Spoiling a good walk

In twenty-five days’ time Bernhard Langer will turn sixty years of age. About a week ago he won a record tenth title on the PGA Tour by annexing the Senior PGA Championship, eclipsing the nine won by Gary Player, who will be 82 in November.

It’s all right for some – but this much I know. Playing golf in your mid-sixties takes nerves of steel and a significant measure of fortitude.

In my own case, I found that from about the age of forty I used to ‘stiffen up’ considerably upon sitting down anywhere after completing a round of golf – be that afterwards at a lunch table, driving home, or just pouring myself into an armchair in front of the television later that evening.

Now two and a half decades later, I find that by the time I’ve driven to a golf course, unpacked my golf bag, shoes and trolley, trudged to the pro shop to pay for my round and bought a set of twelve Calloway balls (about the minimum number I tend to lose every time I play), I’m about as stiff as in former days I’d have felt after having played a round … and that’s before I’ve even begun one these days!

When you don’t play golf too often (about half a dozen times a year in my case) you pay the price in terms of getting back in the groove. Twenty years ago I used to plan for the fact that it would take three to four holes to ‘get in the swing of playing’ again and I could execute a stroke with anything like proficiency … or, that is, gain a 50% chance of hitting the ball roughly in the right direction, which virtually amounts to the same thing.

Yesterday, in a round which took me a gross 127 – playing with two brothers whose rules include ‘carding’ a ‘blob 9’ if upon any hole they are going to take at least that number of strokes on a hole … and I did have five of those – I cannot have hit more than half a dozen shots passable well.

My key problem, my opponents told me – initially with glee but later, as the problem persisted, with increasing concern and pity – was that my head was coming up every time I swung through the ball.

They were quite right about this. Upon all six occasions I hit the ball well – and two of my drives off the tee using my driver went over 220 yards (the longer, nearly 250 yards, partly because the wind was coming directly from behind) – I managed to rectify this fault.

However, mostly – i.e.  not least the roughly other fifteen times I drove off the tee – I hit the ball either wide right, or wide left, or caused it to dribble just ten to fifteen yards into the long grass to the left off the tee by trying to belt the ball too hard and simply hitting it with ‘the heel’ of the club.

Embarrassing – or, more than that – frustrating in the extreme.

The day was near-perfect for golf weather-wise. Sunny, warm, barely a cloud in the sky until we were well into playing the second nine, when dark clouds circled but only cause a few drops of rain to fall on two occasions.

That didn’t make our play any better. I ‘tweaked’ my tennis elbow playing one shot out of the rough and subsequently felt instinctively a bit tentative whenever I set up to attempt another at full power.

Sadly, our putting was consistently poor. On four or five holes the groundsmen were working on the greens and so had fixed up temporary versions for those of us out on the course. This was less than satisfactory – attempting to putt on basically upon a surface little more than that a field, but with a hole twice the normal size, was a lottery … and I don’t win the lottery very often.

Trying to put the world to rights as we chatted on the round we played yesterday, one of my opponents – a financier – offered the view that Britain was in terminal decline as a world power, possibly not before time.

Somehow we had developed an underclass who were terminally workshy, which was why employers were always hiring in cheap workers from within the EU etc. But the attendant worry was that simultaneously the gap between rich and poor was getting bigger and bigger. Most of our politicians upon all sides were second-rate so there were very little chance of ever securing the leadership we needed, and so on.

I suppose, if I was being ‘down in the mouth’, I could have finished by saying that it was a depressing accompaniment to what by then had become a rather depressing round.