Who's Telling the Truth, Boo?

Boo Weekley shot a second-round 71 at The Players. Afterwards, he came to the interview room and called me a liar.

Well, no. Now that I’m reading the transcript, I see that it’s his daddy that Boo called out.

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Here’s the background. I wrote a “Boo at the Masters” feature for SI Golf Plus, and the gist of it was that Weekley probably isn’t as winningly dense as he pretends to be. As evidence I quoted his pharmacist dad, Tom Weekley, who said, “They talk about Boo not knowing much about the Masters, but he’s read books and books on Ben Hogan. You can’t read that much about Hogan and not know about the Masters.” He added, “It’s not really a front, but there’s a side of him that people don’t know.”

Tom Weekley’s comments could have been overlooked, but Boo followed up his T-20 finish at the Masters by driving to Hilton Head the following week and successfully defending his Verizon Heritage title. So the pressing question of spring has been: Is Boo for real?

Fast forward to this afternoon’s Boo conference. Craig Dolch of The Palm Beach Post raised his hand and said, “There was a story in SI a couple of weeks ago, and they quoted your dad as saying you know a lot more about golf than you let on.”

“Daddy’s full of it,” Boo said, getting a big laugh. “Daddy wasn’t never there. I mean, he was there, but, like, he said I read a bunch of Hogan books. I read TWO Hogan books, and they were my neighbor’s.”

While the reporters puzzled over the significance of owned books versus loaned books, Boo tried to distance himself further from his elitist dad. “He said I probably read every Hogan book there was, I think somebody quoted him saying.”

That somebody, of course, would be me.

Boo finished his answer to Dolch by refuting allegations that he actually pays attention to Tour news. “I do watch a little more golf,” he said. “But I mean, that ain’t nothing. If I’m laying around the house at night getting ready to fall asleep, I’ll flip over and see what is golf, what is on. But I ain’t going to sit there and just watch it.”

That’s a non-denial denial if I ever heard one. But trust me, it’s genuine Boo.

(Photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty Image)

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