end, a birdie.
My feelings on this issue have always been: fair point, but as a sportsman, does one not have at least some duty to crowd-please? As long as Iâve loved golf, Iâve always loved the players who take a stadium-rock attitude out onto the course. The sporting accountants who grind out their scores with dollar signs for eyes â the Bernhard Langers, the Nick Faldos, the Padraig Harringtons, 1 the Tom Kites â have always held negligible interest for me. Iâm not all that fussed about the plodding classicists either: the Luke Donalds, the Jack Nicklauses, the Jeff Maggerts. What I want out of my pro golfers are very specific requirements:
The ability to play miraculous escape shots (yet not in a way that could fall under the unattractive heading âScramblingâ).
A classic swing (but one that works in a natural, flowing way, rather than a join-the-dots way).
The capacity to hit the ball vast distances and to be always close to, if not at, the top of the driving stats (but always with an ultimate sense of having more firepower in reserve).
The power to make vast numbers of birdies and eagles in a row (but without ever looking as if putting could be described as one of your strong points).
A constant, lingering feeling of unfulfilled promise (but with the odd, heroic, against-all-odds victory thrown in).
Am I asking too much? Maybe. Does all this make me the golfing equivalent of an aesthetic fascist? Perhaps. It also makes for frequent heartbreak as an armchair golf fan, and probably goes some way to explaining why my favourite five golfers ever â Angel Cabrera, Eduardo Romero, Fred Couples, John Daly and Sergio Garcia â have amassed, at the time of writing, the piddling total of four major championships between them.
So, now I was a pro, was I really expecting the same swashbuckling standards of myself? Well, sort of. In all my dreams about playing professional golf, Iâd always been less interested in the victories and the scores I would shoot to secure them, and more interested in the artful shots I would perform along the way. Since my life as a pro so far only amounted to two and a half holes of tournament play and an eighteen-hole pitch-and-putt tournament , it was probably too early for an attitude autopsy, but I had already noticed a significant difference in my approach to that of the pros I had met â something about it that was a little less ⦠mathematical. I had imagined that âItâs not how, itâs how manyâ was something I would leave behind upon leaving amateur golf, along with rants about extended tee times on Ladiesâ Day and snide comments about my untucked shirt. It was an ugly, mustnât-grumble kind of phrase that I associated mainly with Roy-ish types who liked to kid themselves that their manifold golfing failings â e.g. inability to hit the ball more than 198 yards, propensity to swing their sand wedge as if involved in major garden-clearing project â did not matter in the grand scheme of things. But, slightly surprisingly, pros said it too.
In the professional golf world, though, the INHIHM mantra takes on a much more serious meaning. Here, in a kill-or-go-broke environment, one could not afford to put style first. The priority was doing whatever it took to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Pros were very interested in âhow manyâ. I, on the other hand, remained a great advocate of âhowâ. When Iâd come away from the Cabbage Patch Masters, what stuck with me and pleased me was not the birdie Iâd made on the twelfth hole (reasonably struck wedge to fifteen feet, pretty good putt) but the sumptuously struck tee shot on the following hole: the one that felt like liquid velvet and flew the green by twenty yards. Similarly, if I hadnât quite revelled in my drive so much on the second hole at Stoke-by-Nayland, maybe I would have been able to get on with the
My feelings on this issue have always been: fair point, but as a sportsman, does one not have at least some duty to crowd-please? As long as Iâve loved golf, Iâve always loved the players who take a stadium-rock attitude out onto the course. The sporting accountants who grind out their scores with dollar signs for eyes â the Bernhard Langers, the Nick Faldos, the Padraig Harringtons, 1 the Tom Kites â have always held negligible interest for me. Iâm not all that fussed about the plodding classicists either: the Luke Donalds, the Jack Nicklauses, the Jeff Maggerts. What I want out of my pro golfers are very specific requirements:
The ability to play miraculous escape shots (yet not in a way that could fall under the unattractive heading âScramblingâ).
A classic swing (but one that works in a natural, flowing way, rather than a join-the-dots way).
The capacity to hit the ball vast distances and to be always close to, if not at, the top of the driving stats (but always with an ultimate sense of having more firepower in reserve).
The power to make vast numbers of birdies and eagles in a row (but without ever looking as if putting could be described as one of your strong points).
A constant, lingering feeling of unfulfilled promise (but with the odd, heroic, against-all-odds victory thrown in).
Am I asking too much? Maybe. Does all this make me the golfing equivalent of an aesthetic fascist? Perhaps. It also makes for frequent heartbreak as an armchair golf fan, and probably goes some way to explaining why my favourite five golfers ever â Angel Cabrera, Eduardo Romero, Fred Couples, John Daly and Sergio Garcia â have amassed, at the time of writing, the piddling total of four major championships between them.
So, now I was a pro, was I really expecting the same swashbuckling standards of myself? Well, sort of. In all my dreams about playing professional golf, Iâd always been less interested in the victories and the scores I would shoot to secure them, and more interested in the artful shots I would perform along the way. Since my life as a pro so far only amounted to two and a half holes of tournament play and an eighteen-hole pitch-and-putt tournament , it was probably too early for an attitude autopsy, but I had already noticed a significant difference in my approach to that of the pros I had met â something about it that was a little less ⦠mathematical. I had imagined that âItâs not how, itâs how manyâ was something I would leave behind upon leaving amateur golf, along with rants about extended tee times on Ladiesâ Day and snide comments about my untucked shirt. It was an ugly, mustnât-grumble kind of phrase that I associated mainly with Roy-ish types who liked to kid themselves that their manifold golfing failings â e.g. inability to hit the ball more than 198 yards, propensity to swing their sand wedge as if involved in major garden-clearing project â did not matter in the grand scheme of things. But, slightly surprisingly, pros said it too.
In the professional golf world, though, the INHIHM mantra takes on a much more serious meaning. Here, in a kill-or-go-broke environment, one could not afford to put style first. The priority was doing whatever it took to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Pros were very interested in âhow manyâ. I, on the other hand, remained a great advocate of âhowâ. When Iâd come away from the Cabbage Patch Masters, what stuck with me and pleased me was not the birdie Iâd made on the twelfth hole (reasonably struck wedge to fifteen feet, pretty good putt) but the sumptuously struck tee shot on the following hole: the one that felt like liquid velvet and flew the green by twenty yards. Similarly, if I hadnât quite revelled in my drive so much on the second hole at Stoke-by-Nayland, maybe I would have been able to get on with the
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