So Tiger Woods is on sabbatical, perhaps never to return, crippled with his back and apparently struggling with nerves that stubbornly refuse to do what they're told.
And that’s a pity. No one likes to see exceptional talent reduced to hackery. But neither will many of us be reduced to tears: even judged by the standards of sports most self-absorbed, Woods can be a remarkably graceless individual.
Hot-housed from birth, it’s hardly surprising Woods morphed into sport’s ultimate billboard, a walking-talking “Winning Takes Care Of Everything” cog.
But goddamn, I’ll miss the swearing if he does jack it in.
If there’s one thing Tiger can do as well as swing a club it is to get properly down-and-dirty with the vernacular: you can argue with the lack of variety sometimes but hardly the venom.
Nike wishes he just wouldn't do it. And Woods invariably has to issue heartfelt and sincere apologies afterwards. But it's actually only when brand-TIGER slips, and potty-mouthed Eldrick peeps out, that I can warm to the man even a little.
Because what else is a person supposed to do except bellow at the skies, the fates and every other mother’s son, when a small ball contrarily persists in not doing what you want it to do?
It’s perhaps the only time us public get to hear Woods actually meaning what he says: a pure, unvarnished, unguarded, non-manipulated expression of raw frustration. Who can’t identify with that? And who seriously can be offended by it? In fact who can’t acknowledge there are times when the profane is damn near poetic?
Public persona
The key is meaning it. There’s got to be a punk thing – three consonants and an attitude. You can always tell when someone’s faking it. And since we’ve long found out Woods’ goodie-two-shoes public persona was a towering monument to fakery, there’s a strange retrospective reassurance in those ‘Youtube’ displays of ‘audible obscenity’. Because, by f**k, he meant it then.
Of course, having to use dots like that is a sure sign of not meaning it at all. It’s the sort of twee rubbish the media game indulges in, affecting shock at language that wouldn’t make an eyelid bat in any newsroom worthy of the name, never mind be so moved as to churn out condemnatory twaddle about values and supposed obligations to set an example.
A similar double-standard had Formula One1 bosses a few years ago condemning Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix for using language that "shines an unwelcome beam of adverse publicity on teams and sponsors, the sport and the FIA".
Vettel and Raikkonen were spouting off for the sake of it which isn’t clever at all but the subsequent piece of PR piffle fouled the air up a lot more than any sniggering childishness the two drivers indulged in.
It’s a contradiction within so much of modern life that everyone is desperate for the supposedly authentic yet so much time and effort gets wasted on maintaining facades of dull banality, supposedly for fear of causing offence, but often, in reality, for fear of losing customers.
Except people know the difference: we really do: we know when language is truly nasty, when it’s meant to hurt and humiliate: and we know when it’s just someone who just can’t take it any more and starts bawling at the skies in sheer maddening frustration.
A couple of months ago the Italian prop forward Martin Castrogiovanni paid big tough rugby hacks the courtesy of very definitely meaning what he said to them.
And in between gleefully reporting Castrogiovanni’s rant about Leicester’s director of rugby, Richard Cockerill – yes he used bad words, yes even the one you can never, ever use – there was still ample opportunity for some of rugger’s buggeriest to outline their shock and disgust at the depths of profanity used by the Italian.
Incongruity radar
The idea of anyone in rugby, even the chaps reporting on it, getting hysterical at such language was so off the incongruity radar it was only Castrogiovanni’s subsequent ten grand fine, and a suspended four-match ban, that brought things shuddering back to earth.
Read back at what Castrogiovanni said and tell me it doesn’t contain the truly authentic tone of a man past caring what he looks or sounds like. Okay, it’s crude but it also pours the real unadulterated deal into a public discourse often notable only for its vacuousness.
You have to have been raised in a particularly creamy-white ivory tower to not appreciate that, or, say, the alliterative rhythm that Andy Murray's fiancée poured into her recent ripe portraiture of Thomas Berdych at the Australian Open. Shocked? Really?
You see bad language mightn’t be clever but it can occasionally be so genuine as to highlight just how offensive the clever stuff really can be, the ‘officialise’ applied in order to ensure rotten substance is kept conveniently disguised behind a bland conforming surface.
There’s plenty to blush about in sport generally, a cast of grotesques so fluent in the business of keeping their backsides pristinely covered that there appears no way of applying some plain-speaking industrial-strength reality where it is so desperately necessary.
No, much better and easier to piously keep fining those who mouth off a little rather than concentrate on something that might interfere with the commercial money-hose.
Actually that’s why the idea of Woods giving up is ridiculous. Even if never breaks par again, there’s still millions to be made. But you have to wonder if we’ll ever again properly see Tiger mean it.
