Insults For Charity

Gary Player & Friends Spare No One For A Good Cause.

- Max Adler

HOW MUCH does a round of golf with Thomas Bjorn, or hospitality tickets to the DP World Tour Championship, fetch at charity auction? It depends, it turns out, on how creatively the auctioneer can insult a gathering of high-net-worth individuals.

The scene is a black-tie gala in an English garden during a heat wave. Servers roam with trays of champagne and fruit-infused gin on ice. Earlier in the day, at the pro-am outing at Wentworth, Ian Woosnam impressed with one-arm push-ups, and Alvaro Quiros boasted sarcastically about winning his first event in two years. The indefatigable host of the Berenberg Gary Player Invitational, the Black Knight, remarked after pro Inci Mehmet piped a drive past his, “Boy, if you were married to her, you wouldn’t want to come home late.”