AMERICA AT LARGE:Given the subjective nature of these things, the annual explosion of sportsperson of the year awards should usually be taken with a grain of salt, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

IT’S TIME to start bracing yourself for the onslaught of end-of-the-year awards as they come spewing out over the final days of 2009. This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong-headed about the concept, but given the subjective nature of these things they should usually be taken with a grain of salt.

For more than half a century, for instance, Sports Illustrated’s “Sportsman of the Year” award has been one of the more coveted of these. In bygone years the magazine’s practice was to winnow the list down to five or six candidates. Stories were prepared on each of them, all written on the assumption the author was dealing with the eventual winner. Since the award wasn’t announced until the last week of the year, the identity of the winner was a secret nearly as guarded, even in the hallways of the Time-Life building, as the mysterious process by which he was selected.

An ancillary benefit accrued to the magazine’s readers. Though they weren’t identified as such, updated versions of the pre-assigned stories on the also-rans usually found their way into print in the first few months of the new year. And these out-takes were often more interesting than the one accompanying the “Sportsman of the Year”.

But that was then and this is now. In the immediate aftermath of his November 14th demolition of Miguel Cotto, it was revealed by his publicists that Manny Pacquiao had been nominated for the coveted award, which was true as far as it went. Any jubilation the prospect might have set off in the Philippines was short-lived, however, because on November 30th Sports Illustrated itself announced that New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was the 2009 winner. The Sportsman of the Year cover story ran just a week later, in the issue dated December 7th.

As it happened, my co-editor, John Schulian, and I were on the verge of wrapping up our preliminary selections for our coming book, The American Boxing Anthology. I made discreet inquiries to Sports Illustrated sources about the possibility of getting an advance look at the story that would presumably have been prepared on Pacquiao.

The word came back: there wasn’t one.

That the boys in the marketing department are calling the shots would seem apparent. The prospect of a cover depicting the glamorous marquee player in a year the Yankees won their first World Series title in nearly a decade was too good to pass up. A SI source confided that while other nominations had been perfunctorily entertained, “by mid-October it was pretty much a done deal that if the Yankees won the Series, Jeter was going to be Sportsman of the Year”.

Which is not to say his was an undeserving choice – and it certainly was a shrewd one. God knows how many reprints the Jeter cover issue has gone through, but in New York that edition is still stocked on news-stands and bookstores alongside its weekly successors.

At the same time, it does reveal the selection process to have been something of a sham, and to say that Pacquiao never had a chance understates the case. The last foreign athlete to win an unshared Sportsman of the Year Award was Canadian hockey star Wayne Gretzky, in 1982. The last non-American boxer to win was Ingemar Johansson, in 1959.

And whether they admit it or not, the determination of many of the other honours to be bestowed in the coming days may have been coloured by other considerations. The ballots for the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s (BWAA) year-end awards go out this week. Pacquiao, whose 2009 included a win in his rubber match with Juan Manuel Marquez and knockout destructions of Ricky Hatton and Cotto, should by rights have no competition, but a repeat win may not be the slam dunk you might otherwise anticipate.

A guy who’s winning for the first time is usually so giddy you couldn’t keep him away, but once it becomes old-hat you might have to drag him to the dinner to accept his award, and since the presence of the Fighter of the Year trophy is a big selling point when it comes to flogging tickets to the BWAA dinner, you’d like to be sure the awardee will show up.

Last year’s dinner, for instance, was pushed back from its traditional spring date to June specifically to accommodate Pacquiao’s schedule – and then he nearly didn’t show up anyway. Days ahead of the dinner, he had sent his regrets, and BWAA president Jack Hirsch had to marshal all the resources at his disposal to turn the thumbscrews, an episode that won’t be forgotten by some electors as they fill out their ballots this week.

And some will no doubt have retained a residue of mistrust from the coverage of last year’s event. Last month Sports Illustrated’s mainstream stablemate, Time, ran a glowing profile of Pacquiao (it was the cover story everywhere in the world but the US), and included an ostensibly first-person account of the awards dinner in which the BWAA wasn’t even mentioned. (The Time story had Pacquiao in New York “to receive his Fighter of the Year award from Ring magazine”.)

If some boxing writers may be thinking twice about their selections, many members of the Golf Writers Association of America probably wish they had recourse to a do-over. Over half of the Player of the Year (POY) ballots had been returned by the time all the spit hit the fan down in Windermere, and by then Tiger Woods had an un-catchable lead. Few would argue with the selection of Woods, who didn’t win a major title but had seven victories and 14 top-10 finishes in 17 starts. But what do you think the odds of Tiger presenting himself to a room full of writers to receive his award in Augusta this April might be? Approximately zero, we’d make it.

Tiger’s selection may not even have been the most wrong-headed of the 2009 awards, by the way. Loren Roberts’ selection as Senior Player of the Year reflects an American bias, in that Bernard Langer had more wins (4 to 3) and more top-10 finishes (15-14) in two fewer starts, and finished first to Roberts’ second on the Champions Tour money list.

But for our money they all missed the boat. He might not have won a tournament in 2009, but what 58-year-old Tom Watson did over 72 holes of regulation play at Turnberry last July ranks as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of the game.

That Old Tom didn’t get a sniff in the POY balloting should tell you all you need to know about the importance, or lack of it, that should be attached to these awards.