Rory! Rory! Rory!

Rory McIlroy won the British Open today. He is from County Down, where I am living, specifically from Holywood, right up the road. Everyone has been following his progress in the tournament all week. I think it has surpassed the weather as the main topic of conversation (Brits are notorious about commenting on the weather). The tournament seems bigger than FIFA, and FIFA was big.

And it isn't just about Rory. As the Belfast Telegraph noted: "McIlroy's victory means five of the last 19 Majors (26.3%) have been won by golfers from Northern Ireland (population 1.81m), confirming something astonishing is going on in golf in this country."

So there is a lot of national pride tied to the links. This is a place that got used to generating nothing but bad news. It's like if the West Bank suddenly became famous for its cuisine or Olympic athletes.

I watched the World Cup and golf in the U.S. and I watched both here this summer. Massive differences. Here there are no commercials, the bane of my TV-watching existence. And the commentators are well informed and good humored here, so you get a nice mix of technical information and funny observations. The U.S. commentators feel compelled to imbue each action with an emotional overlay that was pure speculation and kind of maudlin. I guess they are told to create drama--maybe to compete with the action-packed commercials that interrupt them every few minutes. Anyway, watching TV is just less annoying here. Not that I plan to become a couch potato, but it's more tempting.

Before watching the golf match, we went for a hike on the mountains above Belfast. We started in the rain:

We were rewarded with a great view of Belfast:

7/20