Steve Elkington, bigoted buffoon with a Twitter account, makes Michael Sam gay ‘joke’

Steve Elkington, for those of us not paying attention when he was winning 10 PGA Tour titles, reportedly had a lovely golf swing and certainly a good enough game to earn the 1995 PGA Championship.

We’re paying attention now, but it has nothing to do with Elkington’s relatively successful current career on the Champions Tour and everything to do with the ugliness he pecks out on his Twitter account.

The 51-year-old Australian proved, yet again on Tuesday when he tweeted an offensive remark about openly gay football player Michael Sam, who was working out at the NFL Combine, that his racism, sexism, homophobia, and just plain boorishness knows no bounds.

“ESPN covering Michael Sam as a a gay athlete is embarrassing,” Elkington typed in a tweet that sparked a mammoth backlash on social media and elsewhere and has since been deleted. “ESPN reporting Michael Sam is leading the handbag throw at NFL combine ... No one else expected to throw today.” A screen cap of the since-deleted tweet, via Devil Ball Golf:

As our sister publication, Outsports, noted, it’s just freaking “hysterical” to point out the not-at-all stereotypical observation that because Sam is gay, “he is obviously a sissy whose only athletic accomplishments would be throwing handbags.”

C’mon, man. That’s so Vladimir Putin.

Elkington has been honing his standup routine for some time, aiming racist slurs at Pakistanis who make up a large part of the population of the English city that hosted last year’s Senior British Open. He followed that up with a joke about a fatal helicopter crash in Scotland, and earlier this month he leered at a female reporter’s “cans.”

And then, as always happens when an ignoramus makes a fool of himself, Elkington expunged his utterances and then tweeted the obligatory sorta, kinda mea culpas.

“Being Australian, I was unaware that my use of language in relation to the Pakistani people would cause offense,” the long-time Houston resident tweeted about his crude shot at Pakistanis, “but having made aware I now deeply regret the use of that terminology.”

Following his dirty old man act, Elkington trotted out the tried-and-true, hitting-the-bottle excuse. “Sorry, I’ve been drinking,” he typed after Twitter came down hard on him for his boorishness.

Tuesday, Elkington wanted his 60,000-plus Twitter followers to know he had nothing against Sam’s sexual orientation.

And some of his best friends are [fill in the blank].

He then later tried to further clarify and step back from his original Michael Sam tweet by using the term “orientals.”

The PGA Tour, which regulates the Champions Tour, could fine or suspend him for conduct unbecoming for these public comments. But as the Tour always does, it is refusing to make matters of player discipline public and available to the press.

No one here would dispute Elkington’s right to share his polluted, dumb-ass opinions via any media he chooses, and it’s highly unlikely -- given his recent history -- that he would ever consider installing a filter between the ugliness that percolates around his brain and his fingers. That’s apparently the way the nit-twit formerly known as a golf champion likes it.

If Keith Olberman has recovered from the shingles, we have a runaway winner for today’s “Worst person in the world.”