Ian Wood: When pressure is a destructive force

Published on Sunday 25 October 2009 22:24

AMONG the features of this golfing season have been the last-round dramas which have had to be played out before the victors got their mitts on the spoils. The risk factor appears to be greater than it used to be. Perhaps the ever-increasing length offered by the new technology, while encouraging players to go for broke as they near the finishing line, also, by taking them closer to the limits, renders them more susceptible to the odd glitch.

Having been raised on Peter Thomson oiling his way to his impressive tally of wins, apparently without breaking sweat, I still tend to be taken by surprise when all does not go smoothly at the big finish. Of course, it will be argued, no doubt, that this is a more competitive era and it's true that the number of potential winners is greater than it was in Thomson's day, but then the tests he faced were the tests of his times and the pressures still had to be faced. When a golfer is coming down the line with an Open title in his sights, I don't suppose it matters much whether he's being pursued by a handful of close challengers or an army of them.

I've often wondered if I could possibly be put under more pressure than I have been in situations as far removed from the Open championship as can be imagined. Not that pressure situations have happened often, but now and again, in the days when the juices were running and everything didn't hurt so much, I'd find myself doing something unusual in a medal competition. It wouldn't be true to say I was ever in hot contention, but I'd suddenly become aware that I was lurking in such a position that if I had a brainstorm and sank a couple of putts, this might be it. The world might become my oyster in the space of four charmed holes.

At such moments, it's fair to say, I went to pieces. It usually occurred about the fifteenth or sixteenth holes and there were always tell-tale signs. Where the driving had been rock-steady, there would come a wobble. Where approach shots had been doing more or less what they were supposed to have been doing, one would behave oddly. Nothing awful, perhaps, but I knew some fundamental change had taken place. As I addressed wedge shots, I began to mark the trouble on the right and consider unthinkable possibilities. Those signs were harbingers of doom and they meant business.

When the rot moved in, the body, such as it was, checked out. There was a build-up of heat at the back of the head, the throat went dry and the palms of the hands became wet and slippery. All at once, co-ordination seemed out of the question. The clubs looked inadequate and ill-suited to the purpose for which they were designed. What had been going smoothly became rough and laboured, and nothing felt right. I wished desperately I was somewhere else.

Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with me that a couple of quick 6s couldn't cure, so there was no problem there, but the point is that I can't imagine being under any more pressure than I was under at such moments. Of course, an Open would have its own pressures, but they could hardly be more destructive. If you can't think, swing or breathe properly on a golf course, things can't get much worse. There would be lots of people about at an Open and I wouldn't want to kill anyone on world-wide television, but that's just heaping pressure on pressure. If a truck has fallen on you already, it isn't going to make a lot of difference if another one drops in.

A depressing aspect of this sort of disintegration, is that none of the hundreds of golf books I've read can really help. That is, they can't help me. They might help people who can play golf to a decent standard, but then they don't need as much help as I do. Browsing through Alex Morrison's words of wisdom from the 1930s – "A New Way to Better Golf" – a chapter heading caught my eye. "Let us not go wrong!" it said. That seemed like a good idea, but then I had to check back to find what it was we weren't to get wrong and discovered that the method described depended heavily on pointing the chin at a spot behind the ball and keeping it there.

My interest flagged a bit then, for I reckon I've enough to worry about on the course without dragging in chins.

For example, only the other day I was approaching the conclusion of a tension-packed match, when, just as I was about to take the club back on an approach shot, I swallowed a fly. There were a lot of the wee perishers about and one had zoomed in as I took my preparatory deep breath. I immediately went into a convulsive bout of coughing, at which point one of my playing partners offered to slap my back. Chokily, I declined his offer. I know this man well and thought I detected a mean gleam in his eye. He'd have beaten me to a pulp.