Bill Elliott
Some things you can’t ignore and no one is ignoring Ukraine right now. A lot of things have been put into perspective by what’s going on, which is not a bad thing in itself. So, for example, the friction between established golf tours and the Saudi initiative seems less bothersome now. However, the really trivial stuff can still raise its head and irritate in much the same way as a shaving cut can trump the swollen ankle you’ve hobbled into the bathroom on.
In between watching the news with increasingly narrowed eyes over recent weeks, I flicked over to the golf at Sawgrass anticipating a pleasant antidote to the upsetting stuff. We all look forward to the Players Championship. As a trumpet call to the real beginning of the new season it works just fine, challenging the competitors to up their games and reminding us that it’s only a hop, skip and roll of drums to The Masters and even more fun.
Mostly it was pleasant. Certainly the sadist inside me enjoyed seeing the world’s finest struggle in wind, rain and what Floridians call ‘freezing’ weather, but which would have had Geordies dusting off the sun loungers.
Incidentally, is there anything more frustrating than a tournament hit so hard by weather that it extends by a day? The answer is ‘yes but not much’. The worst in my experience was the 2010 Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor where, you’ll recall, we had so much rain that the course was permanently wetter than a labrador’s nose following a hectic run through the woods. Journalistically, it was more than merely challenging, it was impossible. My reports over the first three days read like a series of apologies, filled with words like ‘could, should, might, hopefully, rejigged and postponed’.
Meanwhile, that favourite phrase of the dishevelled journalist, ‘on the other hand’, had a starring role right up to the moment on Monday afternoon that Graeme Mcdowell holed the winning putt after Hunter Mahan all but drowned in his own sea of despondency. It meant that for the first time in four days, skipper Colin Montgomerie was able to chat with us without wearing a cloak of lightly controlled hysteria.
Anyway, back to Sawgrass. It wasn’t the shuffling of tee times and trying to work out who was playing which round at what time and who the hell was leading that caused me the most grief. What got me really irritated was the two-shot penalty whacked on to the hapless Keegan Bradley, who marked his ball on a green but hadn’t picked it up and replaced it before a gust of wind moved it a few feet further away.
Keegan and his playing partners all agreed he had indeed marked it and so could replace it on its original position. He did just that, only to be informed a couple of holes later that he should have played it from where the wind left it because he hadn’t picked it up and replaced it. Why, in all that’s holy, is that a rule? Who thinks that’s fair on anyone? We all know golf is full of rules and subrules but, please, amend this one. It is Rule 13.1d(2) if you’re interested, which you’re possibly not, but I am. I rest my case.
I played Sawgrass once, soon after it opened in the 1980s. The genius architect Pete Dye fixed up the game and told me I should prepare myself for the 17th hole, the par 3 that sits in the middle of a lake as an homage to Tristan da Cunha (look it up if you don’t know). When I got there, I saw why and now we all know why. FYI, my caddie told me to ignore the 140-yard distance and think at least 150, possibly more. So I did, took a 6-iron and for the first and only time that year, the one before and the next, absolutely ‘pured’ it.
The ball did not go in the water. Instead it flew the green, hit the grassy walkway, rolled along it, hit a rock or something and left me with a pitch of some 40 yards back over water to the hole. Inevitably, I duffed the ball into the water, hit the next one some 30ft past the hole and three-putted. I’ve never been happier.
“Why, in all that’s holy, is that a rule? Who thinks that’s fair on anyone?”