TIPPING POINT:It may be just because there is money on, but the US Masters can bring out the golf fan in anyone – in fact lots of people even consider it to be a sport, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR
HI, I’M Brian, and I’m a saddo. I have a problem that can’t be ignored anymore. It’s time to come clean. Late at night, when everyone’s asleep in bed, I draw the curtains, switch on the telly, turn the volume right down, get into a comfortable position, and, Dear God, I can’t believe I’m admitting this to the nation . . . watch the last nine holes of the Masters.
There! Yeah, I said it! Want to make something of it?
Oh, Lord, what have I done? I hate myself. Really, it’s awful. And I keep thinking of Messi, and Federer, and Dettori the whole time, you know, real sports stars in real sports. It means nothing. Mentally I never connect. It’s Sunday night for chrissakes, a few beers, no one around, it seems so easy to get away with. All those damn shiny, coloury polo-shirts get me tripping. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. But the guilt is too much. I need help. Mummy?
The thing is I’m not alone. There are plenty of us out there. Normal, rational, healthy, red-blooded blokes, able to dress themselves and operate machinery without having a club captain watching over us, who find ourselves succumbing to temptation. It’s the rawness of it.
Forget the azaleas, and the fake colours, and the simmering undercurrent of good ol’ boy bullshit, there is something compulsive about watching emotions being stripped, mauled and tossed aside like handy-wipes. Even if it does happen in naff city.
Rory McIlroy’s Masters collapse last year was compulsive stuff, a bit like peeping through the blinds at something deeply personal. You’d have to have a heart of granite not to feel for the kid. Watching Greg Norman spontaneously combust when Faldo overtook him in 1996 might have made one want to look away at first but only the steel-willed could manage it. Even Mickelson winning that first time: if it was possible to tangibly see relief flooding out of someone, that was Lefty. See, I even know his nickname, oh God.
It doesn’t mean the Masters is the real thing. It’s not like Zidane scoring a free-kick and penalty in a couple of minutes against England in the 2004 Euros. Or Borg and McEnroe in their epic tie-break. It’s not even Cluxton popping that free over. But for something that requires the participants to engage in nothing more athletic than a brisk walk, it approximates pretty good. And like all such pursuits, a lot of money is spent on it by far too many people who really do need to get out more.
Too much golf isn’t good for anyone. It distorts the world, makes you no use to anyone – bar other golfers who prefer 2D clubby illusion rather than 3D reality. Golf might not make you blind, but it does blind a lot of people to its idiocies.
Only golf can encourage the sofa-bound watching on telly at home to believe they are players in what is happening in front of them. In what other sport could some gimlet-eyed fusspot ring up the PGA, complain that somebody’s ball moved half a millimetre due to shyness when addressed by Pádraig Harrington’s putter, and be taken seriously. So seriously in fact that Pádraig gets told to pack his gear and head for the jet.
And not only will said sofa-bound time-waster not be prescribed what he so badly needs, he, and it’s always a he, will receive the thanks of a grateful game, oh-so-satisfied with itself for being oh-so-honourable.
Sport may be defined by the rules it is played by but golf is really just a rulebook with a bit of walking thrown in. The number of golfers possessed of the self-awareness to recognise the maddening futility of what they’re engaged in is small but remarkably a few do seem to exist.
It is 30 years since Craig Stadler won the Masters. A man famous for his girth, and a moustache so voluminous it earned him a nickname of “The Walrus”, Craig has always played the game with the air of someone seriously pissed off.
Even a slightly off-key drive has been known to send him into displays of shrugging disdain, ’tache contorted with the sardonic impatience of a man being kept from his cheeseburger. Craig’s bad putts can provoke shoulder-slouching self-loathing at having ever chosen such a mind-bending way to make a living as waiting for a small ball to drop into a hole. So in the circumstances, his reaction to an incident that sums up golf in one story was admirably restrained.
It’s a long time ago now but even in comparative youth, Stadler was built for comfort not speed so his instinct when faced with a tricky situation that required him to hit a shot kneeling down on wet grass was to place a towel on the ground so his trousers didn’t get soaked. He hit the shot and proceeded on his merry way.
Nothing happened until the following day – that’s 24 hours baby – but then Craig got called in by the authorities to be told he was being disqualified because a rulebook pedant watching on telly had spotted the towel, and had rung up to point out the rule about not elevating your stance.
What seemed like common-sense trouser maintenance to anyone else became “improper building of a stance” in golf.
Stadler did pretty well in the circumstances. It only took him 12 months to comment on the incident, at which time he responded to queries with: “Skip it. It’s been a year – let a dying dog die.”
So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Craig, a man about as far from the hard-body corporate stooges who have cantered to wealth on the coat-tails of Tiger Woods as it is possible to imagine. Craig cuts a more elephantine than walrus profile these days and is rated 1,000 to 1 by bookmakers to win again at Augusta.
They couldn’t be accused of generosity but there is a reassurance to be had from seeing Stadler and other ex-champions at the Masters. And it pads out the field, thus reducing the list of those that can actually win, always a handy perk around odds.
That’s my excuse. There’s nothing like a few quid riding on the result to focus the mind. And those nine holes are on the Beeb again this weekend, dashing hopes that a Sky exclusivity might provoke a detox intervention. As always, the first taste is for free.
Plus, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, really, right? It is classified as a sport, officially. No biblical laws are being broken. It’s just a bunch of badly dressed clubhouse types mooching around Redneckville. The cops and the tabloid press are hardly going to be waiting outside the window on the back of watching a couple of hours of it.
Still, I might just draw the curtains.
