James Lawton: Woods has every right to prepare in his own way

Tiger Woods is facing so many charges at the dawn of the 34th Ryder Cup it is not easy to know where to start.

There is, however, not much doubt about the crime that has provoked most horror. It is that he knowingly and wilfully ignored the wishes of the paying customers and took his final practice round at a time when most of them had still to sit down to breakfast.

This was, of course, a rather terrible culture shock in a country where participants in the national game of football are under pain of club discipline if they don't slavishly applaud the fans at the end of every game, presumably for buying pork pies with great laddish panache.

It means that in a large section of opinion here, in a place which is beginning to challenge the belief that when you turn off the M42 North you haven't left the planet, Woods is thus guilty of quite egregious arrogance. His defence is that he is doing what suits him best and that in the past it has worked quite well.

While charabancs from places like Leamington Spa were still disgorging irate golf aficionados, Woods was putting the finishing touches to a round which started with the first streaks of dawn. Another entry on the rap sheet is that Woods played several holes without a police escort, thus making a complete farce of some of the most elaborate security measures since the christening of Brooklyn Beckham.

It will also have to be taken into consideration that earlier this week Woods flatly rejected the suggestion of his captain, Curtis Strange, that he and his practice partners try a drive or two off the forward tee at the 10th hole, just in case Europe's captain, Sam Torrance, went back on his original preference for taking the green out of play.

This is pretty much the case for the prosecution, which will no doubt seek to prove that Woods has by his deeds announced his belief that he is bigger than the Ryder Cup and quite possibly the entire game of golf.

What cannot be denied is that Woods appears to have turned the last few days into a mild form of living hell for his captain.

Strange was yesterday supposed to talk eruditely about the subtle thought processes which had determined his fourball line-up for this morning's action. This didn't happen – beyond the revelation that Mark Calcavaccia isn't playing fourballs on account of the fact that he doesn't like it – because Strange was required to spend most of his time defending Woods's decision to go out several hours before the officially scheduled start of practice. He said that he had simply told Woods to prepare as he does for a major tournament, which if you weren't Outraged of Leamington Spa, seemed to make quite a bit of sense on any casual reading of major tournament results over the last few years.

This left a burning question on the lips of golf traditionalists. Had Woods committed the most gratuitous defiance of Ryder Cup discipline since the former European captain Mark James and his team-mate Ken Brown were reprimanded for choosing to slip into Hawaiian beachwear rather than the team uniform? The counter-query is whether the Ryder Cup has begun to take itself so seriously it is on the verge of total madness.

Quite apart from the ludicrous claim that it has become the world's third most important sporting event, there was yesterday's bizarrely overblown opening ceremony, when the Bishop of Warwick seemed to be under the impression that his job was to prevent the outbreak of the Third World War. Tiger stood in the chilly afternoon with an expression of gloom that would have gone down very nicely at a Welsh funeral.

But do the charges against Woods really stick? Only if you believe that Woods has a duty to shape his build-up around spectator opportunity. It certainly doesn't apply to leading performers in other sports. Sir Alex Ferguson doesn't post practice times outside Manchester United's training ground, with a special note of when David Beckham will be taking free-kicks, and in heavyweight boxing Mike Tyson isn't famous for throwing open his gym – even for $1,000 ringside customers. In recent times this has probably been inspired by a fear of wholesale refunds. Woods is not in quite such a vulnerable position, competitively speaking. Nor, it seems reasonable to believe, is he required to justify himself anywhere but on a golf course where the issue is win and loss rather than the fine tuning of his game.

Woods may be told that he has responsibilities to the game that has made him so rich. But then he can say that there is a strict relationship between his golf and his wealth. The latter doesn't accumulate by chance. It comes out of extraordinary talent – and commitment – that he has shaped to his own needs.

His promise here was that he would go along with the ceremonial of the week just as long as didn't compromise his sense of proper preparation. That preparation may smack a little of control freakery. It may seem the product of a driven, obsessive spirit. He may be deemed to one be one of sport's more lordly superstars. But to all of this he can give the classic response, "If you take the best, you have to live with the rest."

Without Woods, this Ryder Cup would carry one of the heaviest asterisks in the history of sport, and this is still true when his less than sensational track record in Sotogrande and Brookline is considered. His success or failure seems to define any tournament in which he plays. He is the watchword of golfing excellence.

He hopes to remind the world of this when the action starts today. Then he will be on spectators' time. Yesterday's was his. He thinks he has earned the right to make such a claim. Surely only a perverse jury would disagree.