Smiting Drives - Tiger Woods addiction is taking over my life

19 Jan 2010 - 07:21:51

I need to go to rehab. It's not the drugs. It's not the booze. And it's definitely not the womanising that's the problem. It's Tiger Woods. He's taking over my life.

That's not to say I don't owe Tiger a huge debt of gratitude. After all, golf's off-season - as fleeting as it is these days - is hardly awash with bankable material in your average year.

Most Christmases you're left churning out tired season reviews, dishing out cursory imaginerary awards and plucking names from the sky in the hope they might achieve something remarkable and prove the implausible - that you actually know what you're talking about.

But this year everything changed. The world's best golfer - and formally the most marketable sportsman on the planet - was revealed as a womanising fraud with a charge list as long as the longest drive he ever did thwack.

For a while, golf owned Google. Golf owned celebrity gossip. Golf owned the media.

You could almost hear the desperate screams of editors as they threw themselves head first onto the speeding bandwagon, chased by golf-club-wielding money men.

"Hey guys! GUYS! Do we have a golf writer on staff these days? I can't remember. We need a golf writer. We need one real bad."

"You fired him a couple of years ago," came the reply. "Said we didn't really need a golf guy anymore...but I think the property guy plays a bit."

I couldn't resist that one, but the bigger picture is that golf was finally getting the publicity it deserves - albeit delivering the worst kind of message in the worst kind of way.

A couple of months, and a public apology later, Tiger continues to dominate the golfing agenda - despite the fact he's disappeared, we have no idea when he's coming back and there's actually some golf being played elsewhere.

'Sources' tell us our man is in rehab in Mississippi. But then again 'sources' (Russell Simmons) wrongly told us he was donating $3 million to the Haiti earthquake relief effort. Not even a natural disaster could pass by without mention of the world number one.

Whether Woods will return for the Masters remains a complete mystery, but that won't stop yours truly and the rest of golf bloggerati speculating either way from here until April.

I myself am firmly in the 'He won't be there' camp (a missed major is good for PR, his game won't be ready, too much media glare). But if enough of the 10,000 Tiger Woods articles I read between now and then suggest otherwise I'm open to transgression.

Next week, something other than Tiger Woods.

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