Y Fenni Batter

Apologies for blogging too much; I have too much on my mind at the moment.

I've always regarded myself as an ex member of the press, despite my actual involvement being peripheral and pretty much specialised, so when the press tend to bandwagon jump, I tend to get a knee-jerk reaction.

An aside, but you'll get the drift. Many years ago, I hated Steve Davis - the snooker player. Snooker was big business for colour television and it was the kind of sport that appealed to television in the 80s. Steve 'interesting' Davis was the target of all of my hate. I wanted anyone to win a tournament, but not him. When Stephen Hendry came onto the scene, he made Steve Davis seem positively electric and with a personality as big as a small communist country. When he started to win everything, I started to root for the guy I saw as the underdog - Steve Davis.

Now, this is an irrational thing that I've had for years. I hated Man Utd for years; they started to look fallible, suddenly I found I had more respect for them than ever before - still don't like them, but you have to be objective, even as a football fan. Fallen idols seem to be embraced more in the last 30 years than ever before.

The only real exception to the rule has been Tiger Woods. When the master golfer came onto the scene, he was so good that to dislike him was irrationality at its most extreme. He shook up golf, made a really difficult game look easy and allowed golf to become less staid and more modern. He was also mixed race so that made the stuffed shirts of modern golf sit up and listen - golf was not a middle class white boy's preference any more.

I'm not a huge fan of adultery, but its something that happens, quite a bit and its a fact of life. I can honestly say I've never known that many people who have indulged in it and regardless of how you view it, it didn't really change the people involved. Tiger Woods 'infidelity' as he is himself now referring to it, has been trumped up by the world press as something so earth-shatteringly awful that you'd think the poor bastard had been found with an 8-year-old boy on the end of his cock!

However, the fact that he has publicly come out and apologised, not just to his wife and children, but also to the massed world population, actually makes my blood boil. Frankly, it's his business and maybe to a certain degree all the companies that sponsor him; other than that, there is no one he has to answer to. I don't think he owes anything to his fans and followers; its his bloody life, he has enough money and intelligence to do with it as he wants. Yes, there's a lot of debris; his wife is probably distraught (at the prospect of gaining half of his vast fortune if she files for divorce) and its not fair on the kids or the other family members. But, other than that, its no ones business. I really couldn't care less what he does with his penis; I just want to see him making mincemeat of golf courses and making the game less boring than cricket to watch.

My respect for Woods has waned a little. Not necessarily because of what he's done (and from reports he done quite a few!), but because of the way he's been pulled into this world view of peoples private lives and pandered to it. For fuck's sake, if I had this guy's money, the first thing I'd be saying to the first reporter shoving a mic in my face would be, "Why don't you fuck off and cover some real news you bone-picking cunt", very loudly, then ask the reporter how he's going to show that on Fox news?

However, if you read some of the 'other' reports of this incident, you'll see that Elin Nordegren, Mrs T. Woods, is actually a raving psychopath with a penchant for using the same equipment as Tiger, but as a weapon of facial destruction than for knocking balls around - although I'm pretty sure she'd do that as well. She might be strikingly fit and gorgeous, but she's also got a temper on her the size of Woods' bank balance and reports suggest that she is anything but easy to live with. I'm not condoning Tiger, what he did was stupid on a lot of levels, but none that warranted a public apology, or the acres of column inches dedicated to what a black golfer did with his knob and who with.

The bottom line is the guy's wife should be more interested in being happy rather than worrying about losing her comfortable life and that's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing a woman who knows that her husband has been sleeping around and is prepared to accept it because of the commercial benefits from it. It's like WAGs - why the fuck would half of them want to be with stupid brain dead dorks - because that's what most footballers are and a fair few are as ugly as slapped arses. As much as I disliked the Mrs Merton Show, the best question of the last decade - the 1990s - was when she asked Debbie Magee what she saw in the millionaire Paul Daniels.

It's never been something I've been able to get my head around. Why some people stay with partners who are so obviously the biggest most disrespectful cunts alive. But then you start to realise that some people are just unbelievably shallow and that's a real shame, because you only get one chance at life and it seems a great waste of a life to throw it away for the sake of a nice house, fast car or foreign holidays. Not something I'll even pretend to understand. Since when did love, affection and commitment became less important than materialistic nonsense?

I just hope the above scenario doesn't apply to any of my friends, because that would be really sad and they'd deserve to spend the rest of their lives miserable and unhappy!