"Williams' fragile grip on reality has been apparent for some time."
/Must read piece from David Walsh in The Sunday Times on Steve Williams.
For much of their time together, Woods and Williams seemed more than player and caddie. They were best men at each other's weddings and Williams never saw his job as solely that of bag carrier. No, he carried a torch for the greatest player of his generation, cleared a passage for him through the crowds, spotted the spectator about to take a picture, gave the evil eye to those who dared to whisper as Woods began his back swing.
That was the source of the first reservation about Williams. During the high summer of Woods' career, he forgot that he was, actually, just the caddie. Rather he saw himself as Butch Cassidy to Woods' Sundance Kid, a partner through thick and thin, more performer than auxiliary. Countless times you fought the urge to remind Williams that he was just a bagman; better paid but no different from his colleagues.
They said he was New Zealand's "best-paid sportsman". Well, if a caddie is a sportsman the average labrador can do long division. Williams' job was to say "it's 176 yards to the front, 182 to the pin", or to tell Woods that "the wind is off the left", but otherwise to keep up and shut up. As the dollars and the wins accumulated, he lost whatever humility he might have had at the beginning and there are few caddies on the tour with anything good to say about him.
And this...
One caddie, with plenty of tournament victories on his CV, spoke about Williams to this newspaper after learning of the Shanghai outburst.
"Basically, the comment he made about Woods shows Steve up for what he is. He is the one who is the arsehole. For years on the tour, he tried to intimidate the other caddies. Some take it, some don't.
"One day he is friendly to you, the next he ignores you and you can't have time for a guy like that. It is his arrogance that has got him into this position and there's no way that Adam Scott can continue to employ him. You can't say what he said, and the official body that represents caddies will have to look at it."