WHILE the new recruits to the ranks of professional golf get ever-younger, it might be as well to keep the lid on the hysteria for a while until the dust settles and the hormones sort themselves out.
Without wishing to put a damper on the welcome parties for the likes of Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee and company, it should be borne in mind that they're all so young they haven't been around long enough to know what can happen in the game when all seems
to be going swimmingly. Once the gut-wrenching experience of missing the unmissable has ceased to come as a complete shock and has developed into a brooding fear which will not go away, then perhaps it will be time to take stock and see how things are progressing.
As far as I've been able to make out in the process of negotiating a long and largely miserable golfing life, putting, for instance, begins as a carefree part of the game which is regarded as an undramatic, faintly boring and almost incidental requirement in a sport where the fun comes from pouring your all into belting the ball. As a result of this attitude, pressure on the putting is not the factor it will become in due course and because this is so, more putts tend to be holed. They are holed because the young golfer expects them to be holed and when they don't go in they're treated with a sort of so-what? reaction and it's up and away to the next big drive.
The longer the golfer sticks at it, the more sensitive he or she is inclined to become to the slings and arrows which whine about once the golfing bug gets into its stride. Consider, for instance, the Spaniard, Sergio Garcia. As a lad, full of juice and optimism, he could hardly miss on the greens. Every putt was struck firmly and with total authority. Failure was not contemplated and on the rare occasions on which it turned up, it was dismissed immediately as an aberration which had nothing to do with him and, rest assured, would never happen again. For years now, Sergio, has been at the head-scratching stage. He's acknowledged by the experts as one of the finest strikers of a golf ball through the green, but the putts are no longer in the bag as soon as he has lined them up. He's beginning to evoke shades of Tom Watson, post-1984, when the light was beginning to go and the putting stroke no longer quite so dependable. In Watson's case, however, five Open championships, a US Open and two US Masters had been secured already and he was in his mid-30s. Garcia has yet to notch the major title he has seemed certain to win since he started out and he's now 29.
I once played in a pro-am with England's Peter Townsend, who turned professional in 1966 and, with a glittering amateur career, complete with Walker Cup honours, behind him, looked set to make a significant impact and there's little doubt that if he'd carried on as he'd started, he would have. However, Townsend's troubles came along early in his professional life. Apparently, he felt it necessary to change the swing that had brought him so much success in the amateur game and the tampering did him no good at all. He later recovered sufficiently to win in Europe, South America, Africa and Australia and he was twice selected for Ryder Cup duty. By the time I played with him, however, his putting had become something of an ordeal for him and he gave the impression of being a troubled, though unfailingly charming, man.
A curious feature of golf at club level is how many mature players who have played to reasonable handicaps retain an ability to putt well. I've often wondered why this should be, when the putting can go so completely in the case of so many older professionals. It's probably something to do with prolonged exposure to tournament strain, though it's difficult to think of anything much more straining than the this-for-the-£1 moment in the sweep when tempers are fraying and nerve-ends twanging. While I do not have the good fortune to belong to the happy band of good putters, I play with some of them from time to time and it can be impressive. When I was a boy, I often had the pleasure of playing with a past-captain who was in his 90s at the time. He usually confined himself to playing nine holes, but it was always something of a sprint and he set a hot pace. The years had taken their toll on his long game, but he made the most of what he had with relentless accuracy. He was rarely in the rough and when he was he became distinctly irritated about it. His pitching and putting were uncanny. He never seemed to three-putt, which probably had something to do with the fact that he laid so many pitches stone-dead.
The outcome of this was that he usually contrived to take care of the opposition over the nine holes with a combination of near-par scoring and the exhaustion brought on by the sheer speed of it all.
The full article contains 899 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
