BRETT: I am Brett Winterble. I’m your guide today on the Rush Limbaugh Show on the EIB. It’s wonderful to be here and to be a part of this amazing team. If I can just depart on one thing really quickly and share this with you. So, 21 years ago, I was working for the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I was screening the program at the time, but I would not have been here that day 21 years ago, because it’s my anniversary and I married my best friend, Sherri, and we’ve been happily married ever since — and all the big stuff that ever happened in my life, by the way, always happened because I was connected to the Rush Limbaugh Show. Seriously. Absolutely.
I got married, had kids, and it’s the high honor and distinct pleasure of my life to be here today with you — and it is wonderful to be here. You know, yesterday I shared with you that we’re ending every program on EIB with an EIB High Note. It’s dedicated to Rush in honor of his optimism, humor, and overall good cheer. Today’s High Note features Rush himself doing something he loved — golf.
Today marks the beginning of the 85th Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. Now, Rush never played in that tournament, but he did play several times at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. He played alongside some of the greatest players of all time. He also met and became friends with the noted CBS Sports host Jim Nantz.
Over time, the two of them came to have a real regard and respect for each other. If they were in the same city for one professional reason or other, they always found each other for dinner, for instance. From back in February of 2001, here’s Jim Nantz, Ken Venturi, and David Feherty commenting on Rush while he’s out on the links and also interviewing him afterward.
NANTZ: Look who we have playing for the first time at Pebble Beach, Rush Limbaugh, at 15.
VENTURI: Well, it’s Rush Limbaugh, 2nd shot. His website had over 20 million hits a day during the election.
FEHERTY: Thats a good-lookin’ shot.
VENTURI: Right in the heart of the green, uphill putt.
FEHERTY: I did notice that finish. I’m down here with Rush, and I have to ask you this one question. It’s a very politically incorrect partnership, you and Fuzzy.
RUSH: (laughing)
FEHERTY: What would make a man who is so relentlessly correct, nearly all of the time —
RUSH: (laughing)
FEHERTY: — pick a game that will make you appear so hopelessly wrong?
RUSH: (laughing) The challenge of it! The challenge, I mean I have promised America I am not gonna quit my radio show until everyone agrees with me.
FEHERTY: (laughing)
RUSH: That’s about the same challenge as getting to be a scratch golfer.
FEHERTY: It has to be fun out here. You’ve only been playing the game for four years —
RUSH: Four years.
FEHERTY: — and this is one of your favorite golf courses?
RUSH: Let me tell you about golf: Golf will tell you everything you want to know about somebody when you’re playing with them. Character, whether they cheat, whether they lie, whether they quit. But more than that, this is the one sport you can go out with the best, and now and then hit a shot they’ll take. I could never play middle linebacker in the NFL, I couldn’t hit a 95-mph fastball, but I might be able to shoot one of those 115-yard wedges that you guys would take any day.
FEHERTY: Well, you hit a pretty good one there. Go up there and knock it in for par.
RUSH: Thanks.
FEHERTY: We’ll be watching you.
RUSH: It’s great to be here. It’s so much fun, and I wish everyone could do this.
FEHERTY: Thanks for being here. Back to the 18th.
NANTZ: 18 Limbaugh, for par… Eeeeeh! Gosh all mighty. Excellence in Putting. He got it there. Well done, a nice closing par for Mr. Limbaugh. He had a good time this week in his first visit to this tournament.
BRETT: No doubt, no doubt in my mind at all that Rush is hitting balls up there in heaven, teasing his old friends that he’s reunited with about getting stuck in a cloud trap. Godspeed, Rush Limbaugh. It’s wonderful to be here with each and every one of you, and I love that we’re doing this happy finish, this smiling finish that we get to do every single day: the High Note.
Remember, the world is an incredibly rough-and-tumble sort of place. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to this. It comes down to understanding who you are as a person, being comfortable in who you are as a person. Rush was always that person. He knew who he was. He knew what he believed. He was confident.
He didn’t let the ebbs and flows of the daily traffic of politics or storylines get him down, ’cause he knew there’d be another day to fight and another day to smile and another day to laugh. I think that’s one of the most important takeaways that we can have from all knowing him and all listening to him, and it’s a remarkable opportunity to see this show continue and to be a part of it in the way we are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BRETT: So amplifying the High Note, we just played the clip — the audio clip — of Rush playing there at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am back in February of 2001 and joking around with some of the great golfers out there. A great bit of information for you: The great Joe Muniz — great friend of mine, great friend of all yours as well — dug up the video of Rush golfing for all of us out of the archives.
We went and found it in the archives, and you can watch it now. You can see that clip that we just highlighted by heading over to RushLimbaugh.com. You can look at that video clip watching Rush. Certainly, he sounded like so up and so excited to be out there. Pebble Beach is such a beautiful place, and the idea that you get to play with some of the legends and some of your great heroes?
If you’re a golfer, that has gotta be just cloud nine, literally, to be out there and experience that. Don’t forget, though, that at RushLimbaugh.com, you’ve got so many great resources, so much great video, so much great content — including, as I mentioned, that video clip of Rush playing at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February of 2001. It’s a chance for you to continue to connect with this program, which is gonna be here for a very, very long time — and it is wonderful to know that that resource is gonna continue.