It must be great being a young, successful sportsperson, bouncing gleefully around the globe with wide-eyed joie de vivre while remaining blissfully unaware of the crushing banality of everyday adulthood.

Take Yani Tseng, for instance. As the rest of us plootered about worrying if we changed the clocks or had enough monkey nuts stock-piled for the guisers, the all-conquering 22-year-old from Taiwan was celebrating the 11th worldwide victory of a quite staggering season of achievement in the women’s scene.

It’s no wonder she has had a permanent smile etched on her face for the entire 2011 campaign. Even the intrusions of cameras on one of the tees during the closing round of last weekend’s Suzhou Taihu Ladies Open in China -- a Ladies European Tour event in which she meandered to a seven-stroke victory -- was simply brushed aside with her now trademark grin.

“Today there were lots of cameras and I tell myself, ‘Don’t worry about it’,” she said of the incessant clicking that comes with the increasing Yani Mania. “I’m happy to see them coming out.” Imagine good old Monty reacting to such a frenzy of digital distractions? The perpetrators would’ve been burned at the stake.

These are privileged times for those who follow the women’s game. Watching someone exert a powerful dominance in a sport tends to be pretty awe-inspiring and in Tseng, golf has a player who is doing just that. And she shows no sign of loosening her fearsome stranglehold on her rivals. Every week, after all, provides another opportunity to stamp further authority on her bruised and battered peers.

“I just try to focus on every shot, every hole, every tournament,” said the world No.1 in the build-up to last weekend’s event, which came just a few days after she had landed the LPGA Tour’s Sunrise Taiwan Championship in her own backyard. “Last week I won, but it’s already passed. Now I’m looking forward to this week and trying to focus on doing the best I can and do the best every week.”

She even has the men in her sights and, like Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie before her, has expressed an enthusiasm for testing herself on the PGA Tour at some point in the future to “improve my skills further”.

Not so long ago, before his career unravelled when a variety of skeletons came rattling out of the closet and into the public eye, all the talk was of Tiger Woods shattering Jack Nicklaus’ record haul of 18 major titles. The way Tseng’s career is hurtling along, she’ll probably steam past Woods and achieve that historic feat herself.

Having successfully defended her Women’s British Open title at Carnoustie back in the summer, Tseng became the youngest player -- male or female -- to win five major crowns.

In the men’s arena, there has been fierce, and frankly nonsensical debate, as to whether Luke Donald is a truly deserving world No.1, despite the Englishman’s unwavering consistency which is a hallmark of the greats. There can be no such argument regarding Tseng, however.

Here is a player who dominates the opposition, whose consistency is unrelenting and who has the nerveless ability to triumph on the major stage. She is the undisputed global leader and her record in the big four events on the women’s circuit over the past year has been sparkling.

She won the 2010 Kraft Nabisco Championship and was runner-up in this season’s contest. She won this year’s LPGA Championship and posted a top-20 in 2010. She has been 10th and 15th in the last two US Opens while her aforementioned double whammy of British Open triumphs has added further shine to a glittering golfing cv.

If she was a fella, Tseng would be the biggest thing in golf right now.

 

AND ANOTHER THING

During the summer, Rory McIlroy trudged away from the Open at Royal St George’s whining about the links game after a buffeting from the elements. A couple of weeks later at the Irish Open, he got himself involved in an on-line Twitter tussle with the American commentator Jay Townsend, who had criticised the 22-year-old’s caddie, JP Fitzgerald.

Next on the headline-grabbing series of events was his decision to bin his long-standing manager Chubby Chandler and move to the Dublin-based Horizon sports group, a swop that was described as “bizarre” by Lee Westwood in one of these infernal tweets.

His play-off victory over Anthony Kim in Sunday’s Shanghai Masters, his first success since he won June’s US Open, was a welcome relief from all the off-course hoo-ha.

Thank goodness that the young Ulsterman is now letting the clubs do the talking again.