Everyone loves Matt “Kooch” Kuchar, right? The American golfer has cherry‑cheeked and boy-smiled his way around the great courses of the world for years, the affectionate hooting of his fans a harmless counterpoint to the sometimes po-faced mien of the sport.
Except “Kooch” is no innocent schoolboy. He is 40 years old and as tough a customer as there is in golf. At the World Match Play in Texas on Saturday, he got properly hard.
After missing an eight-footer on the 7th hole that would have drawn him level, Sergio García assumed Kuchar would concede the “gimme” so back-tapped from a couple of inches, only to see the ball dribble past the hole. According to the PGA Tour: “Kuchar told the official he wanted to give García the putt, but that cannot be done retroactively.” Dumb all round, or what?
Three holes later, a still-fuming García turned to Kuchar as they walked down the fairway and said: “I was at fault, but if it was me I’d have given you the putt at the next hole.” Kuchar couldn’t (it was a five-footer at the 8th) and didn’t. Kuchar held off a rousing fightback by the Spaniard and went on to lose in the final on Sunday against Kevin Kisner.
The incident divided the game, as these nit-picking scenarios tend to do. García has previous. He was disqualified last month after bashing up some greens and bunkers in Saudi Arabia. Kuchar has had his moments, too. Last November in Cancun, he took a dig at everybody’s sense of fair play when he paid the experienced local caddie David Giral Ortiz $5,000 after the hard-up bag-carrier had helped him to victory around an unfamiliar course that was worth $1.296m to the rich American. Kuchar’s immediate response was: “For a guy who makes $200 a day, a $5,000 week is a really big week.” Social media howled him down and, three months later, he apologised and paid Ortiz $50,000. But he’d opened up his hard heart to the world.
All of which will pale into insignificance if Rick Reilly’s latest book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, lives up to advance publicity. In one incident the US president allegedly threw a celebrity opponent’s ball from the green 50 feet into a bunker.
Golfers have their own code of behaviour, but it has parameters. Rory McIlroy (who has played with Trump) says of “gimmes” for instance: “You might give your opponent a couple of three-footers early on and then make them putt them. Anything inside two feet I would give.” Bubba Watson, speaking before Saturday’s bust-up, revealed on Sky his rules for conceding a putt. “If I don’t like ’em,” he said, holding up three inches of tape, “it’s somewhere in around there. If I do like ’em, we don’t have enough [tape].” He added: “If they hit a quality chip shot, if they hit an unbelievable shot out of the trees, I might give ’em putts, just to show respect. But, at the same time the first hole is a little bit different to the 18th hole. There’s definitely a lot more love on the front nine than there is on the back nine.”
It’s doubtful there’ll be much love between Kuchar and García at the Masters in a fortnight. Enmity in golf lingers, as between Nick Faldo and Greg Norman for many years. It’s a jungle out there on those clipped lawns.
Few sports depend on etiquette like golf does. Football, though, can be a zoo. Which is why it might be time to start loving the England team again. There’s much to love, or at least admire until the morning. They are young, keen, talented and have a waistcoated manager so Dudley Do-Right he might have walked out of a comic. Gareth Southgate is to football what Martin Johnson was to the England rugby union team who won the World Cup in 2003: a leader of few words and much integrity.
There was never anything flash about the angular defender and midfielder who had enough football talent to play 57 times for his country and more than 500 times for a handful of decent clubs. He was, in a nice way, unremarkable. He has blossomed as a person since his elevation to England manager, though, and he showed more statesmanship in one interview last week than the entire cabinet have managed in the past three years.
It is obvious Southgate owns the locker room. Led by the majestic Raheem Sterling – ear cocked to the bigots after scoring – Danny Rose and young Callum Hudson-Odoi supported the gaffer’s measured condemnation of the racism that marred England’s win in Montenegro. They spoke not to Fifa or Uefa or the Football Association or the Premier League. Southgate went over the heads of the suits to a wider audience, home and abroad, who are the source of the problem. Some of those miscreants had representatives in the pro-Brexit, Leave Means Leave march in Westminster on Friday evening, spitting mindless invective at authority when they crowded around the gates of 10 Downing Street. They’re from the same tribe. Southgate and the players have been listening to similar bile for years.
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The last prominent athlete to enter the Westminster web of intrigue, Sebastian Coe, ran out of track and was pensioned off to the graveyard of red leather and ermine. But a mischievous thought recurs: what if Southgate one day became prime minister? We could do worse. Perhaps he could persuade some of the vocal mob to think again about their racism. Maybe some of the well-spoken hooligans inside the mother of all parliaments would learn something, too, from the gaffer’s direct and simple words.
Southgate did not go to Eton – or even Winchester. He went to Hazelwick Comprehensive in Crawley New Town. When he picked out the artless thuggery that has plagued sport – and society – for decades, he did not need to wave a union flag to get his message across, like Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson. He was imbued with common sense, a commodity for which this country once was highly regarded.
