YET again it has taken a golfer to remind the world that there is still a thing called sportsmanship.

Brian Davis will forever be known as the honest guy who threw away the chance of a first-ever win on the American tour, but won a million admirers.

Declaring a two-shot penalty on himself for inadvertently moving a loose impediment in a bunker, Davis deserves to be given some sort of award anyway, for once again proving his sport has a code of conduct that others should follow.

Footballers steal inches at throw-ins, rugby players can be smeared in fake blood, cyclists are forever found to have been taking drugs, but golfers have it drilled into them from picking up a club, that in this game cheats do not prosper and will not be tolerated.

Well done Brian Davis for upholding the traditions, and I hope your first win is not far away as consolation.

TO ME the Ashes means bat and ball, baggy green caps and a little urn.

However, the fall out from Iceland’s disruptive volcano has given the word new meaning.

When can we take to the skies again? Does this mean the World Cup might not happen? What about our summer holidays? Is Gordon Brown to blame?

Hovercraft services, ocean going liners, submarines, even pedalos are going to come in handy and their owners are going to make a mint.

Men – and women – will go to desperate lengths to get from A to B.

I remember a group of mad jocks hiring a submarine to get to the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina.

Once the chaps had seen a few of the South American beauties that inhabited Cordoba they decided to abandon the return voyage and have never been seen in Roxburghshire ever again!

My own horror stories include a trip to the UEFA Cup Final in Copenhagen in 2000 when Sabena went on strike, and having got to Brussels, I was stranded and had to find a way of completing the journey via a train ride through Belgium and Germany and a ferry from Hamburg.

As this was pre-Euro I had no local currency and had nothing to eat or drink until arrival in Denmark. Worse I was informed within 10 minutes of checking into the hotel that there had been a riot involving Arsenal and Galatasaray fans and I rapidly became a news reporter before the game had even started.

You guessed it, the match was an awful 0-0 and then I had to find a way home.

Even worse was the time I flew into England twice in the space of 12 hours!

A monsoon caused the cancellation of a flight from Taipei, where I’d been covering a ladies golf tournament, meaning I had to go straight to a UEFA cup-tie in Kaiserslautern (Germany) which had been brought forward 24 hours – without coming home first.

Over the next 32 hours I stopped off in places like Manila and Delhi and finally got into Heathrow at 12 noon on the day of the game just in time to catch a flight to Frankfurt, from where I caught a train to Paris which fortuitously stopped in Kaiserslautern.

Getting there at 6.45pm (local time) I was on YTV’s Calendar programme 30 minutes later, and commentated live on the game, though co-commentator Ian St John swears I nodded off at one point.

To round off the trip of a lifetime I flew back with the Sheffield Wednesday team immediately after the game, arriving at East Midlands bang on midnight.

So to all frustrated travellers at the moment, you have my deepest sympathy.

PRONUNCIATION is something I’ve always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about.

Admittedly I once called a Scottish football team Burnt Island when it should have been Burntisland (one word) but I’ll put that down to youthful ignorance.

I go to great lengths to discover how foreign players like to have their names pronounced, for example Zeeco not Syco, as Jack Charlton once called the great Brazilian Zico, or Ed de Hoy, the Dutch goalkeeper who wasn’t too taken with Archie McPherson’s Ed de Goo-i.

I was slightly horrified at the weekend to hear a Five Live presenter’s pathetic attempts to run through the draw for the next round of the Rugby League Challenge Cup.

He had no idea what the KR stood for in Hull, couldn’t make his mind up between Lay, Lee or Leaf, and as for Lezignan, well I can only assume he’s never been taught French at school judging by reference to Les Ignan.

Best of all was a side-splitting version of the Hull City striker Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink who has become Jonny Vinegar of Hasselbank!

The one that really does my head in is people referring to pronounciation. There isn’t such a word. It’s pronunciation. If we can’t get that right what chance do we have with names?