Thought for the Day
Any book described as a classic is often cited but never read
Why do we put ourselves through this torture?
There are two elements of golf and they are completely contradictory. First is swinging the club and all of us, on occasion at least, are able to do it with a relative degree of competence.
And then there’s putting.
Whereas launching the ball from the tee or stroking a crisp iron to a distant green require strength, speed, power and athleticism, putting’s the opposite. It is predicated on touch, sensitivity and finesse. Even more importantly, wielding the flat stick examines your nerve and psyche like no other part of the game – with the possible exception of hitting a bunker shot from a poached egg lie to a pin cut tight to a water hazard; sorry, penalty area.
It is no coincidence that the roots of that worst of all golfing ailments, the yips, are buried deep in the psyche, that dark and forbidding cavern into which even the most experienced psychiatrist would hesitate to venture. And yips only occur on the green – there is no equivalent in the full swing. The nearest comparison would be the shanks but that’s a problem of technique and swingpath, not evidence of a fragile ego.
During World War II, when flight crew refused to fly, battered into submission by the daily terror they faced, they were ejected from the Royal Air Force and their discharge papers stamped ‘LMF’, which means ‘Lack of Moral Fibre.’ It was a horribly insensitive way to label otherwise heroic people but I was reminded of it at the conclusion of the Texas Children’s Houston Open, when Scottie Scheffler faced a putt of under six feet, on the 72nd hole, to force a playoff.
Scheffler is, without question, the best player in the world, and has been for some time. He has achieved a degree of pre-eminence that is almost Tigerish, yet despite this his putting has never matched the quality of the rest of his game – the one aspect of golf in which he displays human frailties. But even that has improved markedly in recent months with a new putter and putting coach. From distance he either holes out or lays the ball stone dead and at the weekend of the Texas Children’s Houston Open, he did not miss from inside seven feet, that horrible distance from where you expect to hole but know only too well how easy it is to miss. It was evidence of remarkable improvement from a man who previously looked as if he would rather be in a dentist’s chair without anaesthetic than trying to hole a four-footer.
And then came the last green in Houston and as he stood over the ball I thought, with a depressing sense of inevitability: ‘He’s going to miss.’
Bobby Jones, to my mind the greatest of them all, said: ‘As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole.’ And there’s the rub, that little thing called thinking. Putting gets in your head, like a mental virus. For example, in the 650 years we have been playing the game, no putt has ever been holed that was left short of the hole. Willie Park Jr, who died in 1925, acknowledged this with the words: ‘As long as you live, the hole will never come to the ball.’
With this vast accumulation of experiential knowledge at our disposal, you would imagine that the thoughts of every golfer who stands over a putt would be: ‘If I don’t make this putt, it’s going to finish beyond the hole.’ I would be willing to wager, however, that in any given round you will leave many more putts shy than long.
As Evel Knievel said: ‘I learned one thing from jumping motorcycles that was of great value on the golf course, the putting green especially: Whatever you do, don’t come up short.’
Nick Price was even more emphatic than Bobby Jones when he said: ‘Putting is probably the most important thing in the game. It’s that classic argument you always hear, but it’s true. You can hit the ball great, but if you can’t make anything, it’s so deflating. The psychological aspect is huge. Putting is the source of where you really go in a round.’
Mention of the psychological aspect of putting is key, I think, because more than any other part of the game, putting is a mental, rather than physical activity. Grandmothers and toddlers can do it at the crazy golf course during a day out at the seaside so we, who have been playing the game for years, if not decades, should surely have mastered it by now.
The trouble is, every missed putt leaves a tiny but ineradicable scar. We carry with us the memory of all those misses and the knowledge that there’s no such thing as a gimme, which the writer Jim Bishop defined as: ‘An agreement between two losers who can’t putt.’
Such is the recent form of Scottie Scheffler that, despite his near-miss at the weekend, he will enter the Masters in less than two weeks as odds-on favourite. But if that magnificent golf course tests one element of your game above all others, it’s on the greens, which means it also tests your intestinal fortitude. If Scheffler can overcome them both, we might seriously consider him the equal of Tiger.
Quote of the Week
During the last quarter century, as we all know, greens have become more difficult to putt. The main reason, of course, is related to the solunar tables and the gradual warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Then of course, there’s the new multi-dimpled golf ball.
George Peper