"Let's just say the European Tour may soon have to employ chiropractors to tend to its media bending over backwards to defend his opinions as merely youthful naivete instead of blasphemy."

I smell some press tent skirmishes over Scott Michaux's column questioning the rampant lovefest favorable coverage of all things Rory McIlroy.

Let's just say the European Tour may soon have to employ chiropractors to tend to its media bending over backwards to defend his opinions as merely youthful naivete instead of blasphemy. They've spent so much time building McIlroy up as Europe's answer to Tiger Woods, they just never expected him to answer this question like Tiger Woods.

A smug "he'll learn" from Captain Colin Montgomerie is the harshest rebuke McIlroy has yet received.

You think an American would be treated so gingerly by the notoriously biased European press that cheers in the media centre? Fat chance. Ask Hunter Mahan if he got off as lightly last summer for his clumsy second-hand analysis of the event as an over-hyped burden on the players. The Euro press wrongly assumed he would be overlooked as a captain's pick as punishment for his insolence.