Reaching Rush
Contacting celebrities is difficult. Very busy schedules and their own agendas make it even more difficult to actually convey or exchange ideas with celebrities even when one is able to briefly contact them. Holding their attention long enough to overcome their natural resistance to strangers becomes more difficult still. And when coupled with the inborn human reluctance to embrace new thinking especially if the new ideas conflict in some manner with their own thinking, the hurdle becomes almost impassable. The natural reaction of celebrities to strangers bearing new ideas is disbelief, mistrust, and dismissal.
I tried unsuccessfully to contact Rush for more than a year through open-line Fridays, email, and sending faxes or emails to the various places quoted in his newsletters. Eventually, I began trying to contact people around Rush. For a time, I was able to carry on a brief dialogue with David Limbaugh and subsequently with Rush's Chief of Staff, Kit Carson. I don't know how much of my websites they personally examined or whether Carson ever referred any of my material to Rush. David Limbaugh admitted he knew nothing about golf, but confirmed that he sent Rush a link to my first website. David also volunteered that Rush had never mentioned receiving the link or whether he had ever viewed the site. Even if Rush had looked, my first website only provided limited information about EIG along with some personal history designed to introduce me to Rush. At that time, I had not realized the potential political ramifications of EIG nor had I completed the proof that none of the historically observed modern scoring reductions could be attributed to golf club technological innovation. Strike one!
By the time I contacted Carson, and unknown to me at the time, Rush was already being affected by the impending revelation of his inadvertent addiction to prescription drugs. Carson's examination of my website was very superficial; he dismissed EIG as nothing more than a marketing scheme to put Rush's name on golf clubs. In fairness to Carson, he and Rush had plenty to think about besides EIG. During the interval between David Limbaugh and contacting Carson, I had realized the potential for Rush to use the income or the market capital from EIG to advance his conservative political agenda or even to seek the Whitehouse if he so desired.
After Rush got out of rehab, I tried again to contact him through Carson. Carson had looked at some of the material on my website because he dismissed me as a kook specifically citing the reference to my thoughts about Rush's potential to be elected President, a reference that had been written prior to the revelation about his addiction. Strike two!
The hurdles to make Excellence in Golf a reality had gotten much higher. Unable to contact Rush myself and having alienated potential friends at court, I realized that EIG might not become a reality without help from other golfers or from Rush's audience. Rush has talked about the fact that his success is predicated on the fact that instead of telling his audience what to think, he publicly validates what they already believe. His audience of more than twenty millions, including me, share his conservative views. The concepts of the Reagan Renaissance began to shape.