When asked why his peers chose him as the most disliked man in golf, Masters defending champion Bubba Watson tried an unusual form of public-relations judo.
"I take it as I need to improve as a man. I take it with pride," Watson said, to the general bafflement of his audience.
In an anonymous ESPN poll of tour pros published this week, 103 players had this proposition put to them: "(Blank) is in a fight in the parking lot. You're not helping him."
Nearly a quarter slipped Watson into the (blank).
"Obviously, I've never been in a fight in my life, so if I was in a fight, it was my fault. I caused someone to get angry. So, yeah, I wouldn't help myself either."
Two things. First, there's nothing obvious about it. Judging by his frequent meltdowns on the course, Watson seems as if he's the sort of person who could get in a punch-up at a First Communion.
Second, if I'm getting my head kicked in in a parking lot, I would prefer onlookers look past the fact that I deserve it. I'd prefer they just hit the other guy with a garbage can.
Watson is on the leading edge of golf's rising cast of dubious characters and outright villains. Man by man, many of the best seem compromised in one way or another.
This was once a sport led by men whose characters were conflated with their performances. The Jack Nicklauses and Gary Players and Ben Crenshaws. That aging trio were ambling around Augusta on Wednesday, being treated with a deference that verges on religious awe. It's like Saint Francis showing up at your barbecue.
Presumably, they had their faults. Everyone does. We never heard about them, because they weren't being marketed like human logos. These days, everybody's a brand, and we hear everything about them. Far too much, really.
When they snap on the course, it's news. When they get dinged with a misdemeanour or break up with their wife, it's news. Whenever they make the mistakes most of us get to make in private, everyone knows.
By its nature, golf is a sport of repeated disappointment mixed dangerously with a large sense of entitlement.
It is bizarre watching a crowd of several hundred, pin-drop silent, standing 20 feet from a guy and boring holes into him with their eyes while he tries to drop a putt. There's no equivalent in sport.
Imagine trying to put together an IKEA bookshelf, while everyone in your neighbourhood crowds into your living room to watch you do it.
It might end well. And it might end in mass murder.
That's Watson's sin. He is an unhinged, occasionally spiteful, maniac on the course. He does the one thing the multimillionaire sports rock star can never, never do in public – he whines. Then he either wins or loses. Either way, he gets on a private jet and goes home.
Tiger Woods we know all about. He remains a favourite, but a diminished one. He may win majors again, but he's already dropped out of the Arnold Palmer pantheon of worship.
As soon as he wobbled, people fell on him for the crime of being aloof. We'll forgive a winner anything, but losers get no wiggle room.
While Woods is making pained efforts to seem more fun, the brittleness is never far from the surface.
"I think it's anyone's choice whether they use the Internet or not," Woods said, musing on the idea of whether this lifestyle is worth all the irritants. "So I refuse to go on and read what you all write, good or bad, whether you're friends of mine or not."
This is clearly not true. Six months ago, Woods banged off a shrill rebuttal after a softly satiric piece was published about him in Golf Digest. Nothing says, 'I don't care' like a 600-word explanation of how much you care.
These days, it isn't hard to ignore the noise. It's impossible. Because whether or not you're googling your own name every morning, everyone in your entourage is. This stuff bleeds in at the edges, like mustard gas.
Rory McIlroy is here looking for the career majors sweep. He also broke up with his very sweet-seeming fiancée a long time ago. More people remember the fiancée.
Dustin Johnson may be the game's most consistent performer. He's the only player to have won at least one tournament in each of the past eight years. He also did coke once. Okay, twice. His interpersonal skills and boundary issues could use some work. And that's all you know about Dustin Johnson.
At his press availability, people kept lobbing up questions to him asking how his life had "changed" over the past year. Johnson's engaged to Paulina Gretzky and had a kid. He wouldn't take the hint. He kept ploddingly rounding back to improvements in his game. You had to admire his refusal to fall back on one of the usual routes pros take to laundering their image – domestication.
If Johnson wins the Masters, they're going to have to livestream his next blood test.
Who's a genuine, across-the-board beloved figure in golf these days, who also wins? The closest thing may be world No. 2 Henrik Stenson (whom no one knows) and former Masters champion Adam Scott (who is so pleasant to listen to and look at, he may have been grown in a lab).
Golf doesn't produce hard-scrabble, lift-yourself-up storylines ('Yes, I was raised in terrible poverty. We suffered horribly between tee times.'). It puts the entire onus on just one person. They don't get the cover of belonging to a team.
The advantage in tennis – the closest comparison – is that the best win all the time. They may not win titles, but they win matches. A very good golfer might go his entire career without winning anything. Victories smooth out the personality edges.
So we go ferreting about for something else of interest to talk about. And, more often than not, we prefer it be something that pulls them down to our level, rather than raise them up any higher.
Cathal Kelly