AS SUNDAY mornings go, yesterday's was fairly standard until the telephone rang. It so happened that when the call came I was sitting beside the phone staring glumly at the laptop and awaiting the arrival of the muse, which is becoming later by the week.
On picking up the receiver, I heard a confused noise of the kind which often heralds intelligence being beamed from Karachi or some such distant place. Suddenly, however, it dawned on me that I knew one of the voices. I ventured a weak hallo, but was
completely ignored. As far as I could gather, the voice was discussing a recent cruise and the story was just picking up pace when I snapped out of it, realised I was listening in to a conversation which was none of my business and hung up.
I was intrigued, however, and once I'd recovered a degree of composure, rang the owner of the voice to see what was going on and was told, in the fullness of time, that the call must have been made inadvertently on a mobile phone which had presumably been dropped, kicked or sat upon in such a way as to make it ring me up. Why, having done this, it was then unable to make my reply audible to its owner, I don't know, but then I suppose the spot where it had been dropped, kicked or sat upon might not have been in the vicinity of the owner when the call went through. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was just another indication that technology is getting above itself. When mobiles begin to call people, unbidden and whenever the fancy takes them, things have gone too far.
I've felt there's been a drift this way for some time and the situation is particularly dodgy in the field of putters. Putting has never been a strong point of mine, but I've had my moments and they've always been with putters which have seen service. They've not all been old, but they've been seasoned. I've never putted well with putters which are regarded as state of the art. The Ping putters which were pounced on by one and all when they first came on the scene and are regarded as classics to this day, did nothing for me. I bought one, but a round over the King's Course at Gleneagles Hotel drove me to the brink of breakdown and I'd swapped it for an old mallet before the bus was half-way home.
One of the big sellers of recent years has been the Odyssey line and I was cajoled into buying one, which, incidentally, became only the second brand-new putter – after the Ping – I've ever bought. The purchase was made after the professional had made one of the most impassioned sales pitches in the history of the game. He'd used one in a competition and, as he put it, in a voice scarcely his own: "I couldn't miss." This man is not given to hysterical outbursts and I found his crazed enthusiasm strangely moving.
I was also moved by what followed. The honeymoon was short-lived and thoroughly unnerving. Curiously, the putter felt extremely useful and I've no doubt that in more capable hands than mine it might have produced spectacular results. As it was, I'd have been as well putting with a loofah. I told the professional, who was so taken aback, he immediately cut an inch off the putter. It had been bad before, but it was now appalling. These days, I keep it in the dark with all the other offenders and bring it out every now and again, just to see if it has turned over a new leaf. Fat chance.
It was against this background that I finished the year 2007 putting with a hickory-shafted putter with a wry-necked gem-like head from Anderson of Perth. This brought such an improvement that with the coming of the season's end and all the hollow-tining and inconsistencies which make life on the greens difficult at that time of year, I decided to rest the hickory and have my bad times with one of the other failed putters which could go ape if it liked and it wouldn't bother me one whit.
This way, I reasoned, my confidence in the hickory would remain unshaken until the balmy days of summer swanned in. There's the rub. The summer is about to fade away and there has been a decided absence of balmy days. The hickory has remained unused – until now. Recently, I was obliged to square up to the fact that if the old putter was going to get a run before Hogmanay, now was the time.
By way of tuning it up, I took it to the practice green and was astonished to find the ball coming off the face sweetly and rolling in that free, flowing way a putt does when truly struck. This seemed too good to be true, and it was. Since that blissful session, I've hardly sunk anything worth sinking and I'm missing from inches. However, the putter's back in action now whether it likes it or not and if it thinks it's getting another winter off, it's got another think coming.
The full article contains 886 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
