Monty: Please Help Us Know What Dreadful Things Not To Say!

Leave it to Colin Montgomerie to be the cherry on this week's ice cream sundae of idiocy eminating from Wentworth.

From Martin Dempster of The Scotsman:

“Now we’ve got the [European Tour] chief executive involved in the whole thing having to say ‘sorry’. Christ, we’re all frightened to say anything; we’re frightened to open our mouths in case we say something that isn’t kosher in 2013.

Uh, Colin, uh, I think using Christ's name in vain that way is pretty much a universal not-kosher. I mean, you were asking…

“Somebody should tell us what to say because no one is quite sure what is right and wrong. George says ‘coloured’, somebody says ‘black’. But who is to say who is right and wrong?

Uh, Colin, I think we'll go with conventional wisdom on this one that white people referring to colored athletes just really is pretty offensive? Work for you?

“And for the chief executive, who is a very educated man, to get caught up, we need to decide what we can and can’t say and move on quickly.”

I smell a committee forming!

As for what the Sunday papers are saying, The Observer's Paul Harris makes an interesting case defending the landmine that is discussing race in America, and while I don't know if this was an American standards issue versus general ignorance, this is a fair point:

But, experts say, that simply shows one of the key rules of discussing race in America: who is saying something matters just as much as what is being said. Thus, black Americans and their community organisations can call themselves coloured, but O'Grady cannot. An even more stark example is the common use of the "N-word" by black rappers, but when non-black celebrities use it – such as the famous case of Seinfeld actor Michael Richards – their careers are destroyed.

"When a white person uses a word like 'coloured', it has associations with the Jim Crow era of segregation in the South when signs on bathrooms and water fountains would say 'colored only'," Professor Carl Nightingale, an expert on race in America at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says.

John Huggan does not defend the ignorance of Sergio Garcia or George O'Grady, but he does file a lengthy review of America's issues with race and golf, and concludes...

So, while much good work is being done, golf in America has some way to go when it comes to mirroring the diverse society of which it is a largely white part. Tiger Woods, 16 years on from his iconic maiden victory in the Masters, remains the only black face on the PGA Tour. There are none on the LPGA Tour. Just over half of one per cent of the PGA of America’s members is black. Which is where we came in. Like it or not – and despite the best efforts of many – golf in America remains largely a white man’s game.

The Independent's Michael Calvin reminds that we're just getting warmed up with this stuff as the Open heads to men-only Muirfield and no doubt, more bizarro comments.

Peter Dawson, the chief executive of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the game's all-male ruling body, claims that concern over Muirfield's sexual exclusivity is restricted to the "chattering classes". His platitudes include an insistence that "the temperature is changing".

He may care to invest in earplugs and asbestos undershorts. The "fried chicken" controversy, a demeaning by-product of Sergio Garcia's feud with the equally unattractive Tiger Woods, is about to come home to roost. Golf's anachronistic ways will be subjected to scorn and scrutiny until they are modified.