It’s that time of the season again when an ornate silver plated four-turret lens camera on a plinth gets everybody into a frightful fankle.
Back in more tranquil times of yore, of course, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award was a fairly modest, dignified affair. It was all neatly pressed shirts, nicely coiffured hair, appreciative applause and, well, a bit of understated class.
Nowadays, it’s a blingy, strobe-light flashing, music thumping extravaganza of barrel-scraping gaudiness. The fact that Lewis Hamilton turned up with his pet bull dog at last year’s eye-watering kitsch-fest, to gasps of wonderment from the easy to please simpletons who gushed in amazement at a four-legged beast with a crumpled face that just sat looking thoroughly miserable, simply highlighted the garish depths into which the event has been plunged. Oh, and to underline this general sense of wretchedness, it’s called SPOTY because, in these finger-tapping, acronym driven times, the title Sports Personality of the Year is clearly too wordy and complex for the Great British public to pronounce without choking on their own tongues.
Anyway, the short list of runners and riders, and some loupers and dookers, is out and, perhaps predictably, there is no sign of a golfer. Tennis, rugby league, boxing, gymnastics, swimming, cycling and long-jumping are all represented and, given the BBC’s diminishing sports portfolio and its general shrugging indifference to golf, you half expected the West of England Patchwork Quilt champion and the Hereford & Worcester Quoits League Order of Merit winner to be on it too. They probably had more chance than a golfer.
Ok, so Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy may not have had a major winning year but four wins on the global stage should still merit recognition. And having shattered his ankle during the peak season playing football, the fact he returned to end a topsy-turvy campaign by winning the Race to Dubai and the DP World Tour Championship recently simply illustrated his majesty. He is a golfer from the United Kingdom who consistently performs at the very highest level while his views on developing the game in the wider public provide examples of his broader sense of awareness and duty. Not all sportsmen or women can say that.
McIlroy missed out on the Sports Personality of the Year award (sorry, but I refuse to write SPOTY) last year at the end of a quite shimmering season in which he had won back-to-back majors. It was an astonishing year but, given BBC’s retreat from serious golf coverage, it was perhaps predictable that McIlroy’s place in the public consciousness and the general appreciation of the scale of his accomplishments was not as widespread as it should have been. His career was never going to be defined by that silvery thing on the plinth, of course, but it was still a hard snub to stomach. And to make matters worse, the aforementioned Hamilton and that ruddy dug won it.
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