What to give Tiger for Christmas?

Last updated: 23rd November 2009

I'm hoping Santa will bring me a nice new TaylorMade cart bag to go with my woods, but just what do you give a millionaire golfer for Christmas?

A billionaire or perhaps near billionaire like Tiger Woods can buy almost anything his heart desires, but his problem is that he already has just about everything a man could ever want.

Apart from great job satisfaction, a seriously gorgeous wife and two appealing children, he has a waterside home with enough outhouses to warrant it being called a village, he has his own super-sonic jet and royal motor yacht and probably just about every toy for the older boy that is available.

With his fat Nike sponsorship, clubs, clothes, shoes and other golfing equipment are permanently on the house, but even if he decided to free himself of the shackles imposed by sponsors, buying his own golfing gear certainly wouldn't pose a problem.

In fact he could probably buy up every shop in the USA's largest golfing retail chain without batting an eyelash.

So what do you give him and other golf tycoons like Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Padraig Harrington for Chistmas?

Tiger, of course, does badly want five more majors to surpass Jack Nicklaus's record of 18, but that's not something you can give away for Chistmas - and I doubt Tiger would accept such a gift, even if you could

If you ask me, material goods will mean nothing to these men.

But you might well be able to bring a smiles to their faces when they sit around their Xmas trees in just over a month's time and open their presents with their families on Chistmas morning if you can include a gift letter advising them that you have managed to engineer one or two rule changes with the Royal and Ancient and USGA, the game's rules bosses.

Perhaps the first change they would like to see would be a rule that allows them to drop away from a fairway divot.

For many of them, there is nothing worse than hitting a splendid drive down the middle of the fairway only to find they have landed in a nasty divot filled with sand and loose grass.

And this at a moment in time when they face a crucial shot at a difficult, terraced green, guarded back and front by water, that demands braking backspin and deadly accuracy.

I've heard that Jack Nicklaus feels that the out of bounds rule is another that does not make any sense.

Why shouldn't it be treated like a shot entering a hazard - ie lose a stroke and play it from where it entered the out of bounds area.

I certainly question a law that says a man who goes out of bounds, possibly due to an unlucky bounce, has to be as severely punished as a rival who has a 'fresh air' and misses the ball altogether!

And in any case, finding your ball has rolled into an out-of-bounds position and having to go back to play it again has to be one of the surest ways of slowing up play - one of the great curses of the game, both for the hot-shot professional and for the rank amateur.

This next rule change is not something I go along with, but I seem to recall somewhere, sometime, someone, either, in exasperation or jest, suggesting that if tennis players were allowed two serves, why shouldn't golfers be given two cracks off the tee?

It would be OK for the pros and those caddies who a make second living out of seeking and finding lost balls, but it would seriously hinder the speed of play, even if discarded shots were deemed unrecoverable.

On the other hand, an outlandish rule change I would like to see implemented on an experimental basis would be the reduction of a putt from a shot to half a shot.

Putting is a totally different game from the other one you play on a golf course and too often the great masters of swing lose out to golfing mediocrities lucky enough to have a great nose for finding the hole when they reach the green.

Tiger wouldn't like to see this change, but Ernie Els might. The 'Big Easy' still hits great shots most of the time, but these days he just can't seem to get his putts to drop.

FOOTNOTE: Somewhere back in the 192Os the value of the putt was so seriously questioned in the USA, it was decided to widen the hole as an experiment. I think it was made half as wide again, but guess what! The change made no material difference to available stats and after only a handful of tournaments, the experiment was scrapped.