In one of the more bizarre stories of the week, professional golfer Tripp Isenhour was charged with cruelty to animals Wednesday after he intentionally smoked a hawk with a golf ball on a course in Orlando.
The Nationwide Tour player was filming some golf training thing and got angry after the noisy bird forced a retake. He started firing shots at it, and (after several attempts) eventually found his target. It killed the bird on the spot.
I'm sure it's not the first time a bird has been killed on a golf course. God knows, I came close to killing several things the other day with my wild and crazy shots at Harbour Town.
What makes this guy such a loser? He did it on purpose.
Since the bird was protected, he now faces a penalty of 14 months in jail and $1,500 in fines. That will be the easy part. The tough part will be trying to get the rest of the world to forget about the incident. Sorry to break it to you buddy, but things like this don't go away.
His life will never be the same, and for that, the punishment will eventually fit the crime.
The other bad people in this story are the camera crew that watched the whole thing unfold. After the first five or six failed attempts, you think one of them would have said something along the lines of, "Hey dude, maybe instead of taking shots at protected birds, you should spend more time working on your game. Maybe then you wouldn't be stuck on the sucky Nationwide Tour."