Stallions need to be fed their oats not brand messages

By Celia Walden Published: 6:42AM GMT 19 Feb 2010

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Tiger Woods gets a kiss from his wife Elin after losing his match at the Presidents Cup golf tournament, 2005 Photo: Reuters

As a young reporter, I spent a summer babysitting George Best. Occasionally, when George became maudlin (which, to his credit, didn"t happen often), he would lament the fact that, as a teenage prodigy, nobody had warned him of the pitfalls of fame.

Had George been micromanaged in the way that sportsmen are now, I doubt his fate would have been very different: excess was in his soul. But when I see Tiger Woods, and the cabaret of apology he is being forced to make, Ashley Cole enticing women with pictures of himself wearing what appear to be a large pair of women"s bloomers and John Terry impregnating his best friend"s girl, I can"t help but think that over-management isn"t the answer.

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Be it the sportsmen"s fathers (in Woods"s case) or their agents, urging them to marry young and play the family card, all the while knowing (because of course they know) that their charge"s real desires lie elsewhere, the outcome is likely to be a frenzy of entanglements with Page 3 girls and nightclub hostesses. Sportsmen aren"t members of the Royal family; I don"t need Woods to be paired off with a docile and past-free young blonde to take him seriously as a golfer, just as I don"t need Cole or Terry to be palatable human beings, playing at happy families in order to cement ""the brand"". And if I don"t, why should the sponsors?

A simple solution would be to ban all professional sportsmen from getting married before the age of 35. These are stallions we"re talking about, not ordinary men, and while promiscuity has never been proved to harm a sportsman"s performance on the pitch, subterfuge, and everything bound up in that, just might.

* Shall I put that in a bag for you?" smiles the lady at Paperchase, brandishing my card. This keeps happening, and every time it does, I feel my hands curling into fists in my pockets. "Yes please," I smile, looking over my shoulder to check that I am, indeed, alone in the shop, and biting back the question: "But why for me? I don"t see anyone else standing at the counter with a Far Side birthday card."

This new, superfluous linguistic flourish seems to accompany an increasing number of daily transactions: "Shall I ring that up/wrap that up/get that down/order that in for you?" It"s supposed to make me feel loved, of course, unique, in a world of drones and automata.

What the lady is really saying when she offers to slip my Larson sketch into a pretty pochette through the stationery apparatchiks who doubtlessly hold compulsory away days to preach the benefits of bespoke courtesies in our loveless global economy is that I matter to her. The bag is being offered to me, specifically, because Paperchase cares about my needs.

It is the jabbing finger of the TV evangelist, the overfamiliar waiter who seats himself at your table to inquire: "How we"re feeling?" Soon, no transaction will remain uncluttered with market-spiel, because now cue the gravelly film-promo voice it"s personal.

* Amid the fallout following Gordon Brown"s television interview last Sunday, something seems to have been overlooked, namely the peculiar state of Peter Mandelson"s head. When Mandy, with his trademark other-worldly sheen popped up (like women, the Business Secretary doesn"t so much perspire as glow) I was struck, as I have been of late, by how extraordinarily refreshed he looked. As the Simon Cowell of the political world, it"s not beyond the realms of possibility that Lord Mandelson, like Cowell, sees Botox as "no more unusual than brushing your teeth". Or perhaps it"s just the Curious Case of Peter Mandelson, the only man to age backwards.