The KILLING of GARCIA TALKER

“We will have him round every night. We will serve fried chicken”. These dozen words have rocked the febrile world of golf to its proverbial foundations. Can you credit it?

Here’s how they came to be said. Every year, the European Tour (the organisation that manages those events in Europe at which the professionals play) hosts a dinner for players and officials. That this year’s dinner was held at Heathrow suggests that it is not the most elegant event in the social calendar.

Evidently there are speeches and rather less formal shenanigans at these dinners. For aught I know, they have fire-eating and pole-dancers. At any rate, the golfer Sergio Garcia had the mic this year and someone asked whether he would invite Tiger Woods over for a meal during the forthcoming US Open. The subtext to this question was not wholly without mischief because it is no secret that Garcia and Woods are not exactly bosom buddies.


A contrite Señor Garcia

Garcia’s off-the-cuff answer brought a hushed horror to the crowd. People rose from their half-eaten sorbets and left the room in search of smelling salts and brandy. For the next 24 hours, all flights due to land at Heathrow were diverted to Stansted. Tiger Woods is secluded at an exclusive retreat in Beverly Hills where profound shocks are given state-of-the-art treatment. Garcia has been banned from all professional and amateur golf courses for the rest of his life and has been obliged to take up crown-green bowls. The Queen has been informed.

Here’s what my statement would be if I were Garcia. “I love fried chicken. I cook it every week and everyone says mine is the best. Whenever I have a particularly favoured guest, I serve fried chicken. I am told that fried chicken is eaten by black people in the United States. I can tell you that it is also eaten by white people in the States. It is eaten by Europeans in Europe, by Asian people in Asia and by Africans and South Americans in, respectively, Africa and South America. It is nowhere an unusual dish, save perhaps in the Arctic and the Antarctic, where chickens are more difficult to keep.


Fried chicken: this is a Thai version

“At the dinner, I did not mention the fact that Tiger Woods is of mixed race. Indeed, the matter of race never entered the discussion until I was accused of racism. I deny racism. I will not apologise because I have no reason to apologise. If what I said in any way implied that Tiger Woods is of mixed race, so what? This is not a secret about him. It is not racist to say that someone is black or of mixed race. There is never any mention in the British media of Stephen Lawrence wherein he is not described as “the murdered black teenager”. Is that racist?

“Is it racist to suggest that the French drink champagne or that the Jews eat chopped liver? I am a Spaniard. Is it racist every time someone describes me as a Spanish golfer? Would it be thought racist if someone asked whether I would like paella on the European Tour dinner menu? And would it be racist even if I merely laughed and said ‘that’s fine’? I only ask because Tiger Woods has said “it’s long past time to move on and talk about golf”. I agree.


Tiger and Sergio nearly come to blows

“So who are these people who take it upon themselves to be offended on Woods’ behalf? Is any of them black or of mixed race? The management of the European Tour is hardly celebrated across the world as a model of interracial, non-sexist integration. Nor is any other part of the professional golf world. Should we not look at the fact that, after more than a decade and a half at the top of the game, Tiger Woods is still virtually the only top-100 player who is not white? Isn’t that a rather more pertinent question than arguing about whether an informal, unplanned remark gave offence to people whose own circumstances were in no way touched by it?

“If the authorities decide to take any punitive action against me, I shall take legal action against them. I shall also consult my lawyers if any sponsors try to vary my contracts with them. This is a non-issue blown up by the media and by self-important individuals anxious to jump on any bandwagon that permits them to air their own constantly-nurtured sense of outrage. It’s time people grew up”.

*************************************

My regular readers will have noted that the flow has slowed this year. This is largely because I am engaged in writing a book and also – and, as you may imagine, this is apt to interfere with the book-writing too – a new dog has joined our pack, a seven year-old rescue chocolate Labrador, name of Bear.


Bear

DRIVEN to DISTRACTION

My partner and I watch almost no sport on television – none at all in situ – and he takes no interest whatever in print coverage of it, whereas I do look at results (mostly where they pertain to teams within the county in which I was raised) and sometimes read about the characters in sport – insofar as there are any characters – who find themselves in positions that can be psychologically compelling … which largely means in practice managers of football teams. As people, players of any sport are deadly dull, only ever interviewed concerning their own performances and rarely showing any insight into their own psyches.

But we make an exception for golf. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s been said that sport played on a green surface is very restful on the eyes, but if that were the cause we would be watching lawn tennis, croquet, snooker and crown bowls too, let alone soccer, rugger and cricket.

Graeme McDowell celebrates the Ryder Cup win and shows what he's made of

My late mother was devoted to playing golf and involved herself deeply in the local club, serving as ladies’ secretary for a quarter of a century. I can remember how she fretted about preparing her first annual report (not that I was much help, a budding scribbler of around ten, though I’m sure I told her she would be fine) and how assured she had grown by the time she delivered her last report. My father never played the game, resented (sometimes openly) her “other life”, but enjoyed being a social member of the club. This was typical of him, never initiating anything himself and taking advantage of those who did, while grumbling about how inconvenienced he imagined – or more likely pretended – he was by the making of the arrangements, even though he didn’t object to enjoying himself in the upshot.

In my early teens, Mum attempted to get me interested in playing golf and I had a lesson or two. Looking back, I suspect that I submitted to this because the club professional, one of whose main tasks was giving lessons, was an absolute dreamboat in his 20s. But I didn’t have much aptitude or application for driving, chipping and putting and it didn’t last. The young pro sadly died in a car accident, one of the first fatalities to be actually caused by one of the then new-fangled seatbelts, the buckle of which pierced his liver.

Ryder Cup WAGs on parade

I sometimes watched golf on television with Mum, as much to enjoy her enthusiasm as to generate any of my own. That certainly wasn’t because of the alleged restfulness of green, for we were watching in black and white. What’s more, the outside broadcast cameras had only a certain range, it being impractical to cable them across thousands of yards at a public event, so the players would in turn disappear from the coverage between, say, the seventh and the thirteenth holes. The greatest consolation was the ripe and cultivated commentary of fruity old Henry Longhurst.

These days, the BBC only has rights to coverage of the Open and highlights of the Masters and the Ryder Cup among the major tournaments. We’re certainly not going to pay for a general sports satellite package just to get a chance to watch the US Open and the PGA, the other majors in men’s golf. And we didn’t watch all of what was available of the Ryder Cup. Being a sport viewer is incredibly time-consuming. Even a game of darts lasts long enough to remind you that you could be reading Proust instead.

Mr & Mrs Corey Pavin show their colours

But what we did see was enthralling enough, or it would have been if the news hadn’t already revealed the results before each day’s highlights began. Yesterday, The Guardian asked its sports section readers if Graeme McDowell should be BBC Sports Personality of the Year and an amazing 88 percent voted ‘yes’ according to today’s result. It fell to McDowell (with his playing partner, fellow Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy) to win the match that clinched the Ryder Cup but, in truth, it might have fallen to any member of the team. Ian Poulter and Luke Donald both accumulated higher match-winning scores than did McDowell – The Guardian named Donald ‘Man of the Match’ – and Lee Westwood was generally deemed to have been the team leader on the course. Most of all, the victory was credited to the non-playing captain, Colin Montgomerie, who put his own demons aside and managed his team with tremendous aplomb. Monty is certainly the most intriguingly complicated character in British golf and more often the victim rather than the begetter of lurid headlines about his private affairs (cf a certain T Woods). I don’t see why a backroom boy shouldn’t be hailed as Personality of the Year but perhaps the rules insist that only players of sports are eligible.

Tiger and Elin before the storm

McDowell of course did win the US Open in June, the first European player to do so in forty years. Even with that win, he is placed only 13th (behind Westwood, Donald and McIlroy) in the current world rankings. Paul Casey, who didn’t automatically qualify for the European Ryder Cup team and wasn’t one of the captain’s three personal picks either, is the third Englishman currently in the world top ten. Yanks make up half the top tier and Woods is still number 1 despite his continuing indifferent form.

American golfers in particular make me wonder why I am remotely interested in the sport. I’m sure that, were I to find myself stuck in a lift with any two of them, I would have opened a vein long before we were rescued. Almost without exception, all professional American golfers are Christian fundamentalist Republicans, though at least, as far as I know, none of them thanks god when he wins, as the German Bernhard Langer was wont to do. But their preferred pastimes are killing animals for ‘sport’ and being gung-ho about the military. The American Ryder Cup captain, Corey Pavin, even called in some US military man to give his team an – in every sense, no doubt – over-the-top pep talk. Pavin used to sport a cloney moustache and we thought he was gay. His independently-minded wife clearly contradicts us. She is Vietnamese, a refugee from the fall of Saigon. Though she may not quite fit the profile of US golf WAGs – virtually all looking like Playboy centrefolds and inclined to the blonde – she has done her share of “glamour” posing.

Craig Stadler, one of the big players of the past ...

This class of air-hostessy, air-headed, cheesecake girls are programmed to gold-dig and golfing pros are a good catch. There will not have been anyone playing in the Ryder Cup who isn’t a millionaire, most of them several times over. Tiger Woods’ ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, is the template for golfing wives (and evidently the possessor of an image that draws much interest, for the presence of her name earlier on this blog has brought it more visitors than any other single search criterion). From what we have glimpsed of the club hostesses, cocktail waitresses and “glamour” models with whom Tiger amused himself during his marriage, his taste in sexual partners is no more sophisticated and no less blowsily obvious than that of his fellow American pros.

... and John Daley, never "in regulation"

Golfers may be a catch financially but few of them are any sort of catch by any other standard. It is a curiosity of golf that fitness is not a given. Indeed, golf is a game that men are apt to take up when they retire. To call some famous golfers “out of shape” would be to treat them kindly. You also certainly don’t need to be good-looking – golf is not a sport that attracts groupies, as far as I am aware (unlike football and tennis). Probably the main reason for Woods’ dominance of the game for so long is that he is one of the very few players actually built like an athlete.

That rare creature, a golfer who looks like a pop star: this is Camilo Villegas

Golfing prowess is down to having accurate vision, the ability to develop and adapt the way you swing the various clubs, the particular strength to hit a ball a long way, the knack of applying spin to a shot and the judgment (and experience) to know which particular club to use in each given circumstance. These gifts are what propel the likes of McIlroy and Rickie Fowler into professional golf at a young age and then into a quick acceptance on the lucrative American tour. Woods – like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer before him – clearly had these gifts in particular abundance. Those gifts can desert you and your career can go into free fall, especially when you've won a major: think of Ian Baker-Finch, Lee Janzen, David Duval and indeed Corey Pavin. But one hell of a lot of golf playing depends upon luck which is why, once a special player like Woods has lost his dominance, anyone in the field might win a major and why no seeding system is ever going to make sense in golf. The luck comes in many forms – luck with the wind, the bounce, the lie, the camber of any particular part of the green, the knap and condition of the grass, the time of day that you tee off, the relative intrusion of extraneous noise and movement while you address the ball.

Villegas lines up a putt: don't even think about it

It’s a curious world indeed, with all its mysterious jargon: addressing the ball, having the honour, winning 4 and 2, eagle 2, 3 iron, back 9, laying up, holing out, pin high, matchplay, lofted club, plugged, hooked, chip and run, free drop, in regulation, the turn. And a passing glance might suggest that it is played only by old men in bad clothes with equally old men in worse clothes carrying their bags for them. But it’s a game that can turn on a sixpence and which guarantees nothing. Who could forget Nick Faldo winning the 1996 Masters after Greg 'The Great White Shark' Norman gradually squandered a six-stroke lead? Or Tom Watson, rising 60 and always a popular favourite, almost winning a sixth Open championship last year and suddenly losing his way at the last? It’s a very strange game and I find it no less strange that someone like me can be captivated by it.

NEVER UNKNOWINGLY RUDE

I have gravely offended a friend. That is, of course, if I am permitted still to use the term “friend” in relation to him. I was “rude”, it seems. He has told me this often enough for me to accept that this must be his settled conviction. I don’t think I’ve been rude at all. Like all things, this particular fracas has to be seen in context. I will try to give a flavour of the context and then you may be the judge. The exchanges in question have all taken the form of email.

My (hitherto) friend is in the way of being a bit of a writer. Recently he wrote a piece on spec for the newspapers and he sent a copy to me. Candidly, I thought the piece was pretty awful and wholly misconceived but I didn’t tell him that. Having said how I was out of knowledge and sympathy with the subject of the piece – in other words, to give him to understand that I wasn’t really qualified to judge – I then concluded with a short paragraph beginning “If I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism – I think that …” and then made a mild and entirely constructive suggestion as to how he could improve the piece. I ended with: “Still, you ’av a go, sir, you do ’av a go”.

I have no way of knowing if he took tut at this (as I thought) entirely light and friendly approach to giving him the benefit of my opinion based on thirty years of being a freelance journalist. Whether he incorporated my suggestion or managed to place the piece or was at all grateful for the help I offered he never vouchsafed.

Now this is a man about whom I have written before on this blog. At that time, I hadn’t heard from him in a long while. This was, it seemed to me, not entirely unconnected with the fact that I had lent him a tidy sum of money and the agreed date for its interest-free repayment was some time passed. He had moved house (several times, it seemed), he had changed his phone number and email address and people who knew him could not direct me to him. So I wrote about him and I named him.

Eventually the sum was repaid – not without extra outlay by me in the form of expenses incurred – and connection was renewed, though I still have no address or phone number for him. A couple of times, he has asked me to alter the reference earlier on this blog. The first time I ignored the request. The second time – quite recently – I addressed it. I will not now use his real name so let me hereafter refer to him as Colin. It’s the sort of name he deserves.

Before I repeat the burden of my demurral to his request for a blog rewrite, let me add some context. Colin has a page on Wikipedia. When I first looked at it, I thought it read rather ickily, as if written by himself or his agent. Wikipedia itself evidently thought so too because, subsequent to my first reading it, the site has appended two announcements at the top of the entry. One, decorated with a pair of scales, says: “A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view”. The other, led by a large exclamation point, says: “This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources”.

In asking me to remove the material on my own blog, Colin calls what I wrote “suppositions and not at all true”. I responded thus: “I don't feel the slightest bit inclined to alter my posting for these five reasons:
1) You may not care for it but I don't believe anything in the piece is unjust, unfounded, malicious or mendacious.
2) The number of people who will have read it is vanishingly tiny. I have had about 7,500 visitors to the site, many of them returning, many of them staying only for a few seconds, a huge number of them just wanting to view the picture I ran last year of Tiger Woods' wife (which puts it all very much in perspective). Only two searches to the site have used your name as a searching criterion and both those searches, I would submit, were done by you (I don't get informed who visitors are but I do learn how they come, from whence and why). If anybody other than you reads that piece in the future (which is a very, very remote possibility), it won't be anyone who will use it as an excuse not to commission you, believe me.
3) Nobody who knows you will have read it. Even fewer people who know you will read it in the future. Put your moniker in Google and tell me whereabouts on the list is a link to that piece (I don't know myself because I haven't looked but I'm confident it won’t be in the first 5,000).
4) If you want to be concerned about something about you on the internet, attend to your Wikipedia entry. That seems to me a) vastly more likely to bring people who want to know about you, especially people in the biz who might do you some good and b) vastly more likely to make such people think you're a flake and not to be trusted.
5) I don't as a general principle approve of rewriting published documents other than in very exceptional circumstances. Anyway, it would be a chore and I have enough to do just now. You're lucky I squeezed you in at all”.

Reading that again ten days later, it seems to me to be forthright and comprehensive but neither unduly unfriendly nor uncalled for.

At the end of his reply, which largely dealt with other matters, Colin wrote “I guess there is not much I can do to get you to remove those comments. But why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I’m a flake?”

I found this question pretty astonishing. It seemed to me to suggest that he needed a wake-up call. My reply went on to other matters but began with this paragraph: “The editorial comment that the monitors have placed on your Wikipedia entry acts as a caveat emptor. It strongly suggests that they think this is a self-promotional entry rather than an objective one. That's what anyone who doesn't know you will assume (people who already know you already know that that's exactly what it is). As a consequence they (the people who don't know you) are likely at the very least to think twice about you. If you reckon that does you less damage than a passing reference buried in an obscure blog, you're putting your vanity way before your commonsensical approach to the business; and you're a lot dumber than I took you for”.

Reading that again now – and, as is my practice, I read it over several times before sending it, very different from Colin who never looks over his emails and habitually sends stuff that is full of typos and often phrased so obscurely that I cannot glean his meaning – it seems to me to be the robust good sense of someone looking out for a friend. I didn’t think I needed my usual cautious approach – “if I may say so – and I know you bristle at criticism” (see above).

Back came Colin: “Well the Wikipedia page was actually built by someone I used to work with at the BBC, and done out of kindness, as he was aware of such things are [sic] Wikipedia long before I was. Look I know this won't do anything to rebuild our friendship, but I do have to quote my partner on reading the first paragraph of your email: "why the hell would you let anyone speak to you like that?" I have always had the utmost respect for you Stephen as you know, and as I have admitted before I have also found you brusque to the point of bloody rudeness on occasion. But I really can't put myself in the firing line for this sort of thing any more. I know you are as staunch a believer in good manners as I am, so I really must register my upset at the way I am being spoken to here. If you don't think you are being unnessarily [sic} rude then fair enough, but I have to be allowed to say how I feel. xx”

I found this perfectly outrageous. My first instinct was to write back thus: “Why would I give a tuppenny fuck what your fucking girlfriend says? Is she a fucking professor of moral philosophy? Has she read the whole fucking correspondence? Over the years, my partner has made many sarcastic and disobliging remarks about you, but I’ve never quoted a single one of them at you because a) I don’t need reinforcements; b) he is biased in my favour and therefore not what I would consider a reliable witness; c) he’s never met you and only knows from what selected morsels I share about you and hence he simply and literally doesn’t know what he is talking about”.

However, I didn’t write that. Instead, I wrote: “Before I buckle under the lash of your partner's rush to bitter judgment, let her consider these questions:
– Does she know that my email was in response to your query ‘why does my Wikipedia entry suggest I'm a flake?’?
– Has she seen the Wikipedia page in question?
– What is her own considered view of the impact of the two cautionary notes flagged up there by the site monitors on the expectations of anyone visiting that site in the hope of learning something about you?
– Can she find it within her to see that only someone with your best interests at heart would be trying to knock sense into your head about this matter?”

Incidentally, I nearly declined the invitation to refer to the woman in question as Colin’s “partner”. I have never met her and don’t know her name; indeed this was the first time he had referred to her. Colin is, if his own account is to be credited, a serial womaniser and very few of his relationships, as far as I know, have lasted past three months, but I depend for this intelligence wholly on what he has indicated to me over the years. This one, the professor of moral philosophy, may be The One for ought I know but, as I say, she was news to me. David and I, on the other hand, have been together for thirty years. I submit that my own use of the term “partner” is justified.

Colin began his next email thus: “I do appreciate that, and it was nothing to do with what you said, it's to do with the way you say things. There's just no need to be so brusque about everything. I sincerely appreciate you have my best interests at heart and your advice is always welcome, but so often it comes across as unnecessarily violent”.

Brusque, rude, violent … it comes hard to a congenital pacifist to be called violent, especially “unnecessarily violent” (I’m not sure I would know how to identify necessary violence). I felt a little sarcasm was called for. My next email began: “Isn't it a lovely day? The birds are singing. The fish rise to the food with a will. There's a slight breeze. The dogs are sleepy and not very keen to walk round the field. Of course, the nights start drawing in now. It'll soon be deepest February. Oh god, sorry, I've turned unnecessarily violent. Even brusque. What a heartless bastard”. I then complained about something he’d written to me on a different matter that was perfectly impenetrable in these terms: “It's said that a true gentleman is never unknowingly rude and when I am rude to you it's because I bloody well intend to be, but I'm not sure you realise how bloody rude it is to toss off an email without reading it through, correcting the mistakes and making sure that it is coherent. But then if I whinged about that, you'd think I was giving you a hard time” and I ended “So, what did your girlfriend have to say about your Wikipedia page?”

Colin replied: “I just don't see the need to write in that tone. I don't mean to sound like Derek Batey when I say this, but I simply can't imagine anyone reading an email like that and not finding it bewilderingly hostile”. By this time, I felt I was being lectured about how I should conduct myself and I resented it. Back I came: “Oh I say, do chuck it, Carruthers, old man. If I felt hostility towards you, I wouldn't write at all. But if you keep on with this dreary bleating, I shall indeed start to get hostile. And I don't particularly appreciate being told how to write. You need to be able to face robust knockabout to survive in this business. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen”. And I added: “I ask again: what did your girlfriend say about your Wikipedia entry?”

Uncharacteristically, I heard nothing for four days. I had been reading a novel set in New York, where Colin had, a year or so back, had a play mounted off-Broadway but was never able to go and see it. So I wrote again: “You're not actually sulking, are you? Oh puhleeze. If, as we all hope, you are eventually going to make it properly in New York, you will have to grow a thicker skin. Manhattanites are brutal and robust and take no prisoners. Sensitive types don't last five minutes.
I'll tell you a New York joke:
– How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– OK, how many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?
– None of your fuckin' business.
You still don't tell me what your girlfriend says about your Wikipedia page. This is because she agrees with me. Am I right or am I right?”

Colin came back: “No of course I'm not sulking, I just have been busy the last few days. It's not as if I work for the BBC any more and get paid to send emails all day!
I actually have a thicker skin than you may thick [sic], but (and this is my final word on the subject) whether I do or not is no excuse for rudeness. This isn't the Eighties for fuck's sake.
And no, my girlfriend didn't agree with you about Wikipedia, she just said ‘I wouldn't let anyone speak to me like that’. But you don't think you were being rude so we'll have to agree to differ. Life’s too short”.

Perhaps I was being over-sensitive now, but I thought this was Colin eating his cake and having it too, so I replied (in full): “The next email you send me which contains either of the words ‘rude’ and ‘rudeness’ will be deleted unread. If you think I'm rude, you haven't lived”. And that’s where it stands at the time of writing.

Colin ended his most recent email to me with the following request: “Would you read something of mine if I send it to you?” It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Well, it does mine. Perhaps it doesn’t yours. I’m always very reluctant to read friends’ stuff because what they want is an unequivocal cascade of praise and there’s not much point in your reading their stuff if nothing less will do.

Some years ago, a friend in the biz asked if I would look over the first few chapters of the autobiography she was writing. I said that there wouldn’t be any point in my doing so if she didn’t give me carte blanche to be entirely candid. No, no, that was exactly what she required. I read the material, largely enjoyed it and write her a six-page letter of notes. The most damning criticism I made was that she had written too generously about others and left herself and her own feelings out of the narrative too much.

I heard nothing from her. Three or four years went by and I never knew whether the book was published. Then I fell over it in a remainder shop and bought a copy. She hadn’t included me in the acknowledgments. Before I had read it, she invited me to a party at her house. I arrived before more than half a dozen others were there, none of them people I knew, and we stood about making aimless small talk. Then another guest arrived, the hostess brought her in and announced loudly enough to shut everyone up: “Now, Steve, I want you to meet this old friend of mine. You see, she really liked my book”.

Given the evident sensitivity of Colin, I’m not sure I can face the potential nuclear winter of making any comment at all about his latest piece of writing. As he wrote just two days ago, life’s too short.

The WOMAN TAKEN in ADULTERY

There is no sanctimonious little twerp anywhere in these islands more deserving of a come-uppance than Peter Robinson. The former estate agent became First Minister of the Northern Ireland assembly some eighteen months ago in succession to his mentor, Dr Ian Paisley. He also sits in the Commons where he is the longest-serving Belfast MP (31 years) in the history of the province. His wife Iris, to whom he has been married for rising 40 years, is also a member both at Stormont and Westminster. They like to be known as “the first couple” in Belfast, but in London they are more often referred to – due to the extravagance of their expenses claims, their combined income from various sources (above half a million per year) and their ostentatious expenditure – as “the Swish Family Robinson”.

"It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair" [Paul Simon]: Just after Christmas, Iris Robinson announced that she was withdrawing from public life “for mental health reasons”. Last Wednesday, aware that a BBC Northern Ireland current affairs reporter and producer knew a good deal about the circumstances of her withdrawal, she issued an emotional statement, admitting to an extramarital affair that she blamed on her mental state. She had, she declared, tried to take her own life back in March. Ahead of the broadcast of the programme (in Northern Ireland on Friday evening; available throughout the UK on BBC iPlayer until next Friday), the notion was put about that Mrs Robinson’s lover had been “a local businessman”.



Iris Robinson not (I think) from her own campaign literature

Thereafter, Iris Robinson went to ground, or was put to ground. The Sunday Times reports her holed up in the French ski resort of Chamonix where, interestingly, Elin Nordegren repaired in face of the unfolding publicity about the affairs of her husband, Tiger Woods. Peter Robinson now took control of the story, decided to play it as if all were open and above board and invited the BBC’s camera and other selected reporters to his study where, dressed in studiedly casual clothes (the kind an estate agent would affect), he unburdened himself of his own statement.

The pearl at its centre is this passage: “I love my wife. I have always been faithful to her. In a spirit of humility and repentance, Iris sought my forgiveness, she took responsibility upon herself alone for her actions and I have forgiven her. More important, I know she has sought and received god’s forgiveness. I only ask, if people feel they must judge her, that they find within themselves, as I have done, the gift of doing so with mercy and compassion”.



The Elin Nordegren of Stormont

"Jesus loves you more than you will know" [Simon}: That the almighty turns out to be liberal on adultery is clearly to the enormous advantage of the Robinsons. What has been historically a bull point for the Unionists in the perceived wisdom of said almighty is that he is reliably supportive of moral superiority. Moral superiority has ever been the central plank of Unionism in Ireland, politically as well as spiritually. Peter Robinson, as may be detected in his statement, is so in thrall to moral superiority that, even in her agony, he cannot forebear publicly to score moral points off his wife (“I have always been faithful to her”) as well as off everyone else (“I only ask … people … [to] find within themselves, as I have done … mercy and compassion”). As I say, a sanctimonious little twerp.

Darragh MacIntyre’s report for Spotlight, produced by Mary McKeagney, appears to pull no punches. What Peter Robinson called “Iris’s inappropriate relationship” was with someone who only became anything resembling “a local businessman” as a result of Mrs Robinson’s connections. He is Kirk McCambley, the son of Iris’s butcher, a boy she had known since he was nine. In 2008, Bill the butcher died and Iris took Kirk under her wing; there is no mention in the story of Kirk’s mother. They became lovers. Iris was 59, Kirk 19, so she was well old enough to be his grandmother.



Local businessman, aged 19

The Bible story of the woman taken in adultery is the source of Christ’s admonition “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” and we shall occupy no moral high ground concerning the sexual aspects of this story, save in this regard. Iris Robinson, rather inconveniently for her present circumstances, has been most widely known until the present shemozzl for a thoroughly unforgiving stance on the sexual morality of others. On the very morning that her husband was succeeding to the post of first minister, Mrs Robinson was telling BBC Radio Ulster that homosexuality was “an abomination”. She advocated that gay people should seek a cure for their condition. On another occasion, she told BBC Radio 5: “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals, trying to turn away from what they are engaged in”. In the Commons, she announced that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing children”. It would be instructive to know whether Mrs Robinson’s “very lovely psychiatrist” has been able to winkle out at what age, between nine and 19, the butcher’s boy first became sexually alluring to her.

"Coo, coo, ca-choo, Mrs Robinson" [Simon]: Iris Robinson is a born-again Christian, unlike her husband who is a life-long evangelical, but as we know it is frequently the converts who become, metaphorically or otherwise, the suicide bombers. Iris’s deployment of the term “abomination” in describing gay people has its origin, as you might guess, in The Bible, specifically Leviticus 20:13: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them”. Most unfortunately for the sainted Iris, we find this in Leviticus just three verses earlier: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death”.


Peter Robinson tries out an AK-47, Israel 1986

Such death is not sanctioned by scripture if it is administered by one’s own hand. Here is the First Book of Corinthians 6:19: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body”. In other words, Iris, suicide isn’t smiled on much in the scriptures either.

On the morning of the night in March when Mrs Robinson attempted to do away with herself with an overdose, Mr Robinson ascertained that she was conscious, phoned her aide, Selwyn Black, and then left for Stormont. She was hence alone until Black and paramedics arrived, the latter determining that she ought to be hospitalised. While others took care of her, Robinson was making jokes at the despatch box – "Going to the candidates' debates" [Simon]. He rationalised this callous behaviour in his statement thus: “I’ve never allowed my personal life to interfere with my work”. A sanctimonious little twerp, as I say.

"We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files" [Simon]: So far so simple. Now it grows murkier, as these things will. Using her political power, Iris solicited £50,000 start-up capital from two local entrepreneurs, so as to set up young Master McCambley in a restaurant in a fashionable riverside development. McCambley won the contract for the enterprise against some competition, despite having no experience in business or as a restaurateur. Iris Robinson sat on the council that awarded the contract. Having secured his situation, Iris then demanded a ten percent facility fee in cash. In every detail itemised in this paragraph, she was either breaking the law or breaching government regulation or both.



Iris and Peter hear of the sad death of Stephen Gately

Not surprisingly, the relationship with McCambley soon broke down. “Just cut links with Kirk” she texted Black. “God’s word was very clear on it”. You might think it a pity that the almighty didn’t find it within himself to be a bit more upfront at the outset of the relationship. Has he not heard of stable doors and horses bolting? Iris’s reaction was to demand the return of the £45,000, partly to clear her own debts, partly to be donated as conscience money to the church; as it happens, in this case, to the church run by her sister-in-law. The church never received any payment. At this point, the Robinsons were holidaying at their Florida flat so all the arrangements had to be conducted by Selwyn Black who, understandably, began to object that, as a former RAF chaplain, he didn’t think that looking after an adulterer’s financial affairs fell within his sense of what was proper, let alone his job description.

"Where have you gone, Ken Maginnis, oh?" [after Simon]: Back in Belfast, Iris Robinson began blatantly lobbying for contracts on behalf of the surviving creditor who had bankrolled McCambley’s business. It was at around this point that Peter Robinson became involved (and she attempted suicide). Discovering that his wife was misusing funds, contacts and contracts, he ought to have made a full breast of it to the committee overseeing propriety or otherwise in ministerial dealings. But he did not. “They both knew the consequences of what they had been involved in,” Black told Spotlight at the programme’s conclusion, “and did nothing to address that circumstance. It goes right to the heart of credibility in Northern Ireland”.



Marilyn (aka Peter Robinson but perhaps a different one)

At least one section of the community is having a deserved good laugh at the expense of the Robinsons. A correspondent wrote to The Guardian on Friday: “May I be the first homosexual to genuinely wish Iris Robinson MP a complete and swift recovery?” And the gay monthly magazine Attitude, in a spirit of merry satire, has invited Kirk McCambley to pose as its next cover pin-up.

"Ev'ry way you look at it, you lose" [Simon]: In sum, this lurid affair pans out as a curious mirror image of the Tiger Woods scandal, this time with the wife dallying with the parochially Irish equivalent of a nightclub hostess and the husband playing the martyred, wronged but vindictive partner, so it is poetic that Mrs Woods and Mrs Robinson should flee to the same glamorous refuge. So far, Elin Nordegren has emerged in rather better shape than Peter Robinson whose political future is very much in the balance. Whether, with its tradition of moral superiority, the Democratic Unionist Party will continue to support him must be in doubt. Perhaps they will say to him, as they have already said to his wife, what Christ said to the woman taken in adultery: “go, and sin no more”.

GO GET ’IM, TIGER

As my devotees will readily testify, low gossip and idle speculation are unknown to me. But oh boy, how can one resist Tigergate?

Hot off the net is the news of fall-out from the “scandal”: the entire writing team of Late Show with David Letterman have today resigned in protest at the host’s rejection of all their Top Ten list of gags about Tiger Woods and his insistence on penning them himself – his team agree that they are “not funny”. So you see the Tiger Woods “scandal” is a big story.

“What’s Tigergate?” some may ask. Here’s the bare bones of it. Eldrick Tont Woods is the world’s most successful sportsperson in history, certainly if you measure it by income. Of course his sport is an especially lucrative one. Whenever you see men playing golf on television, you can be sure that not one of them is less than a dollar millionaire unless (and golf is one of the few sports where this is still possible) he is an amateur. Well on the way to becoming sport’s first billionaire, Woods has been ranked number one golfer in the world for 575 weeks to date (more than ten years in total) and continuously for nearly four-and-a-half years, despite having been out of action with an injury for eight months during that period.

By no means all of his wealth derives directly from playing golf. Tiger Woods is a highly marketable brand because he is highly popular and brings a huge following to his sport, both on the courses and on worldwide television. He also has always appeared squeaky clean, something PR people look for. Shrewdly, he has subscribed to the writer JM Coetzee’s philosophy of handling public attention: “I don’t perform cartwheels for the media”. It is twelve years since Woods granted an extended interview. He has remained private, aloof and therefore largely untouchable. So he is able to command top dollar for advertisements and endorsements.

This weekend’s incident has blown much of this out of the water. According to the official version, Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade 4x4 out of his driveway shortly before 2.30 on Friday morning. Almost immediately, he collided with a fire hydrant and then a tree. The car’s speed was not sufficient to engage the airbags. Both Woods’ lips were cut in the impact. His wife, Elin Nordegren, following on foot, tried to open the automobile, then smashed a window with a golf club and dragged the semi-conscious Tiger from the vehicle.


Mrs Woods in her modelling days

Police were summoned and determined that “no alcohol was involved in the accident”. How this finding was reached is not revealed. Can you effectively use a breathalyzer on a semi-conscious driver who has lip lacerations? At any rate, by around 3.00 Woods was being treated in hospital from whence he was discharged shortly thereafter. Later on Friday, Nordegren denied police entry to their home, saying that her husband was resting.

The internet duly heaves with theory and rumour about this sequence of events. An already running tale about Tiger and a woman described as a “nightclub hostess” suddenly acquires much greater significance. If that story may be accessed by you and me, it may be accessed by Mrs Woods. She wouldn’t be best pleased, goes the theory.

For what it is worth, I have my own take on this event. It has the merit of tidying up those elements in the official account that seem somewhat unconvincing. First I ask this question: did the cops breathalyze Elin Nordegren? Because, you see, my theory is that she was driving the Cadillac (damn it all, Tiger endorses Buick). She hit a hydrant and then a tree because, you know, she’s a girlie. Oh no, wait, that’s completely wrong (sorry, just twitting my women readers). She hit a hydrant and then a tree because she’d had a couple of bottles of vino. Concerned about her rushing out of the house and jumping in a car, Tiger pursued her on foot. She stepped out of the car, having picked up a stray golf club – I expect David Hockney has paintbrushes lying around in his car too – and slugged him in the face. He fell down. Aghast, she wondered what to do and decided to smash the Cadillac’s window so that she could claim she had done this to release the central locking and pull her husband from the wreck. “There is no blood in the car” screams The Hollywood Gossip site in italics (that’s how I know it was screaming). You bet your ass there’s no blood in the car.


Tiger – he means it

If my theory is what the Irish call bollix, Mrs Woods is free to sue me. I doubt her husband would welcome the further publicity of such a case. After all, while the matter is not sub judice (and it will remain so for at least as long as the Woods decline to talk to the Florida Highway Patrol), we are all free to speculate without prejudicing justice.

Meanwhile, if Tiger Woods still wants to reach that magic figure of a billion dollars, he had better come up with a convincing account of what transpired in the early hours of Friday morning. Otherwise, the endorsements might prefer to go to … um … John Daly.

NICE GUYS FINISH LASTING WORK

“For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost,/But – how you played the game” (Grantland Rice, Alumnus Football).

I cannot but wonder why anyone follows – let alone pursues – sport. Save for a very, very few practitioners and punters, sport means recurrent disappointment or (in media histrionics) heartbreak, tears, tragedy, a shattered dream, the end of the world, etc. Even for Tiger Woods, even for Roger Federer, there is occasional “defeat” to weather along with the regular “victories” to be savoured. Dominating sportsmen like these inevitably begin to aim higher and then, if they do not manage to surpass some ancient record of achievement, they feel obscurely that they too have failed. Oh please. Take up gardening.

This weekend, apparently, Christine Hamilton (whose talent I have evidently underestimated) failed at the last to win some driving contest, having led the race all season. (I hadn’t known one race could go on so long). I guess she’s still a shoo-in for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a title that I have always thought to be the most extreme contradiction of the multimedia age. Good grief, it’s been won in the past by a woman wholly devoid of personality, Princess Anne’s numbskull daughter, who proudly boasts that she’s never picked up a book in her life. (Sports Bore of the Year would be a much more close-run contest).

Before Christine’s shame, some bunch of rugger buggers was seen off in Paris by a team from a nation that surely needed the psychological boost of victory more than England did. I read that the English players had been so written off at the contest’s outset that, had they won, many bookmakers would have been bankrupted (aha, one tangible reason to have wished the English team good fortune). To have done as well as they did was apparently a remarkable achievement and “they can hold their heads up high” unless, like me, you think they should have grown out of such a schoolboy activity long ago. (I saw the English rugby captain on a news bulletin. He sports one of those so-called cauliflower ears that boxers always had in the comics of my childhood. Not attractive).

To pursue or follow any sport is to elect to spend almost all of your time sunk in dismay. After all, “there can only be one winner” (sport is of course rife with cliché). This means that trailing behind the winner is a crowded field of losers and also-rans, all of them disheartened, self-disgusted or proclaiming forlornly “we wuz robbed”. Most of them anyway are on steroids and other performance-enhancing (i.e. cheating) drugs. Why would any sentient human being want to subject his leisure hours – or worse, his (inevitably short-lived) career – to recurrent frustration?

I suppose the only comparable field is politics. J Enoch Powell, a shrewder observer than he was political operator, once declared that “all political careers end in failure” and with very few exceptions he must be deemed right on the money. Most politicians want to get their hands on one or two of the levers of power and, once having done so, begin to fancy their chances in the top job, be it president, prime minister or dictator-for-life. Consequently, almost all of them fail as the number that reaches what is sometimes called “the top of the greasy pole” is of course a vanishingly small proportion of those who think they might like a shot at it. Of those who do get to perform the top job, even fewer leave office with enhanced reputation and the enduring love of the people. There are barely any winners in politics, only better or worse losers.

Sport is not dissimilar. Even those who rise to be champions again and again inevitably continue to compete when their skills are waning and so at last fall to younger, fitter, hungrier contestants who want to become even more famous champions than those they supplant.

The arts offer so much more satisfying a field of endeavour. Of course there are meretricious awards and lists of supposed “greats” so that the media and, to a lesser extent, followers and consumers of the arts can feel that they have tamed the artists by providing a framework of competition and struggle and so a spurious sense of triumph and loss. That shrewd old bird, the Irish playwright Brian Friel, graciously accepting an Olivier award for his magical play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991, declared to the assembled dignitaries: “Success is merely the postponement of failure”.

But happily the arts are not measured by the mechanistic standards of sport: score lines, worth totted up in points. In art, in self-expression, “success” and “failure” are far more complex and subtle notions than the winning of a tennis game “to love” or a golf match “four and three” or a cricket match “by an innings and 17 runs” or a wrestling bout by "two falls, two submissions or a knockout". Accordingly, books and paintings, movies and musical compositions, verses and dances, plays and programmes have a more lasting and mature relationship with their audiences than a sports event ever can. Of course sports fans mistily recall a George Best dribble, a Len Hutton cover drive, an Arnold Palmer sand chip, a Muhammad Ali upper cut and in such images lies the poetry – all the poetry – of sporting prowess. But who would prefer a whole season of flat racing to a single bar of Bach or a stanza of Shelley? Plenty of people, you reply, and I counter: “but they’re all STUPID people”.

And of course there are far more stupid people than the other kind, so sport is perceived to be more popular and newsworthy than the arts and therefore Doris Lessing, Nobel literature laureate (not in competition with anybody for that award), gets considerably less media coverage than the aforementioned Christine Hamilton. It seems to me, however, that Lessing brings far more credit to this country for the recognition of her extensive body of work over many years than does the failure of various journeymen in the objectively judged struggles of this week's sporting event. No motorcade to Trafalgar Square for Lessing. No special stamp issue. I hope there was a message from the Queen and a statement by the Prime Minister but I heard tell of neither. Lessing at least has this consolation: if there are humans still extant a hundred years from now, her work will still be read when all trace of Johnny Wilkinson – is that his name? – is forgotten.