Kavanagh's 'Angular Momentum' directs him to Druids Glen

Even before he triumphed in week four we'd spotted Patrick Kavanagh's 'COAM' line-up on our leaderboards and, as our Galway manager…

Even before he triumphed in week four we'd spotted Patrick Kavanagh's 'COAM' line-up on our leaderboards and, as our Galway manager suspected it would, the acronym had us flummoxed. Intensive research over two minutes on the internet gave us several possibilities: (1) Chiltern Open Air Museum, (2) Coin-operated Amusement Machine, (3) College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, (4) Customer Owned and Maintained, (5) Committee on Academic Misconduct, (6) Colegio Official de Arquitectos de Madrid, and our favourite, (7) Campground Owners Association of Montana.

Patrick, though, finally put us out of our misery when he told us he'd come upon the term in an old American golf book, which, after more intensive research, we're guessing is Joe Dante's The Four Magic Moves To Winning Golf from the early 1960s.

COAM is "Conservation of Angular Momentum", which, off the top of our head (ie Google), is a law of physics that allows a golfer to produce large amounts of kinetic energy. And you can never have enough of that. According to Golf Digest, "Dante wanted to become a doctor, but World War II got in the way, so he became a healer of another sort - a golf teaching professional. He was the first teacher to relate the physics theory 'conservation of angular momentum' to golf through the idea of the delayed wrist release. In contrast to most teachers of his time, he urged his pupils to make an early wrist break going back, and then - to keep the wrists cocked as long as possible - start the downswing with a vigorous slide of the hips."

So, now you know where you're going wrong. Whatever your vices, Patrick is quite relaxed about it all - his "Conservation of Angular Momentum", after all, has won him a fourball in Druids Glen.

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan

Mary Hannigan is a sports writer with The Irish Times