Williams digs up golf's murky past

THE morning after Ron Atkinson racially abused Marcel Desailly in front of a mic he thought was closed, I knew the 30,000 words I’d already written for a book on Ron would never be used.

And Atkinson would never work meaningfully in football again.

Pity Steve Williams wasn't my subject. The news from Shanghai last weekend that the caddy had called Tiger Woods a “black arsehole” into a mic he knew was open could have been shrugged off in a day or two.

Football, for all its faults, takes this kind of thing seriously. While the FA watches tapes, hires lip readers and calls witnesses to try John Terry, the PGA's and European Tour's work has already been put to bed. Steve has apologised, he won't do it again. Case closed. See you in Sydney.

As Tiger Woods reportedly put it when shrugging off the racist abuse he suffered as a young member at the Navy club in Cypress, California; “That’s just the way it is.”

The sport would like to think it has moved on a lot from those days, from days like 1990 when the founder of Shoal Creek insisted “we don't discriminate in every other area except the blacks.”

And of course it has. But a sport with this kind of history would want to send much clearer messages than it did this week. It should have thrown the book at Steve Williams.