Real Golf

Gee Tiger Woods, you must be doing it tough this week. Sitting at home with your bung knee up, watching while someone else is going to win the British Open.

Gee I have a lot of sympathy for you. We have heard all about the wife and the kid and the money but I don't care. What really gets to me is the way you would wince in pain with that extremely painful knee while winning the US Open. Then you say that you have been in pain for the last ten years.

Do you hear the violins playing? Welcome to my world Tiger. A world where just getting out of bed and walking down the stairs every morning wakes up the house with the noise coming out of my joints. I play golf too, albeit about 20 shots a round worse than you. Ever been up before it's light in the middle of winter, pulling your own buggy around while you zig zag across the fairway. Of course you haven't. That is what Steve is for. Ever tried to hit your first shot of the day without a warmup over the water on my local golf course? Probably not. You get picked up in a Buick hours before you play and are taken to the designated warmup area. There you find a neat pile of Nikes ready to hit into the distance. You don't even have to go and collect them afterwards.

Real golf is about finding a smaller golf ball in your bag of practice balls. Mine is a Slazenger. How many years out of date is it?

Ever had to play a game of golf with 3 other guys and be the designated seeing-eye golfer. You see most of the guys at my golf club are getting on and lose the ball after the first 20 metres. None of us can afford the laser surgery that allows you to see an undulation on a green from 200 metres.

Tiger, you are good, you know you're good and so does everybody, so just get on with winning every time you play but please leave the theatrics out, no matter how much it hurts. Please just spare a thought for all of us limping around the course with bad knees, backs and whatever you can throw at us, carrying our own equipment, forgetting to pack an umbrella and getting excited when we find somebody else's Nike golf ball that they lost in the water of the first hole. To all of those club golfers out there I have one thing to say "for those about to golf - we salute you".