Peter Alliss is the voice of golf in the UK.
Last year Golf Refugees had a slight brush-off with him, his lawyers and his management company when they all took offense to our press advertisement for the original black ball. The ad featured an image of our black golf ball and a humorous headline which said 'Peter Alliss just choked on his cornflakes.'
Last year Golf Refugees had a slight brush-off with him, his lawyers and his management company when they all took offense to our press advertisement for the original black ball. The ad featured an image of our black golf ball and a humorous headline which said 'Peter Alliss just choked on his cornflakes.'
Anyway, here's what Alliss has had to say on the eve of The Masters, with extracts from an interview for The Times:
“I’m surprised, in a way, they are letting Tiger 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.'"
“But if he had to start somewhere, that’s the safest place because it is so controlled. Personally, I think it’s a little bit cowardly.”
Alliss went on:
“He’s been caught shagging birds. He’s not been married all that long and he’s an idiot. If he was sitting here now, I’d say, ‘Tiger, you are an idiot.'"
“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.”
“My lasting memory is seeing Ian Woosnam come out of the front door at Augusta p***ed with Sam Torrance. Both of them fell in the bushes and it wasn’t a very good sight. I thought, ‘Boys, boys. Get a couple of bottles and go home. Don’t get p***ed here.’”
Perhaps most surprising is Alliss’s criticism of Augusta National and the Masters itself. Men only? That’s fine by him.
“I think they do many things wrong, but they do an awful lot of things right. They have an air of oppression, an air of fear. You can see it in the way they control the fans — or the ‘patrons’, as they call them. It’s all bulls***, but it’s good bulls***. Everyone is frightened of them because they don’t want to be pushed out.”
And what rules are there for commentators?
“You meet people who tell you, ‘We don’t do this, we don’t do that.’ They’ve got rid of commentators before. One such was Gary McCord, who was barred after saying that the greens were so slick they must have been “bikini waxed” and that the bumps in the terrain resembled "body bags”.
Peter Alliss, he's a ******* hero.
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