Eighteen years ago a PGA Tour golfer called Stephen Ames was drawn against one of the greatest of all time, Tiger Woods, in the first round of a match play event in the US.
Woods had won twice that year despite a wayward driver in his bag and had taken time out with the flu. There was some uncertainty about his game. Everyone knew. But Ames made the critical mistake of saying it out loud.
When asked about the match, Ames talked his chances up by slighting Woods’s form. “Anything can happen,” he said. “Especially where he’s hitting it.”
Ames had history; several years previously he had also made comments about Woods.
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“He doesn’t look like he has enough respect for other players. Tiger’s coming across as bigger than the game,” said Ames.
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“He’s a spoiled 24-year-old. If I was in his position, I’d be more considerate. If I was beating the spit out of [other players], I wouldn’t have to beat them in that way too. He made $11 million [in 1999], endorsed more than $50 million – what’s he got to be unhappy about?”
Ames had handed Woods a grudge.
The match ended just after the turn, with Ames going down in flames 9 and 8, Woods almost driving the green on the par-4 sixth, winning every hole on the front nine and squaring the 10th to end it.
Woods was asked afterward if he’d had added motivation to win. “Oh yeah. There certainly was,” he said. “Stephen provided it. I think I did all right today. I think he understands now.”
Grudge definition: a persistent feeling of ill will or resentment resulting from a past insult or injury.
Some people carve their grudges in stone, others incubate them and allow them to inflate. Some hide them away and strike when the chance offers, and some wear them around their necks like an energy cell that drives them on.
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In sport grudges can be good things to bring into conflict. On Friday night at the Aviva Stadium neither the All Blacks nor Ireland will be short of them as recent battles between the number-one and third-ranked teams in the world have not been short of verbal exchanges.
Players traded sledges during the three-Test match series in New Zealand in 2022, which Ireland won 2-1, and did so again during their World Cup meeting in Stade de France last year.
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Centre Rieko Ioane, in a classless gesture, put his finger to his lips in a “we’ve silenced you”, while looking up at the Ireland supporters.
Johnny Sexton wrote in his book Obsessed about the exchange between him and Ioane at the end of the that same World Cup quarter-final in Paris.
“Rónan Kelleher still ploughs into Brodie Retallick and Sam Whitelock. Whitelock goes in for the poach, clearly without releasing, but somehow Wayne Barnes awards him the penalty, even though it has all happened under his nose – and it’s all over,” writes Sexton.
“And as I stand there, hands on hips, staring in disbelief at Barnes, Rieko Ioane still comes up to me and tells me, ‘Get back 10 metres.’
“’Huh?’ ‘Penalty,’ he says. ‘Back 10.’ And then, after Barnes blows the final whistle, he says, ‘Don’t miss your flight tomorrow. Enjoy your retirement, you c***.’
“So much for the All Blacks’ famous ‘no d***heads’ policy. So much for their humility. I walk after Ioane and call him a fake-humble f****r. It doesn’t look great, me having a go at one of them just after we’ve lost. But I can’t be expected to ignore that.”
Meanwhile, Retallick, who Kelleher ploughed into with the ball, also had words for Peter O’Mahony. “Oi, Peter! Four more years, you ****wit,” said Retallick, who has now retired. In a recent podcast, the former lock confirmed that those were the words he said to the Irish flanker.
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Could this be the grudge match of all grudge matches? Well, a letter writer named Brian wrote to this paper 23 years ago asking columnist Frank McNally how long an Irishman can hold a grudge. Frank’s reply was a whopping 800 years.
“The English didn’t get around to oppressing us seriously until the 1500s,” said Frank. “But at some point, possibly following a review by independent consultants, the grudge was backdated to the Norman invasion of 1169, and the 800-year figure is accepted now by most authorities, including the Guinness Book of Records.”
But the more prescient and disputable point is made that, were it not for grudges, sport could die out altogether.
And so, Sexton was in the Irish camp last week and was due to address players again this week in his mentoring role. O’Mahony is ready to be sprung from the Irish bench into the backrow and Ioane has been retained by Razor Robertson in the All Black centre alongside Jordie Barrett. The chemistry is there.
More than ill-will, a grudge is a feeling that begets drama. It’s a mindset, an emotional investment in the situation. It’s an unresolved conflict.
One cure is to cultivate forgiveness. Thankfully, neither Ireland nor New Zealand have reached that stage of godliness yet. Another cure is to win the match as winning purges grudges. Tiger Woods understood how to nurse the grudge. You can bet that Sexton and O’Mahony do too.
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