If I could wave a magic wand and fix one of my many irritations heading into the new year, I’d be hard pressed think of a more satisfying outcome than the cessation of apologies from the golf commentary booth.
By all means, apologise for getting a player’s name wrong. Or for getting my hopes up with a McIlroy birdie graphic when he’s actually putting for bogey. Apologise for lying to us about a second shot approach from the fairway when the tee shot went out of bounds. Or for jinxing a player on a run of 100 holes without a three-putt. A loss of picture due to a faulty satellite. A weather delay. Or for one of Dame Laura Davies’ farts.
But please don’t apologise for a player cursing – ever – for no offence has ever been taken, despite what your producers might say. And if it has, well, then good enough for the f***ers!
It pains me more than it should to hear commentators attempt to excuse raw emotion spilling from tour players at their wits’ end. Especially when all I hear from players and tour chiefs alike is a supposed appetite to turn the sport into an entertainment product.
If that’s the case, then cursing should be encouraged. After all, the fairway is our Colosseum and when the gladiators lose their shit at a misbehaving tiny white ball, sleep well knowing the grandstands salivate over the sudden relatability of the sport’s finest sword wielders. When steam leaves Jon Rahm’s ears, we are entertained.
Maybe it’s the Irishman in me that has a soft spot for letting fly. That’s Tommy Tiernan’s theory anyway – forced to speak another tongue since birth because the British banished our language and replaced it with the subjunctive tense.
The comedian blames the English for his French, a language littered with conflicting grammar clauses and rigid rules that would disrupt his connection with a comedy audience were it not for his aptitude for cursing.
“I should be speaking the Irish language but I don’t understand a f*cking word of it,” he once told an audience. “We’re all here hoping to get lifted up out of the mundane and the only way to do that is through words, but the English language is all grammar and rules. The Irish soul is much more fluid.
“The English language is like a brick wall between me and you and f*ck is my chisel.”
In a tormented golfer’s case, screaming f*ck to high heaven is one way to chisel away a gnawing frustration that could ruin a round if left to fester. It’s not malicious. Just a coping mechanism. A fiery exhale released before you combust. Like the Dame on air after a curry.
In Shane Lowry’s case, it can be an art form. As close to poetry as a man from Clara dares venture. A classic of his came on the par-3 15th at Palm Beach back in 2016. Lowry had barely put his 7-iron on the ball when he yelped “Ahhhhh ya f*ckin idiot!”
If anyone should’ve been offended, it was Lowry. Everyone else should’ve applauded the self-criticism delivered in an endearingly thick Irish brogue. It reminded me of Father Crilly outing Fargo Boyle for menacing in the King of the Sheep competition to gasps of horror and a delayed “f*cken hell” from a member of the crowd in Father Ted.
And it’s not just the sheep affected, it’s the goats too… or the GOAT, Tiger Woods. Again a 7-iron was used in the making of the expletive, this time on the sixth hole at Augusta. “Tiger Woods,” Woods grimaced in the third person. “You SUCK…. God dammit!” To which Verne Lundquist on commentary astutely observed – “I don’t think he’s pleased”.
But for anyone who plays the game, reaching boiling point is par for the course. We’ve had Jon Rahm cursing at drones in his backswing. Zach Johnson cursing at patrons at Augusta and Tyrrell Hatton cursing at everything that moves. Like it or not, in golf, cursing is the 15th club in the bag and at times it’s the most important. It’s a consequence of how difficult this great game is to master and a reminder that even the ones who come close to doing so are human beings too.
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