GOLF IS GOOD:

ANDREW DADDO

DID you hear about the shot clock tournament in Europe recently? It was the Shot Clock Masters in Vienna, won by Mikko Korhonen with a score of 16 under. Basically, it worked like this, the first player in the group has 50 seconds to play their shot, while the rest have 40 seconds. That’s all shots – from the tee to tap ins. Mad. The pace of play was off the charts with rounds taking a little over four hours. And with a winning score of 16 under, it doesn’t look as if the big boys suffered too much. Second place was 12 under – hardly a disaster. And European Tour chief executive Keith Pelley said it was a huge success. Dir! What’s not to like? Fast golf is bloody great. There is a place for a leisurely round, don’t misunderstand me. I mean, how good is it to cycle through your thoughts and imaginings? Where you think you can actually see the ball compress on the clubface and launch through a series of imagined trajectorial windows aligned in such a way that the nut will land on a specific and pre-chosen blade of grass. I get that.

There are even days I try and do it, even rarer days when I think I can. But this stuff of dreams takes time. And with a field of golfers up your Khyber Pass and the group in front slipping away, my grandfather’s voice tells me to “stop buggering around and get on with it.” So, I do, most of the time. And so do you, pretty much. But not the pros. At least, that’s how it looks. During the US Open, I almost put my Skuttle (that’s an old Trident Golf reinterpretation of the Callaway Tuttle found at a thrift shop) through the TV. Dustbin Johnson, who was quite brilliant, took an eternity to stalk a long birdie putt to get to within three shots of Super Brooks. He is, isn’t he? Seriously, put a cape on Brooks Koepka and he’s in Hollywood with Lois Lane hanging around his neck. Was it the 17th hole? Maybe the 16th. Dustin was in the zone. He looked at the putt from the front, then the back. Then each side. Then behind the hole again, then back to front. His brother was Aimpointing for all he was worth, then Dustin abandoned the slopes on the grass to read them in his ‘green reading’ book. What fun to have one of those! Little arrows confirming what your mind cannot. Then he was back to the green. Hit the danged putt Dustbin, Jaysus. And he did. And it missed. Super Brooks binned his and that, as they say, was pretty much that. It did make me wonder what would happen if these blokes didn’t have five minutes to hit a shot. Given human frailty has a role in golf, would it make that much difference? Probably not. The commentators would have to get to the point instead of waffling on about “a kid from a town on the wrong side of a river who grew up chewing the inside of his cheek for the taste of meat.”

Besides, the pros have shown in tournament conditions they can size up a shot and hit it within 40 seconds, so there’s a fair chance we can, too.

Forty seconds is a long time, most of them didn’t need it. And there’s a stack of things you can do in forty seconds. It takes longer than that for Weetbix to go soggy. Labradors can nail a can of Pal. You could get wet weather gear on, or off. Most pre-golf warm ups are forty seconds. It takes 40 seconds to cook a pancake.

You could text your mum and say hello, change your Facebook status, do your footy tips, micro-meditate, upload a selfie, correct the mistakes on your golf card, clean your wedge, put a stripe on your golf ball – each one in less than 40 seconds.

Around the world, there are 172 births every 40 seconds. There’s a death by suicide in the time it took for a golfer to play a shot in the Shot Clock Masters.

You could have sex five times, just, maybe not in a row.

Forty seconds is a long time. And it should be enough, shouldn’t it? I suspect that’s how long most of us probably take anyway. There’s still time to chat, time to imagine and pontificate and assess the job at hand. There are all those lovely steps between hitting one shot and the next to look about and realise how lucky we are to be on the course and not somewhere else.

Forty seconds per shot? Love it.