This is the way golf writers once behaved: Bernard Darwin, a legendary golf correspondent on The Times, did not waste his time attending a press conference when a golfer had completed his round. “The readers want to know what I think about it,” said Darwin. Of course this did not prevent Darwin and his eminent successor, Peter Ryde, mixing socially with the best golfers. Peter Ryde once turned to leave an Arnold Palmer press conference, when Palmer was the best in the business. As Ryde reached the door Palmer called after him: “Don't forget we're having dinner tonight, Peter.” None of the confidences exchanged over dinner ever found their way into the paper.

That was in the 1960s. Although social relations between golfer and writer might have become less intimate, the image remained unchanged: unlike other sports, golf was a civilised activity conducted according to unwritten rules. Players and writers concentrated on the golf. Tiger Woods has changed all that, all by himself. Following his bizarre car crash and his exposure as a serial sexual athlete, the old image is fatally cracked. Sports desks want to know what their golf writers knew about Tiger's predilections and, if they had known anything, why had they not written it?

The story begins in the summer of 2009, on July 17 to be precise, on the Ayrshire coast at Turnberry where Tiger Woods, maybe the finest and certainly the wealthiest golfer ever to address a tee, had failed to qualify for the final two rounds the Open Golf Championship. It was only the second time he had missed the cut in a major championship. Jamie Corrigan, golf correspondent of The Independent, was intrigued by the absence of Tiger's usual spark: “He seemed resigned, almost disinterested,” says Corrigan.

Alan Shipnuck, who writes about golf for Sports Illustrated in New York, recalls: “I remember at Turnberry a few of us sitting in the press room discussing the rumours we had heard about Tiger and [his wife] Elin having a big blow-up that week and whether or not it had played a role in his poor play. It was out there, but no one asked Tiger a question before he fled.”

Corrigan had first heard rumours about Tiger's fractious marriage during the U.S. Open Championship a month earlier. Apparently, Elin had told Tiger that the adultery had to stop. After the Open, he picked up the rumour that Elin had turned up in Turnberry and lost her temper. Clearly, the adultery had not stopped. On November 27 last year Tiger crashed his car into a fire hydrant in Orlando, Florida, while fleeing from Elin's wrath, triggering the story that transported Tiger from the sports page to the front page. As part of the mass follow-up, The Independent carried a story on December 5 by Corrigan headlined: “We all knew about Tiger's secret life.”

After he had filed his piece, the sports desk asked Corrigan politely why he had not said so earlier. Corrigan was unapologetic. There was no way he could stand up the rumour, he said – “You just don't get anywhere near him.” (Apparently, the reaction from sports desks on the tabloids was less well mannered.) Shipnuck asked himself whether it is the responsibility of a sportswriter to reveal details of an athlete's sex life. “The answer is yes, if it's affecting the game itself.” But he was disinclined to trash Tiger's reputation based solely on innuendo and third-hand gossip.

An awful truth began to sink in

One up for the gossip writers – the golf writers had been humbled. In The Daily Telegraph on December 3 Oliver Brown lamented: “The game of golf is unused to the type of salacious scrutiny that Woods's dalliances have visited on it.” An American writer, Don Friedman, considered the consequences: “Suddenly the non-golf media will be out in force, as it is in other sports.” And as it has been in cricket. It was 25 years ago that a well-known and respected cricket writer lost his job on the Daily Mail because he declined to co-operate in an exposure of Ian Botham's taste in sex and drugs and rock and roll. Among football writers, the classic case of conflict of loyalty between the specialist and his or her desk was the Daily Mirror's investigation that accused former Leeds and England manager Don Revie of attempting to fix matches. The libel action brought by Revie never came to court, but the Mirror stories had been handicapped by the reluctance of some of the paper's sports reporting staff to co-operate with the news operation. And in the dark ages before tennis and athletics embraced open professionalism, the specialist writers conspired to mask the reality of shamateurism.

Cricketers and cricket writers grew accustomed to each other's company on long tours to Australia and South Africa when they travelled by boat. John Woodcock, himself a legendary sports writer on The Times, was in Australia for a celebrated tour in 1954-55. He recalls playing a game of real tennis in Hobart with England's promising young batsman Colin Cowdrey before being rushed to hospital with a perforated duodenal ulcer. He was bedridden for three weeks and did not arrive in Adelaide until the first day of the fourth Test. The following morning Geoffrey Howard, the team manager, and Len Hutton, England's skipper, arrived in Woodcock's hotel room in a scene that Woodcock himself describes in Stephen Chalke's memoir of Howard, entitled At the Heart of English Cricket.

‘ “Where are you spending the day?” they asked Woodcock.
“In the press box.”
“No you're not. You'll come and spend it with us.”
“I wouldn't dream of it.”
“Yes you will.”
In the event, I spent the rest of the match in the England dressing room. I was of an age with the players. I'd sailed with them, so that many of them were close friends by then. It's not a match or a gesture I shall ever forget. It wouldn't happen now. ’

Chalke's book contains a photograph of Woodcock in the dressing room cheering England's five-wicket victory, which also won them the Ashes.

Woodcock argues that it would not happen now because saturation coverage on television means the audience has already seen the cricket and is curious about the cricketers. The most compelling example was Ian Botham's spectacular lifestyle. His appetite for drink was gargantuan; as a young man, he liked to smoke pot, and he was susceptible to the charms of pretty young women – all great grist to the tabloid mill. Although the cricket writers who toured with him knew all of this, they concentrated on Botham's remarkable performances on the field rather than off it. But the story was too good to keep the lid on it, especially after Botham started to produce a column for The Sun. This was seen by its rivals as a diversion, and The Mail on Sunday decided they must have the story of Botham and his recreational drugs. The Sunday paper asked the Daily Mail cricket correspondent, who was with the team in New Zealand and Pakistan in 1983-84, to help with the story. This was Peter Smith, who was popular with both the players and his colleagues but declined to get involved with the investigation. Smith's lack of enthusiasm so rankled with the executive who inspired The Mail on Sunday story that when he transferred to the Daily Mail a few years later, Smith was fired.

Smith went on to work for the Test and County Cricket Board as the liaison man between the players and the writers. He was good at his job and after Smith's death the Cricket Writers' Club remembered him with a trophy in his name, awarded annually for an outstanding contribution to cricket. (Botham's libel action against The Mail on Sunday was settled in 1986 after he had admitted smoking cannabis some years earlier. Each side paid its own costs.)

His frankness was disarming

Many sports reporters, such as Peter Smith, have felt a greater loyalty to the people they wrote about than to the people they wrote for, though only a few were willing to confess to it. One who has is Ken Jones, who had earned a living as a professional footballer until an injury ended his career. He joined the Daily Mirror in 1958 and before long established a reputation for writing about football in a way that was fond as well as informed. At that time, Don Revie was Mr Big in football, first at Leeds and then as England coach. He was simultaneously a useful contact and a control freak. Jones recalls a match when an envelope containing cash was left by Revie's club at each seat in the press box. Jones and some others gave it back; some did not. Revie believed that everyone had a price.

Bob Stokoe, who became famous as the manager of Sunderland from the Second Division when they won the FA Cup in 1973, was also a firm friend of Jones's. They knew each other well enough for Stokoe to reveal to Jones that Revie had offered a bribe to Wolverhampton Wanderers to lose a game to Leeds in 1973. This was not an isolated case apparently, and the Daily Mirror published a damaging investigation accusing Revie of offering bribes. Years later, Jones wrote an obituary of Stokoe in which he told how, although he had by then transferred to the Sunday Mirror, he had been asked to assist the reporters on the Mirror story. In The Independent on February 5, 2004, Jones wrote: “I was obliged to give the investigators some time but I chose not to pass on some of the things I had been told.” Now he adds: “How would you prove it?” but the Mirror's investigators, led by Richard Stott, were unforgiving. When Jones's loyalties had been divided between friends and employer, he decided he owed more to his friends than to his colleagues. (When John Terry's opportunistic adultery was exposed in February, however, none of his admirers could do him any favours. No less than five of his previous dalliances had already been charted in the red-tops.)

These clashes of loyalties are less likely to trouble today's sports writers. Class is now defined by money and Tiger is in a different class than the writers. This was not always so. When Peter Smith and Ken Jones were travelling with England teams they were earning more than the players. “At the end of every tour, the press threw a party for the players,” says Jones. Not any longer. Few football writers will earn in a lifetime what England captain John Terry earns in a year. Most star players now see journalists only because they have been instructed to. It has become a sterile environment. But the principal reason for fewer conflicts of loyalty is a radical change in the culture of journalism. During the Second World War and for 15 to 20 years afterwards the press regarded itself as the fourth estate of the realm. The relationship between newspapers and “the authorities” was not routinely adversarial. Foreign reporters on Kemsley Newspapers, for example, where Ian Fleming – creator of James Bond – was foreign editor, willingly debriefed the security services over lunch at the Travellers' Club. Golf and cricket writers were echoing a relationship that had been taken for granted by their editors.

The culture began to change in the 1960s, first on the posh Sundays. A new generation of journalists, many arriving from universities, insisted that their first loyalty must be to the paper, and the culture spread slowly to sports departments. Golf was the last sport to have its private relationship exposed to public scrutiny. In a Sports Illustrated symposium on the aftermath of Tiger, a writer named Gareth Evans said: “I think the golf press will have to take it up a notch in the same way the business media did [in the U.S.] after bad whiffs from Enron, WorldCom and Madoff.” They will be forced to do so by scurrilous websites that are rejoicing in the discovery that the market for celebrity scuttlebutt is as strong on the golf course as in Hollywood studios.

Tiger! Tiger! Burning less brightly now. What have you wrought?