HOLD THE BACK PAGE:AND SO once more unto Eldrick Tont Woods, whose extramarital philandering continues to spark new revelations on a daily basis.
His indefinite withdrawal from golf has prompted fresh nightmares for an US PGA tour that is almost comically dependent on the Tiger to boost tournament attendances and drive television audience share.
And as his corporate sponsors compete in the How to Dump Him Using Mealy-mouthed Euphemisms stakes, you’d fancy a flutter only on Nike sticking with him, given the assorted PR disasters and downright bad boys that company has historically kept on the books.
In this neck of the woods, perhaps the most intriguing tactic adopted by Team Tiger was to use English privacy law to muzzle the British press and try to prevent the publication of nude photos allegedly featuring Elin Nordegren Woods (Woods’s people won’t even admit to the existence of such snaps, arguing that any images doing the rounds must be doctored).
The lawyers for the golfer have been using a High Court injunction obtained last week in London to try to prevent US publications – those with assets under British jurisdiction – from printing the photos in America. The injunction was granted by Mr Justice Eady, English lord high executioner in recent years on the matter of privacy and press intrusion.
The received legal wisdom since then has it that Woods’s lawyers were extremely unlikely to get a prior restraint order if they’d chanced their arm in a US court. Eady, the epitome of judicial smugness (and we’re talking Denningesque “appalling vista” levels here), has almost single-handedly been shaping English privacy precedent since the Human Rights Act was incorporated into English law nine years ago.
One of Eady's seminal judgments was made in the case of Max Mosley and the News of the World.
Readers of a salacious bent may remember the revelations at the time of Mosley’s sexual antics, in comparison to which Wood’s activities resemble those of a bluestocking Episcopalian out on the mildest of roisters.
But Mosley’s m’learned friends successfully argued before Eady that Mosley’s sexual behaviour could not be connected with how he ran the FIA, governing organisation of world motor sport.
British fans won't give a monkey's
WE POSITED last month the all too believable notion of Irish pubs, silent and bemused, as drinkers watched France play England in a group match of the World Cup in South Africa: it’s hard, when you can’t work out which team you hate most viscerally.
Well, the draw for the groups put paid to that one, although one lives in somewhat morbid hope of them clashing in the knock-out stages.
Minus the Gallic complication, most Irish sports fans should logically identify with England’s progress, given the considerable affiliation and identification here with English clubs.
How can even a Man U nouveau root for Rooney all season, then spurn him come summer?
I once encountered the sports editor and Gaelic games correspondent of a national newspaper, dickied up in tuxedos on a Monday night and looking, frankly, somewhat shifty when asked about their gig.
Turned out they were off to a benefit night for Neville Southall, at which they hoped to get the great Evertonian’s autograph. (Both men, sentient beings otherwise, had inherited their true-blue leaning patrineally: a common Irish pattern).
As the competition nears, many English fans are already engaged with beg, borrow or steal fund-raising and booking dilemmas of which Irish soccer heads can only be envious.
For many corporate groups, the choice is between tour operators who do or do not include a fully armed security back-up.
Few of the scare stories about the serious violence in South African society are exaggerations. This is a country with an average of 50 murders daily, and where more than 15,000 carjackings were recorded last year.
England’s first game against the USA (can’t imagine where Irish loyalties will lie for that one) in the Royal Bafokeng, north of Johannesburg, will be followed by a journey of nearly 1,400kms to get to the Green Point Stadium in Cape Town to face Algeria (bet they’ll be rooting for their north African cousins in Baltimore, Co Cork!).
It’s a longish hike from the waterfront bars and restaurants to the Green Point, and an unfamiliar threat lurks in the form of the Cape baboons, protected under law but an increasingly persistent threat, given their acquired taste for tourist food and snacks.
It’s a mouthwatering prospect. Your archetypal Brit fan, bare-chested, beered-up and burger-bearing, versus a feral, ground-dwelling monkey.
Bless the French, they never fail to deliver
IN THESE shiny modern times of slick professional standards and multi-camera slowmo replays, we sometimes lack the wherewithal to slip into that most comfortable and reassuring of games: sniggering at gross national stereotypes. But may the deities forever smile upon the Frogs: they never fail to deliver, and on so many blessed fronts!
Those of us who had a good counterintuitive guffaw at Homer’s reference to cheese-eating surrender monkeys, Simpsonesque irony and all, can never have played French club rugby, red in tooth and fingernail. And most of us are too young to remember that it’s not all that many decades since Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England point-blank refused to play internationally against France (and that fatal injuries actually occurred in their brutal national championship).
Even the buffed Noughties version of French rugby occasionally reverts to a character forged in eras when not just eye-gouging, but rampant purse-snatching were merely bog-standard elements of the game. Thus last weekend’s downright stupid ocular activity by two frustrated and vengeful Stade Français tulips in Belfast. Briseann an dúchas. Although, let’s admit: we may aspire to, but most of us all too often fall short of Hemingway’s acme of courage: grace under pressure.
The readily clean French game of more recent times was buttressed by practicality: games were better and more bravely reffed; there was more effective invigilation of offenders; post-match citings began to bite, and conceding penalties became a costly habit in the professional game. In addition, substantial numbers of more temperamentally equable foreign players and coaches flooded the French game.
The ranks of that particular foreign legion may soon be decimated, however, and quite soon. The Jouers Issus de Filiéres de Formation directive means that next season half of each pro squad must have passed through the French system before the age of 21; the following year, the quota rises to 70 per cent.
A taxation change is also putting a financial grip on all clubs. The directive is heading for the European court, but the intent of the French authorities is manifest.
Still, there’s good stereotypical reassurance on a number of other Gallic cultural fronts this December.
The country that revelled in turn-of-the-century George Feydeau, and could extend its genetic appetite for farce to include Thierry Henry's more recent Hand of Gaul manuscript, has moved on from highbrow Sartre and Genet theatre to embrace – musicals! Two years ago, The Lion Kingtook Paris by storm, Grease, Gone With The Windand West Side Storyhave conquered and this month Broadway-sur-Seine is alive to the Sound of Music. Reassurance, surely, for any hypothesis that under that deep veneer of sophistication and lofty intellectualism, there throbs a backbeat of purest French corn.
Also this month, a book and documentary entitled Le Face Cachée des Fesses(The Hidden Face of the Bottom).
In it, intellectuals, philosophers, painters, sculptors and scientists extol the vast contribution to civilised life made by the derriére.
Personally, I just loved the claim by the authors that “[les fesses] speak of the foundations of our society – literally and metaphorically – and of its taboos and desires”.
How could anyone not love such a society?
AN UPDATEon Caster Semanya, the 18-year-old South African athlete who ran away with the women's 800m gold at the World Championships earlier this year but who has 'gender issues'.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), having thoroughly bungled its handling of her case thus far, is still trying to get the gender genie back in the bottle.
The IAAF has apparently accepted that she is an innocent party, and has now offered to pay medical expenses for any surgery she may decide to seek in order to continue competing as a woman.
News leaks suggest she has internal testes, and high testosterone levels, and it is known that internal testes imply an increased risk of testicular cancer.
Postscript: I omitted to mention last week that the draconian measures being used to counter teenaged internet addiction – including bootcamps, and the use of electro-convulsive ‘therapy’ – were a Chinese phenomenon.
What drew my attention to it was the story of a 17-year old boy, whose parents stopped him going to an internet cafe, and who poured pesticide in their cabbage soup.
He’s now doing a long stretch for the murders.
FINAL STRAW
JOCKEY KIEREN Fallon just can’t avoid having his name high in the headlines, and juxtaposed with the word drugs. At least he was a volunteer for last Tuesday night’s BBC1 Inside Sport, a programme that covered his road to redemption.
It ranged from his loss of the plum job with Henry Cecil’s stable, false rumours of Fallon’s affair with Natalie Cecil and the long-running Old Bailey race-fixing trial that collapsed two years ago after the gradual shredding of a gossamer-thin book of evidence.
Fallon spoke honestly about his own addictions and he reckoned it was the stress of the lengthy race-fixing contretemps, plus the prison-term it threatened, that pushed him towards the soma-easement of cocaine.
Interestingly, he added that Newmarket – flat-racing (and congestion) capital of middle England – continues to have a serious social drug-taking problem.
A local padre reckoned: “That’s because we’re no different to any other town.”
Newmarket hit the racing headlines again this week when trainer Cecil spoke at a meeting in the town protesting against plans by Lord Derby to build 1,200 new homes in the town.
At present, Cambridge commuter traffic combines with trainers leading their strings onto the gallops to make Newmarket dreadfully congested, and the town’s entire racing community is opposed to the development.
One’s tempted, of course, to say that it’s only Flat racing, but we must resist such temptation.
