“The press have thrown a cloak of tawdriness over his lifestyle and his family and his mother.”

Peter Alliss gives an unfortunate interview to Peter Dixon in which he's all over the map in his comments on Tiger. On the Masters and Tiger playing there:

“I’m surprised, in a way, they are letting him play there,” Alliss said. “It either shows they have a desire to be helpful or a weakness. It would have been rather grand — but would have perpetuated the stupidity of it — if they had said, ‘Sorry, we don’t want your sort here.’

What sort would that be?

Alliss particularly dislikes the public nature of Woods’s fall from grace and finds the whole matter distasteful. “I think it’s tacky,” he said. “The press have thrown a cloak of tawdriness over his lifestyle and his family and his mother.” And yet he has a choice phrase to describe the past two to three years in which Woods has often come across as grumpy and uncommunicative. This, he says, was Woods’s “Fornicating Period”.

So, the media is bad, but he has no problem taking the information they've shared, accepting it as truth, and using it to form a negative opinion of the man?

Interestingly, Alliss dismisses the notion that it is disrespectful to the other players for Woods to bring his circus to town in Masters week. However, he was withering in his condemnation of the 14-times major champion for choosing the middle of the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship in February to make his first public statement since November, that cringing mea culpa. “Ernie Els was right when he used the word ‘selfish,’ ” Alliss said. “It was thoughtless and I didn’t like it."

More consistency. And one final dollop of hypocrisy...

“But we’ve all done stupid things. If you are a red-blooded male and you’re chatted up by a decent-looking bird, it’s very hard to not say yes. It was a lot easier in my day. I remember some very famous golfers who used to book into hotels as Mr and Mrs.”

Wait, is he saying...no.