Around a roaring log fire last Sunday evening, just before the start of the last round of the US Open, and over a few wee drams of Speyside’s sweet and fruity mother’s milk, an old Sunshine Tour friend and myself soon got around to the state of the greens at Chambers Bay last week, and started reminiscing about some of our own stories from years of playing, and of Pros “losing it” and “tossing their toys out of the cot”.
And these tales weren’t only due to adverse course conditions. Most were self-inflicted!
And the one that stood out the most vividly for me concerned 2 good friends who I was paired with during a Winter Tour event on the West Rand. One was local Krugersdorp born and bred boy Roger Wessels, playing on his home track, and the other was Nic Henning, he of the famous South African golfing family.
We were headed down our back 9 (the front nine of the course) in the second round, with a cut looming, and where I was playing quite well, Nic was doing ok, but Rog was going to need some help from the birdie gods just to make the cut. He was also feeling the heat, being one of the locals, and who are always expected to run away with any event played at home.
I knew Roger very well, yet his occasional tendency to a short fuse were definitely not on view as the ball bounced every which way but where he wanted it to, and several lip-outs were starting to become the order of the day for him. I had no idea what the temperature was under his collar, but then on the short downhill par-4 5th hole, he finally caught an iron shot right out of the screws, and the ball was headed high and handsome, and straight for the pin. He held his pose, allowing just the thinnest of smiles, but then his jaw dropped and he watched in horror as his ball sailed about 30m over the back of the green and into some of the thickest bush in the Krugersdorp magisterial district.
He immediately reached into his back pocket for his yardage book, and quickly worked out that he had added metres instead of subtracting them from the sprinkler head he’d walked past en route to his goen. He then reached into his other back pocket, retrieved my scorecard which he was marking, walked calmly over to me to hand it back to me, and stated very matter-of-factly that “that’s it, I’ve had enough and I’m heading for home”!
I was always one to see the lighter side of things, and once he’d turned his back and started the long trek back up the hill towards the house, I could not contain myself any longer and broke into fits of laughter. Nic, who was chopping wood in the trees, figured out what had happened and also started cracking up, and we then continued the round, caught in between our feeling of pain for a fellow Pro’s suffering, but thankful and happy at the same time that there’d been no tantrums, f-bombs and helicopters flying around.
The drama was by no means over as Nic dumped one in the soup on the following par 3, ending the hole with a nasty treble-bogey, and leaving himself now perched precariously on the cut-line.
But then on the next hole, a short but tricky par 5, I was reaching down to replace my ball on the green for a short birdie putt after Nic’s much-needed effort for his own birdie had rimmed out, when I sensed some unusual noise and movement around me as I was down on my haunches. As I looked up, I saw Nic’s putter bouncing and rolling around the hole, just narrowly missing hitting his own ball, but taking a small chunk out of the green, and which just happened to be right in my line.
Apparently, after his putt lipped out, he almost threw his putter at the ball, but it slipped out of his grasp, and flew straight for the hole, and his own ball. Luckily it didn’t make contact, otherwise more penalties would have doomed him to a certain missed cut, but as they say in cricket, “it was all happening”.
It was a crazy 3-hole stretch, and we all have had a few laughs about it over the years.
The tensions that tournament Pros play under comes out in many weird and wonderful ways, and that was certainly the case last week at the US Open, although modern day press and social media have made it a much bigger audience today, and also on a global scale.
Kappygolf 