Police refused him entry to the course shortly before he was due to tee off for the first round, according Woods' imminent arrival a level of security more appropriate for an American president.
Turner went ballistic, marching off to the media room to make his feelings plain. Veteran golf writer Brian Doherty recalls with a chuckle that "from every quote I left out one word". Turner then laid an official complaint.
Worse was to come. Stepping over a rope on to the practice putting green, he was asked to return and enter the area through the gate. "Don't be so bloody silly," he told security guards, three of whom responded by manhandling and frogmarching him off.
"In 18 years of professional golf, I don't think I've ever played in a tournament where players have been treated worse than they have this week," he told the Herald.
"I've never been more insulted ... If they want to have [Woods] here for an exhibition match, that's fine. But if you're going to have him here for a tournament then the other guys have to be [treated] the same."
Turner's comments - some would call them outbursts - did not conspicuously endear him to the crowds. One spectator castigated Turner from the side of the fairway, calling on him to "pull your finger out and stop moaning". The golfer's response ("Which finger? This one?" he shot back, with a gesture that Tiger Woods would call flipping the bird) was nothing if not witty. But those who emerged from the weekend thinking that Turner had called it wrong doubtless remained unimpressed.
The man himself was this week philosophical if unrepentant. His only regret was that he had played at all.
"If you're going to get involved in the politics of something, then you find yourself fighting on three different fronts. Frankly the game's difficult enough when you've got your entire focus on the job at hand."
Suggestions seeped from the locker room that Turner was not alone in his views, even if he was alone in expressing them. His complaints about the effect of the Tiger Woods circus on players trying to earn their daily bread reportedly earned him a round of high-fives from other players, out of sight of the television cameras.
"You get a lot of guys saying: 'Bloody good on you'," he said this week. "But that's always true. Golfers are acutely aware of being polite. There's a lot of muttering and not much said. A lot of the guys think it's too much trouble, that it's better to keep your head down and put up with it."
So why doesn't Turner do the same? Call it genetic predisposition - or the nature of nurture. Speaking up, even (or especially) when others would rather they shut up, is something of a Turner family tradition.
The Turners are arguably the nation's leading sporting family. The three brothers, Brian, aged 57, Glenn, 53, and Greg (at 38, the baby of the family), have all represented their country (at hockey, cricket and golf respectively), the last two with distinction. Yet none of them has conformed to our expectation of sporting (or any) heroes that they be retiring, modest, quiet achievers. They'll tell you their parents - Alf and Audrey - brought them up to speak up and that's what they've always done.
That attitude, and the robust defence of their right to hold it, runs like a golden thread through their various careers. Brian Turner is these days more famous as Greg's caddie than as a hockey player. And he's long been a distinguished poet and an opinionated columnist for South Island newspapers. He told the Listener as far back as 1987 that he was argumentative even at school and learned early that speaking up often meant standing alone.
"I worked out early on that there was a vast difference between what people said they thought and what they actually thought. Glenn and I always managed to rub administrators up the wrong way. We've been forthright and I think they saw it as uncooperative."
This week, speaking from his home in Oturehua in Central Otago, Brian made it plain he hadn't changed that view and that he remained perplexed about the flak the boys received for shooting straight.
"Most of my opinions and Greg's have been expressed as a result of being invited as a newspaper columnist and Glenn has written a few things in collaboration with me in which he said a few things he wanted to say.
"So what is it about New Zealand and New Zealanders that objects to the fact that people express their opinions, that deems it offensive? I think that tells you more about New Zealand and New Zealanders than it does about us.
"We've got a requirement in this country to be positive about things and that has the effect of suppressing dissent, because if you do quibble about some aspects of something in the interests of trying to refine and improve it you are immediately said to be being niggardly and negative."
Brian Turner says the family tradition of dissent came from his upbringing. The Turner boys are solid Central Otago working-class stock - his father was a bicycle mechanic and a taxi driver and drove a bread truck for 30 years.
"We were always brought up to debate issues and not mealy-mouth them," he says. "If we disagreed, you argued your point.
"There has always been a marked absence in New Zealand of intelligent discourse and we have always attempted to pursue some of that. [New Zealanders] are a lily-livered lot; we shy away from candid talk and there's a tradition of being thankful and shutting up."
Glenn Turner, who was sacked as New Zealand cricket coach after a long-running battle with New Zealand Cricket's former chief executive, Chris Doig, and is now the coach of the Otago side, has the same memory of his home life.
"Our father always taught us to question things and I'm rather glad that he did. He enjoyed debating things and quite often he would take a contrary view to see what would happen.
"There are people who use systems to their benefit and people who try to improve them and I think we come into the latter. We've always thought it was healthy to question, to challenge."
It's no coincidence that Glenn Turner should have married a woman who went on to become Mayor of Dunedin and tread on a few establishment toes in that city.
Sukhi Turner, who says she married Glenn "because he was someone who had the courage of his convictions", says she was sickened by the "obsequious" response to Tiger Woods' presence.
"It's quite demeaning. We worship money and that's quite cringe-making. Where's the pride? We need to stand up and be ourselves. I think some of the older values that the pioneers had would go a long way towards fixing a few of those ideas."
Such an approach makes enemies, but, perhaps predictably, the Turners take the view that the offended need to look to themselves for the source of their offence. In his Listener piece this month, perhaps in hindsight, Greg wrote that "one of the most damning reputations to have in New Zealand is of being 'a bit too big for your boots'.
"If there is a downside to this attitude, I suspect it is that we are tougher on our own than those from elsewhere. We admire the 'confrontational cockiness' of the Australians but won't accept it from our own."
Speaking from his Queenstown home this week after returning from a camping trip he'd taken to get away from the fuss, he says: "I grew up in a different environment from Glenn and Brian - I've always said I haven't got two brothers, I've got three fathers. But certainly, whenever the family was together some pretty healthy debate went on.
"I've always enjoyed discussing things with people and felt like the best way to develop an opinion was to throw something out there and get on with having to defend it or have your mind changed.
"We've always been prepared to discuss issues and debate them. If someone can convince me, I'm more than happy to change my opinion and so are the others.
"But honesty is something that's not always admired, so there is a cost. I'm more aware of that now and less concerned about it. If someone is concerned about my having an opinion that's different from theirs, that's more their problem than it is mine."
Greg Turner's honesty does earn him the admiration of the golfing press and not just because he makes good copy. The Herald's sports editor, David Leggat, who covered the Open, says the golfer is a "stubborn person who sees things in black and white, but he doesn't just give trite answers to questions. He thinks about what he's saying".
Golf writer Brian Doherty agrees. "I've always admired him because you always knew where you stood with him," he says. "It was always a case of, if you don't like the answer, don't ask the question."
But the praise is mixed. Outspoken radio sports talkback host Murray Deaker says he had had a great time at the golf. "It was a chance to see the world's greatest sportsman in New Zealand, a superstar as colourful, as full of charisma, as I've ever seen, and I found it refreshing and memorable."
And he deplores the fact that Greg, "who has made a bloody good living out of golf", should purport to stand up for the hard-up, hard-done-by fans.
"It's okay for him to earn millions but all the Turners talk socialist all the time.
"Greg hasn't said one thing positive about the Open. He had a good point to make - that the ticket prices were far too high - but it seems sad that after he had done that that he became the focus.
"I admire Greg Turner because he calls it the way he sees it. But in this case I think he's overshot the mark and I think he did the Open a huge amount of damage."
But Turner wonders how a man who makes his living analysing and criticising sport and its practitioners can simultaneously admire and deplore outspokenness.
"You can't admire somebody for speaking their mind and then get upset if that has an effect," he says.
As for the money, Greg almost audibly shrugs at Deaker's accusation that he's a "couch socialist".
"If you haven't been successful you're accused of being envious; if you have you're accused of hypocrisy.
"I've been very fortunate. I've been paid a lot more money than is reasonable for doing something as meaningless as hitting a golf ball around a field, but what do I do? I'm a golfer.
"That doesn't mean I don't have opinions. I don't expect everyone to agree with me all the time, but if you don't express it and discuss it, nobody goes anywhere, do they?"
Perhaps the final word should belong to the Turner boys' veteran critic, their mother, Audrey, whose heart swelled with maternal pride as Greg got into the off-course rough.
"I was proud of him," she says, "and I was disappointed that some of the others didn't speak up too. The boys were always taught to speak up for themselves but they had listen to everyone else's view. You have to be fair."
Full coverage: NZ Golf Open 2002
Off the course: news related to the NZ Open
