Angling with legends

Martin Johnson, The Telegraph, 27 September 2003

Unless you happen to a Frenchman trying to win the Open Championship, there can be few more satisfying sounds at Carnoustie than the plop of your golf ball landing in the Barry Burn. Apologies, of course, to the marshal whose jacket bore the brunt of the splash, but he'd also have been aware of the special sense of history, and the knowledge that you had gone where the likes of Harry Vardon and J H Taylor had gone before. Besides which, as my caddie was quick to point out: "At least you went in for two. Jean Van de Velde took four to put it in there."

Van de Velde wouldn't have gone paddling in the famous Burn yesterday. The tide was in, and it was deep enough to accommodate the Loch Ness Monster. However, thanks to the caddie's angling skills with an extra long pole, the ball will be able to occupy a position of pride on the mantelpiece, and the three-iron will be auctioned, like Christy O'Connor's Ryder Cup two-iron, for charity.

It was a fitting end to a pretty atrocious round of golf, albeit with the unlikely contribution of three net eagles in an otherwise lopsided partnership with a proper golfer, Kenneth Ferrie. We need not go into too many gory details, but in order to illustrate the general standard of his amateur partner's play, a blow-by-blow description of a four (net three) down another historic Carnoustie hole - the par five sixth named Hogan's Alley - should suffice.

Hogan was so accurate that on one occasion, playing twice in a day, he reportedly put his afternoon drive into his morning divot. Which prompted the New Zealand golfer Greg Turner to say: "If he was that accurate, why didn't he aim to just miss it?" but you get the drift. Anyway, Hogan's birdies rarely involved putting his drive within three feet of the out-of-bounds fence, slicing his second on to the grassy bank of a burn, half duffing his third to the front edge, and then holing (my caddie paced it out) from 58 feet.

The trick about partnering a pro in one of these things is to do something useful on a stroke hole, then on the non-stroke holes (when your ball is back inside your trouser pocket before you've even reached his drive) hope he does something good. And the other, rather more difficult, trick is to try to remain vaguely interested in a round of golf requiring six hours to play.

A members' fourball here routinely gets round in 2hr 45min, but in one of these events it is not so much a question of trying to stay in the zone, as attempting to stay out of the twilight zone. Carnoustie is tough, but not so tough as to justify packing your pyjamas, and yesterday it was so windless it was though the place had been double-glazed.

Neither was it a case of the huge galleries getting out of control. Gary Lineker attracted a crowd of around half a dozen, which was roughly six fewer people than we had, though there were crowd control marshals all over the place. With no crowd to control, they passed the time by chatting happily to themselves, occasionally on the top of a professional's backswing.

Constantly asking people carrying "Quiet Please" notices to keep quiet did not improve the pace of play, but it was largely down to a combination of amateurs hacking and professionals declining to take their shot until the butterfly perched on a gorse bush 50 yards away had stopped fluttering.

The way to solve this problem is simple: make all pro-ams a shotgun start. And make sure the shotgun is loaded with buckshot.