How refreshing to see an American youngster finally burst on the scene to prove that natural born talent is something that comes along every now and then, even in golf.

It’s good timing for US golf as well. Considering the revelations surrounding the personal affairs of their previous wonderkid – Tiger Woods – there is now an emerging talent that seems fit to pick up the baton, carried for so long by Woods, and run with it.

Ok, so Rickie fowler might not have yet won an event, but even Tiger took time to find his feat in among the big boys of the tour.

You might be surprised to know that it wasn’t until the October of his first season. Rickie Fowler is already on course to surpass that after recording two top tens already in 2010, including finishing just one shot behind Hunter Mahan in Phoenix.

And it might just be enough to get some colour back into the green tinged cheeks of Americas who’ve been understandably envious when looking across the Atlantic at the amount of young talent on display.

Martin Kaymer and Chris Wood are those making inroads at the moment and in the last few years Oliver Wilson, Ross Fisher and Sergio Garcia have all kept fans on the edge of their seats.

At the moment however, all eyes are on Rory McIlroy, and the comparisons that are currently being drawn with him and Rickie Fowler, even down to their tousled hair, must be exciting for US golf fans.

It’s been a long time since they have had a young gun to shout about and, if he lives up to the hype being built, he could be the one that reignites a bi of the spark that has been lost in the game stateside.

There is also potential for a Watson/Nicklaus-type encounter, the young pretender against the seasoned No.1, in an enthralling battle in which one struggles invariable to maintain his hold on the power, while the other tries to mussel it away with both hands.

Aside from his youthful flair, the most pleasing thing for our cousins in the States must be the fact that, before setting out to achieve individual goals, like a certain young Mr McIlroy, Fowler has vocalised his desire to play in the Ryder Cup.

That’s his goal for this year, and the former Walker Cup star could be a formidable opponent for any European – not to mention the chance to set up an ‘Our Best Youngester vs. Your best Youngster’ contest, if given the chance.

Fowler and McIlroy certainly seem to be on a Ryder Cup collision course and, when the battle lines are drawn by the respective captains, wouldn’t it be tasty if they were placed in opposition for the deciding match of Sunday’s Ryder Cup singles. My mouth’s beginning to water already.

Many questioned whether or not he had the game to match his colourful outfits and fiery attitude, and until his WGC Accenture Matchplay Championship win, they had every right.

But now, having become the first Englishman to win a WGC title, the third Englishman to move inside the world top ten and the leader of the European money list, it seems that Ian Poulter, a player that has so many times seemed to flatter to deceive, has put these criticisms to bed.

However, while he certainly has come in under the radar, Poulter’s rise to the top has not been the overnight success that it may seem. Poulter himself said, “It’s been a long time coming.”

His first season on the European Tour was nothing if not a success. He finished 31st on the Order of Merit and improved steadily in subsequent years, culminating in fifth place in 2003.

From that point, it seemed inevitable that ‘Poults’ would start challenging on the global stage, but a push for the lofty heights of world rankings and tournament wins was not forthcoming, for whatever reason.

Including 2008, he could only muster two European Tour Order of Merit top tens and many started to question whether Poulter’s desire to be succeed was being overshadowed by his need to be viewed as a golf personality.

Bright dress, the establishment of his own clothing range and his obsession with social networking website Twitter were all cited as proof that the Englishman was not taking his golf as seriously as he otherwise might have.

Last year put paid to all of those suggestions. In only 15 European Tour events Poulter managed to come ninth on the European Tour. In a third of those events he finished inside the top ten and added an eighth European Tour title to his name, clinching the Barclays Singapore Championship.

Poulter’s rise in stature, it seems, was tied to that of the English game, for which 2009 was its most successful year in decades. Lee Westwood was in the midst of his most lucrative season to date, earning more than £4million and finishing in the top three in two of the four majors, not to mention becoming champion of the inaugural Race to Dubai.

Paul Casey was experiencing similar on-course success. In only nine events before being ruled out by injury, Casey recorded three European Tour top tens, two wins and moved up to third in the Official Golf World Rankings.

Indeed, 2009 was the year that English golf had been waiting for and 2010 is the year that will begin to reap all of the benefits.

Westwood, Poulter and Casey are No.4, 5 and 6 in the Official World Golf Rankings and with the likes of Donald, Wilson and Fisher knocking at the door – all three are within the top 40 – the long wait for an English major champion must surely be over.

However soon it comes, it is long overdue. Nick Faldo was the last, winning the Masters in 1996, and that generational gap which emerged between great English golfers is now closed and a new era has begun.

Indeed, two years on from a European team in which Poulter, Casey and Wilson were, all to varying degrees, surprising Ryder Cup selections by Faldo, they will now be regarded as necessary inclusions by Colin Montgomerie.

With the experience, and now the results, to go with it, Poulter, Casey and Westwood will be the lynchpins; Donald, Wilson and Fisher will be likely inclusions and Ross McGowan, Simon Dyson and Chris Wood possible wild card choices.

It would not be altogether surprising if half of the European side were Englishmen picked by a Scotsman, and you could hardly argue with Montgomerie if this turned out to be the case.

David Duval’s story will go down as one of the most remarkable in the game of golf. 

His momentous fall from grace must have been considered by golf-minded film directors as a harrowing hard-luck account.

But the chapters of this script are not yet completed, and ‘David Duval: A Golfer’s Tale’, seems to be taking yet another twist that we can only hope leads to a satisfactory end, and one that would surely merit a Holywood adaptation.

Almost ten years Duval has waited to get his hands on a piece of silverware, and he will have to wait longer still after coming so close at the AT&T Pebble Beach.

But this is the second time the same man, whose mouth-watering rivalry with Tiger Woods in the late 90s looked like being every bit as captivating as Arnie and Jack, has given us a glimpse of his best in recent times.

“I’m pretty good at what I do,” Duval said after only his second top ten finish since October 2002. “I’ve had some struggles for a long while and I feel like I’m kind of getting back on top of everything how I want to. This is what I expect of myself. I expect to play well. “

His second place finish at the US Open last year can no longer be deemed a one off. Still, it will take much more than that to put right the decade that Duval has had to endure.

‘Where did it all go wrong,’  it appears, was a phrase coined to describe his plight.

A combination of injury and illness appeared to have effectively put an end to his career. Only a year after winning the Open in 2001, Duval fell to 80th on the PGA Tour money list. The year after he was 211th. Obscurity prevailed for seasons after that.

For all intents and purposes Duval was finished with professional golf. Or, more accurately, it was finished with him.

He competed in the US Open in 2004, missing the cut on 25-over. He only made one cut in 2005 and while that was met with  public sympathy, like  he had never experienced while at his peak, public support wasn’t the answer to the questions Duval needed answering.

However, like in all good underdog stories, one event seemed to turn it all around – or at least seems to have stopped the rot. It was Duval’s decision to use up his final career money exemption in 2009.

He made the cut in his first event of the season, which wasn’t remarkable in itself but showed Duval all was not lost.

He burst back onto the golf scene just weeks later with his second place finish at Bethpage Black, rekindling memories of the man who once stripped Tiger Woods of his No.1 status. Only one of two ever to do so.

With this he jumped from 882 to 142 in the world rankings, proving his game was not yet dead.

And he has shown it again in 2010.

It’s not quite a complete recovery, but the green shoots are spouting. The next stop for Duval is the Mayakoba Classic at Rivera Maya-Cancun which comes on the back of two consecutive cuts and a good finish there would signal the beginning of a successful run on the course.

There are flashes that Duval is turning the corner and, more importantly, he is back enjoying golf.

“I got more satisfaction today out of hitting the golf shots through 18 holes and controlling my golf ball in somewhat difficult conditions,” Duval said.

“Given the circumstances, to do that and to post a decent score, I feel good about that.”

2010 has already proven to be a remarkable year and we still have a long way to go before the event that marks the year for years to come to come to light.

But a better story than the comeback of David Duval can scarcely be imagined and, as far as the storyboard of the one-time Open champion is concerned, we could now be just reaching the climax.

Lee Westwood has called it “bending the rules”, Scott McCarron says it amounts to “cheating”, while the USGA are insisting it’s permitted. Whatever side of the argument you fall on, it appears that the wedge debate has finally begun. 

The problem for most pros has surely got to be one of moral significance. Proponents of the honourable game have a duty to uphold the laws of the game and follow a strict code of conduct – just ask John Daly who served a six-month PGA Tour ban last year for behaviour unbecoming of golfers. 

The question, however, over the non-conforming but still allowed Ping-Eye 2 wedges made before 1990 is not quite as black and white as big John’s behaviour.  

It’s certainly not illegal, but is the use of square-grooved wedges, which have been specifically outlawed, more than a golfer’s faux pas? 

Is McCarron quite right in his criticism of Mickelson, comments that could land him in hot water with Lefty’s legal representatives? 

If you ask me, quite apart from his choice of words, his intentions are spot on. He has brought the subject to attention and, unlike before, it now begs a satisfactory conclusion. 

Using clubs which quite clearly breaks the new groove rule that is openly being mocked, thanks to a 20-year-old court agreement between Ping and the USGA which takes precedence allowing the offending wedges to be put into play. 

They’re, quite simple, getting away with breaking the rules on a legal technicality. Okay, it’s not quite the same as getting kicking your ball from out behind a tree on the sly, or shading a shot or two off your final tally, but are we not entitled to expect more? 

In these times especially, the game of golf has been tarnished quite enough. 

Secretly the PGA must be breathing a sign of relief that finally someone has come out and made a scene. They themselves can’t afford to flout a legal bind to which they are helpless to avoid, but if players like McCarron attempt to shame their counterparts into submission, the new groove ruling might be received in the same way as the regulation on clubhead or ball size. 

In this case Westwood is the shining example. A Ping ambassador since turning pro, the Englishman has resisted the temptation to which Mickelson and Daly have so easily succumbed.  

“It’s a very strong word to use, cheating,” said Westwood. “It wouldn’t be my choice to use the term, it’s obviously not against the rules.” 

“I could do it more than anybody else because I’ve got thousands of Ping wedges. I have the opportunity to do it and I don’t.” 

And what did it cost him to use the clubs that have caused so much outrage? One missed cut at his opening event of the season, which was quickly followed up by third at the Qatar Masters.

The fact that Mickelson and co. are unwilling to make a similar sacrifice perhaps says more about the underhanded lengths they would go to enhance their bank balances, rather than the attention they are willing to pay to the rules of the game that even club golfers so respect, to their credit.

As he (reportedly) continues his treatment for sex-addiction at a clinic in Mississippi, Tiger Woods remains the talk of golf – although, for just about the first time since he plowed his car bonnet-first into a fire hydrant outside his home in Florida, the talk just now centres around his golf and not his infamous “transgressions”.

During last week’s Abu Dhabi Championship, the first leg of the European Tour’s three-part Gulf Swing, Sergio Garcia was asked about what impact an absent Tiger might have on this year’s USA Ryder Cup team.

Were he to miss the match at Celtic Manor, it would be the second straight Ryder Cup without him after his ruptured knee ligament forced him to miss the most recent instalment at Valhalla in 2008.

Without him, a Paul Azinger-inspired America stormed to glory, ending Europe’s hopes of making it four victories in a row and six wins in seven matches.

Alluding to that, Garcia commented: “Tiger’s absence made a difference. It made some of the other players step it up. They wanted to show everyone they could win without Tiger. Maybe when he’s there, he’s the leader and everyone falls in behind him. Without him, everyone wanted to be the leader. They played amazing golf. You could see a different energy in the team.”

The Spaniard, already a veteran of five Ryder Cups at the age of 30, clearly then subscribes to the widely-held belief that a Tiger-less American team is a better American team.

Indeed, in spite of his undisputed dominance of the game over the last ten to 15 years, question marks remain over Tiger as a team player.

He has been accused of being stand-offish and aloof in some team environments, as well as of actively distancing himself from team activities

During the 2006 Ryder Cup at The K Club in Ireland, it was reported that he walked out of a karaoke session organised by then captain Tom Lehman as an ice-breaker for the team. Woods, it would appear, did not like the idea of singing for his peers

Conversely, though, there are stories of he and world No.2 Phil Mickelson partaking in epic table-tennis battles during Ryder Cups and Presidents Cups, their competitive instincts seemingly overlapping from the golf course into the team room.

Woods’ Ryder Cup record is also often used to beat him with when it comes to matters of team golf.

The history books show that he has won just ten of his 25 Ryder Cup matches so far, losing 13 and halving two.

However, this is a slightly misleading statistic as, of those ten wins, three came at The K Club, the last match in which he played.

In last year’s Presidents Cup, meantime, he won all five of his matches – becoming only the third player in the history of the event to do so.

Furthermore, as he holed the winning putt, Woods also become the competition’s most successful all-time player – he has 18 wins to his credit. Not a bad haul for someone who’s not a ‘team player’.

Whether it was just down to chance that Woods’ absence from the last Ryder Cup coincided with a telling and overdue American win will always be a matter for debate.

However, this year’s US captain Corey Pavin is in no two minds that – sex scandal or no sex scandal – he wants the world No.1 on his team in Wales this October.

“The perception is that having Tiger in the team can cause problems internally. The perception is wrong,” said Pavin. “I watched him in 2006 and walked every step of the way with him the first two days of the matches. I looked into his eyes and I could see how much he wanted to win.”

Whether Woods makes it to Wales or not, only time will tell. But one thing’s for sure: he and his people will be pleased to hear his name being mentioned in golfing and not salicious sentences once again.

The first major event of this season’s Tartan Tour has already taken place – even though the circuit’s curtain-raising competition is still 11 weeks away.

David Orr, the reigning Scottish PGA champion, and one of the country’s rising golf stars Mark Kerr have both been banned from playing on the Tartan Tour until July 1, following a breach of PGA training programme rules.

The duo, it appears, have not been fulfilling the 30 hours of weekly shop duties required as part of the PGA programme and, resultantly, will be forced to kick their heels on the sidelines for the first six months of the year.

The head pros at Orr and Kerr’s respective clubs – Stewart Russell at East Renfrewshire and Alan Tait at Marriott Dalmahoy – have also been punished for breaching the PGA training regulations and code of ethics, each receiving a £1,500 fine and Tait being advised to resign from the Tour committee.

The decision to punish the four men is a bold move by the Gleneagles-based PGA Scottish Region and, hopes the organisation’s former captain Cliffe Jones, will likely deter any other players from bending the rules.

“These sort of people have had warnings and it was only a matter of time before action like this was taken,” he said.

“Yes, these guys pay their money to be in the PGA but this could have been nipped in the bud a long time ago. We have to maintain adherence to rules and regulations and the integrity of the sport.”

Perhaps so, but this matter poses almost as many questions of the PGA as it does the players who it has chosen to punish.

For example, if this matter could have been “nipped in the bud a long time ago”, why wasn’t it? Why wait until now to discipline two talented young golfers, coming off the back of successful seasons?

More to the point, how was it decided to ban the players for six months?

By the time the suspensions come to an end, close to 30 Tartan Tour events will have taken place, including the prestigious Northern Open.

That’s an awful lot of golf to miss out on for not an awful lot of wrong-doing.

In terms of actual time spent on the sidelines, it is comparable with the sentence handed out by the International Rugby Board to French rugby union scrum-half Julien Dupuy, who was rightly cast temporarily into the wilderness for gouging an opponent’s eye during a match.

I ask you, which of these is a greater offence: potentially blinding a fellow sportsmen, or not fulfilling one part of your training criteria?

The punishment, to me at least, doesn’t fit the crime and it concerns me that the PGA may have made a rod for its own back by doling out such excessive, disproportionate suspensions.

There are much greater sins a golfer could commit. Deliberately improving one’s lie, for example. What would the censorship be for that? A life ban? Crucifixion, perhaps?

Yes, golf is a sport that prides itself upon adherence to rules and the integrity of the game. But it should also maintain its responsibility to reprimand and rehabilitate within proportion. More than that, it should always be governed with common sense, not an iron fist.

For my part, I frankly cannot see how anyone stands to benefit from a six-month suspension. Not the players, not the organisation.

Consider this: David Orr was the stand-out performer on last season’s Tartan Tour, winning ten titles and in excess of £36,000 in prize money.

Supposing he maintained that momentum into this year, he’d be in good shape to have a crack at European Tour qualifying – assuming that is his intention – and, as we all know, confidence is every top golfer’s 15^th club.

Let’s then presume he makes it onto the tour. Does that or does that not reflect well upon the Tartan Tour and, in turn, the PGA Scottish Region? Of course it does.

Now, he’s broken the rules, so why not suspend him for a month, two at the most, and see if he can’t pick up where he left off.

But six months? The poor guy’s season will be over before it begins. And, in the meantime, he has to drive a taxi in Glasgow justs to make ends meet.

Is that the kind of message the PGA wants to be sending to aspiring young pros?

No, rule-breaking should never be condoned. But at the same time, there’s no justice in injustice.

The 2010 PGA Tour season crowned its first winner this weekend when Geoff Ogilvy (pictured) won the season-opening SBS Championship.

However, if you had tuned in to watch the Australian’s victory on Sky Sports, you would have been forgiven for thinking that you had mistakenly tuned in to an episode of “Wish You Were Here?”

Reason being the footage from the tournament was regularly and repeatedly interrupted with advertisements on behalf of the Hawaii tourist board.

All I wanted to see was how Scotland’s No.1 Martin Laird was faring as he went after his second PGA Tour title.

Instead, what I got was footage of some drama school drop-out getting all misty-eyed after swimming with sea turtles.

Cute though the turtles were, I don’t spend the best part of £40 per month on my Sky Sports subscription to watch them flap around the ocean in high definition; I spend it hoping to be rewarded with the best sports coverage money can be.

In all fairness to Sky, the poor coverage is not entirely their fault.

They pick up their feed from The Golf Channel in the USA and are, therefore, at the mercy of the American broadcasters.

If they decide to interrupt the final round of the first event of the season to show overweight tourists diving off rocks at a “local beauty spot”, then Sky – like us – just has to grin and bear it.

However, I suspect that, over the course of the season, that smile will be forced through ever more gritted teeth, assuming the advert breaks persist.

Last November, Sky Sports acquired the rights to broadcast the PGA Tour in Britain for the next eight years, following the collapse of the tour’s previous broadcasters in the UK, Setanta.

Eight years, then, would suggest that golf is part of the network’s long-term plans, which hopefully, at some point, will include setting up its own direct live feed, without the need to rely upon The Golf Channel or such like.

Not only would this hopefully reduce the amount of advertisements and sponsors’ messages that we are subjected to, it would also, with any luck, mean more objective coverage.

Indeed, on the occasions that images of surfers crashing through waves didn’t punctuate the coverage, it seemed as though The Golf Channel had selected just a handful of the 28 players in the field to follow.

Geoff Ogilvy, as defending (and ultimately back-to-back) champion figured prominently as did US Open champ Lucas Glover.

Rory Sabbatini’s final-day charge also earned him some air-time, whilst America’s darling Kenny Perry figured regularly, too.

Martin Laird, however, hardly featured at all during the course of the week, despite being within two shots of the lead right up until the back nine on the final round.

Even Sky Sports’ studio analyst Butch Harmon – an excellent observer, incidentally – picked up on his near-invisibility to The Golf Channel’s cameras, noting when he final appeared a quarter of the way through his closing 18 holes that it was nice to see the broadcaster’s cameras had remembered he was there.

The US-centric coverage was as inevitable as it was frustrating.

But, hey, at least Sky Sports has eight years to do something about it.

To listen to some people talk about the state of Scottish golf as we enter 2010, you’d think it was all doom and gloom.

It seems as though some people believe that, as it is in our bonnie country that the game was born several centuries, we have a duty to continually remain world leaders in the sport.

A silly train of thought if you ask me. After all, Scotland is responsible for a multitude of universally-adopted inventions, the television for example. Still, you don’t see the folks from ‘Television Monthly’ lamenting the lack of a home-based market competitor to Samsung or Sony, do you?

Let’s not forget, for all we have done and achieved, we are still a small country, geographically not even as big as Lake Superior or French Guiana, and with a population less than that of El Salvador, Burundi and even Laos.

We’re a small fish in a big pond. So, we have no right to expect any success at global level, which is why, when it happens, we ought to enjoy it and, when it doesn’t, we ought to retain our sense of perspective.

Some people will tell you that 2009 wasn’t a vintage year for Scottish golf. Oh really? We got our first winner of a PGA Tour event on American soil for almost 20 years, saw our amateurs crowned European team champions (on the back of their World Amateur Team Championship win in late 2008), had one of our own appointed the European Ryder Cup captain, saw the first Scottish female major-winner crowned, had two Scots in the Solheim Cup and we also witnessed former US Amateur champion Richie Ramsay (pictured above) win his first European Tour title the week before Christmas.

That’s on top of the fact that we had Scot win the EuroPro Tour Order of Merit and the European Seniors Tour Order of Merit.

And still we’re force-fed guff that 2009 was a poor year for the game in Scotland? Do me a favour.

This year’s shaping up to be pretty good, too, with a number of players having secured their European Tour playing privileges.

In the ladies’ game, meanwhile, Carly Booth and Kylie Walker both won their cards for the Ladies’ European Tour, where they will join their fellow former amateur cohort Krystle Caithness. Booth, incidentally, is the youngest player ever to win a card for the LET.

Quite far from being doom and gloom, then, you’d have to say that the Scottish game is sitting on the cusp of a very bright future. Not bad for a wee country, eh

So, Tiger has tucked his tail between his legs, admitted his philandering ways, and taken a hiatus from golf to “focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.”

A sensible move, not to mention the right one. Tiger clearly has significant personal issues which he needs to resolve without the distractions of professional golf getting in the way.

Here’s hoping that he returns better for the break, too, both as a man and a golfer.

Until such times as he makes his comeback, however, golf will have to muddle on without him and the prospect of a Tiger-less season raises some interesting questions and possibilities.

For one thing, there is a very real possibility that his long reign as world No.1 will come to an end.

Since turning pro in 1996, Tiger has been world No.1 for a total of 578 weeks. That’s just over 11 years altogether. Only two other players – David Duval and Vijay Singh – have been world No.1 since Tiger ascended to the top spot, their reigns lasting a combined 47 weeks.

However, as a result of the time spent on the sidelines nursing his injured knee, Tiger’s once-handsome lead at the top of the rankings has been significantly reduced over the last 12 months and, assuming his self-imposed exile lasts longer than a few months, it is likely that he will be overtaken sooner rather than later by one of his challengers, most likely current world No.2 Phil Mickelson.

At present, Mickelson – who, lest we forget, finished the season in imperious form with impressive wins in the Tour Championship and WGC HSBC Champions Tournament – is only 6.66 points behind Woods. Steve Stricker will also be eyeing Tiger’s throne, as will Lee Westwood and Padraig Harrington, both of whom could have a realistic shot at becoming Europe’s first world No.1 since Nick Faldo.

Ranking questions aside, Tiger’s absence must surely be causing PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem and his team sleepless nights.

Whilst Finchem publicly supported Woods’ decision to step away from the game, he must have been privately devastated.

The tour’s troubles, after all, are well documented and the last 12 months have been particularly problematic for the world’s richest professional golf circuit, with several sponsors backing out and events – some well-established ones amongst them – going to the wall.

Make no mistake, Tiger Woods has been crucial to the PGA Tour’s success over the last decade or so.

He has made an unfashionable sport attractive to blue-chip investors such that prize money has almost quadrupled since he turned pro.

It is also well-known that when he plays, TV ratings spike and when he doesn’t they plummet.

That’s why the loss – temporary or otherwise – of the PGA Tour’s most prized and most important asset must be of major concern at the organisation’s Ponte Vedra Beach HQ.

Like Finchem, Corey Pavin must be inwardly reeling at Tiger’s announcement. The US Ryder Cup captain now faces the prospect of not having the world’ No.1 player in his team at Celtic Manor Resort and will have to make duel plans, contingent upon Tiger either playing or not playing in Wales this October.

This time last year, you would have said a Tiger-less American team would probably not notice his absence, such was the impressive nature of previous captain Paul Azinger team’s success in 2008. They had to make do without Woods as he recovered from his knee injury and they won.

But you just need to look at Tiger’s sensational performance in the Presidents Cup in the autumn – where he won five points out of five – to realise his importance to the side. Often criticised for his matchplay performances, Tiger actually boasts a reasonably formidable record in recent Ryder Cups and Pavin will unquestionably want him in his side.

Of course, there may just be a ready-made saviour-in-waiting for golf in the form of Rory McIlroy. Just 20-years-old, this year’s Race to Dubai runner-up recently hit a high of ninth on the world rankings – it took Tiger until he was 21 to break into the top ten – and he will attempt to compete on both the PGA and European Tour next year.

The game of golf will be watching his development closely and hoping that he can emulate at least some of Woods’ achievements and help the game attract new sponsors and supporters, whilst also retaining existing ones.

Whatever happens, Tiger’s absence doesn’t mean the end for golf. If anything, it could herald a whole new beginning.

The people who have spent the last fortnight fighting Tiger Woods’ somewhat tedious fight for privacy in the wake of revelations about his “transgressions” are missing one very important point – he has made fools of them, too.

In fact, there are few people that the world No.1 has not let down with his alleged misdemeanours. Obviously, some have been let down more than others – none more so than his wife and family – but, if the rumours about his private life are true, everyone who has followed the 14-time major winner in his career has been the victim of a major hoax.

We have all been led to believe that Woods is a man of honour, integrity, class. We’ve been fed stories of his virtue, his fortitude, his general magnificence.

But it has all been a sham, a good old-fashioned con. Woods is not the role model he has painted as. He’s not the flawless icon he and his people would have us believe he is. He’s not some symbol of aspiration that young would-be golfers have been urged to emulate.

If the rumours are true – and, let’s face it, he hasn’t said they’re not – then Tiger is nothing more than a coward, a cad, a narcissist and a liar.

But, like all transgressors, he is not beyond forgiveness. Not completely anyway. However, whether or not he is granted that depends heavily on the next 12 months.

Right now, Tiger’s reputation is in pieces. But, perversely, the whole sordid situation has presented him with a fantastic opportunity to restore and repair his battered image.

Here are a few of the things he could do to make 2010 the year of “The Rebirth of Tiger Woods”…

1. Smile more…

Tiger’s stoic, emotionless game face has become one of his most effective tools on the golf course. However, it has also created ill-will towards him from some sections of the gallery who find his demeanour cold and distant. What a difference it would be if he could learn to smile more on the course. His transgressions have proven him to be mortal, so why should he persist with his robotic persona?

2. Spit less…

Woods has often been criticised for his disgusting habit of spitting on the course. His frequent flatulence has also been met with some revulsion amongst onlookers. Time to cut out the gross behaviour and show a bit of respect to the courses he plays and the people who watch him.

3. Speak up…

There are few golfers out there who can match Woods when it comes to saying lots without saying anything. He’s an expert waffler, a first-class diverter of awkward questions. But, hey, if people are going to pay to watch him play, aren’t they entitled to know what sort of person they are spending their money on? When you’re a person in the public eye to the extent that Woods is, you have to accept that you can’t pick and choose your privacy so, when you step out of line, you have to expect to be hauled up for it.

4. Clear out…

It would seem as though certain members of Tiger’s much-vaunted inner sanctum of confidants, employees and managers have been as complicit in his alleged deceit as he has, with his close friend – and manager of his design business – rumoured to have scheduled flights for one of his reported mistresses to spend time with him in Australia. Those people have got to go. Tiger needs to make a clean break from those who have supported and encouraged his “transgressions” if he is to be redeemed.

5. Man up…

Since his vaguely worded confession, Woods has locked himself away from the public eye and kept schtum. Big mistake. He’s so used to people yelling “you the man” at him, that it’s now time for him to prove he is by making a public apology. Not via his website but on TV. Go on Oprah, go on Letterman, go and shout it from the rooftops if that suits you better. But don’t, Tiger, persist with this lily-livered, gutless hiding from the truth because it will, as is its wont, eventually out.

Over to you, Mr Woods.