Tiger Woods, returning to his favourite Magnolia Drive, receives his pairing sheet for the 75th Masters at Augusta. I submit that he might like, even as a four-time winner of the green jacket, to reacquaint himself with two paragraphs inscribed on the back of that pristine document.Bobby Jones, father of the Masters and president in perpetuity of Augusta National, pronounces thus: “In golf, customs of etiquette and decorum are just as important as rules governing play. Excessive demonstration by a player is not proper because of the possible effect upon competitors.”
Here is legalese of the most exquisite piety, written in 1967 and attuned to the solemnity in which golf is steeped. By “demonstration”, the great Mr Jones alludes simply to over-exuberant celebrations of a fine shot.
There seems a curious blessing in the fact that this totem of the sport, and guardian of its delicate sensibilities, is not alive to see the day when a player spits on the putting surface.
The jurisdiction of Augusta is so arcane that, as host broadcaster, you can be censured even for failing to describe the fans as ‘patrons’. By that logic, clearing the contents of your throat on the Georgia greens should be punishable by ejection from the premises – preferably headfirst, over the course’s whitewashed walls.
So whither the outrage for the crassness of what Woods did in Dubai last Sunday? No big deal, the American commentators cry. He spits all the time. He suffers from allergies.
He must have been bothered by the Middle Eastern sandstorms. But by such craven complicity in his behaviour do they ignore the very principles upon which the sport is founded.
For golf is, at its core, an exercise in self-discipline. It is the sole sporting setting in which players penalise themselves for a rules violation. Plus, beyond the rules lies that tacitly acknowledged code called etiquette: the one by which pitchmarks are required, bunkers raked, and ‘Fore!’ shouted for an errant drive. Remove it, and you have lapses as unsavoury as Woods’s established as the norm.
I confess I have always hated the sanctimony with which etiquette is invoked by golfers. Having played from the age of five, I struggled to understand why an angry gouging of the turf – or, when a little older, some muffled cursing – was not an acceptable reaction to a scuffed wedge. It appeared a paradox that the most maddening sport on earth to master should frown upon any overt emotion.
I was fortunate enough to absorb these lessons as a member of Royal West Norfolk, an institution that has tempered its exclusivity by its friendliness to black Labradors, its tolerance of spikes in the clubhouse bar and its general antipathy to tedious blazer politics. And yet I would hazard that if you spat on a green, you would be frogmarched off the links in a good deal less time than it takes to protest: “But Tiger does it, too.”
Ewen Murray, the Sky Sports golf anchor, has attracted much heat across the Atlantic for saying of Woods’s hawking: “It doesn’t get much lower than that.” It suggested, rather like Sam Torrance’s labelling of American rowdiness at the 1999 Ryder Cup as the “most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”, that he ought to get out more. But his remark put the army of Tiger apologists to shame.
The sycophancy around Woods stems from his portrayal by many American scribes as an athlete. His gym-rat talk of the ‘reps’ he needs to cement his swing changes is all faithfully recorded.
Indeed, his actions have been likened this week to that of a baseball pitcher spitting on the mound. Golf, though, is not athletically arduous. Lung-bursting physical exertion hardly forms a rationale for his repulsive habit.
The only reason for Woods to spit upon the Emirates Club greensward is to exhibit contempt for his own poor play. His problem is that, in doing so, he offers a grievous affront to a game he professes to love.
The apology he released – on Twitter, for goodness’ sake – was as tepid as the European Tour’s nominal fine. The killer line? “It was inconsiderate to spit like that and I know better.”
In the anniversary week of his televised mea culpa, promising change after years of philandering and on-course transgressions, golf’s fallen idol manifestly knows no better at all.
-Oliver Brown, The Telegraph
