On Thursday night with nothing better to be at, an hour’s half-interesting golf wafted from the telly to a half-interested couch. The World Matchplay is a tangled old mess of quadratic equations at the best of times, but with the majority of the world’s top 10 getting their agents to update their weekend travel plans, it’s hard to justify committing a set of eyeballs to it for any length of time. But it was the ears that were driving the car this time around, picking up the Hovis-Ad tones of Lee Westwood in the commentary box.
Ordinarily, a blast of Westwood’s voice wouldn’t be enough to stop the clicking finger. Nothing against the chap himself, you understand. In fact, this column has generally been reasonably well disposed towards him ever since a phone conversation with his manager Chubby Chandler in or around 2002.
Westwood was in the middle of what looked like a career-defining slump at the time and a phone call to Chandler to tease out the possible reasons behind it was met with an admirably brusque response: “Lee made it to the top five in the world, won a load of money, got married and had kids. Personally, I think he decided he’d done enough then and stopped bothering.”
Golf being such a genteel sport, you don't often hear anyone wishing ill on one of the competitors
And who among us can say we’d do different?
Mini-crisis
Anyway, having survived said mini-crisis and risen all the way back to the top of world golf in the years since, Westwood was playing in Texas last week. He wasn’t playing on Thursday because Jason Day had withdrawn due to his mother’s cancer surgery, leaving Westwood with the day off and time to flute about in the Sky Sports commentary box. And he was good value as well, mostly because he spent the hour willing Pat Perez to make a comeback against Marc Leishman, who had beaten him the day before.
Golf being such a genteel sport, you don’t often hear anyone wishing ill on one of the competitors. And while Westwood wasn’t exactly sticking pins in a Leishman voodoo doll, it was fun for once to hear a voice that wasn’t oh-so-carefully dancing on the head of a pin in an effort not to offend anyone. He more or less willed Perez to victory.
Listening to Westwood, it was hard to think of a sport less blessed by the quality of its ex-pro punditry than golf. While Johnny Miller and, at a push, Brandel Chamblee have their acolytes in the US, the lack of anyone willing to stir things up this side of the water renders all golf covering fundamentally and deliberately beige.
It used to be that you questioned the level of critical analysis in soccer punditry because you suspected that Alan Shearer and the boys couldn't say what they really felt for fear of running into players or managers on the golf course. In golf, that's literally the case. Everyone is so nicey-nicey because everyone is part of a self-contained, determinedly unruffled world. Some of them are coaches, wandering from range to studio and back again during tournaments.
But even if golf wasn't the sort of sport that didn't so much mind its ps and qs as keep them under armed guard, there would still be a major hole in what we understand sports punditry to be. Golf can't have a Gary Neville or a Jamie Carragher or a Paul O'Connell for the very sound reason that nobody at their level ever really retires.
Media darling
There was a story on ESPN just last Friday on the future of soon-to-be ex-Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. A long-time media darling, Romo is on his way out of the Cowboys this off-season and the big question was for a long time whether he would land at the Denver Broncos or the Houston Texans. But now, say ESPN, two other players have entered the race to sign him – Fox and CBS. Nobody doubts that Romo's future in in TV; the only question is whether that future is now or in another couple of years.
There isn't a golfer alive with the capability of winning a tournament on tour who would dream of giving it up to go work on TV
Romo’s situation never happens in golf. It couldn’t. Romo is in demand by other teams because they believe that at 36, he could still lead them to a Super Bowl. There isn’t a golfer alive with the capability of winning a tournament on tour who would dream of giving it up to go work on TV.
And so they play on, through the down years. They fall down the rankings and miss the cuts and gradually, their star power is eroded. They hang on for the seniors tour, where the money is still decent enough. Eventually, they turn into Colin Montgomerie, a living-off-past-glories bore who makes people want to throw their remote at the TV. They stay pro too long to be interesting as ex-pros.
In this world, the news that Pádraig Harrington will be part of Sky’s coverage of the Masters in a couple of weeks can only be good. Harrington has never been the type to lose sleep over what he might say about somebody for fear of running into them on the range and there’s a mischievous side to him that likes to stir the pot when the mood takes him.
If nothing else, more Pádraig will mean less Monty. Amen corner to that.
