The former golf world No1's spitting in Dubai was pretty thin gruel compared to my school football team-mate Gecko
In The Friends of Richard Nixon, his book about the Watergate inquiry, lawyer-novelist George V Higgins is highly critical of the 37th president's swearing. It's not the frequent use of expletives that offends the author ? who deployed plenty in his own fiction ? but the amateurish way they are scattered about. Nixon's blaspheming and cursing sounds forced to Higgins, like a Sunday schoolteacher trying to impress rough boys.
If you want to know what real swearing in the White House sounded like, Higgins observes, you should have listened to Nixon's predecessor Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a swearing natural. He then quotes one of Johnson's fruitier similes. The crimewriter's point is forcefully made, too, because even today, close to half a century later, I would struggle to get the line past the Guardian's editors. Suffice to say that the big Texan compares a rival's impact on the political landscape to that which the arrival of ladies' tights has had on the sexual habits of the nation. It's not big or clever, but it certainly sticks in your mind longer than anything Nick Clegg's ever said.
I felt somewhat like George V Higgins myself this week when I finally got around to watching the Tiger Woods Dubai spitting incident. Now, I admit that I'm slightly jaundiced on this topic, because I had to spend my school holidays in Dubai as a surly teenager and frankly anyone who spits on the place has my sympathy, but even so ? it was a whole lot of fuss over what was, gobbing-wise, a damp squib. I mean, the bloke didn't even attempt to drag his nostrils first. I doubt there was enough tack in that grolly to hold up even the weakest putt. "Call that spitting?" I said to myself as Woods's lukewarm floss flopped listlessly earthwards. "Hell's teeth, these people would have cacked themselves if they'd seen Gecko".
Gecko was in my school football team. He was tall and angular, with the outsize hands and feet of a fairground prize. His facial features were almost impossible to discern because his skin was permanently enraged. (And to be honest, if you'd been stuck to Gecko's face 24 hours a day you'd have been pretty cross yourself). Gecko played somewhere around the halfway line. He ran about irrationally and threw himself into tackles like they were foxholes, but he reserved most of his energy for spitting. Unlike Tiger, the lad really put his heart into it. And quite a lot of his lungs as well.
Gecko's spit was not nebulous. It flew across the air like a Spanish omelette made from Evo-Stik, smacked its target with the squelching, pulpy slap of Jonny Wilkinson tackling the Kraken, and stuck as firmly as some carnivorous alien plant on to the face of a space marine. Wherever Gecko ran he deposited one. After 90 minutes the playing surface was a viscous minefield. If Barcelona or Spain had attempted their short-passing game against us they'd have got nowhere, I can tell you.
The walls of the boys' changing rooms were likewise decorated with Gecko's throaty-nasal effluvia. Neither soap nor solvents could remove it. The caretaker had to chip it off with a cold chisel. Sputum, the tar of frequent No6s, catarrh, Spangles slivers and the reddish dye of aniseed balls gave the splotches the look of abstract expressionist artworks. Gecko was the Jackson Pollock of phlegm.
Tiger Woods's flobbing was entirely feeble by comparison, but it has furthered the former world No1 golfer's fall from grace. According to my colleague Lawrence Donegan, "[Woods's] image is a lost cause". Well, maybe, but only if he is intent on trying to make people think he is a nice chap. This would now seem nigh on impossible, so surely the best course for Woods's image consultants is to head in completely the opposite direction and attempt the sort of rehabilitation through recklessness achieved by Ossie Osborne?
Golf is crying out for a genuine bad boy, someone the fans can truly loathe. Every other sport has them ? even bowls managed to dig up Griff Sanders. Yet golf has lagged behind. OK, John Daly is a beer-swilling oik, but there's a fine line between evil and stupid, and Daly staggers across it in a cloud of king-size smoke, in much the same manner as Paul Gascoigne did.
No, what golf needs is a smart-casual equivalent of boxing's H�ctor "Macho Man" Camacho, a preening lightweight who memorably observed, "My girlfriend boos me when we make love because she knows it turns me on" (well, that's why she told him she did it anyway), or Paul Nicholson, the dark star of darts who rightly observed, that some viewers get more interested in the game if there's somebody to hate: "If you watch a soap opera for instance or a pantomime there's always the good and the bad."
Clearly this will not come naturally to Woods, but if he can remodel his swing he can surely take a similar approach to restructuring his image.He could start by employing Gecko as his spitting coach. I've no idea where the bloke is these days, but with modern DNA testing and the evidence he left behind there should be no trouble tracking him down.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/feb/18/tiger-woods-spitting
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