Woods's Remark Insensitive, Not Meant to Hurt

I got a call Tuesday from a reporter at BBC Radio, wondering if I'd go on the air to discuss the Tiger Woods controversy.

Having just returned from the Masters, and having spent four days watching Woods miss putt after make-able putt and finish tied for third in his quest for a fifth green jacket and 11th major championship, I assumed she wanted me to talk about his inexplicable inability to figure out the greens at Augusta National.

No, she said, people over here are very concerned about his language, particularly his comment that "as soon as I got on the green, I was a spaz."

I had heard Woods use that term after his final round, a day he needed 33 putts to get around the course, but in the interest of good taste, and yes, perhaps political correctness, and mostly knowing full well that my editors almost certainly would not allow "spaz" to appear, I decided not to use it.

My feeling then, and now, was that Woods had described his putting several different ways, all of them leading to the conclusion that he'd been awful.

At one point, he used the word "atrocious" in talking about his sloppy work on the greens, which certainly painted the proper picture and demonstrated his own obvious self-deprecating disgust with the state of putting. That's the quote I decided to use in my story.

Over in England, however, my friend Lewine Mair, the brilliant golf correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, wrote a follow-up piece in which she implied there had been a cover-up in a number of American newspapers trying to protect Woods from himself.

"America's leading newspapers," she wrote, naming the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe, "helped Tiger Woods avoid controversy by ignoring his use of the word 'spaz' to describe his putting in the final round of the Masters at Augusta National.

"It was an extraordinary insensitive if impromptu comment from a player who usually shows nothing but compassion for his fellow men, other than when he is up against them in a golfing context," she added.

I would agree with Ms. Mair that it was an insensitive remark, even though I've also been told the word apparently has a far more offensive connotation over there than it does over here. But quite frankly, in no way, shape or form was my own decision not to use the word an attempt to help Woods "avoid controversy."

Woods does a fine job on that score himself. For the most part, he is unfailingly magnanimous in his praise of his opponents, avoids touchy or controversial subjects virtually at all costs and has always been thoroughly cognizant of saying and doing the right thing.

In February at the World Match Play championship at La Costa, for example, he clearly was perturbed with Stephen Ames when he read a comment by Ames implying that he'd have a chance to win their first-round match because Woods wasn't driving the ball especially well at that point.