Brian Viner: Tiger has a bad knee... the Goose, foot in mouth

Winston Churchill once described golf as "a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose". Had the great man lived to see the best of another kind of great man, he might have reconsidered. In winning the US Open at Torrey Pines, Tiger Woods deployed the 15 weapons at his disposal – 14 of them in his bag and one of them, his preternatural willpower, in his head – as effectively as Churchill's hero, Henry V, used his longbowmen at Agincourt.

The one weapon that Woods was not fully able to deploy was his body, which is why his third US Open victory will forever be recognised as the finest of all his major championship triumphs. All right-handed golfers exert pressure on their left knees, and the greatest golfer exerts the greatest pressure, hence the tear in his anterior cruciate ligament which has now forced him to sit out the rest of the season.

For years, Woods has worked tirelessly in the gym to build up strength in his arms and legs, but there comes a point, in just about all sports except power-lifting, at which too much strength becomes counter-productive. I am reminded of another sporting superstar, Ronaldo, the Brazilian version, who arrived at PSV Eindhoven as a skinny kid with twigs for legs and was quickly despatched to the weights room and given as much milk and red meat as he could stomach. His legs duly became much bigger and stronger, but the knee problems that would blight his career were hatched right there in the PSV weights room.

Anyway, there is no doubting the severity of Tiger's injury, which leaves poor old Retief Goosen looking a right charlie. Goosen it was who made public the suspicion that Woods might just be hamming up the damage to his knee, bringing to golf the gamesmanship of professional football – on which subject, what a shame that Michael Ballack besmirched such an inspirational performance for Germany against Portugal on Thursday evening by responding to a gentle tap as if he'd been garrotted.

I am told that Goosen was by no means alone in thinking that Tiger's winces and grimaces might have been cranked up, but it is the South African alone left looking stupid – and worse, disrespectful – now that we know the truth, that the winces and grimaces were, if anything, rather heroically suppressed. Still, the Goose can console himself with the thought that he, a man previously known for his cautious reticence, has a worthy place in the speaking-too-soon annals, alongside so many other sporting figures who have made pillocks of themselves down the years with mistimed, misconceived utterances. The other Woods-related entry came from Fuzzy Zoeller who, trying to make a joke out of a dark-skinned man winning the Masters, wondered whether Tiger would choose fried chicken and collard greens – a popular dish among poor black folk in the Deep South – for the following year's champions' dinner.

It is hard, though, to see the former England cricket captain Tony Greig ever being displaced as pillock-in-chief in those annals, albeit more than three decades since he promised to make the West Indian tourists "grovel" – a highly-charged word for a white South African to use towards 11 black men from the Caribbean, and just what Clive Lloyd's team needed to inspire them before they administered a series of hidings on England in that hot summer of 1976, which included 71 all out in the third Test at Old Trafford. (Greig himself was second-highest scorer, with nine, while David Steele mustered a top score of 20, just pipping the extras tally of 19.)

Also prominent in the annals of stupid remarks are any number of sporting administrators, but let us give credit where it is due and praise an institution which this week issued a statement of such eminent sense that it was hard to reconcile with that institution's image as a collection of gin-soaked, doddery old reactionaries. Unexpectedly, the MCC did not equivocate on the subject of switch-hitting, as performed by Kevin Pietersen and frowned upon by Graham Gooch, among others, but gave it its full if rather wordy blessing.

"MCC believes that the 'switch-hit' stroke is a difficult shot to execute," came the pronouncement from Lord's, "and that it incurs a great deal of risk for the batsman. It also offers bowlers a good chance of taking a wicket and therefore MCC believes that the shot is fair to both batsman and bowlers."

Amen to that, and how reassuring to see one of the most traditional sporting bodies embrace entertainment and evolution. As for the business of switching from right to left, Pietersen is in illustrious company. There is Ronnie O'Sullivan, of course, and Garry Sobers bowled with both arms. Rafael Nadal is a natural right-hander who plays tennis left-handed. Maybe Tiger should give it a whirl. It would give his knee a rest, and the rest a chance.

b.viner@independent.co.uk