By his own admission, Rory Sabbatini has a devilish streak. Ask him to list the craziest things he has done and he mentions Nascar racing, smashing windows and the day he painted a dog white. He was only a kid, messing about at home, when he so discoloured the rottweiler that it had to be shaved. “I’m not going to deny it,” he says. “I’m a trouble-starter, always have been.” Tiger Woods would attest to that. As would Ben Crane, the snail-like player he once left behind in disgust; Nick Faldo, about whom he is scathing; and the 25% of PGA Tour professionals who say they are uncomfortable in his company.

A snappy dresser with biting opinions who resembles nothing so much as South Africa’s answer to Ian Poulter, the world No 11 is the rashest, brashest, most controversial figure in golf, and no less likeable for that. He attributes who he is to where he comes from. Although he was born in South Africa, his mother is half-Irish, half-Scottish, and his father Italian. “There is a lot of hot blood flowing through me, a lot of passion,” says Sabbatini, who played for Great Britain & Ireland in the 1998 Palmer Cup, an annual match between collegiate players from either side of the Atlantic.

He graduated from the University of Arizona, married an American and settled in Texas. He plans to become a US citizen, but his childhood in Durban, the last British outpost of South Africa, shaped his personality. “I love English humour,” he says. “I grew up watching Monty Python and Blackadder. I have a lot of sarcasm, a lot of dry, snide remarks that get taken the wrong way. Even my wife still struggles with it.” He and Amy are quite a couple, both fiery and forthright, as demonstrated by the self-made T-shirts on which she wears slogans supporting her husband. Both have an extravagant dress sense. Rory refuses to reveal how much he spends on clothes, for fear that his accountant will kill him. “If someone comes up to me and asks if I’m a golfer, that’s probably the worst thing they could say.” The parallel with Poulter is obvious: flashy, full of confidence and willing to say what others shy from. By attracting attention with their thoughts and threads, they put themselves under pressure to perform. “I’ve never stood naked behind my golf bag, though,” says Sabbatini. “I don’t have enough guts for that.”

Long before Poulter declared that golf would be reduced to a battle between him and Woods, Sabbatini had become notorious for describing Tiger as “more beatable than ever”. It was, in retrospect, not the most prescient observation, but as criminal offences go, it was hardly up there with the Great Train Robbery. For the man who was runner-up at last year’s Masters, planning to take a step further was only natural. “Lick the lollipop of mediocrity once, and you’ll suck forever. Would you raise your kids to believe they can only be No 2, and can never be No 1? If you limit your potential once, there is a danger it will become a habit. You can’t do that. You have to strive continually to be the best.”

Sabbatini, though, has been crucified for the comments, which are repeated to him on each occasion that he comes up short. Like Poulter and Stephen Ames, the 31-year-old has discovered that, for as long as the game bows and scrapes before its greatest player, too much ambition is frowned upon. “Tiger’s untouchable, apparently, a protected species,” he says. “I guess it’s like the migratory eagle that [Nationwide Tour professional] Tripp Isenhour shot. If you take aim, you will be prosecuted. He is on a pedestal, unfortunately. You can’t even talk about him.”

Sabbatini set more tongues wagging in December when he withdrew from Woods’s tournament, the Target World Challenge, after three rounds. Woods was unhappy with the explanation – shin splints and “personal reasons” – and vowed to get to the bottom of it. “I’ve had no need to explain myself to him. If anything, my responsibility was to Target, not Tiger. They’re the ones who put up the money, not the Tiger Woods Foundation.”

Woods leads the list of people Sabbatini has rubbed up the wrong way. A quarter of players polled by Sports Illustrated voted him the man they least enjoyed playing with. “When it comes to making other players uncomfortable, Tiger probably leads the field,” he insists. “We’re out there competing. It’s the nature of the beast. I’m not out there to be anyone else’s cheerleader. I’m out there to do my job. At least with me, people know where they stand. There are never any grey areas.” He has no time for Faldo, who said after the Crane incident that if he were ever to be paired with the South African, he would play slowly on purpose. At the 2006 Players Championship the two were joined by Camillo Villegas and soon found themselves on the clock. “I’ve never had much respect for Nick Faldo,” Sabbatini says. “I’ve witnessed with my own eyes some other things that he has done, and when it comes to integrity as a professional sportsman, I don’t see him as one of the leaders. It’s quite impactful when a young member of the Tour looks at me after two holes and says, ‘Man, it doesn’t matter how successful I become, I never want to be like that guy’.”

Sabbatini’s heroes are not golfers. Another of his boyhood passions, Formula One, led him to grow up idolising Ayrton Senna, and he is intrigued to hear of comparisons between Woods and Lewis Hamilton. “I don’t know if golf is as hard as driving F1 cars. If you swing too fast, you’re not going to kill yourself. If you make a corner too fast, you are probably dead.”

He has a need for speed, even in his RV motor-home, which doubles as his home on the PGA Tour. He and more than 20 other families make up a community who wave to each other on the road, and when their buses have been parked on site, gather around a barbecue in the evenings. One of their friends in that group is John Daly, whose recent troubles have saddened Sabbatini. “He is a great guy who will spend hours and hours signing autographs, but his biggest downfall is that he cares too much what people think. It eats away at him more than people realise, and that’s where the downward spirals come from.”

Sabbatini doesn’t have that problem. In a sport too often paralysed by diplomats who all look the same, he is a breath of fresh air, an entertainer, but most of all a thick-skinned competitor with a mind of his own. And if that has landed him in trouble off the course, it could turn out to be his biggest asset on it.

Don’t mess with the trouble and strife

- Rory Sabbatini takes his wife Amy and their infant son on tour with him in a luxury motor-home, and Amy is certainly not afraid to make her presence felt. After he was warned for slow play in 2006, she created a T-shirt with the words ‘KEEP UP!’ on the front and wore it on the course the next day. She also wore a T-shirt displaying the words, ‘Stoopid Amerikan’, after Paul Casey’s antiAmerican comments following the 2004 Ryder Cup

- She is not the only sports wife with a ‘forceful personality’. When Jeff Tarango was defaulted by umpire Bruno Rebeuh at Wimbledon in 1995, Tarango’s French wife Benedicte walked up to Rebeuh and slapped him twice in the face. Tarango was fined $63,000 and banned for two Grand Slam tournaments, including the following year’s Wimbledon

- After baseball player Kris Benson was traded from the New York Mets to Baltimore Orioles, his wife Anna said: ‘I can’t believe they traded him for a bag of balls,’ referring to Jorge Julio and John Maine, the pitchers the Mets received in return. The fragrant Anna, who has her own reality TV show, an internet poker site and a 34DD chest, told her husband – in public – that if she ever finds out he has cheated on her, she will sleep with every one of his teammates

- Joe Bugner’s wife Marlene was more than just a pretty face – she was the driving force behind his career and he described her as his business manager, partner and minder. Anybody who wanted a piece of Bugner, or who wanted to put a business proposal to him, had to get past Marlene. She helped him during his brief foray into acting and masterminded an ill-fated vineyard venture