Golf: Good manners and sportsmanship

By GREGOR PAUL

A breach of etiquette in the fastidious world of golf is a serious business. Standing on your playing partner's putting line, not repairing a divot, wearing a shirt with no collar or forgetting to take your hat off before entering the clubhouse are heinous failures of protocol.

Good manners and sportsmanship are all but dead in most sports, but not golf. Since Mary Queen of Scots first swung a mashie niblick at St Andrews in the 16th century, the game has prided itself on a code of conduct where politeness, honesty and integrity are paramount.

The code is so strong that players call penalties on themselves even if no one else actually saw the rules broken. Last week Tom Lehman was in contention to win the Greensboro Open in North Carolina. He thought he saw his ball oscillate as he came to tap in on the second green. Nothing showed up on the video but he called the one shot penalty anyway and slipped out of the running.

With that culture ingrained, woe betide those who fall foul of the code. Seriously, there are men in Scotland, the home of the game, who have been forced to leave town after word spread that their behaviour had been less than exemplary on the golf course.

The golfing fraternity holds wife-beaters and probably even estate agents in higher esteem than those who have in some way failed to observe protocol.

To succeed at the highest level, aspiring players cannot leave their golfing persona on the 18th green. The code requires players to be unfailingly polite, modest and courteous almost regardless of where they are or what they are doing.

When you consider this heritage and how hard the game has worked to build and nurture its image, you understand why the two unsavoury incidents involving young New Zealand players that have come to light in the past month havecaused such a sensation.

The first incident where Riki Kauika inserted the business-end of team-mate Kevin Chun's toothbrush into his darkest recess while Bradley Isles took a picture, has probably happened a thousand times on rugby tours and been laughed off as team bonding. Somehow it's hard to imagine a similar incident occurring on the professional golf tour.

Despite famously not getting on, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickleson were paired in the recent Ryder Cup. Mickleson played like a goose and was largely culpable for the parings' defeat. Yet, Woods never saw the disappearing toothbrush trick as a means of exacting revenge.

That's why Kauika's actions left a bad taste in the mouth of not only Chun but golf administrators too. When it emerged last week that Kauika and Eisenhower Cup team-mate Josh Geary got boozed up after the Taranaki Open and caused $1500 of damage, serious concerns arose that the youngsters were either ignorant of behaviour expectations, or flagrantly falling short.

To breach the rules once could be regarded as a misfortune, to do it twice looks like carelessness.

But top coach Murray Macklin who knows Kauika, Isles and Geary believes these incidents were aberrations and unlikely to be repeated. New Zealand Golf has also announced it is to review development programmes in light of recent events.

"From an etiquette perspective, all of these boys, when they are on the golf, course demonstrate superb understanding of the rules and the culture of the game. When they are playing they perform with distinction in these areas. When we see and hear of the kinds of incidents that have occurred this year, it is more than likely to be teenagers blowing off a bit of steam. While we don't condone it and we are not saying to the kids 'we will let you do this', they are still youngsters.

"There is a quiet understanding of why it happens even though we don't accept it. From where we stand the etiquette of the game is drummed in on a frequent basis. "We have to make a bit more of aconscious play to these kids that the way they behave on the golf course has to be mirrored off the golf course."

It is a message all promising youngsters should treat seriously. Vijay Singh may be the world number one now but he was in purgatory for years and even today some players mutter darkly about his past.

Playing on the Asian Tour in 1983 he was disqualified for laundering his card to make a cut. He was shunned in Asia until 1985 when he landed one of the least attractive jobs in all of golf, resident professional at the Kenningau club in Borneo.

- THE HERALD ON SUNDAY