The new season is truly underway, top players have begun making appearances on the game’s major tours and two 2014 Ryder Cup players followed polarised paths to the clubhouse after taking seemingly insurmountable leads last weekend.
Yet nary a soul is mulling the unlikely collapse of world No 12 Martin Kaymer, who blew a 10-shot lead with 14 holes to play in Abu Dhabi, or the unerring victory march of No 13 Jimmy Walker, who cruised to an easy win in Hawaii hours later.
Nope, the buzz of the moment centres on whether the equally concussive tales told last weekend by Tiger Woods, Robert Allenby and Dustin Johnson will hold up under even greater fan scrutiny.
Given that the game has long laboured, often to the point of piety and sanctimony, to propagate the image of tour members as angels with dirty club faces, the stories offered by the trio generated more incredulity than credibility.
It began when Allenby, 43, said he was kidnapped, robbed and beaten after missing the cut on Friday night in Honolulu, Hawaii. That Allenby, a four-time winner on the US tour who owns a caustic sense of humour, spent much of the night in a bar and could recall few details of the alleged incident caused many raised eyebrows.
One witness, a homeless woman who came to his aid, later disputed a key fact in the Australian’s story – that Allenby had been dumped 10 kilometres away from the bar by his supposed abductors.
Yet facial cuts and bruises irrefutably confirmed that some sort of injury to Allenby took place, which is more evidence than Woods mustered.
Like a yeti, the former world No 1 stealthily emerged from his winter hibernation and showed up at a World Cup ski event in Italy to support girlfriend Lindsey Vonn.
Vonn won, which represented perhaps the last indisputable truth of the day. Woods was soon photographed with a missing front tooth, which his agent later claimed was knocked loose by a shoulder-mounted TV camera that collided with the player’s face during Vonn’s awards presentation.
Event organisers disputed Woods’s toothy tale, claiming that he had not attended the ceremony. Moreover, when Woods removed the cold-weather scarf that covered the lower part of his face, no blood, cuts or contusions were visible around his mouth.
A day later, the first interview with US star Dustin Johnson since he left the PGA Tour five months ago, reportedly to deal with drug issues, was published.
The 30-year-old, eight-time winner was flanked by his agent and a public-relations adviser and was armed with a sheet filled with talking points when he told Sports Illustrated that he did not have rehab and was not suspended. Johnson said he left to deal with unspecified “personal challenges”.
“I did not have a problem,” Johnson said regarding his reported cocaine issues. “It’s just something I’m not going to get into. I have issues. But that’s not the issue.”
The transparency from the US tour on the circumstances of Johnson’s abrupt exit, shortly before he would have played in the Ryder Cup, was as lacking as the player’s circular explanation.
As for Kaymer, the hazy tales offered by Woods, Allenby and Johnson make the details of the German star’s improbable, incomprehensible meltdown seem downright believable.
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