Las Vegas is a big stage, so when Tiger Woods and Phil
Mickelson came to town to play a head-to-head golf match on Nov. 23 it was big
news. The morning after Phil got the better of Tiger in a playoff, the Las Vegas Review-Journal
(R-J) had a great front-page photo of the two golfers on the course under a headline that
said, “Shadow Ridge Showdown,” and a caption referring to the match at “Shadow
Ridge Golf Course.”
But there was a slight problem. The match was played at
Shadow CREEK Golf Course. The mistake is perfectly understandable. Shadow Creek,
owned by MGM, is an ultra-exclusive, hoity-toity playground for the rich, the
famous, and the high rollers. The name “Shadow Creek” is not commonly used in
the R-J, especially since Michael Jordan no longer holds an annual celebrity charity
golf event there. “Shadow Ridge,” however, is frequently in the news in Vegas,
as Shadow Ridge is a local high school and probably familiar to newsroom
staffers. Who knows, maybe the headline writer has a kid who attends school there. It’s easy to see how someone could make the transposition. To
their credit, the R-J fessed up with a correction the next day and fixed the error in their archived editions.
We all make slips of the tongue (or keyboard) like this. The most famous may have
been at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York when the party’s presidential
nominee, Jimmy Carter, paid a top-of-his-lungs tribute to that great Democrat statesman, Hubert
Horatio HORNBLOWER. Of course, he meant to say Hubert Horatio HUMPHREY, the progressive Senator from Minnesota and Vice President under LBJ. Horatio Hornblower
was a fictional British naval officer in novels by C.S.Forester.
It could have been worse for the R-J. I remember back in the 1990s when the Tri-City
Herald newspaper in Washington State ran a front-page, post-election headline: “Kennewick Voters
Approve Pubic Safety Tax.” Of course, it should have been “public safety.” But pubic safety sounds like a good idea, too.
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