RealClearSports: Tiger Controversy Is What Golf Needs

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By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

CHASKA, Minn. --This is what golf needs, a good controversy that involves the unquestioned best player in the game.

Maybe the people who dote on scandal and debate will decide indeed there is more to the sport than handshakes and kind words.
These are times of action, and about the only action in golf is bending over to pick a ball from the cup. Golf then must do it with reaction.

Like the reaction of Tiger Woods to being charged, along with playing partner Padraig Harrington, with slow play in Sunday's final round of the Bridgestone Invitational over at Akron.

Tiger's in a bigger event this week, the 91st PGA Championship, which starts Thursday at Hazeltine National some 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis. He's trying to win his first major of the year. He's also still trying to defend his criticism of a rules official at the Bridgestone.

Tiger's the big dog. When Tiger barks, everybody hears. Tiger barked loudly after winning the Bridgestone.

He and Harrington, coming down the stretch, separated by a shot, were put on the clock by John Paramor, a European official working the tournament because it was a World Golf Association event. In a timeless game, Tiger and Padraig were being timed, threatened by a fine and a penalty stroke.

Harrington apparently rushed his chip shot from behind the green on 16 and the ball bounced into a pond. He ended with a triple-bogey 8, losing four shots to Woods, the lead and finally the tournament. Padraig stayed silent. Woods did not.

"The way I understood it,'' Woods said Tuesday, "we were the only two in contention. We had separated ourselves. The winner was not going to come from the groups ahead. It was going to come from our group, and we were having a great battle.''

Forty-eight hours earlier, Woods stated, "I'm sorry John (Paramor) got in the way of a great battle, but that happened.''

In his defense, Paramor said the twosome was 17 minutes behind the preceding group on the 16th tee, and the warning was deserved.

On Monday, a day later, there was a story that the PGA Tour, in its speak-no-evil ways, had fined Woods for his remarks. But Tuesday Tiger said he was not fined. Neither was he fine.

"I thought they could have used better judgment,'' Woods said of being put on the clock. "It certainly influenced us in how we played and influenced the outcome of the tournament, and that's not how you want to have a tournament come to an end.''

Harrington, the defending PGA champion, was less critical than Tiger but hardly less displeased.

"As regards to what he said,'' explained Harrington, "I think it's easier for having won the tournament to take the moral high ground and say what he wants. Having lost the tournament, I'm going to take it on the chin and say it was my mistake.''

Which, literally, it was. Hassled or not, flustered or not, a player as good as Harrington, who has two British Open wins along with his PGA, is not supposed to lose control.

The people in charge of golf shudder at this stuff. They deem golf a gentleman's game and attempt to cover up any misfortune or disagreement.

At the Masters, there's a booklet with a quote from the late Bobby Jones warning fans not to cheer a player's errors. The Tour last winter refused to confirm that John Daly had been suspended, even though he had been.

But golf is better off with controversy. Baseball, football, basketball, and even tennis thrive on it. All of a sudden, you have Tiger Woods talking like a low-key Ozzie Guillen -- standing up for what he thinks is right and getting as much attention as for his marvelous play.

Woods has won five tournaments in '09, a year that begin with him still rehabilitating the June 2008 anterior cruciate ligament surgery on his left knee. Two of those victories have come in the last two weeks. However, none of those victories has been in a major.

"For me to come back and play as well as I have,'' said Woods when asked if this still would be a top year without a major win, "and actually win golf events, to say at the very beginning of the year, I don't think any of us could have thought I would win this many events.''

Told that previously he wouldn't have thought it was a good year without a win in a major, something that hasn't happened since 2004, Woods answered, "I've said that in the past, but I didn't have ACL reconstruction either.''

He had it. He's back. And he's letting golf know, with his game and his comments.

As a reporter since 1960, Art Spander is a living treasure of sports history. A recipient of the Dick McCann Memorial Award -- given for his long and distinguished career covering professional football -- he has earned himself a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the PGA of America for 2009.