Spectator Sport: Stars and asterisks

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. What we do know that he didn’t say, because he told us, is that Ferdinand was a ‘f***ing c***’. And of course had that been all, there would not have been a column centimetre devoted to it. But in fact what he didn’t call Ferdinand was more specifically a ‘f***ing bl**k c***’. And it’s here of course, as with Williams, that the story becomes stratospheric.

I don’t believe Williams is racist — he worked for Woods throughout his career until he was sacked last year. In fact he’s very even-handed in his unpleasantness: he said of Phil Mickelson, ‘I hate the prick.’ And I’m sure that whatever you might think about Terry, he’s not racist either. He captains one of the most racially mixed outfits in the Premier League, a team stuffed with bl**k superstars. Should they have used the ‘b’ word? Of course not.