Greg Chappell tells a funny story about giving an after-dinner speech at a sporting club. After the speech, a member comes up to him and says how boring and worthless it was. Chappell is a bit nonplussed until the club president comes up, shoves the critic out of the way, and says, ‘Ignore him, Greg, he's just the dickhead who says what everyone else is thinking.'

It's pretty good advice both for the dickhead and the one who's been baited, but hard to follow in the heat of the moment. That's one of the reasons why it's going to be so interesting to watch Tiger Woods at the Masters this week.

For some reason I'm struggling to remember what it was that Tiger was meant to have done wrong. Not what it was, but why it was anyone's business outside his family. He slept with how many women? And what were their names? Can any news shrink from so much to so little, so quickly? Never mind what substances Tiger was on; what were we on?

Maybe, as someone with very good inside knowledge of the golf scene tells me, Tiger was actually innocent of all wrongdoing and was stitched up by a media not short of hypocritical middle-aged moralisers who didn't realise how much damage they were doing to the game of golf. By diminishing Tiger, they were harming the reach and development of the game into new frontiers, they were fouling the game's image for sponsors, they were downsizing the next TV rights deal. Fools! Didn't they recognise which hand it was they were biting? By hopping on the bandwagon of Tiger condemnation, they were hurting the business of golf, which is all that matters, right?

Or maybe believing that what he does as a business - show business - was what got Tiger into trouble in the first place. Thinking he was part of the entertainment industry, he partook of the perks offered to any star in that firmament, thinking, perhaps, that as everyone was treating him as a rock star then he had all of a rock star's responsibilities.

Or maybe the whole thing is that the moralisers, the Sunday sermonisers, the humourless popinjays who can enjoy a laugh at anyone so long as it's not themselves and what they hold dear, are right on the money, because what they represent is the disappointment of true belief. Maybe sportsmen and women do have greater obligations because they are at the pinnacle of something that is not just entertainment. Maybe golf is founded on concepts of honour, admirably fulfilled by most of its leading players, and Tiger's marital infidelities struck at something that went far beyond his person. His hypocrisy, perhaps, was a blow against that profound value, honesty, that challenges and unites every golfer from the PGA Tour down to the social hacker.

And maybe, beyond that, other sports stand for values relating to community and family and healthy living and tradition and ritual and history and fairness and a whole package of other deeply held beliefs that give the middle-aged burnt-out moralisers some foundation of righteousness. Maybe, like priests, it doesn't matter what the sermonisers do personally, because sport transcends them just as it transcends its practitioners.

For all the holy fools who care too much about sport, there must be some truth in the assertion that games constitute more than just one branch of the entertainment industry. If it's a thing to be taken that seriously, that much to heart, you can't reduce it to questions of corporate franchising and profitability.

So you can't have it both ways, as Tiger found out in his home. Now we're going to see how he deals with the domestic drama in his second home, the golf course, with his second family. But the business of golf, or the business of any sport, is the least interesting thing about it. Melbourne Storm people who defend their club with economic arguments are just mirroring the stupidity of any economic argument against them. All they need to say is that they love their club and that's good enough. Raw irrational hatred and raw irrational love - those are the only things in sport that matter. All the rest is noise.