Fairways in need of new villains

You know, I worry about golf. I lie awake at nights and fret about what will happen to Tiger and Phil and Ernie and David and the boys. I wonder will people not tire of tuning in to watch Tiger win the Big Car Invitational with Phil and Ernie and David bringing up the rear.

Golf could go like snooker. When I was a kid snooker had characters aplenty and we would happily watch Pot Black on our old black and white. Ray Reardon and Cliff Thorburn and old Fred Davis were the big draws, until all those pencil-slim pasty-faced kids emerged who'd never led lives apart from being bent over the baize.

Now you couldn't make me watch snooker as an alternative to hard labour. I suspect most people are the same now. The game reached its peak when Taylor beat Davis, and it was always interesting so long as Higgins or Jimmy White were about. Now? Golf needs a villain. Come back John Daly. You know when the best time for golf was? It was way back when there was virtually no money and it was just a bunch of chainsmoking guys in hats, driving from course to course playing each other and betting on each other and no one had public relations consultants and no one had anything to lose. They smoked like chimneys and they drove like demons all around America, usually with Sam Snead in the back seat playing the banjo. Today they would be uninsurable, so many scrapes did they get into. They had the sallowed, beat-up desperation of David Mamet's characters in Glengarry Glenross, and they had salty tongues and they were all either Texans by birth or temperament.

The guys were pure soap opera. Get past Hogan and Nelson and the lead boys and there was still a cast of characters the like of which no sport has enjoyed since.

There was Clayton Heafner, who looked like Tony Soprano and had the same anxieties. Once he was playing a tournament and playing it badly when he drove the ball into the rough. He shook his head and told his caddy to pick the damn ball up. He was quitting. Immediately Heafner was confronted by a little old lady of the angry variety. She jabbed a finger in his chest and told him that people had paid to see him, he couldn't just pick his ball up. "Okay, okay," he said, and called to his caddy again. "Leave the f***ing thing there." And continued his stomp back to the locker-room. These days he'd be banned for life and he'd be in anger replacement therapy. There was Jimmy Demerat, a former nightclub crooner who hit his shots so low he called them snake rapers, and Lloyd Mangrum, who won the 1946 US Open to placate his wife who had discovered him with another woman early in the week. Then there was the splendid Ky Laffoon, a Native American who once fell out with his putter in the worst possible way, tied it to the boot of the car and dragged it along the road from El Paso to San Antonio.

THEN there was my favourite, Ed Porky Oliver. Monarch of the fairways. When Porky Oliver died, Red Smith, the god of this sportswriting business, recorded a nice story about Porky in the war. Porky had been sent to some southern sweat camp and was struggling through the summer when his friend Joe Louis breezed by. Louis was perplexed. "Whyn't you come up to Camp Shank where we could play some golf together?" Porky was embarrassed. There's a war on. He was stuck here. Golf wasn't a priority.

Louis brushed his worries aside. "I'll fix it."

Two days later Private Porky was transferred. Joe Louis was his new sergeant. First thing Joe did was give Porky the weekend off. Second thing he did was re-introduce him to golf. One day there was some duty pressing, but Louis, unflappable as ever, proposed that they play eight holes before tending to the army business. "Eight holes, but you got to start me two up," said Louis.

"No way," said Porky.

"I'm the sergeant," said Louis.

"Okay," said Porky.

So Louis won and Porky paid up half-a-week's wage and his pal Joe Louis walked off hollering back a proposition: "If you like, Porky, we can box four rounds and I'll start you three rounds up."

Another time, playing the Hartford Open, Porky was on a par five and launched a nice, skyscraping shot with his four-wood. When he got to where his ball should be there was a crowd gathered around as if watching a cockfight. Porky made his way through, only to find a woman sitting in a sundress on a deckchair with his ball in her lap. "It's here," she said, pointing down. "What do I do now?"

And Porky scratches his head, points towards the hole and says, "Just run this way honey."

And the sense of cool. Famously, at the British Open, poor old Harry Bradshaw once screwed his eyes shut and played a shot out of a beer bottle rather than bother the officials for a ruling, but Walter Hagen showed more skill at improvisation the time his ball rolled to a halt inside a discarded peanut bag. Ordered to play the shot from where it lay, he lit a cigarette and dropped the still flaming match on the bag and took his practice swings as the bag disintegrated.

There was Tommy Bolt, who during the war played an army exhibition game in Florence and performed his trademark tantrum, tossing his clubs into a pond in frustration. He was reminded that they were government issue. Thunder Bolt had to wade in after them. No room to mention Lefty Stackhouse, compared to whom Bolt played with zen like serenity.

Those were the days and those were the guys I'd cough up pay-per-view money to see.