‘I love it when people write me off ’
Is there anything which can knock Ian Poulter off his mission to conquer the world of the golf ? It seems that not even a beer chucked in his face can derail his quest.
It certainly failed to at the Players Championship in May, despite it coming complete with some four-lettered fan abuse. Everybody knew that his lobwedge over the trees to within a foot of the pin was a wonder shot, but not until now will everybody realise just how wondrous it was.
To recap, Poulter was in second place at Sawgrass and within sight of the huge cheque that would save his PGA Tour card.
After a year in the wilderness, a runner-up finish in the tournament the Americans like to call “the fifth major” would see him return to the top 80 in the rankings and he would be back on the map.
But as he tried to chase down leader Si Woo Kim, his approach shot almost went off the map. What happened next should enter Poulter’s folklore.
“The TV cameras didn’t show how tough that third shot was – a bad lie, overhanging branches, a tiny gap to go through, and water waiting on the far side of the green if I over-cooked it,” he said. “But the great thing is my brain wasn’t as scrambled like you might expect, even though I’d just hit a shocker of a second.
“A shank is a shank, no use hiding from it. I told myself you have to forget about it, and focus on flushing this next one.
“And when my caddie, James [Watson], paced it out and told me it was exactly 116 [yards] to the flag, I could have kissed him. It was just a perfect distance for a full sand iron. It was still a one-in-100 shot and apart from not holing out, I nailed it.
“And that was when I was covered in beer too. When I was weighing the shot up, some woman bumped into me. She was carrying two beers, and one of them went all over my face. She turned and yelled, ‘I’m so sorry’, before she realised who it was. ‘No, I’m not sorry! It’s you,’ she said. ‘And I f------ hate you’.
“Then I hit a shot like that one, which was probably the best response I could have delivered. It’s a stupid game sometimes, isn’t it?”
Stupid, indeed, but that anecdote says so much about Poulter’s psyche. As does the fact that while the rest of us were worrying that he was on the brink of taking at least a double-bogey and would thus hurtle down the top 10, the 41-year-old had a completely different mindset. “Seriously is that what you thought was going to happen? That I was going to make a complete b------ of it and you were going to have to write ‘Poulter blew it’?,” he asks. “That’s interesting because I honestly didn’t think about anything else but holing it.
“Kim was on the 18th tee and I was playing my shot thinking: ‘If I can put this in from here, there’s going to be a huge roar and he’s going to hear it and might stick his drive into the water’.
“Well, it didn’t quite happen. But I gave it a good go.”
Of course, Poulter is all about giving it a go. He has been ever since he was a schoolboy and the teacher told him he had absolutely no chance of becoming a professional golfer. He heard the same when he was working as an assistant pro, selling Mars bars and cans of coke.
“Yeah, I do seem to like it when I’m written off,” he said. “It gives me more motivation to actually go and do it, to be able say ‘see, you were wrong about me’.”
At the start of this campaign many experts were putting a line through Poulter’s name, declaring that he would never grace the big-time leaderboards again. He played just 13 events in 2016 because of a foot injury and missed the Ryder Cup.
Europe were without their talisman and the talisman was seemingly without his reason for sporting existence. But not once did he think the odyssey could be ending.
“Did I hell,” he said. “Yeah, there were moments in January and February when I entered panic mode, because I didn’t have forever to secure my playing privileges on the PGA
Whether it is being targeted by yobs on the course or sceptics in the media, Ian Poulter tells James Corrigan why he thrives in adversity
‘This lady started apologising for pouring beer on me. Then she realised who I was …’
Tour and, with my ranking down in the 150s, I was facing the prospect of missing all of the majors.
“But I still believed that I’d make it all the way back up there and I still believe I will. Hard work fixes most things in my opinion.
“No one has given me anything for free in this game. No one gave me my Tour cards in Europe or the United States.
“I just get so fed up of people saying: ‘Why are you acting like a flash git when your game has gone to pot? Yeah, I enjoy the trappings of success – the nice cars, the lovely house and attending big sporting events.
“But I’ve never lost sight of how that came about, and I never will.”
Poulter earned his ticket to Birkdale by lining up with the lower-league professionals and amateur wannabes and fighting his way through 36-hole qualifying. He was determined not to miss Birkdale. It was at the Southport links where he recorded his best Open finish, coming second behind Padraig Harrington.
He lost to the Irishman by four shots, but he thought he had given himself a chance when holing an 18-footer for the last. That left him only one behind Harrington, who then decided to play the last four holes in three-under. Still, that fist-pump had felt good whilst it lasted
“God, it did, it truly did and no, I wouldn’t be happy if I hadn’t have made it to Birkdale, and not just because it would have the sixth major in a row which I’d been absent from, which would have been ridiculous,” he said.
“The place holds good memories for me and I have good vibes from 2008. I didn’t play great that week to be honest and it’s hard to be delighted with seven-over, but the awful conditions made it tough for everyone.
“I managed my game and the course nicely, and I slowly got into the mix, but I was still six behind Greg Norman going into the last round.
“Greg fell away and I played my best stuff to shoot 69 in the last round – and I really believed my putt for par on the last could be to win the Claret Jug, before Padraig went mental. But it gave an inkling of what the feeling would be like to win it. I’d love to have it for real.”