Tom Humphries LockerRoom It's a bad week for this column to have to write again about sexual politics and sport. There's a mob of offended Macra types outside the door on their combine harvesters and they're carrying on like, well, like a bolshie bunch of French farmers.

There's that, and the fact we've been getting hate mail all week from the National Coalition of Women with Fuller Ankles. There may be some overlap between the two campaigns: a lot of the letters begin with the greeting "Dear Slurryhead".

All of which makes it doubly unfortunate that this should be the week when Annika Sorenstam makes a bit of history and becomes the first woman to compete in a PGA tour event since Babe Didrikson back in 1945.

Slurryhead and his young Slurries are big fans of Didrikson and even visited her hometown and its Babe Museum during an idle few days in Texas a few years ago. She was a remarkable woman whose achievements on the course unnerved many men at the time. All that was well over half a century ago, however. You'd have thought we'd have moved on.

Yet this week, when Sorenstam goes to play in the Colonial tournament, many of the boys will find that so big and swollen are their pouty lower lips they won't be able to address the ball properly.

The reactions of some players have revealed more about their characters than all the PR-swaddled press conferences they have ever given.

Character, we've often said, is what you do when nobody is looking. Take Padraig Harrington. The guy who famously called a shot on himself in the gloaming at the US Open when nobody in the world except himself suspected that his ball had moved fractionally, the Harrington who lost a tournament once because he forgot to sign his scorecard and took that blow with all the grace in the world; well, Harrington reacted to Sorenstam's initiative perfectly.

Padraig was welcoming and noted wisely that it was a pity that Sorenstam was going to be judged on a once-off event. She deserved the chance to compete in a run of tour events. Much like any tour rookie. That, you would have thought, would be the standard reaction across the tour.

So what is there to say about a guy like Vijay Singh, who takes all the thoughts you ever had about the relationship between sport and character, places those thoughts on the palm of his hand and blows them away.

Singh is one of those lonely drifters of the tour. Even after his big days in the sun nobody ever got a good view of what lay within him, and the standard verdict is that he is dull and somewhat bland as a person but grimly determined as a golfer. Because he doesn't talk about it, the murk of his history is ignored.

Singh knows the margins though. He knows those places where people live when they are just hanging on. He knows the feeling of being an outsider. He was born the son of an airport worker in Fiji and fell in love with golf at an age when most boys are falling in love with girls. From then on golf propelled his life.

It wasn't a country club and martinis life either. When he left Fiji as a young man to play golf in Australia he had to hustle hard. He ran up such a hillock of debts that they banned him from the tour in Australia until he settled them.

He moved on, always the outsider breaking in. The Asian Tour brought him his first success, a tournament win in Malaysia when he was just 21. That was 1984. A year later in Jakarta, in the Indonesian Open, he was partnered with a Canadian, Jim Rutledge, and an Indonesian amateur, Ruswin Ali. When the round finished and the scorecards had been examined Singh was accused of having improved his score by one stroke before signing the card. He was disqualified and suspended from the tour.

Singh has always denied the accusation, but the consequences for him were severe. Reluctant to return to Fiji, he descended into golf hell, becoming a club pro in a series of clubs in Borneo. He played with and gave lessons to oil workers, lumberjacks, truck drivers. He lived, by his account, two-and-a-half hours from the outskirts of nowhere. When he wasn't teaching he was practising, tinkering with a game built on big hitting. To survive, he played for money against oilmen and timber bosses.

He's been there with his backside hung right out over the edge. He's sampled the clubbishness of the golf world and what it feels like when that world turns its back on you. He has occasionally told the story of how once in Borneo he got to the 18th hole with $10 to his name and $700 in gambling stakes on the line and he hit his drive out of bounds. He ended up getting down the par five with a fine drive on his second ball, a big approach and a long putt. Par. Right on the edge of ruin, he survived.

Borneo held him in his disgrace and his tutelage until 1987, when he headed off on a mission, to play the British Open. He practised on the qualifying course every day for a month and still missed qualifying. Back to the wall again, he quit Borneo and joined the Safari Tour in Africa. He survived, he prospered, and you know the rest.

Now he lives in the world of courtesy cars and fine hotels and perfect courses. You would think perhaps that, given his experiences, his spirit would be warm and inclusive. He has lived life as ordinary people know it. Being a Fijian of Indian extraction, he has faced discrimination. He has lived through shame and hard times and he has made it. He has The Life and The Lifestyle.

So along comes Annika Sorenstam, who won 11 LPGA tournaments last year, going around the courses in an average of 68.7 strokes. She has won over $12 million in prize money. She's not saying she's Tiger Woods, but she is saying she has the game, the experience and the character to test herself in Tiger's world, just as Vijay Singh does. That's the essence of sport, being the best you can be.

Vijay doesn't think so. Vijay doesn't want to slice the pie another way.

"I hope she misses the cut," said Vijay. "Why? Because she doesn't belong out here. If I'm drawn with her, which I won't be, I won't play. What is she going to prove by playing? It's ridiculous. She's the best woman golfer in the world - and I want to emphasise woman. We have our tour for men and they have their tour."

Even Tiger Woods was a little churlish at first before his PR minders shook his shoulders and smacked his face. When Sorenstam first announced her intention to pay the Colonial, Woods suggested that the adventure could damage women's golf.

I've often wondered how tour players, with their immense power and influence, could stand to go to a course like Augusta National, where men of Singh's and Woods' skin colour are barely tolerated and people of Annika Sorenstam's gender aren't welcome among the membership.

Frankly, my dears, they don't give a damn. The reality is that golf is a hard, lonely, selfish game and the boys don't give a damn where they play it. Harrington is a stand-out character for any number of reasons, not least, I think, because he was reared on team sports. This has been another superb week for him as a person and a golfer.

As for Vijay, it would be nice if this week he didn't make the cut. And Annika Sorenstam. All right-thinking people will be rooting for her. And if it doesn't work out there'll always be a welcome in a camogie club. The chicks with sticks know a talent when they see it.