Talk is cheat: Scott McCarron's (above) jibe at Phil Mickelson has created a media storm in a tea cup

Somewhere, Tiger Woods is sitting in front of a computer screen going, "Grooves, huh? Didn't see that coming." All week at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, scene of Pádraig Harrington's first tournament of the new season, one topic of conversation has dominated every press conference and barely a mention has been made of Dirk Tiggler himself. Only in golf could a minor rule change – and not even to the sport itself but to the equipment used to play it – be the thing that elbows the absence of the number-one draw off the airwaves.


A quick catch-up for the only-mildly-intrigued. Almost three years ago now, the golfing authorities put players and club manufacturers on notice that from 1 January 2010 a change in the type of grooves allowable on their clubs would be instituted worldwide. In order to make driving the ball in the rough a proper punishment again and stop players getting the same amount of spin out of grassy lies as they would from the middle of the fairway, they decreed that clubs with square grooves – or 'box' grooves as the lingo has it – are out and clubs with v-grooves are in. On a scale of one to who cares, it's a very rough equivalent of make-of-sliotar brouhaha that's been going on in hurling these past few years. Important to a small band of edge-seekers but no more than shrugworthy to everyone else.


The drama, such as it is, came in the details. When a couple of players found out that the rules applied across the board except to one particular make of Ping wedge that was protected because of an obscure lawsuit from 20 years ago, they decided to use them at the Sony Open in Hawaii in January. Those two players were Dean Wilson and John Daly, however, and they finished tied for 43rd (Wilson) and outside the cutline (Daly) so nobody kicked up much of a fuss. Folk were too preoccupied speculating on whether or not InvisiBoy had checked into a sex addiction clinic in Mississippi.


But when Phil Mickelson came out at Torrey Pines 10 days ago and let it be known that he'd also be using the Ping-Eye 2 wedge, everything got ratcheted up a notch. Various players shook their heads and gravely intoned that Mickelson was spitting in the face of the spirit of the law. Lee Westwood, a Ping company man all his professional life, said he had access to hundreds of these wedges but wouldn't be using them just because a loophole allowed him to. Golf writers practically pulled hamstrings trying to be the first to use the line that Mickelson was setting a bad precedent, that his use of the Ping Eye 2 was the thin edge of the wedge, ho, ho, ho.


Then last week journeyman pro Scott McCarron sent the golf world into tailspin when he was asked what he thought of Mickelson's stance. "It's cheating and I'm appalled Phil put it in play," he said. And with that, the walls came tumbling down. Once again and with tiresome inevitability, golf's old-maid horror at the use of the C-word mowed every other issue off the road like a HGV going down a sidestreet.


Every grandee who'd ever stuck a tee peg in the ground reacted as though McCarron had taken a five-wood to a puppy litter. World number-three Steve Stricker warned that there was enough going on in the sport right now without this sort of attention. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem held crisis talks with both the players' committee and Ping executives. Mickelson even made a veiled threat of legal action against McCarron before getting an apology for his troubles. Meanwhile, in a hot-tub far, far away, Dawg The Birdie Hunter was surely cackling loudly and starting to text hostesses again.


What's interesting here isn't the teeth-grinding minutiae of the grooves flap, which is about relevant to 99.99 per cent of the population as a row over what kind of chalk snooker players are allowed to employ. No, it's how the over-weening self-importance of golf and golfers is what will always stop the sport becoming anywhere close to as popular as it deserves to be. A sport so in love with its own moral superiority is an ugly thing and as long as golf continues to be the tut-tutting aunt of the sports world, it will continue to repel the very people it needs if it is to grow.


Yes, cheating is a bad thing and being called a cheat when you are playing within the rules is no fun. But the same goes for every sport the world over and yet only golf gets its plus fours in such a twist when someone so much as hints at the word. The funereal keening around Turnberry last July when Sandy Lyle and Colin Montgomerie had their spat over Monty's now-you-don't-see-it-now-you-do switcheroo in Jakarta in 2005 was so po-faced you'd have thought affairs of state were at stake. But they weren't. It was just golf.


Just a game that revels in your discomfort and never lets you forget that you're in a sacred place where the normal tawdriness of the real world will be frowned upon. Are those jeans you're wearing? Is that a round-necked shirt? Don't stand there. Don't walk across that line. Repair that pitch mark but not this spike mark. Hurry up, there's a group coming behind.


That's why it's really no surprise that the players, the press and the golf authorities latched onto this grooves imbroglio over the past fortnight and steered the sport towards a fairway-based discussion, the drearier the better. The nocturnal secrets of Happy Thrillmore in the red t-shirt knocked golf on its well-upholstered behind for a couple of months there and nobody knew where to look.


The best player in the game subject to the same urges and moral failures as the rest of the world? Golf just isn't wired to handle that kind of thing. And so the sport has chosen to care deeply about a piffling rule change with the added bonus a cheating allegation to get on its high horse about thrown in. Golf people felt on more solid ground that way.


Meanwhile, the first WGC event of the season, the World Match Play, will begin in 10 days with the square-as-a-picture-frame Stricker the likely number-one seed because Woods and Mickelson are choosing to stay away. Good luck grabbing an audience that week, lads.


mclerkin@tribune.ie