Star gazing par for course

Caddie's Role: Groupies, hangers-on, obsessives, call them what you want but when you get mass media-famous people you get plenty…

Caddie's Role:Groupies, hangers-on, obsessives, call them what you want but when you get mass media-famous people you get plenty of punters who want a piece of them.

Frequently I walk past autograph hunters and hear what they really think of the star whose signature they just got. "Who was that'? is probably the most common question I hear. "He's much smaller than he looks on television". "He's so cute", "so polite" or "so rude", there is always a comment. I have seen fans gaping and staring at the ground where the star just vacated.

Whatever the attraction, there is a fascination lingering on the obsessive when it comes to professional golfers on the US Tour.

Of course the fascination does not limit itself to America. In Europe there have been plenty of golf enthusiasts who showed up most weeks of the year no matter how distant the venue may be. The "sweetie" people used to travel across Europe, usually by car so that they could transport their stash of hard boiled sweets which they distributed to the golfers and caddies on the course.

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Most of the tour took their mother's advice from childhood about never taking sweets from strangers until the "sweeties" became familiar by being such a fixture on tour that they became part of it. There were serious sugar withdrawals when there was foot-and-mouth scare in the UK and the sugar dispensers had their sweets confiscated by customs and excise as they examined the content of their syrupy insides.

There was The Duchess , a middle-aged north European lady who followed the tour as a golf enthusiast for months until it finally became clear that she actually wanted to caddie. She did caddie and ended up winning an event.

There was The Exocet, who always turned up at the German events. She was so christened because of her uncanny knack of always being on that narrow pathway where you could not possibly side-step her. Thus the sobriquet of the missile; you could see her coming but you just couldn't get out of her way.

Not to make light of professional star gazing. I know on reflection how I found myself stunned by the sight of the odd movie star I happened to have come across in an airport over the years. I have definitely been left mouth agape and extremely embarrassed. For those of us closely connected to golfers the idea of having to spend another minute of divot duty with a golf pro than is absolutely necessary is anathema. But for a golf enthusiast the chance to get a word with a famous pro when recognised in public is seemingly too exciting a prospect to let pass.

Golfers are assaulted by many of the same autograph hunters at revisited venues each year. There are some events where you recognise the parents pushing their children forward to seek an autograph at the appropriate moment. It is said that these are actually professional autograph seekers. If you ever look on e-bay you will see how many signed photographs and balls there are for sale over the internet.

There is a relatively famous aging golfer who appears at Augusta every year with outrageously loud clothes for a gentleman in his 70s and spends the practice days loading up on signatures. The fascination in America for a player's scrawl is limitless. Despite a healthy interest in it in Europe, we have a long way to go to reach the enthusiasm of the Americans.

Public attention for professional golfers is part of the price of success and most of them deal with it graciously if the timing is appropriate. Last week in Miami the attention for one player got a little too intimidating. I suppose for most young women keen on getting close to a single professional golfer, the young, athletic and handsome Australian Adam Scott would certainly be high on their list. For anyone who knows Adam of course his pleasant demeanour is even more reason to want to get close to him.

Adam started to notice that there was a Korean woman taking a very keen interest in him at the matchplay event in Arizona last month. At every event that he has been to since in the States the same lady has made herself very visible.

She was so apparent that every time he stepped out of his hotel room there was the same woman miraculously near his doorway. The Marriott Hotel at Doral last week was as convenient as you can get for a tournament player. The rooms surround the main area of the clubhouse. The players were assigned their lodgings on site for the week and obviously the sponsors had the pick of the other rooms available.

So when Adam stepped out of his room on Tuesday last week he was once again greeted by the same woman who had being laying in wait for him at every other room he stepped out of in the last month.

He made some inquiries with the tour's security. It turned out that the woman was making bookings through her false association with the Korean player YE Yang. Adam asked Yang if he knew the woman, which of course he didn't. She had been making bookings through the tour for player and family allocated rooms on the pretence of them being for YE's parents.

The trials of a golfers day usually are limited to bogeys and birdies, but now it appears that bogus women have been thrown into the mix. If she is the stalker that she appears to be, then Adam may have to buy himself a big yacht like Tiger to ensure total privacy at coastal tournaments.

Colin Byrne

Colin Byrne

Colin Byrne, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a professional caddy