Ian Wood: Rain is fitting for a miserable game

Published on Sunday 26 July 2009 23:29

IT OCCURRED to me the other day that in the course of my last four attempts at getting in some golf, not once had I managed to progress beyond the seventh hole. This was not, in itself, as depressing as it might have been, for my gouty foot was unlikely to have allowed me to lurch on much further, but the fact that every foray was ended by heavy showers was something I could have done without. The downpours rendered the hobble to the clubhouse just that little bit more miserable than usual and t

The weather pattern, it seems to me, has been eerily consistent. For instance, what appear to be bright and sunny mornings become transformed the moment I put a foot outside my door and by the time I've got the car out, the first raindrops are spattering the windscreen. The trip to the course is made in storm conditions before things moderate on my arrival and they tend to stay docile long enough for a decision to be made to give it a go. Once the die is cast, as it were, and we've set off, blinks of sunshine penetrate the general gloom and make things seem settled enough to risk discarding some waterproofing.

At around this point – and in my case it's always at the seventh hole – dark clouds move in from all quarters, there are distant drum rolls of thunder and, even before waterproofs can be stowed away, rain of tropical intensity is drumming on fairways and greens and the game is up for another day.

The trudge to the car park is of long enough duration to ensure that the equipment is well soaked through by the time we get there and will probably still be on the soggy side the next time it's called into service.

In a way, all this dampness is fitting, for it matches my mood. I'm still in shock after Tom Watson's Open heartbreak. That 72nd hole, when the triumphal, unbelievable, victory march was suddenly reduced to a stricken stumble, quite took the flavour from my dram. In a well-ordered world it should never have happened – not to Watson and not to Stewart Cink, who was obliged to secure his well-earned first major by way of a play-off watched in almost total silence by stunned Watson worshippers.

The hand that writes golf's scripts knows what it's about. It was at work at the Open of 1970 when Doug Sanders dithered crucially on the last green of regulation play before missing the nasty little putt which sent him into the 18-hole play-off with, of all people, Jack Nicklaus. The memory of Sanders attempting to make light of that miss to a hushed press conference remains vivid. Outside, the pipe band which had been ready to hail the winner, hung around and, with nothing else to do, gave it a perfunctory blaw anyway. Somehow the plaintive notes they played lent extra pathos to a situation which didn't really need it.

Things must have been similarly downbeat at Augusta in 1968, when Roberto de Vicenzo fell at the last hurdle, nobbled by a technicality in the US Masters. The popular Argentinian, who had won his first major championship, the Open, at Hoylake the year before, had shot a closing 65 to tie with the American, Bob Goalby – or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. However, Tommy Aaron, Roberto's partner, had inadvertently entered a 4 at the 17th on the Argentinian's card instead of the birdie 3 he'd actually made. He'd scored 65, but the figures on the card added up to 66 and he'd signed it. Goalby won the Masters and Roberto murmured: "What a stupid I am."

On a somewhat humbler stage, a competitor in an Edinburgh Press Club golf competition at Liberton was having a trying day. Nothing was going right and by the time he fluffed an approach shot into a bunker between him and the green to which he was playing, he'd had about enough.

It would be fair to say he was not in a positive frame of mind. There are limits to a golfer's resilience and he'd passed beyond them long before this bunker and the new problems it presented. He gave it all he had and it needed everything because it took him a good number of strokes before he was finished.

In fact, he never actually got out and the number of strokes was never recorded. Eye-witness accounts varied, but the figure 12 was bandied about and seems to be sufficiently close to the mark to convey the nature of the misfortune which befell this likeable and gentle man in that sandy hell. Suffice it to say that something in that fine nature snapped and, with a couple of salty expletives, he snatched the card from his hip-pocket and tore it to pieces.

As I left the clubhouse at the conclusion of play, I noticed him hunched over a table in the corner. He was taping together the pieces of the card, which, when his rage had abated, he'd realised was not his to tear up.