Ian Wood: Technology putts me in my place

IT IS sometimes difficult to imagine life without all the technology which helps take the strain these days. How did we get on without it? I must admit I don't recall any particular feeling of deprivation in the days when there wasn't all that much technology available to people in general.

For example, motorists who set off on family holidays without the benefit of sat navs didn't seem to get lost that often. I suppose that was because they had the sense to take primitive precautions, such as consulting maps and finding out where they were going before they started. Indeed, lack of a sat nav might not have been a bad thing for, as memory serves, the drivers on such journeys could get tetchy when the family weighed in with opinions about which way to go. Their reaction to a smug, disembodied metallic voice telling them what to do can only be imagined.

Still, time marches on and when it comes to technology, it positively gallops. Sport has become transformed, perhaps not always for the better, but transformed nevertheless. Anyone old enough to remember what it felt like to head a football in, say, the 1950s, will no doubt be aware of this.

Not that they're likely to be heading footballs any more, but they'll know full well that if they ever did, it would be night from day. Meeting a cross in those far-off times was like heading a rock. Really good footballers - professionals who had technique and timing - could put head to ball with impunity. For the rest of us, it was a matter of dicing with concussion. A glancing blow could leave you quivering like a tuning fork for several minutes.

Now, footballs are brightly coloured, apparently water-resistant and, according to the recent World Cup, given to swerving around in a capricious manner. They tend to zoom rather than dip. The old leather footballs - and the ones we played with were really old - were sponges which shipped water like leaking freighters and became progressively heavier until, to a small boy attempting a shot, they might have been cannonballs sunk into the turf.

It was not uncommon to see a small boy tear up to such a ball, have a kick at it and then stiffen in agony as he flew over it and fell flat on his face. The only way to get a ball in the air when things got that bad was to try to lob it up then hit it on the drop. A talented lad could get a good ten yards out of it with that method, presuming he didn't break his leg.

Nowhere has sporting technology made a greater impact than in golf and, quite apart from the sheer increase in the length provided by modern clubs and golf balls, the putter is as good a measure of the game's development as any. Recently, watching Corey Pavin playing with all his old dash in a televised tournament, it was interesting to see he was still using what looked to be a Bullseye putter. To someone like Rory McIlroy, this wouldn't mean all that much, except perhaps to make him raise his eyebrows and ask what it was. The fact that it was at one time the putter to own, would probably never occur to him.

What occurred to me when I saw it was how long ago that heyday now seems, and the thought prompted me to burrow into my collection of mouldering putters to check if I had ever bought one. It seems I hadn't and the nearest thing I had to a Bullseye was a Golden Goose by John Letters, which is also centre-shafted and has a head roughly similar in shape. I also happened to have - in stock, as it were - a Quest Blade by Ryder, a model by Harway called, for reasons which escape me, Le Shuttle, a Ray Cook XF15-S and two hickory jobs.

Surprisingly, I also have an almost up-to-date number, a centre-shafted White Hot Odyssey, bought in a moment of weakness when I was confronted by a mad-eyed professional who had just played with one in some competition or other and reckoned he'd putted as he'd never putted before. He couldn't stop holing them, he told me, and I could tell he was deeply moved. Clutching at a doorpost for support, he assured me that this was a life-changing club and more or less told me to grab it while I had the chance, light the blue touch paper and retire.

The one reservation he had was my tendency to address the ball with the toe of my putter off the ground and, in order to forestall any trouble, he advised me to let him shorten the club by an inch or two. Feeling a bit heady now, I agreed, stumped up and waited to be overwhelmed by a new life on the greens. It would be pointless to go into all the gory details.

Suffice it to say that my life on the greens remains dreich in the extreme, the wonder club has been consigned to the darkness and I'm putting with a Lee Trevino blade which is itself close to being red-carded.