A row has blown up in the United States that demonstrates the extraordinary power and influence commanded by Tiger Woods. It is all to do with an ill-judged remark made by a television commentator on the Golf Channel last week, as a result of which the commentator has been suspended.

The row illustrates how sensitive some people are about race in the US and particularly about Woods, even when the world No 1 is not, and one cannot help wondering whether the Golf Channel has not overreacted in its suspension of its commentator more for commercial reasons than any other.

First, the facts. On Friday Kelly Tilghman and Nick Faldo, her fellow commentator, were talking on air during the Mercedes-Benz Championship from Hawaii about how young rivals of Woods might challenge him. “We just have to gang up on him,” Faldo said. Tilghman added: “Lynch him in a back alley.”

Those six words started a firestorm in the US and two days later Tilghman apologised on air for them. Subsequently, Woods said that he accepted her apology and had no issues with her. “Tiger and Kelly are friends and Tiger has a great deal of respect for Kelly,” Mark Steinberg, Woods’s agent, said in a statement. “Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill intent in her comments. This story is a nonissue in our eyes. Case closed.”

It was not closed as far as the Golf Channel was concerned, however. Yesterday it issued a statement regretting the “poorly chosen remark” and apologising to anyone who was offended. “There is simply no place on our network for offensive language like this,” the statement said. “While we believe Kelly’s choice of words were inadvertent and that she did not intend them in an offensive manner, the words were hurtful and grossly inappropriate. Consequently we have decided to suspend Kelly for two weeks, effective immediately.”

Behind this statement is the Golf Channel’s concern that it may lose advertisers if it is perceived as being racist.

In all this there is in this an echo of a row involving Fuzzy Zoeller and Woods in 1997, when Zoeller made what were perceived as racist remarks about what Woods would serve at the next champion’s dinner at the Masters. Woods took offence and would not accept an apology from Zoeller, who is said to have lost a lot of money from businesses that withdrew their sponsorship of him.

The difference between that row and this one is that Woods knows how a tongue can slip. After a recent Masters he described himself as “putting like a spaz [spastic]”, a word that does not have the same resonance in the US as in countries such as Britain. Woods had to apologise for this rare mistake.