Golf is a game that has a way of bringing you down to earth, so it was entirely appropriate that one day after he recorded a 13-under-par 59 at Dainfern, Casey Jarvis had a ‘fresh air’ in his final round at the Stella Artois Championship. Weekend golfers know the feeling. Not the 59 feeling, of course. The fresh air.
And our fresh airs tend to come in the rough, not with the ball two inches from the hole, as was the case with Casey. We don’t putt those, we pick them up. We can blame many things for our fruitless swish. The ball was below my feet; specifically, it was in the water hazard below my feet. A branch jumped out and grabbed my club. I was concentrating on the target. It was a practice swing. Those are all excuses that I’ve used.
I knew a chap who had been a solid 12-handicapper all his life. One day he went to see a motivational psychologist and then went out and shot 69, the one and only time in his life he broke 70. The most incredible thing about his round, however, was not the total, but the fact that in the middle of playing like a touring pro, he had a fresh air. His playing partners had the card mounted and wrote on it, ‘Includes a fresh air!!!’
Another friend was a very decent cricketer; hit the ball hard at four or five in the order and bowled respectable offspin. Golf was a game he played only on cricket tour, but on one occasion at work, he agreed to play at a charity day at his local course. His company hired a film crew to produce a video of the day, which was shown at prizegiving.
There in front of the assembled throng, his fresh air on the 1st tee box appeared in all its glory. Not long afterwards he left the company, explaining to his cricket mates, ‘I couldn’t walk down the corridor to the water cooler without seeing someone who I knew was thinking, “There’s that idiot who can’t play golf”.’
The undistinguished reality of my own play means that I come across quite a lot of idiots who can’t play golf. Many years ago, I played with a chap who had been watching The Open on the telly. He noted that several players were using the new method of lining up a putt by first placing the putter in front of the ball, then lifting it up and placing it behind the ball to putt.
He tried this. Placed his putter in front of the ball, forgot to lift it up and with his backswing hit it firmly off the green behind him and into knee-high rough. Never saw the ball again.
I imagine if that particular idiot were around today, he would be straddling the line of the putt in the modern manner, holding his putter ahead of him and walking down the green towards the pin like a giraffe approaching a waterhole. Then he would turn around and walk straight back down the line entirely forgetting the straddle. The point being, of course, that spiking up his own line would make absolutely no difference to his chances of holing the putt which were, at a conservative estimate, nil.
So take heart, Casey, remember the 59 and not the fresh air.
– This column first appeared in the June 2023 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
