I’m not a king, says Kaymer after airport photo

Kaymer sitting on the airport floor after his big win. Picture: Twitter

The German was photographed in Jacksonville airport charging his iPhone just hours after winning the game’s so-called fifth major under a fortnight ago, but is wondering how it could cause any fuss.

It was put to him at Wentworth yesterday that his sponsors were “unhappy” about the matter, but Kaymer said he couldn’t understand why that would be the case. “Why are they not happy?” asked the 2010 US PGA champion. “They should be happy because it’s just the way I am.”

Kaymer said he’d needed to find somewhere to charge his phone after he and his fellow passengers had been taken off a plane bound for Dallas due to bad weather.

“We were together on the plane for one hour,” he added. “I’d got a lot of text messages and I wanted to talk to some people and so I needed to charge my phone. I don’t really know what the problem is sitting on the floor – I’m not a king.”

Kaymer laughed when it was suggested that Jacksonville airport was hardly the type of place that had VIP lounges. “Yeah, it is Starbucks, Chipotle and that’s about it,” he pointed out.

On golf matters, the man who retained the Ryder Cup for Europe at Medinah insisted a decision to remodel his swing has made him a better player than the one who reached world No 1 three years ago. “I can now hit any shot that I want to, which is important, and I didn’t believe that I couldn’t do it when I was No 1  in the world or even when I won the PGA Championship,” he said. “It was very easy for me to play golf then, but it was not satisfying. I think sometimes really simple things are difficult and we make it way too complicated. So the tough part is to think simple.

“So now I would say I’m a more complete player. But it’s very important that we don’t put it in the wrong perspective now that I should play well every week. The German national football team are going to play the World Cup in a few weeks and everybody is saying, ‘Germany should win’. That’s a good possibility, but there’s a lot of pressure that players have to handle. I think that’s what people forget sometimes. It’s not that easy.”

Next week Kaymer will visit Joachim Löw’s squad at their training camp for Brazil. “I’m sure you can always take something out of their preparation,” he said of that exciting prospect.