For his next trick, Sergio Garcia will make Tiger Woods likable. OK,

For his next trick, Sergio Garcia will make Tiger Woods likable.

OK, maybe that’s beyond the Spaniard’s abilities, but then you wouldn’t have bet on Garcia managing to turn Woods into a sympathetic character, either. And yet, two weeks after the golfers engaged in a match play of zingers at the Players Championship when Garcia suggested that Woods, his playing partner, didn’t wait for him to hit a shot before pulling a club from his bag and causing cheers from the gallery, the story took an awkward, then farcical turn.

First, Garcia jokingly told an interviewer at a European Tour event that he would have Woods over to his house at the U.S. Open and would serve “fried chicken.” Then that Tour’s chief executive, George O’Grady, “unreservedly apologized” for saying of Garcia, “most of Sergio’s friends are coloured athletes in the United States.”

Gosh, I can’t imagine why people sometimes say golf is an elitist game. Other than employing a version of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black defence, it’s hard to know what O’Grady even meant. Was he referring to other golfers? Because the PGA Tour is not exactly bursting forth with dark-skinned athletes. Did he mean “swarthy?” And as for Garcia, the best that can be said about his comment is that it was carelessly stupid. The worst is that he intentionally took a racist potshot at Woods. Tiger, notably, didn’t call it as such, though he did say it was hurtful, and then accepted Garcia’s fulsome apology.

And that’s the amazing thing here. Woods, who had refused to apologize for the incident at the Players and instead branded Garcia a complainer, then no doubt heard when Garcia in response called him a liar, suddenly took the high road and let Garcia remove his spikes from his mouth after he had so firmly planted them in there. Woods almost never does something when it comes to fellow competitors that would be considered gracious. That he would do it with Garcia, someone whom Woods would not piddle on were he aflame, was very much against type. As is so often the case when the two are matched up on the course, it is Woods who comes out ahead in the end.