Rory's wrist proves that golf's a risky business

SIDELINE CUT:The world sat, watched and was horrified as our hero fought through the pain barrier. Maybe it's time to put a government health warning on golf, writes KEITH DUGGAN

FORGET ABOUT American football, extreme wrestling, darts, running for the Irish Presidency, refereeing ladies football in Tyrone, forget about life under the Tories or about being a single mum in the world of Mr K Myers (who should surely now take up residence alongside Major Gowen in the lounge bar of Mr B Fawlty). Forget about hurling, love and climbing Mount Everest. All of those are dangerous games but golf is the most dangerous game of all. Golf is so dangerous that I fear they may have to ban it.

Golf’s inherent wickedness was exposed on Thursday night by everyone’s favourite young man, Rory McIlroy. If you happened to be guiding a space shuttle around the orbit of the earth, you might have missed the fact that McIlroy severely wrenched his arm while playing a tricky shot from “the rough”, as the experts call it, during the PGA tournament currently taking place somewhere hot and affluent looking in America – not a hooded youth in sight.

The Holywood lad was clearly unfit to hold so much as an egg and spoon afterwards as his arm was tender and swollen but he continued to try and play a round against the Bubbas and Rickies and other medley of contenders and thus treated viewers around the world to a display of triumph over adversity that must have left Tiger Woods barfing behind the nearest cluster of azaleas.

McIlroy managed the almost impossible feat of appearing simultaneously tough as nails and, to the mums watching – single and otherwise adorably vulnerable and childlike, his cherub’s face wincing in pain with every shot he took.

There was a while, during the first few “holes” – as the experts call them – that it looked as if McIlroy would have to call it a day and there was a long delay when a physiotherapist came out onto the course and examined the Northern Irishman.

This went on for several minutes and it was televised. We were watching it in the Bridge Bar in Bundoran: it was a squally evening, the traditional musicians were tuning up but everybody was momentarily fascinated – enthralled – by the injured wrist of Rory McIlroy.

He has spoken of just how strange and public his life has become since he won the US Open tournament in early summer. He has watched the normality which mattered so much to him – the freedom to wander into Belfast to see Ulster at Ravenhill, the liberty to cruise the bars with his friends, to go shopping – disappear.

He became public property, to the extent that people felt they could just head up the drive of his home (Mind you, he lives in a fairly extensive spread: it could have been tourists innocently assuming they had happened on Stormont). But nothing illuminated just how much the world has become a goldfish bowl for McIlroy quite like those few minutes when he was having his injury treated.

How many people were sitting in front of televisions around the world staring at McIlroy’s busted arm on Thursday? Millions of regular golf fans, of course. But because golf is the chosen sport of the elite, many important people were undoubtedly watching also.

It is possible, for example, that Barack Obama was on a regular shift in the Oval Office – he may indeed have been using a putter and one of those glass bowl things left by Brian Cowen during his St Patrick’s Day visits to help him meditate as he pondered how he might stop America from going down the tubes.

And it is possible that he might have had a television showing the golf on silent and that he may have been distracted – moved, even – by the sight of McIlroy walking that course with his bandaged arm. Yes, You Can, he probably shouted. And down on Wall Street, the assembled Patrick Batemans might have briefly disengaged from the whirring numbers on their screens to see the freshest face in world sport enduring a ferocious struggle.

And perhaps they feared that McIlroy’s injury would trigger a new panic. Maybe McIlroy’s golf injury could have sent the international markets haywire altogether. And who knows how much betting money was riding on all this? Chances are that the most influential and competitive golf fan of them all, Mr Michael Jordan, was sitting somewhere palatial and tasteful and watching the young Irishman on television, cigar in hand. He would have been exhorting McIlroy to play on.

“Don’t quit on me here, baby,” he might have told the television. MJ does not believe in quitters, particularly when he might have the kind of wager that could refloat Greece riding on them.

And as McIlroy continued to receive physiotherapy, there was time to reflect on just what a dangerous bloody game it is. There are certain concealed facts about golf. It is all too rarely acknowledged that more people are struck by lightning on golf courses than anywhere else in the world. They say that on certain notorious Scottish courses, many men follow their ball into the rough and are never seen again. The golf fraternity don’t send out search parties either: they just wait six months and sell off his membership. They are a tough, unsentimental breed.

They say also that several amateur golfers drowned in the very Carnoustie stream from which Jean Van de Velde tried to hit his ball on the 18th of the Open back in 1999. The golf correspondent of this newspaper told me that himself. And everyone has witnessed the terrible accidents that occur on golf courses, when beginners let fly with a two iron only to drastically underestimate its weight and allow the club to slip from their grip and watch in horror as it rotates through the air before clocking their unsuspecting partners. Civil lawsuits resulting from ill-advised drives from par-five holes number in their millions at this stage – and most are settled on the golf course.

Once, a group of us watched a man teeing off with venom but his driven ball flew off at an oblique angle, struck the gable of the nearby clubhouse and ricocheted back to hit him on the head and leave him with concussion. We all know of golfers who buried themselves alive trying to play their way out of a nasty bunker. Didn’t Hitler meet his end in a bunker?

Golf is dangerous in all kinds of ways. It turns ordinary men into the unashamed wearers of ridiculous clothes. Golf courses are deceiving – golfers feel they are taking a stroll through glorious nature and they confess stuff to their friends that they instantly regret once they are back in the “19th hole” – as the experts call it – sipping a Pimm’s.

How many golfers have gambled their homes and businesses in a fit of bravado at the par-three? Tens of thousands. We have all seen men in golf clothes hitching lifts home after surrendering the keys to their saloon. Golf is the beginning of so many downfalls.

A guy like Rory McIlroy should be safe enough as they say, he is a genius at the game. But if a genius can all but wreck his arm simply by taking a shot, it should be a lesson for the rest of us. Put down the clubs and get the signs up. WARNING! THIS GAME IS A HEALTH HAZARD!