It\u2019s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest in a stream of near-fatal road accidents. What\u2019s the difference between a Range Rover and a golf ball? Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball straight for 300 yards. The extraordinary story of Woods\u2019s decline is written in his face: how the lean, mean athlete of the 1990s has developed into a puffy-faced drug user and sometime drunk is something we once associated with former footballers and boxers. Woods is evidence that no one, not even the prodigiously rich and talented, is immune to the destructive power of addiction.<\/p>\n
Even during his titanic years of greatness when he transformed golf, spectacularly yanking up prize money and pulling in TV viewers by the million, nobody would ever claim he was a nice guy. He had only one focus: the hole. He seemed unable to relate to anyone or anything outside of that single-minded goal, which made relationships tricky. Apart (we discovered after his first big road accident in 2009) from the bevy of groupies, cocktail waitresses and porn stars who populated his free evenings.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t have to be a complete shit to be a great sportsman, though sometimes it seems that way<\/p>\n
He never cared to charm his millions of fans. It was just the ball and the hole. Nothing else mattered. He was like a brilliant automaton, ruling the world\u2019s golf courses. And as a ferociously self-centred player he was invariably hopeless when it came to a team event like the Ryder Cup.<\/p>\n
But now we should let him go. He is no longer the most relevant golfer in the world. He is a former PGA tour pro, still pretending he is going to pop up in the majors. He should quietly move on to the senior tour, if that\u2019s what he wants, and then he can speed along the side roads of Jupiter Island to his heart\u2019s content. Let\u2019s concentrate on the great players we have now: Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Nelly Korda and all the rest.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t have to be a complete shit to be a great sportsman, though sometimes it seems that way. I have known Giles Richards for years, as a friend and as a former colleague, and he is a fine sports reporter who has an immensely well-informed love for Formula 1 racing. We never called him Giles: he was known as \u2018Snake\u2019 for largely unknown reasons, though there was a suggestion that \u2018Giles\u2019 was deemed too posh when he was in a punk band at home in Fareham. Anyway, Giles got right up the nose of Max Verstappen, who is a great driveror a spoilt brat, depending on your point of view.<\/p>\n
On the eve of the Japanese GP last weekend, Verstappen ordered Snake to leave a press conference as he had taken exception to a question he, Snake, had asked him last December. It referred to an incident at the Spanish Grand Prix: Verstappen had driven into the side of George Russell\u2019s car, for which he received a ten-second penalty that cost him nine points. After a brilliant revival towards the end of last season, Verstappen missed out on retaining his title by a mere two points. \u2018Did you regret the incident?\u2019 Giles had asked, as he bloody well should have done. But Verstappen had taken exception to it and ordered Snake out. Now I don\u2019t want to attack fellow journalists, but isn\u2019t it rather shameful that all the other hacks at the presser didn\u2019t walk out in solidarity?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Verstappen has left us in no doubt about how little he is enjoying the new F1 season with its hybrid engines. \u2018Of course I try to adapt to it,\u2019 he says, \u2018but it\u2019s not nice, the way you have to race. It\u2019s really anti-driving, it\u2019s just not what I want to do.\u2019 By contrast, and proving that we are all teenage boys at heart once we get the girl, Lewis Hamilton won\u2019t stop going on about how much he is enjoying life through \u2018adventures, good vibes, great people and the simple moments\u2019. And possibly dating Kim Kardashian as well, Lewis?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,217,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-508909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}