What do Game One of the World Series and The PGA TOUR Playoffs have in common? Taboo television. That according to our Grant Boone, who harkens back to the glory days of influential and often restricted television to help describe today's golf scene.

By Grant Boone, Special to PGA.com

First off, how screwed up are the Major League Baseball playoffs? The Cleveland Indians, despite winning 96 games during the regular season, have been eliminated from the postseason simply because they lost the last three games of the ALCS to Boston!

Sure, they were outscored in those three losses by the equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain to A.C. Green. But isn't complete elimination a bit harsh? Okay, maybe not as harsh as the people who got tuberculosis from the stripper in St. Maarten and, thus, proved the Saturday Night Live "Bad Idea Jeans" commercial prophetic (watch here). Still, quite harsh.

The Indians' only consolation prize is that they're already exempt through the 2008 Tour Championship. The inaugural PGA Tour playoffs were a little like one of those SNL commercials -- close enough to make you think it's legit until you hear something like, "Cute, but she has an extra digit" or "Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball" and realize it's actually a spoof for a product like Oops! I Crapped My Pants.

Truth is, I wasn't allowed to watch SNL growing up. For one thing, it was on too late for a kid who was getting up for church the next morning. And even if you could stay up, Sunday school wasn't exactly the best forum for recapping, say, the exploits of the The Ambiguously Gay Duo.

Among other verboten viewing from my childhood:

Three's Company -- the double whammy of one guy living (ostensibly in sin) with two women plus Suzanne Somers in tight t-shirts

Dukes of Hazzard -- "one of those good ol' boy kinds of shows" (actual quote from Mom Boone)

M*A*S*H -- foul-mouthed majors, cross-dressing corporals

Happy Days -- too much kissing (Note: This only lasted about 3 weeks when Richie and Lori Beth took their relationship up a notch. For the record, it was a good call by Mom. I didn't kiss a girl 'til my freshman year in college. Sorry, young ladies of Madison and Hunter's Lane High Schools. You missed out.)

That didn't leave much, especially seeing as how my formative television years were P.C. -- pre-cable -- long before the realization that people would actually watch "Barnaby Jones" reruns or 24 hour news networks. (That realization was followed by the subsequent discovery that there really isn't 24 hours worth of news to broadcast, which itself was followed by the networks manufacturing crises and giving them catchy nicknames, such as CNN's current "Planet in Peril." Somewhere in there was also the realization that men are much more concerned about social ills and human suffering when the news is read by anchors who look like Lynne Russell, Rudi Bakhtiar, and Susan Hendricks.)

Fortunately for me, there was PBS. Not the nighttime programming where you might've stumbled upon Alistair Cooke, stray nudity, or -- heaven forbid -- both. I'm talking about the daytime stuff from Children's Television Workshop, specifically Sesame Street and Electric Company. (If you're under 40, easily distracted, and have a column due the next day, I don't recommend clicking on the links in the previous sentence.)

I grew up with those shows. Watched them every day, sometimes more than once. I knew all the Sesame Street regulars on a first-name basis, names like Bob, Maria, Luis, and Susan; those who were known by their last names, such as Mr. Hooper; and the ones who had one name but three different actors, like Gordon. I loved the muppets, too. Not so much the Muppet Show, which was fine, but rather the original muppets from Sesame Street, like Roosevelt Franklin, Grover, and Bert and Ernie, who through the years have been accused of being like the aforementioned Ambiguous Duo but who really were named for characters in "It's a Wonderful Life." It was big news when Mr. Hooper died or when someone besides Big Bird finally saw Snuffleupagus or when the actor who played David, Northern Calloway, was seen running through the streets of Nashville wearing nothing south of a Superman t-shirt (true story).

The Electric Company was equally influential. Long before he was Red in "Shawshawk Redemption," I knew Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader. It's where the character Fargo North, Decoder pronounced a sign that read "Don't Sneeze on the Cheese" as "don't snezzy on the chezzy," possibly inspiring a young Calvin Broadus, the hip-hop legend who became Snoop Dogg and later Broadus an entire language in which every word ends with "izzy" or "izzle."

What does any of this have to do with golf, you may ask? A lot less than I intended actually. I hadn't planned, for example, to again pillory the PGA Tour for its ersatz playoffs; it just came too easily, like one of those batting practice fastballs from any of the 6 pitchers the Rockies trotted out to the mound in Game 1 of the World Series.

I was just thinking that if it was Sesame Street televising golf, last week's action would've been brought to you by the letter W. To Wit:

- Mike Weir won the PGA Tour's Fry's Electronics Open - Ron Whittaker won the Nationwide Tour event in Chattanooga - Steve Webster won the European Tour's Portugal Masters (tournament slogan: "A tradition very much like several others: naming our otherwise anonymous event after The Masters.")

According to PGA Tour ShotLink, each of those winners' last names begin with W. Even the LPGA's Hana Bank-Kolon Championship in South Korea had nasty Weather, which led tournament officials to shorten the event from 54 to 36 holes and make a winner of Suzann Pettersen, who not only notched her fourth title of 2007 but also solved her last-minute Halloween costume crisis (click here).

I wasn't actually watching when the tournament was finally cancelled. The decision was made in the middle of the night U.S. time. And as you now know, I don't stay up late on Saturday nights. So with apologies to my Sunday school teachers, past and present, I'll leave it to Phil Hartman (click here) to answer the question, "Just how hard did the winds at the Hana Bank-Kolon blow?"

Grant Boone is a husband, father, golf broadcaster, and sports journalist based in Abilene, Texas. His column appears on PGA.com each Wednesday and every day during major championships and other big events. He can be contacted at pgagrant@hotmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of PGA.com or The PGA of America.