Golf and the über choke
Aaaaggggghhhhh. Adults who have spent far too long watching men and women swing a stick at a tiny ball all hope never to see it again, writes Ben Monro-Davies.
No matter the drama it affords, it leaves all around numb, questioning the point of it all. I am, of course, talking about the sporting phenomenon that perhaps strikes in golf more than any other sport: the choke.
If you don’t know what a sporting choke is, just read about yesterday’s final round of Britain’s The Open championship. With four holes to go, Adam Scott led by four shots, a lead in golfing terms comparable to that enjoyed by Bradley Wiggins going in to the final stage of the Tour de France.
He then hit four bogeys in a row to gift the most desired trophy in golf to Ernie Els. Scott probably can’t remember the last time he did that. He may never have done so in his entire career.
But somewhere on the Lancashire coast at about five o’clock yesterday afternoon, the pressure virus slipped into Scott’s bloodstream and turned a man who’d looked supreme into a clown.
It’s not the first time
All sports see über talents miss penalties, net simple volleys, grass straightforward catches. But in golf, the line between a finely hit shot and a hook or slice is so delicate that winning really is about simply not going nuts. Robert Karlsson pulled out of this Open because he currently can’t take the club back once he places it behind the ball. Ernie Els thanked from the podium, among many, his psychologist.
It’s happened before, so, so many times. Rory McIlroy disintegrated over the last nine holes in the Masters in 2011. Jean Van de Velde needed a double bogey at the last to win the Open in 1999. Instead, he scored a triple bogey, which included him rolling up his trousers and climbing into a stream to briefly consider playing his ball as it lay under water. He should have been tranquillised there and then.
And Greg Norman, a golfer of such talent, blew a six shot lead over Nick Faldo at Augusta in 1996. By the end, I genuinely think a club golfer could have seen him off.
Chokes of this enormity overshadow the contest. No one remembers really who beat Van de Velde in 1999 (it was Paul Lawrie). Everyone remembers the Dane Thomas Bjorn destroying himself in a bunker at the Open at Sandwich in 2003. A prize to those who remember who won.
But can he recover?
And so it will be this year. Ernie Els is so great a player he will not be concerned that his victory will be forgotten, while Adam Scott’s defeat will long be remembered.
Can Scott recover? McIlroy went on within weeks of his Augusta trauma to win the US Open and become world number one. Scott will be asked about his four-hole flop at every press conference from now on in until he wins a major.
And I hope he doesn’t know this story about Douglas Sanders, who missed a three-foot putt to win the Open. Many years later he was asked if he still thought about it. He replied: “I’m over it. I now only think about it every 15 minutes.”