Tiger sinned against, not the sinner

George Kimballon the background to the tabloid kerfuffle over the 'controversial' drop in the first round.

Carnoustie, Scotland. You had to know this was coming.

The minute you saw Tiger Woods availing himself of a generous, and probably ill-advised, drop on the 10th hole in Thursday's opening round, you could see the boys from Fleet Street baring their teeth.

The British press reacted with typical outrage yesterday morning. One headline (quoting BBC commentator Mark Roe) labelled Alan Holmes, the R&A official who granted the defending Open champion relief on Number 10, a "jellyfish".

The righteous indignation seemed to home in on two dubious propositions: first, that Woods had somehow intimidated the rules official into giving him a free drop when none was warranted, and second, that Woods had deliberately lied in recounting the episode when he said his lie had not been improved by the drop, when plainly it had.

To briefly summarise the episode, after Woods yanked his tee-shot into the left rough on the 466-yard hole, his ball came to rest near a television cable. By the time he arrived at the spot, Holmes had determined the offending cable to be an "immovable obstruction", and granted the drop. Woods took advantage of the relief and escaped the predicament to make par on the hole.

That should have been the end of the story, but it was only the beginning. Roe (who was following Woods's group for the BBC telecast primarily because he hadn't qualified to play in the Open himself) publicly savaged the ruling, saying, "In 21 years as a pro I've never seen a drop like it. His first lie was absolutely horrendous and he would have struggled to play the shot. I think the R&A official became like a jellyfish because it was Woods.

"Some rulings are complex," added Roe. "This one was not."

Suffice it to say that Mark Roe was more widely quoted in yesterday's British tabloids than was Sergio Garcia, the tournament leader.

Okay, it was a stupid ruling - but Woods didn't ask for relief, nor did he expect it.

"It was a weird drop," said Woods. "I was as surprised as anybody. Usually TV cables are movable, but they deemed it immovable. I thought they should have been able to move those. Every time I've played around the world they've picked those up, no problem."

To prove his point, Roe later walked over and hefted the "immovable" obstruction and was able to move it - with one hand.

But as R&A rules director David Rickman said in absolving Woods yesterday, "There is no suggestion that Tiger behaved in any way improperly. He awaited the referee's decision and accepted that decision and proceeded on the basis of that decision. That decision is final under Rule 34-2."

Woods also came under attack for having seemingly prevaricated about how much he was assisted by the ruling. The official R&A transcript of his subsequent meeting with the press includes this exchange, upon which most of the newspaper accounts appear to have been based.

Q: Did it help your lie at all?

Woods: No, I dropped a little bit worse, actually.

Now, since in its original position Tiger could barely see his ball through the tangle of grass, this contention would appear to be absurd. Except that isn't what was actually said.

The question (which was posed by Steve Elling, a reporter for CBS) was "Did it help your line at all?"

Tiger Woods understood the question perfectly, and answered it correctly. It was the stenographer transcribing the press conference for the R&A who changed "line" to "lie" and in doing so made him look like, well, a liar.

This isn't the first time Tiger has been double-crossed by an R&A stenographer, by the way. Ten years ago, the 21-year-old Woods was playing his first British Open as a professional and still getting accustomed to the nuances of the links game.

When he met the press after one early round, he described hitting out of the rough at Royal Troon and creating a "knuckleball" effect.

"A Niekro would have been proud of some of the shots I hit today," said Tiger.

Phil and Joe Niekro were famous pitchers for the Atlanta Braves, both of whom specialised in the knuckleball.

But 10 minutes after Tiger walked out of the press tent, the R&A public-relations staff distributed a transcript of his interview, which included Woods purportedly having said, "A Negro would have been proud of some of the shots I hit today."

Loud guffaws from Americans scattered throughout the media centre alerted the R&A staff to the bungled translation. They hastily tried to confiscate every copy they could find, but several of us managed to hang on to them as souvenirs.

The upshot was that, having been cast as the villain in the pages of the tabloids, Woods walked up to the tee for yesterday's second round and hit the first ball he struck out of bounds and into the Barry Burn.

This misfortune was greeted for the most part with an anguished "oooh" from the commiserating gallery, but at least a few lunkheads beside the tee-box could not contain their glee, and applauded Tiger's errant shot.

We're not suggesting that this display of schadenfreude was fuelled entirely by the morning papers, but we did hear one voice rise above the others to say, "Ye'll nae be allah to drop from there, laddie!"