Charged with finding a suitable captain for one of your club's teams in next year's Cups and Shields, would you give the job to Jack Nicklaus? It's not as crazy a question as it seems. For all his wonderful golfing talent, last weekend's events at Royal Melbourne confirm long-held suspicions about the Golden Bear's leadership qualities.
Nicklaus now has the unwanted distinction of having captained the first US Ryder Cup team to be beaten on home soil - at Muirfield Village in 1987 - and leading his country to their first defeat in the President's Cup. And it will be recalled that he was also captain of the 1983 US side which scraped to a onepoint Ryder Cup victory at Palm Beach Gardens in what was effectively a turning point in the history of the event.
Captaincy at this level is largely about moulding talented individuals together, particularly in the fourballs and foursomes. In this respect, I recall Nicklaus remarking at Muirfield Village that he could throw the names of his players in the air and pair them as they fell, they were that good.
Of course things didn't quite work out that way. For the first time in Ryder Cup history, the US found themselves with a formidable, five-point deficit going into the 12 singles. Last weekend in Australia, the gap was a crushing nine points, admittedly under a slightly different format.
Nicklaus blamed the course. "I don't think our guys have played poorly," he said. "What's happened is that Royal Melbourne has shown herself and made it difficult for us to really understand the little nuances." We're talking here about a side that included seven "major" winners.
Perhaps the Bear was picking up on a point made recently by next year's US Ryder Cup captain, Ben Crenshaw, who, when asked to rate the importance of knowing the Brookline course, said: "One of the most esteemed golf writers who ever lived, Bernard Darwin, always had one very simple line: `It's tough to prepare in the other fellow's country."'
As an individual, however, Nicklaus coped rather well in the other fellow's country, by winning no fewer than six Australian Open titles between 1964 and 1978. Therein lies the key to his weakness at a captain.
Unlike lesser players, he never needed a captain's motivation. An unquenchable desire to succeed, whatever the circumstances, was sufficient to make him the finest competitor in the history of the game. And on being asked how a player would know he was the best in the world, he replied: "By claiming the title for himself."
In 28 Ryder Cup matches, Nicklaus won 17, halved three and lost eight, four of them in singles combat. Ironically, the failure of the US team last weekend served as much to illustrate the huge competitive gap between the great man and his successors as to highlight his leadership shortcomings.
"It's as far away from a wheelchair as I could get." - Portmarnock member Joe King, currently playing off 11 despite his legs being paralysed from the knee down, referring with typical good humour to his new, £75,000 Jaguar XK8 sportscar.
Leslie Nielsen, the self-proclaimed "High Priest of the High Handicappers" has been sounding off about the challenge of playing consistently bad golf. And with the sort of insane logic we have come to expect from the star of the Naked Gun movies, he makes some interesting points.
Caught in a reflective mood, he ventured: "Someone - I think it was either JeanPaul Sartre or Fabian - once asked me what was the greatest golf shot I ever saw. I didn't have to stop to think. It was a four-inch putt that Humphrey Bogart missed on the 18th green at Riviera.
"The ball lipped out and he ended up one-down to the head of Columbia Pictures who was trying to decide whether to give the role of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny to Bogart, who really wanted it, or to his own first choice, Gene Autry. I asked him about that putt sometime later and Bogie told me the only harder shot be ever had to make was when he hit a ball out of Peter Lorre's ear in the famous driving-range scene that was cut from Casablanca.
"I told him I believed him. As difficult as it is to play even so-so golf on any given day, there is no more demanding challenge facing even the worst golfer than playing consistently reliable and believable terrible golf on purpose."
It looks like it ought to be the easiest thing in the world, Nielsen said, but there are two serious problems to be overcome. One is that if your efforts at bad play are obvious to an opponent, he will be incensed beyond belief. He then adds the profound observation that: "The only time you play really great golf is when you're doing your damnedest to play bad golf." Those of us who have been down that road know exactly what he means.
David Leadbetter seems unperturbed by the loss of a second major client in the last few months. After an acrimonious parting with Nick Faldo in September, he has also split with Se Ri Pak, the wonderfully-gifted Korean who captured the US Women's Open last July.
As to the suggestion that he was devastated by this latest development, Leadbetter replied: "Devastated my foot. She's the most talented woman golfer I've ever seen or worked with, but she's headed for a fall." He added: "I sincerely hope she finds what she's looking for, not only for her golf game but to help her balance her life."
Leadbetter remains a highly-regarded teacher but I'm reminded of a remark made by one of his first pupils, Nick Price, a few years ago. Totally without rancour, Price said: "David has a wonderful talent for making good players great, but there is no evidence that he can make a mediocre player good."
As we near the end of the year, I feel it's time I paid tribute to my own, personal golfing hero of 1998. Interestingly, I have no idea who the person is, only that he restored my faith in human nature through his honesty and keen appreciation of what's really important in life.
He entered my world last June, when I was on my way home from the US Open, in transit at Atlanta Airport and jealously guarding a splendid five-wood I had acquired out west. With a few hours to kill, I rambled around and then sat down to read a book. But as my flight was about to be called, I suddenly realised something was missing: the five-wood.
After racking my addled brain, I realised I had left it in one of the airport's toilets about an hour previously. With no hope of success, I returned to the WC and sure enough, the club was gone. Then I remembered that there was an information desk about 50 yards away. Hell, it was worth a shot.
Anxiously eyeing the clock, I somewhat timidly asked the woman attendant if anyone had handed in a golf club. "Is this it?" she enquired, picking up the precious five wood. The glow I felt couldn't have been warmer had someone handed me a gift of an entire new set. So, to my mysterious golfing hero wherever he is, I send season's greetings.
This day in golf history . . . On December 19th 1976, the so-called Sunshine Circuit in South Africa ended with a victory by Hugh Baiocchi in the Rhodesian Dunlop Masters Tournament at Royal Salisbury GC. For the first time, the South African season was condensed into the last few weeks of the year, instead of the previous format of spanning the old and new years.
In fact there were only six tournaments, the last three of which were won by Baiocchi, who is now a highly successful competitor on the US Seniors' Tour, where he finished fifth in this year's money list with earnings of $1,183,959. Back in 1976, however, victories in the PGA Championship and the South African Open gave Gary Player sufficient money to edge ahead of Baiocchi in the final order of merit table. Ireland's John O'Leary, who was a regular competitor in that country at the time, was 15th, having had top-10 finishes in the PGA, South African Open and the Transvaal Open.
Teaser: A player marks the position of his ball on the putting green, lifts the ball and sets it aside. By mistake, he putts the ball from the spot at which he set it aside. What is the ruling?
Answer: When a ball is lifted under Rule 20-1, it is out of play. When the player played a stroke with his ball while it was out of play, he played a wrong ball (Rule 15 - Playing a Wrong Ball). In matchplay, the player lost the hole (Rule 15-2). In strokeplay, he incurred a penalty of two strokes and was required to correct the error before playing from the next tee; otherwise, he would be disqualified (Rule 15-3).
