Scene 1
EXTERIOR – ESTABLISHING – EVENING
A small village somewhere in the county of Kildare, a typically Irish landscape on a bright September day.
A young woman skips over an un-swinging gate into a neighbour’s field. Wary of a bullock that lurks in one corner, Maureen pulls her hem above her boots and cuts across the far end and onto the familiar boreen.
She glances at her mobile. The phone screen displays a text from one of the Dublin lads she met in Malaga earlier in the summer. She slips the Nokia back into her pocket.
Spying the local curate clip down the street from the churchyard, hunched over his nine-gear racer, she waves and continues on up the main street and into her father’s little pub.
LONG SHOT – QUIET VILLAGE STREET.
Scene 2
INTERIOR – ESTABLISHING
Some miles away, cosseted in the swooshified luxury that superstars enjoy behind golf’s velvet rope, the world’s most famous athlete is growing bored in a huge hotel room as another Ryder Cup lies mere days away.
ESPN’s SportsCenter rattles out of a bling 80” television. Imported bottled water litters the foreground and Blackberrys, piled in a heap the size of a lambing ewe on a coffee table, make it almost impossible to spot a team of lawyers in identical pinstripe suits. They sit silently on an allotted sofa.
Tiger Woods leans over a putting machine as an agent barks into two smart phones simultaneously. One lawyer, crippled with hunger, sneaks a Petit Filous from his briefcase. As his startled colleagues mouth silent warnings, his eyes dart from his boss to the illicit snack and back again. He attempts to open it furtively.
Woods, quietly and without looking around: “Who the heck is eating yoghurt, guys?
The lawyer, with a baby spoonful of strawberry and blackcurrant to his lips, glances to his friends. Tiger, turning around quickly to face his team of yes-men: “Can’t you see I’m putting here, Eli?”
Addressing his agent: “Can he not see me putting here, Garry? I must be crazy because I thought I was putting here. But obviously not if people are gorging on desserts like it’s the gee gosh last days of the Roman Empire here, for heck sake.”
The agent looks to the sofa of lawyers.
EXTERIOR
Cut to wide shot of lawyer running from plush hotel, zig zagging wildly into an adjacent driving range as if to avoid fire form a window above.
INTERIOR – HOTEL
Agent, in a soothing voice, as he rubs Woods’s back: “Okay Tiger, how about we go for a pint. Real Irish. Mickelson will be so pissed off. You’d like that, right?
Scene 3
INTERIOR – PUB
Camera cuts to a bar as three middle-aged men, in working clothes, sit with their backs to the counter, mouths agape.
Tiger Woods sits in the corner in his full ‘Sunday red’ outfit. His bags were earlier lost in Shannon.
He sits, frantically texting and giggling like a schoolboy on a new Gameboy. His agent stares at the three locals, mystified.
Local 1: “Is it yourself, Eldrick?”
Long pause, as Tigers fires off another text, with his tongue poking out of his mouth.
Local 2: “It’s himself, alright. Concentrating.”
When another man burst through the door, having heard the news of the visitor, a panicking publican – having never had so many customers of a Monday – calls his daughter to help, from the flat above.
SLOW MOTION – SOFT LIGHTING – MUSIC: ANY SNOW PATROL SONG
Tiger’s smart phone falls slowly and dramatically into his untouched pint of Guinness. His and Maureen’s eyes meet. Linger.
Scene 4
INTERIOR – PUB – 5 YEARS LATER
The same three gentlemen sit watching a five-year-old child swing a golf club in a beautiful elliptical arc. They cheer as he shows them an audacious chip from the snug. His grandfather shouts at him, exasperated.
Publican: “Young lad, mind those glasses, they’re the Woods one. I mean, good ones.
Local 1: “Freudian slip, Donal.”
Local 2: “What’s a Freudian slip?”
Local 3: “That’s when you say one thing but you’re actually thinking about a mother.”
Scene 5
15 YEARS LATER – EXTERIOR – ADARE MANOR
The young lad becomes the first amateur to win the Irish Open since Shane Lowry some years earlier. He does so wearing a red polo shirt and a pair of borrowed Nike spikes. The pub locals salute him from the rope, holding pints of porter casually.
In his acceptance speech he says he dedicates the win to his beloved mother in Kildare and the father, whoever he may be.
INTERIOR –LOCKER ROOM
The captain of the European Ryder Cup team seeks out the young lad for chat in the showers, smoking a cigar, which is soon extinguished.
Old pro: “Kid, I’ve got two things to tell you. First of all, your father is Tiger Woods.
PAUSE
“Secondly, you’re on the Ryder Cup team. We leave in 15 minutes. Woosie has the chopper on the roof.”
Scene 6
MONTAGE -– HIGH FIVES – THE SCOREBOARD CLICKS ALONG
The tournament comes down to Tiger versus the young Irish amateur. Woods is once again the home town hero after a long road back from the sex scandals of 2010.
Just as he lines up the putt…
“Mr Woods, I’m your son. Let’s half the hole and go have a beer. Dad.”
Tiger: “Yeah sure kid, get out of the way. This one’s for ‘Merica.”
He hits the putt. It fizzes past the hole.
Suddenly someone in a 1995 Dublin jersey bursts through the crowd. “Jaysis, son, he’s not you’re Da; I am! You’re mudder never text me back after Malaga in ‘06. Hit the putt. For Brussels, wha?
CLOSE UP
The ball circles the hole. Emotion on everyone’s face. It circles some more. And slowly… drops in.
Tiger breaks a four iron across Zach Johnson’s back and storms off.
The End.
Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: adrian.russell@examiner.ie
This column first appeared in the print edition of this morning’s Irish Examiner.
