I think battering is an exaggeration..it clearly wasn't that violent or significant or they wouldn't have played together and joked about it the next week against Barca (if you batter someone about the head with a golf club they're rarely fit to play a football match ..let alone completely un scared by it)...And I'd say option a) carrying on a affair whilst married with twins, with the recent ex and current mother of your best mates child is worse than temporarily being hot headed and rather lightly hitting someone with a golf club whilst wound up
Plus he does lots of selfless work for charity ...he's clearly a nicer person than Terry regardless of his often stupid anger problems really. When you watch interviews with some of these people we assume are cnuts it's fairly easy to see how decent some of them really are in actual life....Drogba for example came across brilliantly in an interview I watched on italian TV before the CL final, where he praised us and several adversaries as well as being very humble so it doesn't surprise me at all to find out he has a Foundation too...John Terry Charity search results on the other hand comes up with one article about a visit he paid to Cancer research on behalf of the England Team for the Bobby More Foundation...the most basic of basic deeds the England captain should expect to do.
But to be really honest, none of us know either of these people well enough to make a proper judgement. Terry just seems like far more of a selfish, idiotic twat