Ryder Cup in his soul

Charlie Mulqueen reads ‘Quiet Please’ a quirky tale of Ryder Cup 2002

ON page one of his extraordinary new book ‘Quiet Please’ Lawrence Donegan, author of the acclaimed ‘Four Iron in the Soul’, claims that the Ryder Cup is the world’s ‘greatest golf tournament’.

One of the arguments he makes to support the point is ‘the US PGA Championship is a tournament that has been won by several golfers who could accurately, if unkindly, be called obscure’.

Those prescient words were penned written prior to Shaun Micheel’s remarkable victory at Oak Hill so one is immediately inclined to take due note of anything Donegan has to say.

This former Guardian journalist of Glaswegian origins became completely absorbed by the Ryder Cup and decided he was going to have a central role to play when the matches came to The Belfry in 2002.

In his customary self-deprecatory manner, he thought of caddying for Lee Westwood before realising the Englishman was unlikely to fire his regular looper Dave Renwick for a greenhorn like Donegan, even if he did have a year on the bag of Scottish journeyman Scott Drummond, some years ago.

He transferred his wiles to becoming a marshal at The Belfry and somehow wangled a white armband which apparently entitled him to go all over the course without ever seeming to have a whole lot to do.

To be fair, the dust jacket carries a shot of Westwood driving off the 10th with Donegan standing immediately behind him and holding aloft his ‘Quiet Please’ board, hence the name of a little book (144 small pages with large print) that initially captures your attention and delights, but later disappoints somewhat. For all the fun Donegan derived from that memorable week, his story is too confined to his own (sometimes elicit) activities and not enough about the famous unfolding story that was Ryder Cup 2002.

Donegan is such a great and humorous writer you feel he might well have wound the greatest of all Ryder Cup matches around his own experiences. You suspect he had neither the inclination nor the time to do that, and I feel that is a pity.

On the credit side, though, it is a very funny book. All the time, Donegan takes shots at himself, admitting that he complained on an almost hourly basis before finally getting his hands on the all-important white armband. Early in the week, he watched Padraig Harrington in practice and compared the Irishman’s apparent happiness in his role as European team member with his own sense of disenchantment.

‘I wandered over to the driving range and among the players there was Padraig Harrington,’ Donegan relates. ‘He was taking swings with a towel tucked underneath his upper arms - very strange behaviour indeed, especially with the range of antiperspirant deodorants now available to the modern man.

‘The Irishman is one of my favourite players. There is the air of an innocent abroad about him. Even though he is a superb player, he has this wonderful expression on his face when he hits a great shot, like a wino who’s just found a tenner in a jacket pocket. I watched him hit balls for a while and in the simple rhythm of his swing, the skill he showed in hitting six successive 120 yard wedge shots to within a few yards of each other, not to mention the pleasure he took from doing so, I remembered exactly why I loved golf; exactly why I had made such an effort to get into the Ryder Cup. Padraig Harrington had made it to The Belfry and couldn’t believe his luck. I had made it and couldn’t stop whining.’

The matches duly get under way and nobody turns up more diligently at The Belfry than Lawrence Donegan. However, if the success of the occasion, and especially the marshalling, depended on our hero, it would have been an unmitigated disaster. To say he didn’t exactly carry out his duties to the manor born is an understatement. But he did have a great time, positioning himself shrewdly round after round - until, of course, it came to achieving his ultimate ambition of being there when the winning putt was holed.

Having come to the reasonable conclusion that Phillip Price’s win over Phil Mickelson would be the clincher, he took off after the Welshman who duly finished off the distinguished lefty in great style. However, Paul Azinger then holed his bunker shot to force a half with Niclas Fasth and that meant the overall issue hadn’t yet been decided. The panic stricken Donegan realised it was all down to Paul McGinley and Jim Furyk who were going up the 18th all square.

‘The 18th green was 600 yards away and the path was blocked by every golf fan who ever was,’ laments poor Donegan.

‘I pulled out my senior marshal’s armband and started waving it in the air. I could have pulled out a Colt 45 and nobody would have taken any attention. And then the midlands air was rent by a mighty roar.’

‘Paul McGinley had holed his putt, Europe had won the Ryder Cup,’ wrote Donegan, a man who clearly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry!