TIGER WOODS, WINNER OR CHAMPION? (2)

Tiger Woods was back in the news this week. Since I last posted on him, three years ago, he has not added to his tally of 14 majors, and had slithered down the rankings. However, strong performances recently have brought him back to world number one, and he was the favourite to win this year's Masters, a tournament he has won four times previously. He was going well, pushing for the lead in the second round, when disaster struck. A short third shot at the par 5 fifteenth looked likely to give him a birdie; instead (and very unluckily) the shot hit the flag, bounced back off the green, and landed in the creek. Taking a new shot with a penalty, he ended up with a bogie 6 instead of a birdie 4.

But things didn't end there, because he didn't play the new shot from the right place. The rules are complicated, but you basically have three options when your ball goes in the water. Woods chose the option of playing the shot from the exact same position as the earlier one. But he dropped the ball a clear two yards further back from where he had played the first one. Normally, that constitutes a 2-stroke penalty; so, in signing his card without that, Woods opened up the possibility of being disqualified from the tournament. The relevant committee spared him that (wrongly, in the view of some commentators, notably 6-time major winner Nick Faldo) and merely gave him the two-shot penalty. But that bizarre event at the fifteenth had cost Woods four strokes, derailed his momentum and scuppered any realistic chance of winning.

Against that background, you might have expected Woods to have shrugged his shoulders, accepted it was not going to be his year, and played freely for the rest of the tournament. He didn't. The intensity, sour expressions, absence of a smile, and all the other stuff were on constant display. Tiger Woods is a very, very good golfer, but he is also a real pain as a sportsman.

Walter Blotscher