Golf Clubs Reviews

Have you slept with Tiger Woods? I don’t think I have, but an awful lot of young ladies do. This week he announced his (roughly) $100million divorce from Elin Nordegren, the Swedish wife he cheated on with a string of women in the biggest scandal golf has ever seen: an event that already seems certain to bring more would-be Tiger Woods conquests crawling out of the woodwork and asking for shush money or child support.

Since Woods crashed his Cadillac SUV into a fire hydrant last November following an argument with Nordegren, at least 12 women have come forward claiming to have slept with golf’s world number one. Now, presumably, would be a good time for more to follow suit, before Woods gets back to the business of trying to bag the four major championships he needs to equal Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 and officially become the most successful golfer of all time.

For many long-time golfers, like me, there’s been a certain feeling of ambivalence as the Woods scandal has unfolded. Of course, it’s seedy and a little ugly, and has tarnished the Woods image that has helped make the game (slightly) more egalitarian; but it’s also a refreshing step away from the perception of golf as robotically asexual.

There have been other sports less commonly associated with sex, drugs and rock and roll than golf, but many of them are played exclusively by people aged over 75, and few of them ever make it on to national television. A game of roomy slacks and firm handshakes, golf has, on the surface, been clear about its feelings regarding iniquity for many years. That is: it’s all a lot of nonsense, which has no place spoiling a good walk, or even, for that matter, spoiling a good walk spoiled.

But with Tiger’s scandal has also come the suggestion that all is not quite as clean and safe as it seems in the golf world. Two weeks ago, revelations came to light regarding Colin Montgomerie’s use of an injunction to prevent a tabloid newspaper publishing a story about his personal life.

Montgomerie, the captain of this autumn’s European Ryder Cup team, has a reputation for being a bit stroppy, and once shoved a state trooper out of the way during the US Open, but God forbid he would actually have something off the course to be ashamed about. We may never know what Montgomerie has done, or even if he has done anything, but with the rumours surrounding him, and Tiger’s continuing fall from grace, comes another possibility: that this stuff is happening all the time.

Naturally, to anyone who’s actually played golf for any serious amount of time, and spent a period beneath the game’s protectively knitted surface, none of this would come as a surprise. To the outsider, professional golf is a world of taciturn, dedicated family men, followed round by obedient blonde women and loving, usually equally blonde, children. But get one of these taciturn, dedicated family men – or one of their acolytes – drunk, and you’ll soon hear a story about a different kind of world, where the boredom of long hours away from home take their toll, and the temptation of alternative entertainment becomes too much.

“We look after our own,” the former Ryder Cup captain and BBC commentator Sam Torrance once barked, in a slightly defensive manner, when I questioned the veracity of pro golf’s image as an a environment where nobody ever disagrees and everyone is one big family.

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Golf is the sporting equivalent of the vicar who preaches against sin, then dresses up in his married organist’s underwear within minutes of the congregation’s departure. As a game with probably more rules, both on the course and off, than any other, it makes misbehaviour far too tempting for everyone to resist it. This goes all the way down to the game’s most everyday, provincial level – a fact I realised when, at the age of 13, I started to bunk off lessons at my disreputable north-east Midlands school and spend time at my local golf club instead.

If I was to feel like a rebel, I would at least have had to go as far as stealing my geography teacher’s car and inviting a bunch of close friends to sniff glue in the back of it. At my golf club, all I had to do was hide a dead mouse in a fellow member’s shoe and I felt like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

For an awkward teenager, in 1990, at a provincial golf club, opportunities for further rebellion in the form of illicit union with the opposite sex were minimal – the fact that, for much of my period at the club, there were only three female members under the age of 30 probably didn’t help – but this is not a problem that pros face. I don’t remember seeing many golf groupies in my own time as a watcher of, and occasional player in, pro tournaments, but the liaisons of Tiger seem to suggest they are very much out there; perhaps just skilfully keeping themselves hidden away in the bushes where, since bedroom short-game revelations ruptured his long game, Woods now hits so many of his tee shots.

This suggestion is backed up by the personal life of Nick Faldo – another victim of a high- profile scandal involving an automobile and a spurned lover violently wielding a golf club – who, at the same time as becoming the ultimate socially inept golfing automaton, has capitalised on his Harrison Ford-esque looks by trading in a succession of wives and girlfriends for younger models.

“If you are a red-blooded male and you’re chatted up by a decent-looking bird, it’s very hard to not say yes,” said Peter Alliss, the legendary golf commentator, in the wake of the Woods scandal. Alliss is known for speaking his mind, but, it might be worth considering, is also 79 years old, and very much considered a guardian of old-school golfing values. What, if speaking as openly as Alliss, would well-known golf personalities, younger and more open-minded than he, have to say about the temptations of the lonely golfer?

Alliss is one of the few TV golf pundits to have said anything less than guarded about Woods. Indeed, one of the most fun things about watching golf’s major championships this year has been listening to the commentators skirt around the issue of the Tiger scandal: a giant elephant in the room with a swinging trunk that nobody was allowed to notice.

But one can guarantee that, away from the microphones, the commentators will be talking more frankly. Similarly, back in the locker rooms, tongues will be wagging. Maybe other players might get a little loose with confessions regarding their own private lives, inspired by the atmosphere of vague hysteria, or just the fact that, in the buttoned-up Church of Golf, confessing feels so good.

Who knows what else will follow then? Perhaps golf will finally lose its self-imposed repression and stop being all trousers and no mouth. Maybe it will drop the pretence, admit it has a libido, and go a bit easier on itself. Or maybe not.

Because, let’s face it, where, really, is the fun to be found in that?

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