They have a delightful tradition at Foxrock GC of playing a nine-hole, re-entry competition. It means that if you make a mess of the first hole, you can decide to start your nine holes on the second. Or you could start on the third, or the fourth, in which case you would play the first three holes twice. All this talk of the Grand Slam puts me in mind of Foxrock. And the way the Grand Slam advocates have conveniently overlooked the fact that Tiger Woods failed to win the Masters (players of his calibre don't make a mess of things) last year. So he re-entered the Grand Slam stakes in the US Open at Pebble Beach. And had he failed at Pebble, he could have re-entered at St Andrews.

One of the great advantages I found with the Foxrock process, was that it greatly reduced the pressure of playing the first three holes. And surely we should never apply such thinking to the ultimate challenge in golf. Woods who, incidentally, was at Augusta National at 6.50 a.m. to check out the course only two days after winning the Players' Championship, has done a truly wonderful thing by being the holder of the game's four major prizes. Let's leave it at that until he produces the genuine article, which he surely will.