It’s getting to that time of the year again folks. No, not another Tiger Woods comeback but the literary world’s intriguingly titled ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ awards. For some reason, the Tuesday column has not been nominated, although the mere sight of some of these meandering, bamboozling intros often makes the sports editor go weak at the knees.
Trying to sprinkle these weekly wafflings with a subtle hint of mild, hum-drum erotica would be an ill-judged move of bumbling incompetence given that I’ve always thought the erogenous zones were a series of sparsely populated rocky outcrops in the south Pacific. You know, those kind of wave-lashed, volcanic protrusions you see on a David Attenborough documentary as he murmurs on about the complex mating rituals of the marine iguana.
Those said rituals often look as elaborate as some pre-shot routines on the first tee … which is a fairly tenuous way of linking these wandering witterings into a golf piece.
But let’s start with football. Like the lingering smell of fish after you’ve made a mariner’s pie without the extractor fan on, the talk of summer kick-abouts and seasons running from February through to November just won’t go away. Brendan Rodgers, the Celtic manager was at it last week, as he joined the chorus of those wanting a move away from the cold and dark, which, funnily enough, is a similar environment to the caves in which certain so-called supporters dwell.
For those who are not thirled to the roon ba’ game - and, yes there are people who like a bit of sporting diversity despite smug insistences from commentators who think football is the be all and end all - the prospect doesn’t encourage much hope for the profile of other pursuits in this country.
Have a flick through the papers, switch on the television, tune in the radio or open up your laptop and what do you see and hear? That’s right, page after page, punditry upon punditry, phone-in after phone-in and Tweet upon Tweet of remorseless parrying and jousting over this unhinged national obsession. Even poor old Andy Murray, arguably Scotland’s greatest ever sportsperson, had to give a shrugging response to a question about the state of Scottish football the other week. The best tennis player on the planet being dragged into a myopic realm that invariably revolves around the overwhelming and stifling fixation with a couple of well-kent Glasgow teams? Desperate stuff.
Golf, meanwhile, continues to face a serious fight for publicity, despite the fact that, in both the men’s and women’s game, we have a plethora of young, supremely talented, engaging and highly marketable players who can be at golf’s vanguard for years to come. On the UK front, for example, 22-year-old Matt Fitzpatrick and 20-year-old Charley Hull won the season-ending events on the European Tour and the LPGA Tour the other week but the fanfare that greeted these considerable conquests was fairly modest. No doubt had those successes involved British players in, say, tennis, swimming, cycling, shove ha’ penny or falconry, then they would have been afforded open top bus tours and the commissioning of commemorative dish cloots. If it was in football? Good grief. The printing presses would explode, hysterical presenters on the TV would scream themselves to the point of spontaneous combustion and the nation would grind itself to a standstill amid Caligula-like indulgences and lavish celebrations.
A couple of years ago, a UK poll revealed that 98 per cent of disgruntled club golfers felt that golf was not a priority for the national sporting media with 97 per cent stating their belief that football simply engulfs the thoughts of those setting the agenda. The results were hardly a shock to the system yet across a variety of media platforms, golf can be treated with shabby, trivial indifference despite the huge benefits in brings to the nation’s health, whether financially or physically.
Here in the cradle of the game, the growing encroachment of football means summer fixtures are already par for the course anyway. Last year, and not for the first time, there were European qualifiers during the week of the Open Championship at Royal Troon while a bewildering array of League Cup encounters were roaring on amid showpiece golfing occasions. “Look lads, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and golf’s biggest global stars are in Scotland,” says an imaginary figure invented for point-stressing purposes in a column. “Sod that, we’ve got a preview of Rangers versus Annan in the Betfred Cup to pore over in eye-wateringly exhausting detail first,” comes the reply from a similarly made-up character.
If June, July and August became the height of the domestic football calendar, we may as well consign premier Scottish golf events to the news in brief.
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