Jimmie Johnson takes a spin around the golf course
Tiger Woods and the PGA Tour are in North Carolina this week, the heart of NASCAR country. So Jimmie Johnson is teeing it up on Wednesday in a pro-am tournament that will feature golf luminaries like Woods and Phil Mickelson, other reasonably well-known North Carolina figures like Michael Jordan, and hordes of anonymous corporate CEOs whose companies pay millions in sponsorship fees.
Johnson is a good golfer by NASCAR standards, which means he can occasionally break three figures. (In NASCAR terms, he's the golf equivalent of a start-and-parker who can run a couple full races a season.) He's run a charity golf tournament the last few years. But he's most golf-famous for a certain wreck he had back in 2006:
I thought it'd be a great idea to surf on top of the golf cart, but it wasn't the smartest thing I've done. It was in Florida, at a friend's golf tournament. I was horsing around, got up on top of the cart and tried jumping off the top. With the plastic cleats on the plastic roof, when I went to jump, I just slipped. I didn't jump out; my feet just kind of came back, and I went straight down, right on my wrist. At first it seemed really funny, but when I was sitting there with a broken wrist, attitudes changed. My wife gave me one of those deals where she didn't say anything at all. That was plenty. Thing was, I wasn't driving that cart. That's why I was bored and ended up on top. I have to drive the cart to stay occupied, and I'll get it going as fast as that governor will allow. If you do a little work with the governor, I'm sure you can speed it up.
Unfortunately, Johnson isn't paired with Woods in the pro-am; the 48 will be playing with Davis Love III. However, if Johnson does check up on the 18th green and send Tiger tumbling into the rough, well, we'll know something's up.
