DURING a recent televised football match in Spain's La Liga, a commentator, speaking of a player of towering stature, remarked: "At six foot seven inches in height, you're always going to have an advantage in the air."
How true that is and what an accurate reflection of how we live our lives. People are always looking for something which will give them an edge and if being about a foot taller than everybody else on a football field fills the bill, then so be it – g
ood luck and let battle commence.
Only the other day, I came across a box of 1.62inch golf balls – Titleists – which had lain unopened for years. I can only suppose it was a gift purchased by a well-meaning aunt from an unscrupulous seller who had omitted to tell her that the transition to the 1.68inch ball had taken place and that the scene had changed forever. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be that much difference in the size, but the little there is counts for a lot and it caused a considerable amount of heat under many collars at the time.
I have to admit that I was among those who feared that life as we'd come to know it was about to collapse about our ears as a result of the change. The way people of my persuasion looked at it was that if we'd been meant to play with 1.68inch golf balls, they'd have been made that way in the first place. What about the wind, eh? The big ball would be blown all over the place, we argued. The cunning art of producing low-running shots on pavement-hard links would be rendered obsolete. It's not as if many of us had ever mastered such an art, but nevertheless, that's the way we felt about it.
Things were most likely much the same when the feathery gave way to the gutty and when Haskell came along with his rubber core ball the game's adherents probably had to be brought round with smelling salts. Fortunately, deaf ears tended to be turned to the reactionary forces and the result is we now have golf balls which fly for ever – given half a chance – and they are virtually indestructible. They sneer at thinned bunker shots and laugh when topped. Their predecessors often wore smiles, but that was due to bad shots having cut them to the quick.
The most bizarre golf ball I ever encountered was the Phantom Flexlite, a ball produced shortly after the war when materials were still short and this ball proved it. I don't know what it was made of, but it felt like putty. My first shot with it was struck from a short-hole tee, came right out the middle of the club and just cleared a burn situated some 15 yards ahead. Three more hearty blows took me to the green and three lumpy putts secured the 7. I presented the balls – there were half a dozen of them in a fancy box – to a fellow junior member who, I'm relieved to say, I haven't seen since.
The ball's behaviour on the green was odd. It seemed to screw about in various directions without ever settling to a basic course. I was reminded of it last week while watching the Volvo China Open at Beijing. It was the first round and Markus Brier, who was to lead the field by the end of the day, signed off at the closing par 5 by three-putting. The next man four-putted and the third man, a Korean called Kim, then five-putted.
The course, it has to be said, was not without its distractions and it is quite possible that the players might have been put off by the odd passing train. There was also some evidence of what seemed to be heavy traffic thundering close by, music wafted in from a distant source and hooters sounded from time to time. There were, in the vicinity, various complexes of what appeared to be blast furnaces from which issued heavy plumes of smoke.
Still, concentration in the face of distraction is the name of the game and it's up to players to gear themselves to the conditions. They should have been prepared to say to themselves: "What blast furnaces?"
A more likely explanation of the multiple lapses, however, would seem to lie in problems posed by the green itself, though it wasn't easy to draw any conclusions from the evidence of television. Cameras can be deceptive, but the green on which the action took place looked quite flat. There certainly didn't seem to be any of the hair-raising undulations which catch the attention at Augusta and yet, here it was, happening before our very eyes – a trio of skilled professionals missing some tiny putts.
Having given the subject some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the reasons for the strange goings-on might not necessarily be related to borrows or blast furnaces.
My feeling – and it's just a hunch – is that either the players had been affected by a small earthquake, or else some malign force had smuggled a box of Phantom Flexlites into the golf ball supply.
The full article contains 883 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
