, but instead here he is in his third year on tour.
After he scraped through Q School, no one expected him to hang around for long. Several years on the grind that is the Nationwide Tour had toughened him up but he was no college graduate, no shiny product of the pro-golf production line.
Instead, he drifted through a huckleberry life in Milton, Florida, a town so small and anonymous that even he is not sure exactly where it is. "I do know that there are more pick-up trucks than cars," he points out.
When official confirmation came through in late 2006 that he had his big-time card for the following season it was accompanied by a cheque for US$25,000. Gobsmacked, he showed it to his wife and then began crying. "Honey," said Karyn, "what's the matter?"
"There's people work a whole year don't make this kind of money. They're paying me to do something I love to do," replied her husband.
Since then he has won twice and starred in that Ryder Cup. It is more than a dream. It is worth more than US$5 million to date. Not bad for a bloke who dropped out of agriculture college after a year and who drifted into labouring at a chemical factory. He was employed as a hydroblaster cleaning out ammonia tanks.
This in turn means he finally got ambition. To get the hell out of there.
He has, however, remained enthusiastically different to the rest of the players. He spent so much time barefoot while growing up in Milton that golf shoes still hurt his feet too much, so he wears sneakers.
Occasionally he bothers to tie the laces properly. Normal trousers irritate a skin condition on his right leg that he believes was caused by rubbing against his "granddaddy's cow" (don't ask, just don't ask) and so, as shorts are banned on tour, he often sweats in rain pants.
When storms toss alligators up on to the house porch he and a couple of pals jump them, tie their snouts and, his words, "move them on". This, apparently, is illegal.
He may not have mentioned this when he got to go to the White House to dine with George W Bush alongside the rest of the victorious US Ryder Cup team, but he was suitably impressed by what he saw.
"Wow, there's so much stuff there," he said. "So many pictures and so much history. I was honoured to meet the President. He's like one of us."
- OBSERVER
