Vousden’s view on golf, life and ‘apparel’

Thought for the Day
If you can’t repair your brakes, make your horn louder

Class is permanent…
For us amateur golfers there is really only one hard and fast law in golf – you never have a day when all the elements of your game are firing at the same time. If your driving is long and straight, you can’t hit an iron to save your life; if your approaches to the green are laser-like in their accuracy, you can’t buy a putt; and if you putt like God, your bunker play or chipping is embarrassing.

On any given day you can have one, or any combination of these elements performing in a way that fills your heart with joy but they can never all work at once. It is written, and what is written cannot be overturned by man, with all his myriad imperfections. There are, as we all know, the Rules of Golf, by which we must all abide, but above even these are the Laws of Golf, which cannot be avoided. These include the fact that a birdie must always be followed by a bogey, that hazards attract and fairways repel, and that the person to whom you would least like to lose, is the one who will consistently beat you.

The exception, of course, is that 0.01% of golfers at the very top of the pile; the 50 or so deities who stride the best fairways in the world, at someone else’s expense, confident in the knowledge that just occasionally they can have it all. The most recent example was Lee Westwood in the Dubai World Championship at the end of last season, playing the final round in an astonishing 64 strokes, during which he hit every fairway and green in regulation (itself such a rarity as to deserve special commendation) en route to winning the first ever Race to Dubai. For the whole week, but on that last day in particular, Westwood had the serenity of a Buddhist monk – it was if he knew the answer to a question that all of us pose every time we step onto the first tee, namely: I wonder how I’ll play today. In his case, the answer was, almost to perfection.

In short, it’s a matter of form – that elusive measure of current ability that seems to arrive with no warning and depart just as quickly and unexpectedly. Watching Westwood in Dubai again the week before last was to watch someone who has shaken off the difficulties posed by a new set of irons, which he almost immediately junked, and a driver in Qatar that sent the ball hard left. Despite this, in his first three events of this year, Westwood has missed the cut, before finishing third and runner-up and it is clear that the form which took him to top of the heap in Europe has survived his winter break.

But I wonder, despite the fact that he routinely climbs pinnacles of achievement while we can only watch in open-mouthed admiration from the foothills, if he has the same anxiety that afflicts the rest of us when we are playing well – namely, the fear that it will disappear in an instant. I know that on those few occasions when I am playing well; when the rhythm and timing are both there, and the ball consistently takes off in the direction, and for the distance, which I had been aiming, I worry. I know it won’t last, and I’m fearful of trying anything even slightly different, lest it should upset the Ju-Ju, or karma, or whatever the heck it is that has blessed me on this particular day.

Bearing in mind Westwood’s history, when he went from European number one into a slump that lasted several years, do you think those same doubts assail his apparently unflappable calm?

Dress sense
Golf, to non-believers, frequently suffers with an image problem and it is not too difficult to see why – we dress in odd, often outlandish clothes, stick rigidly to old-fashioned values of decency and respect for the rules and, let’s face it, too many golf clubs still remain the preferred asylum of nouveau riche arrivistes who look down on the rest of the world, believing themselves to be somehow morally superior to the majority.

And then there’s the language we use. I have written before about the limpet-like enthusiasm with which we cling to outdated terms, such as our insistence on referring to ‘lady’ rather than ‘women’ golfers but there’s another example of this linguistic snobbery that increasingly irks, and that is, our insistence (or rather, the insistence of manufacturers) in describing the clothes we wear as ‘apparel’.

When did this bizarre practice start and, more importantly, how can we rise as one and put an end to it? Just imagine you bumped into a friend in town wearing a new outfit, and you asked, in admiration, where they bought the new clobber. If they replied: ‘I got this fetching apparel in Debenhams’ you would, quite rightly, disown them and walk away without another word.

It’s time we did the same to all the clothing manufacturers, and Nike is a particularly persistent offender, and refuse to buy their gear for as long as they persist in calling it ‘golf apparel’.

Quote of the week
It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.
Robert Lynd