David Leggat: Golf's nice guys really know how to act

Jimmy Demaret was a wise-cracking, party-loving Texan who won golf's Masters three times in the 1940s.

He could have been an alltime legend if he'd bothered trying at the game, it was said.

On walking into a clubhouse dining room during one tournament he spied the famously dour Ben Hogan eating his lunch. Alone.

"Hey look, there's Ben sitting with all his friends," Demaret quipped.

Hogan was a grim, aloof, unsmiling operator off and on course. He was hugely successful and didn't care what others thought. He was Nick Faldo's hero. Make what you will of that.

Hogan won nine of 16 majors he contested and is one of the true legends of the sport.

Jimmy and Ben came to mind as Phil Mickelson was wiping Paul Gow's spray off his chin in the wake of his USPGA championship victory at Baltusrol, half an hour from Manhattan, this week. Mickelson's carefully manicured image as one of golf's nice guys took a pasting as the little Sydneysider let loose.

"No, they wouldn't feed him," Gow, world No 159 and a bog-standard Tour battler, said of his fellow pro in the locker room.

"He ignores the other players, he is an arrogant person. He is the opposite - what you see on television is totally different to what he is around the clubhouse.

"He has done some great acting classes in Hollywood, and they have worked out for him."

Biff, bang, wallop.

The interesting thing about this is how rarely a golfer will tee off on a fellow player. There's no such holding back in many other sports.

So what should we make of Gow's comments on the world's No 3 player?

Depending on your preference - and presumably whether you're a Mickelson fan - he's either out of order or bang on, not necessarily because he's right in his reading of the Californian leftie, but simply for speaking his mind.

Golfers so often appear seriously buttoned-down types with the world's worries on their shoulders. That's why we sit up when a John Daly or, a couple of decades ago, a Lee Trevino or Arnold Palmer come along.

As he was waiting on the first tee preparing for an 18-hole US Open playoff at Merion in 1971 with Jack Nicklaus, Trevino pulled a rubber snake from the depths of his bag and tossed it to a startled Nicklaus.

Some golfers would have whacked Trevino. Nicklaus probably considered it. Trevino won. But top players with rich personalities are rare on the fairways.

Now think of the other big money individual sport. Tennis differs in that its practitioners are usually much younger, and because of the cocoon-like environment in which they live, are often desperately self-absorbed, immature people.

But it is similar to golf in the sense of possessing relatively few stellar players with an outsize personality.

Jimmy Connors was either a funny, outrageous guy or a foul-mouthed ratbag. Take your pick, but he had an undeniable talent for getting the crowd on his side.

Compare him with Pete Sampras, unarguably an alltime great, and held to be a good guy, but totally incapable of coming up with a single memorable quote.

Gow is not the first person to wonder whether the crowds see the real Mickelson. Fijian Vijay Singh, world No 2 and a first-class wooden performer, asked pointedly of Mickelson's smiling image: "Is that the real Phil?"

Los Angeles Times columnist Thomas Bonk wrote this week: "On the surface, it seems to be an incongruous relationship - gruff, no-nonsense, blue collar East Coast fans going overboard for a laidback, private jet-flying, country club grad from southern California."

Mickelson has clearly learned to work his audience, high fives, back slapping, cheesy grins and so on, and they've warmed to a player who went 49 majors before winning the Masters last year.

This is what he told the Baltusrol crowd after his win: "I want to thank the people here in New Jersey. I want to thank you for being who you are."

Maybe Gow had a point. After all, for someone able to serve up that sort of presidential tripe with a straight face, turning the personality button on and off like a switch would be a breeze.