When Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the 1960's Liverpool soccer team said the sport was more important than life and death, thankfully he was joking. These days, its hard to know if folks know the difference.
We do know that many professional sportsmen and women will sell their own mothers to win these days. Witness the baseball doping scandal, soccer's various betting scams, and the vast sums demanded by football players and boxers alike.
But even sadder is when a rare attempt at sportsmanship in the cliched old "spirit of the game" is punished by the sport's own ruling authorities.
As Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington stood on the 16th tee at Firestone they were going head to head to win the Bridgestone Invitational. Enter the chief referee of the PGA European Tour, John Paramor, who warned the pair for "slow play". No matter that they were the final pair on the course, and that they were set for a compelling climax, perhaps the most captivating of the season. Paramor told the world's greatest player, and his best current pretender to that thrown, that they were "on the clock". Even yours truly, a perpetually hopeless and luckless amateur, knows that such an edict can ruin your concentration, even in a five-dollar round, let alone a high stakes international event.
Harrington, a proud PGA role model who nevers falls foul of the game's etiquette, fell apart. He hit his ball in the water, ran up a triple-bogey eight, and the contest was over. Woods won but did not celebrate. Instead he expressed disappointment for the effect of the referee's intervention on the play of his partner and chief competitor. Tour officials subsequently threatened him with a fine for his remarks, when they should have been proud that their greatest-ever ambassador had set an example for the millions of youngsters the organization's mission aims to encourage, simply by putting golf's unique spirit of camaraderie before cash.
It reminded me of another golfing colossus who was branded a fool and a traitor for an appropriate act of dignity and generosity forty years ago next month. Jack Nicklaus, at the climax to the Ryder Cup, could not bear the thought of his European rival, Tony Jacklin, missing a short putt and throwing the whole match away for Europe. Nicklaus was widely ridiculed for conceding the putt, ensuring the game was halved and the tournament drawn. Only four decades later is it truly recognized as one of the actions which sets golf apart as a game which still retains the core values of human endeavor. Shame the PGA, the very people meant to safeguard those values, appear to have forgotten.
