Martin Johnson column: The business of golf commentary

There’s nothing like a debate about sports commentators for polarising opinions, and if I were to compile a list of the most heard comments at my golf club bar this summer, the top three would be – in no particular order – “Tiger Woods is finished”, “What was McIlroy doing playing football?” and “It’s about time that old buffer Alliss retired”.

What’s interesting about Alliss is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a member of his fan club, or in the group who think he should be quietly taken away, plonked in a bath chair and wheeled around the village pond twice a day to feed the ducks. Both opinions are held for precisely the same reason.

You either like his raconteurial style, or you don’t, which is why, when Alliss delivers his hopes for a speedy recovery for the ingrowing toenail currently being stoically endured by the Hon Sec of The Royal Niblick GC, the nation’s living rooms are either echoing to the sound of appreciative chuckling noises, or exasperated snorts followed by the whoosh of flying sofa cushions.

It’s the same with Sky. You wouldn’t find any of their commentators droning on about a footballer called Charlie Tully who once played for Celtic in the 1950s – as Alliss once managed to slip into the Beeb’s final day Masters coverage – but you occasionally get mildly irked by being told to hurry back after the advertising break to see whether Jin Jeong can overhaul Mathias Gronberg’s 12-shot lead with three holes to play in the Phuket Masters.

Hardly surprising, then, that the news that David Feherty’s contract with CBS in America is not being renewed was greeted with equal measures of dismay and delight. To many, Feherty’s waspish wit is the only thing which makes a humdrum Saturday afternoon at the Greater Milwaukee Open watchable, while to many more his apparently obsessive desire to crack unfunny one-liners is far more of a factor in declining TV audiences than Woods morphing into Maurice Flitcroft.

Not that Feherty’s fan club should be too bothered, as he’s sure to pop up on another network in the not too distant future, possibly on the same channel as another commentator who is equally liked and loathed, Johnny Miller. Never afraid to say what he thinks, say his admirers. Self-opinionated bore who’s overly fond of saying “in my day…” mutter his detractors.

Surprisingly, one of the most popular golf commentator/analysts in America right now is Nick Faldo. The surprise not being that he has interesting thoughts on golf, which he’s always had, but that he’s managed to pull off the difficult trick of finding just the right mix of being informative and entertaining.

The one thing Faldo could never be accused of when he was the world’s best golfer was being entertaining, for the simple reason that the golf was far too serious a business to take Walter Hagen’s advice to smell the flowers along the way. If Nick was ever aware that he had a couple of playing partners for company he never let on, opting to speak to no-one other than Fanny or –especially if it was heading in a direction which didn’t meet his full approval – his golf ball.

He did, though, know how to win over American golf galleries, which is not the hardest thing in the world, as I discovered watching Jack Nicklaus once reducing his fans to hysterical laughter merely by commanding a flying insect to get off his golf ball. And in Nick’s case, his finely honed pretend-to-trip-over routine after holing a putt sent the ruptured spleen count through the roof.

You wouldn’t have predicted it when he was thanking his media pals from the heart of his bottom, or from the cringe-making speech introducing his Ryder Cup team, but he’s turned out to be a natural behind a microphone. He’s somehow managed to avoid upsetting any golfers too, which is something you can’t say about Feherty.

Colin Montgomerie has been a regular victim, and when Feherty was once partnered with Monty and the equally volatile Howard Clark in a European Tour event, he said afterwards: “It was like playing with Dame Edna Everage and Charles Manson.”

However, whichever side of the Feherty argument you happen to be on, he at least offers an alternative to the majority of golf commentary in America, which appears to depend upon treating the sport as some kind of religious experience, requiring copious helpings of syrupy unctuousness. And not just golf, but all sports.

When Jim Courier was given the job of on-court tennis interviewer at the Australian Open, he slobbered metaphorical kisses over everyone – once thrusting a microphone at Roger Federer and saying (trust me, he really did): “Can you cook? Can you make your own bed? Is there anything the Fed (sic) can’t do?”

There are exceptions – Dottie Pepper memorably informed her audience that the 2007 Solheim Cup American team was made up of “choking, freaking dogs” – but they’re few and far between, and the prize for the most oleaginous of them all goes every year to Jim Nantz.

As we all know, the Augusta National insists upon a reverential portrayal at all times, which is why they’ve inserted a clause in CBS’ contract demanding they refer to the spectators as “patrons”, and which is also why – you have to presume – Nantz is given the job of interviewing the Masters winner in the Butler Cabin every year.

There’s less oil in the Middle East than one of Jim’s interviews, and back in 2008, when Trevor Immelman told him that he had “put in a lot of hard work, and now it’s all been worth it”, Nantz gushed back: “And you can see it in your eyes.” (Pause for dramatic effect). “It’s very clear.”

What was very clear to me after reaching for the vomit bag was that all those players who’ve come close to a Green Jacket, but have somehow found a way of losing – and Greg Norman springs to mind here – weren’t , as Dottie might have said, “choking, freaking dogs” after all.

They blew it because they remembered, in the nick of time, that there was a terrible price to pay for winning.

Tagged David Feherty, Jim Nantz, Nick Faldo, Peter Alliss, Sir Nick Faldo