Tiger Woods

I grew up in the suburbs surrounded by golf courses. As a teenager I did a bit of caddying and I played  a bit of golf. Surprisingly I wasn't too bad but it was not really the game for me - I prefer my exercise a bit more vigorous.

But it wasn't this that really put me off, it was the arseholes who are magnetically drawn to golf clubs. The kind of aspirational twats who enjoy being part of an organisation that tells them they musn't wear shorts on the course or that they have to wear a collar in the bar  - and that after twenty years of kissing arse they can become the club captain. And then I found in work that golf was a social forum for 'business' - which really meant a vehicle for brown-nosing with clients or superiors. So I avoided golf much as I also avoided the freemasons and the rotary club - and haven't found my career disadvantaged.

So I'm not big on golf or golfers and I haven't followed closely, or particularly cared much, about the Tiger Woods scandal. But I can offer a couple of observations without straying into the morality of his infidelities:

Firstly I suspect that they are more about power than they are about sex. Celebrities are the new royalty - of the worst 'divine right' kind. Such is the cult that surrounds them that they feel, and most of the time the media and public go along with this, that they are above the constraints of the great unwashed. The feeling that they can shag every gold-digger that makes herself (or maybe himself ?) available becomes not only a privilege but a defining quality; and consequently almost a necessity of celebrity. It's the same sense of 'droit de seigneur' that drives pissed up footballers to pick fights in Cheshire night clubs - or worse.

And secondly, and specifically with the Tiger Woods case, there is more than a hint of racism. The underlying  feeling that black celebrities have by their very definition 'got above themselves'. Particularly so if they have conquered a WASP  bastion such as the golfing world. Particularly so if they have a glamorous  and conspicuously aryan wife. There will always be the 'OJ Simpson' factor' - the facts of the case secondary to the white establishment's delight at seeing an 'uppity' black man fail.

That's it - I promise I will never mention golf here again.