That morning after on the golf course
Dear Louis Oosthuizen
At first I wondered how the hell you did it – shooting 63 at the Gary Player Country Club in the first round of the Nedbank Golf Challenge after having been hospitalised the previous day for kidney stones!
I am fortunate enough to have never been afflicted with that particular ailment but I have a mate who has and he was man down for the better part of a week. When I went to visit him following his discharge after he had spent three days in hospital, he cried like a baby, telling me it felt like he had a red-hot poker in his nether regions.
But you went out there and made the Sun City layout look like a mashie course. To card nine-under par when you are feeling in tip-top shape is one thing, to do it after a night where you were in agony and had very little sleep is quite another.
But then I remembered a round I played a couple of years ago after a particularly memorable 50th birthday celebration. It was the milestone of a very good buddy of mine and the missus and I decided to Uber to the Friday night party so we could celebrate in style.
And, boy, did we do so. I started the evening with my regular tipple – brandy and ginger ale
Guy Hawthorne
– but a few hours later I was trying every shooter the hired bar hands could conjure up. We then had a good few Irish coffees and wrapped things up with many Jaegermeisters. We eventually left the party at around 3am on the Saturday morning.
Knowing I had my regular monthly golf game with three buddies at Huddle Park that morning, I decided , in my (alcohol-fuelled) wisdom, that going to bed would be a bad idea in case I slept through the alarm clock and missed our tee time.
When I arrived at the golf course, one of my mates remarked that I looked like “death warmed up”, which is exactly how I felt. I briefly described my Friday evening to them and they unanimously agreed to up the value of the skins we were playing for.
I was dreading the morning, but I flushed my opening drive right down the middle, hit a seven iron to about a foot and walked off with a birdie and two skins on the first hole (the win and the birdie). I was playing well but the next four holes were halved in pars until we got to the par-5 sixth.
I caught my drive in the screws and had about 220m to the front of the green. I hit a sweet three wood with just the right amount of draw and found the centre of the green, from where I two putted for birdie, and six skins (including the one for the birdie).
I cleaned up that day and later realised why I went into the round with no expectations.
Your other scores of 72, 71 and 75 at Sun City suggest that may have been what happened to you, so maybe you should adopt that approach. Don’t expect too much and you will very often be pleasantly surprised.