Television
Club bores
James Delmgpole
For some time now I have had this embarrassing problem which I sometimes tell friends about in the hope that they'll go, 'Oh, that's OK. It's perfectly normal. We do it all the time.' Unfortunately, though, they never do and I'm beginning to worry that I may have a serious psychiatric problem.
The problem is that I like watching golf on TV. So much so that when last Sunday some friends came round for bridge I secretly got quite pissed off with them when they didn't leave early enough, because my plan had been to spend the last part of the evening watching the Masters (BBC 1, Sunday) in bed, but by the time I got there all that was on was the ruddy San Marino Grand Prix (ITV 1, Sunday).
So I ended up having to ring up my mother the next day to find out what happened. 'Don't worry, darling, you didn't miss anything. They all fell apart and Tiger Woods ended up winning by four strokes,' she said. This undermined an important part of my thesis, which is that one reason watching golf is more interesting than watching Formula 1 is that you never know who's going to win.
But I still think my thesis is basically right. For one thing — please correct me if I'm wrong, 0 saddo sports stats freaks — Tiger doesn't win nearly as many golf tournaments as Michael Schumacher does Fl races. And for another, Fl is the most boring sport in the world. It just is, it is, it is, as the Fawn and I discovered a few years ago when for some bizarre reason the watch company TAG Heuer decided to take us to the British Grand Prix.
What's great about Fl is that it's so outrageously awash with cash that you get the most lavish hospitality and the coolest freebies. What's crap is the motor racing. You sit there for hours watching these cars go round and round and the noise is so deafening you can't even talk. If you're sitting on a straight it's boring because the cars never overtake one another. If you're sitting on a bend it's boring because they slow right down. And it's boring anyway because Schumacher always wins. (Except in the grand prix I saw which was the one where he crashed. Even that didn't make it interesting.) Golf, I suppose, can be fairly dull too at times. In fact I'd be lying if I said that this year's Masters was one of the more
thrilling tournaments I'd seen. My inexpert. could-he-total-bollocks theory on this is that the Augusta course where it's played is a bit too difficult. Everyone's so busy trying to stay alive and the margins for error are so narrow that there's no space for any of those ultra-long how-didthey-do-that super-puns or those nifty little chips that trundle into the hole and make you glad you were watching. There have been only 14 holes-in-one in the competition since 1934, which says it all really.
I have mixed feelings about Tiger Woods. On the one hand, unlike Schumacher, he's such a genial sweetie it's impossible not to wish him well. On the other hand, he's so unflappable and consistent, that you might as well be watching a replicant. In America, I dare say, they're very taken with the idea of a man who wins all the time. But if Tiger is to regain widespread affection over here, what he'll need to do is crack up spectacularly just when his lead looks unassailable, like Greg Norman did that time a few years ago. Then, later. he can be the comeback kid and well be rooting for him all the way.
One advantage golf has over Fl is that you care about more than just the person who's winning. At any one time, there are usually about six or seven players (rarely if ever British) who could — at a push — overtake the leader. And because all it takes is one mistake for them to cock up their chances completely. their every shot is charged with significance and the tension can be enormous.
That's one reason, I suppose, why I'm hooked. Another is that I rather enjoy the sound of Peter Alliss's voice, not to mention some of the deliciously inane drivel he spouts, such as the time the camera focused on a small green lizard, which he confidently identified as a Komodo dragon. I also like the dinky computer graphics, where you zoom up a virtual fairway from the tee to the green, and the bits where Nick FaIdo or Ken Brown previews how impossibly difficult it is to play each hole, enabling you to nod sagely with armchair expertise as the competitors' balls go awry.
But I think, if I were talking to a psychiatrist about this, probably the main explanation for my bizarre interest in a sport I can't even play would he that it's a subconscious plea for maternal attention. My mother, you see, is a total golf obsessive who is never remotely impressed by any of my achievements because a) they're not sporting, b) I don't do a proper job and c) the only way in which I could make it a proper job is if I were suddenly to become Ian Wooldridge.
Which is why I didn't just ring her up on the Monday after the Masters to find out what happened but why I also made a point of ringing her up over the weekend to tell her how much golf I'd been watching. 'Oh, you're such a good boy,' she said. 'I'm very pleased with you.' See, it works.
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