Dragon's fire still burning
THE LA Moye golf club on Jersey prides itself on its memorabilia. In its committee room there are antique balls, wrinkled scorecards and photos of famous old members dotted round the walls. There is also a collection of clubs, including ancient hickory shafted items dating back long before anyone thought of building a course on the island.
The most famous implement belonging to the club’s most famous member, however, is not on show. The 15th club, the illegal extra driver that Ian Woosnam took with him into the last round at Royal Lytham last year, the club that cost him the Open, is not on display. “Aha,” says Woosnam, surveying the collection with a sheepish smile. “No, no, I’m saving that one. One day I’m going to auction that for charity.”
Even for those of us who have long since viewed golf as a game suffocated beneath a blanket of pedantry, what happened to Woosnam last year was cruel beyond the standard levels of the sport’s sadistic regulations. Three years since he won his last tournament, 12 since his only major, the Masters, the former world No1 found himself in the lead on the final day of the Open, a championship he had been attempting to win for nearly 25 years.
“I’d not been in that position for years,” he recalls of that final morning. “My putting was going well. I was playing better as the week went on. Yeah, I thought this was it, maybe this was destiny, maybe this was my time.”
Chock full of confidence, he had visited the practice green, where he had tried out a new driver, then instructed his caddie, Miles Byrne, to return it to the locker room. But Byrne forgot, the club remained in Woosnam’s bag and on the first tee it was discovered that the contender was carrying an illegal extra piece of equipment. The penalty was two strokes and, though it was a burden he was unable to shake off as David Duval took the title. It was one of the great sporting might have beens: though he ended up three strokes behind Duval, who knows what would have happened had the penalty not been imposed.
“Yeah, once I got the penalty I was never going to win because there was always something in the back of my mind holding me back,” he says. “But if that hadn’t been there, you know, maybe I’d have put pressure on Duval, maybe he’d have cracked.”
His voice, still carrying the brogue of the Welsh borders, tails off for a moment as he contemplates what might have been. But a year on from the event he is trying hard to put a philosophical spin on things. He is beginning to workshop it all up into a great after dinner anecdote, the hardest of hard luck tales.
“You’ve got to live by rules,” he says. “If you didn’t, golf would be out of control, the world would be out of control. I knew exactly how many clubs I was supposed to have. Plus the caddie knew exactly how many. I would never have used it, but that’s not the point. You have to start with 14, and that’s that.” At the time Woosnam was widely admired for the way he took his punishment. A look to the heavens and a tensing of his jaw was about all the disappointment he showed. How on earth did he stop himself from seeking immediate retribution on his forgetful caddie?
“You’ve got to admire the lad for admitting it,” says Woosnam. “He could quite easily have tried to dispose of it. But at least he was honest and true and put his hands up and said: ‘You’re going to go ballistic.’ And maybe it cost me the Open and a Ryder Cup place. But it was a mistake and you have to live with it.”
The younger Woosnam, a no-nonsense brawler from Shropshire farming stock, might not have been so philosophical. “Maybe not,” he smiles. “He might have been going around without a head. But I’ve learned to take the highs and the lows and be patient.”
Patience? For the ordinary hacker, endlessly frustrated by the game’s ability to torment, that is not the first virtue that springs to mind when it comes to golf.
“I think everyone should go home and have a punchbag. But it’s just counter productive doing it on the course. I’ve broken putters, broken two irons, chucked clubs up trees, but it’s not done me any good score wise. Nor has it done my image any good.”
Unlike the extra club incident. Of the five great golfers who dominated the European Tour in the 80s and early 90s, Woosnam was never the biggest draw. Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer: these were the players who the crowd looked out for. Woosnam just went about his quiet way, accumulating titles, earning big money, enjoying his golf, always first in the bar and often last out of it. Then, on that last round at Lytham, he became a national hero. There wasn’t a person watching who wasn’t rooting for him to overcome the penalty.
“I couldn’t believe how quickly everyone knew,” he says. “Within 50 yards of the tee the buzz was going round, so many people knew what had happened. From then on I had a sympathetic crowd behind me and I wanted so much to do it for them. The reception as I went up the 18th that day, I don’t mind admitting I had tears in my eyes.”
Woosnam had a doubly supportive crowd because they knew Woosnam had emerged from a period of some three years during which his game had gone to pieces. He was suffering from the yips, the disorder in which the hands make sudden involuntary jerking motions on the very point the golfer is attempting to make a putt. His game was emasculated by the condition. “That was the worst,” he says. “I was trying this, trying that, getting nowhere. At one time I couldn’t enjoy it at all I was missing putt after putt.”
Eventually he resolved the problem by following the lead of Sam Torrance and switching to a broom handled putter. “It made a huge difference to me, helped me enjoy the game again,” he says. Was it just psychological? “Yeah, it was exactly that, psychological, making it feel better is vital,” he says. “But there’s also mechanics: it’s like a pendulum clock, impossible to push too hard. Putting shouldn’t be hard. Why should it be difficult? But that’s where the mind comes in. So much is running through your mind.”
Thus, with his long putter Woosnam suddenly discovered he could not only enjoy his golf once more, but that he was a contender again. And there he was leading the Open, until his caddie turned forgetful. “What was so nice was seeing all the people behind me,” he says. “They realised this is someone who’s been trying to win the Open for 25 years and his best chance comes and it’s taken away. It wasn’t as if I threw it away by bad play.”
The irony was that all through his prime he had played with the same caddie, a Yorkshireman called Phil Morbey, universally known on the tour as Wobbly. They had only parted company a couple of months before the Open, when Woosnam thought his form would never return with sufficient potency to keep Wobbly in the prize money he had grown used to, and he sent him on his way with his blessing to caddie for Jose Maria Olazabal.
“If it had been Wobbly it would never have happened. Miles Byrne was very nervous.”
Woosnam, though, forgave Byrne, saying that he had made a mistake and would never make another. A fortnight later, at a tournament in Sweden, his faith was proven to be misplaced: Byrne overslept and missed the tee off time. There was no second chance. So what is the forgetful caddie doing now? “I understand he’s doing OK. He’s back in Ireland in construction, I think,” says Woosnam. Then he smiles. “But we haven’t spoken.”
Despite his recent history, Woosnam says he can hardly wait for the start of this year’s Open at Muirfield.
And if he wins? “If I win it, I wouldn’t play it again,” he says. “And I’ll tell you something else as well. I’ll be counting my bloody clubs on the first tee.”
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