Wentworth a lesson in harsh realities

DEVELOPMENTS at Wentworth over the weekend cruelly demonstrated that regardless of wealth or success you can still be living in a very harsh, unforgiving world.

Paul McGinley is a Ryder Cup hero, but not a whole lot more in a golfing context, a very long way from the stratosphere populated by the likes of Tiger, Vijay, Phil, Ernie.

Sure, he has made what most of us consider an absolute fortune from the game, but then he was born with a talent and an instinctive dedication to his craft. He is also a highly intelligent man who walked off the golf course at the end of the BMW PGA Championship on Sunday close to tears, not because he had failed to win a tournament that would have altered forever his status in the professional game but because the wife of a close friend and neighbour lay gravely ill in hospital.

"To see what Darren and Heather are going through would tear you apart", he said. That was his foremost thought, not that a couple of wayward drives had cost him the biggest tournament on the European Tour.

And then there was Colin Montgomerie's situation.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of what happened in Jakarta last February, there is little doubt that Monty's reputation as an honest competitor has been ruined for all time. He cannot win and the media and his fellow players who have felt slighted by his grumpiness over the years are ensuring that he never will.

Just note some of the headlines from Sunday's QUALITY newspapers:

"Evans piles pressure on Monty"

"Monty under a cloud as 'Jakartagate' unrest grows"

"Evans out in the open over Montgomerie affair" and "Monty under fire."

The tabloids, even though they tried hard, couldn't do a whole lot better.

We were told: "Monty isolated in rule row"

"Evans: we all resent Monty"

"Monty gets rough justice"

"Monty row: Colin walks into a new storm."

Gary Evans, a journeyman pro and not the most likeable of individuals, put the cat among the pigeons with his comments on Saturday.

The hounds are baying. The game that purports to being purer than the driven snow, is very much in the dock. Nobody but nobody is escaping and that can't be a bad thing. Take Tiger Woods; there may well be more famous and better-known sportsmen in the world today (Schumacher, Ronaldo, Wilkinson, Federer and so on) but I doubt it.

And yet golf's strange, sometimes incomprehensible rules, apply to him like everybody else. As with Colin Montgomerie, he doesn't escape. Disagree with Gary Evans if you will, but I can't in all honesty dismiss his request that "we look at what he did at Augusta this year. When play was suspended for bad light, he was able to pick his mud covered ball up and replace it clean the next morning."

Tom Pernice, an American pro, doubted the legitimacy of Tiger's driver and was proved correct.

Miguel Angel Martin would be a virtually unknown Spaniard were it not for the fact that he was disqualified for the fifth time at the recent British Masters at the Forest of Arden. He trod on a sapling so as to improve the angle of his swing. Like it or not, something dodgy happened as far apart as Jakarta, Augusta and Warwickshire. Few would doubt Evans's closing remark that "the integrity of our game cannot be allowed to be compromised in such fashion."

There was much to admire and understand in the manner in which European Tour executive director George O'Grady and Colin Montgomerie coped with the publicity surrounding this ever more delicate situation on Sunday. "It's been handled by a highly competent referee and by the Tour as a whole and that should be the end of the matter", was the gist of O'Grady's comments. "I thought this was all history although everybody is entitled to their own opinion", was the best Monty could come up with.

No explanation why Evans and his supporters are wrong and he is right.

Having knocked around the Tour for quite a few years now I can vouch that Evans's claim that "my views are shared by 98% of the players" is exaggerated but not by as much as many people would have suspected. The trouble from Monty's point of view is that, as Evans pointed out, he does have "smoke around him before. Look at what happened at Valderrama a couple of years ago. He got the benefit of the doubt there." Only he will ever have the answer to Evans's aside that "only he knows what he was really thinking in Indonesia."