Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Stars and asterisks

issue 12 November 2011

Parental advisory: what follows contains asterisks that some may find upsetting. It is clear that Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and John Terry, the hopefully soon-to-be-former captain of England, are not particularly nice men. In fact they are assholes, to use one of Williams’s favourite words. So when Williams was asked what he would do with his joke caddying award at a blokey evening in Shanghai recently he said he wanted to shove it up Woods’s ‘bl**k asshole’. Now, had he just said ‘asshole’, nobody would have given it a moment’s thought beyond observing that, my oh my, Steve Williams is just the sort of guy you want to bring home to Mum. The use of ‘bl**k’ sent his remarks into the stratosphere.

What Terry did or didn’t say to Anton Ferdinand, Rio’s rather less well-known brother, will in time become a matter for scholars to pore over.

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