Dufner had won twice on the PGA Tour up to then, but the most productive known for his playoff loss to Keegan Bradley in the PGA Championship last August. Well, because of that and his laconic attitude. After his victory in the Nelson, Dufner asked if he had ever shown emotion. “A few times a year here and there,” he said. “Usually there’s booze or Auburn football, but most of the time I’m chill. “
Dufner’s schedule to Dallas included a presentation at J. Erik Jonsson Community School, which is largely funded by the Salesmanship Club, the organization Byron Nelson runs. Dufner’s responsibilities included a Q&A consultation in front of Sales Club Members and tournament sponsors, as well as an appearance in one of the classrooms.
Local NBC affiliate KXAS sent some reporters to cover the event in teams. David Watkins controlled the sponsorship session, while Christine Lee sent the class in, setting in motion what, a decade later, remains one of golf’s most unlikely and indelible viral moments. .
As Lee recalls, Dufner wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm that Thursday morning: “You saw it on Jason’s face, it wasn’t the most exciting excursion for him,” he said, again, if school officials were waiting for Dufner to make the wheel on the classroom global map carpet. They were given the pro. Ideal sweetness is to Duf what smoke intensity was to Hogan.
His time with the young men lasted longer than Dufner had planned: at least forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. For much of this time, he sat cross-legged on the floor while the master, sitting in a chair to his right, talked to scholars about, yes or no, relaxation. Soon, Dufner’s body began to hurt and he walked to the wall behind him to help himself. His body seemed transported, as if he was leaving late at night.
“I just observe the elegance while the consultation is taking place,” Lee told me the other day. “And as a journalist, I like to take pictures. “
A snap here, a snap there. Lee didn’t think anything about what she was saying, and in fact, not for a moment did she think she was capturing a symbol that was about to go around the world.
“Honestly, I just look him up and wonder if he’s going to fall asleep,” he said.
It wasn’t until Lee reviewed his photos after Dufner’s appearance that one photo, in particular, caught his eye. The symbol represented the golfer with disheveled hair, with his hands nailed under his back and staring into the void, as bored as an atheist at Easter. mass.
Oh, that’s funny, Lee thought.
Later that day, he reconnected with Watkins to the notes they had documented.
“I like, ‘How did it go?'” Watkins told me recently.
“And she likes, ‘It went well. ‘ Except I don’t think I’m doing very well. “
“I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’
“She says, ‘Well, I took this picture of him in the classroom. And his face, he just didn’t react and didn’t move much. “
“I’m like, ‘Well, let me see it.
“And she showed me what Dufnering’s picture was. “
When Lee took this photo, President Obama had just taken the oath of office for his momentary term, the New York Giants had just scored a Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots, and the selfie was about to become Oxford’s word of the year.
Dufner’s game was also taking shape. He had won twice in 2012 and, at the Colonial, almost a third time. He tied for fourth at the US Open at the Olympic Club. He played his first Ryder Cup, accumulating 3 numbers in the painful defeat of the United States in Medina. (When asked about his relaxed atmosphere that week, at such an electric event, Dufner said, “As soon as the putt comes for birdie, I move on to the next shot. That’s how I’ve approached the game, and I don’t see that conversion just because we play in the Ryder Cup. By the end of the season, he had set a sixth place in the world, the highest of his career.
Dufner was making a call to himself. Several calls, actually. Duf, Duf Daddy, even The Dude: A nod to Jeff Bridges’ character smoking weed and wearing a bathrobe in the 1998 film “The Big Lebowski. “He had arrived in spite of everything.
Golf lovers knew him. And soon enough, pop culture enthusiasts would too, who couldn’t tell a putter from a throwing wedge.
“I knew he had a hilarious personality of an everyday kind, that you wouldn’t have thought of him as your overall PGA superstar, which he was at the time,” Watkins said. “He’s the type of people. And knowing that about him and having this image made me laugh. I couldn’t what I saw.
“Me to Christine, ‘Can I have this picture, please?I would like to publish it.
“She says, ‘yes, absolutely. ‘
Surprised by his score, Watkins posted the photo on Twitter and. . .
. . . nothing.
“He didn’t run much,” he said. He didn’t have many followers. You know, it probably wasn’t a blue checkered guy back then. No one was paying attention. “
Social media is that funny. But a reply, a percentage, or a retweet can replace it all.
Watkins’ golfing friends also enjoyed the photo and the idea of a wider audience seeing it. One of those friends, Derek Johnson, advised Watkins to send the photo to the sports and cultural site Deadspin.
“I didn’t send it because at the time, being in the media, I didn’t need to give another outlet the ability to spread the story,” Watkins said. “But also my TV channel was not the type, you wouldn’t choose it on our or on my Twitter to blow it up. “
Johnson had no such clash of interests, so he shared the image.
The creators of the likes of Deadspin were in him. That same afternoon, the site published an article with the funny headline: “Golfer Jason Dufner Seems to Have a Lot of Fun Visiting These Kids in Dallas. “The article was so popular that that same day, the site followed up with a “Jason Dufner Sad Photoshop Contest,” in which Tom Ley called Dufner’s photo “our favorite thing today. “
Lee had no idea of the stupidity that was brewing until the next morning. That’s when his phone started ringing. His manager at KXAS had left him several messages. “Usually my phone explodes if something vital happens and I have to leave the state or city for a wildfire or mass homicide or something,” Lee said. “But fortunately, this time it wasn’t. “
This time, one she had taken lit up social media.
Lee’s immediate fear that her boss might be angry with her. I didn’t clean; He had called just to see if she had noticed the reaction to his snapshot. Then she thought of Dufner. ” I’m a little embarrassed for him, because he didn’t need it to be noticed in a negative way,” Lee said.
In fact, the symbol almost immediately generated a clever shave on the part of Dufner’s Tour friends. Within hours of the publication of the Deadspin story, the game’s biggest stars were #dufnering, a call encouraged during the 2011 #tebowing craze. Bubba Watson began to pass hunched in front of General Lee; Rory McIlroy leaning against a grill chair; and Rickie Fowler hunting like a corpse in a red wapassn in his garage. Keegan Bradley’s tweet about the photo, “the most productive photo ever,” he wrote, drew a lot of attention and garnered a lot of retweets. On Friday morning, #dufnering was trending on Twitter and Bradley took a full look at it. From the Shell Houston Open, he posted a symbol of himself, Dustin Johnson and Brandt Snedeker sitting side by side, hands clasped.
When D. A. Cuestiones won the name on Sunday, what other team did it have but still Dufner next to the trophy?And that’s precisely what he did.
Dufner had no leg on which to stand, nor a wall against which to collapse. All he could do was sit down and take the ribs. I can tell I was tired, my back hurt from sitting on the floor and we were talking about resting and concentrating. #dufnering”
Dufnering still delivers a lot at this stage, and the KXAS makers were eager for a chance to reunite the golfer with the news hounds that had facilitated the madness. Dufner agreed to an interview.
“Before filming, I walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t need it to come out. Lee said. “I said, ‘That wasn’t my intention. But it happened and that’s it. How do you feel about it?’
“He took it very well. He was probably one of the coolest guys I’ve ever talked to in this golf environment. He just agreed. And he thought it was funny that people’s pets were also looking to copy his message. And so it all worked, it gave it clever publicity, right?
Watkins (pictured above with Lee and Dufner) detected a lower Dufner vibe.
“We had all these fun things we were looking to do with him, and he just didn’t have them,” Watkins said. tired like this. He did an interview with us, which he evidently didn’t need to do. And the story pretty much ended after that. He did what he had to do as the protective champion and said this had gone viral.
Two years later, Watkins and Dufner’s paths crossed through a remote television interview hosted by one of Dufner’s sponsors. Watkins was in Texas and Dufner on the West Coast. A joke. Something like, “When do I expect my commission check?”
“It hasn’t gone up much because of that,” Watkins said. I always think it doesn’t need to have anything to do with me. “
The following year they met again, this time in a Dallas bar between the weeks of Byron Nelson and Colonial.
“It gives me a second impression, but it doesn’t say anything,” Watkins said. . I’m David Watkins. Does that call ring a bell?” And he said, “No,” just through my eyes, as in my soul, and then I left disgusted. He didn’t even say a word. “
Recapping Dufner’s week so far, New York Post reporter Mark Cannizzaro wrote:
Jason Dufner’s emotionless expression on the 18th green at the end of his third round of the PGA Championship at Oak Hill was an updated edition of what’s already fashionable in golf: “Dufnering. “
Dufner, the sagging, scruffy-shouldered golfer with expressionless gaze on his face who has become a cult figure in his sport, for one consecutive day had the chance to break out of his patented boring mold and do anything else. – show emotion, smile, pant, make the wheel.
Whatever it is.
We, however, would get nothing and would love to.
The name of the article: “Expressionless can raise the first primary to the fashion of ‘Dufnering'”.
Inextricable Dufner and Dufnering.
On Sunday in Oak Hill, Dufner closed coolly with a score below 68 to beat Furyk by two and win his first and only major title. launched unknowingly.
The following week, during a media blitz in New York City, Dufner was a guest on ABC’s morning show Live with Kelly and Michael, with Rebecca Romijn replacing Kelly Ripa. Less than 4 minutes after the interview, Romijn’s co-host, Michael Strahan, couldn’t resist.
“Dufnering, is it rarely very?” he says, looking for a copy of the viral photo. “Can you please this?”
After Dufner detailed how he immortalized the moment, Strahan said, “You know what, you created a sensation. “
“It went well,” Dufner said, drawing applause from the studio audience.
Watkins thinks so, too.
“I’m sure when you say ‘Jason Dufner’ to the average golf fan, that’s where your brain goes,” he said. “I think there’s a part of me that feels a little guilty about that. But I think overall, it’s a smart thing for him. I’d like to think so.
Watkins said she has no regrets posting the image and admits she enjoyed her own fleeting burst of fame among colleagues and friends in the weeks and months after the photo was posted.
“I knew it was an unflattering image,” he said. But I also didn’t expect it to explode. So when it happened, I didn’t feel bad at all. But I think I appreciated the attention I was getting. So the attention I get.
“I felt like I had a very, very small role in everything that other people enjoyed and enjoyed. So yes, it was a big party for me. I think it’s the most viral thing I’ve ever been a part of. “
Lee also took the photo’s popularity by surprise, even more so than Watkins. “I wasn’t born with the viral social media gene, the Marvel detector gene,” he said. explode]. That was never my intention. When I took it, it was just more to laugh.
In the end, however, the photo delivered much more.
“It helped me think twice about how social media works, how storytelling works, how things can be shared,” Lee said. “It just made me realize, wow, the strength of an image. “
As editor-in-chief of GOLF. com, Bastable is guilty of the editorial direction and voice of one of the game’s most reputable and popular news and service sites. It has many functions: editing, writing, ideation, development, pipa. I dream of breaking the 80s, and he feels privileged to work with such an incredibly talented and dedicated organization of writers, editors and producers to painting. Before taking the reins of GOLF. com, he was editor-in-chief of GOLF magazine. from the University of Richmond and Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and 4 children.
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