Hole as big as a rubbish bin, playing on top of the world
By PETER CALDER
They talk in yards, feet, inches - metrication has not penetrated to the heart of this most royal and ancient of games.
So when you crouch on the silky baize of the green, assessing the expanse of manicured turf between the white ball and a hole, 41/4 inches in diameter, cut into the ground, you're thinking of it as a 15-foot putt.
And it's a long 15 feet. The hole is the size of a needle's eye. You hope to leave it close, not miss by too much.
Or you're Michael Campbell. The hole is the size of a rubbish bin. Failing to make the putt doesn't come into it. The clubhead goes back. The ball rolls. Rolls. Drops. Rattles.
"I feel invincible," Campbell said yesterday, as he basked in the day after his summer's fourth tournament win, which took him well past $1 million in prizemoney.
"There has been a huge turnaround in my confidence, in my life. I feel at ease with my golf. Right now I find golf easy."
He knew some might think him cocksure, but he wasn't boasting. He was talking something as simple and factual as the colour of his golf shoes.
We prize modesty in our champions, but those who spend time around champion golfers know there's a world of difference between confidence and immodesty.
Geoff Smart, a freelance coach and member of the board of the New Zealand Professional Golf Association, says success in golf is a "complicated mixture" of technique and self-belief.
"You have to have the technical expertise but confidence comes only with success. You get a lot of people who talk confidently but it is just not there. You can't have true confidence unless you're achieving."
Former All Black first five-eighths Grant Fox calls it "the zone."
"You get into the groove and you know that nothing can go wrong, that you're never going to miss."
Mr Smart recalls Johnny Miller, an American superstar golfer of the early 1970s (a man who memorably pronounced that "serenity is knowing your worst shot is still pretty good") who "once said that he had game totally under control; and he would never have to practise again."
It was not a literal fact, but neither was it a boast. It was an expression of how good the golfer was feeling. And how good a golfer feels gives a pretty good line on how well he'll play.
"There are moments when everything works. The technique's there, the mind's focused, and everything just gets easier and easier.
"That's where Campbell is at the moment and I think he's just capable of doing anything."
His view is shared by Richard Ellis, the director of golf at Gulf Harbour Country Club.
"People who hear him say he's invincible might think he's a smartass but it's not meant in that way," he says. "Once you get to that top echelon and you know you're good you continue to be good."
The whole field in a tournament has the ability to win it, says Mr Ellis. "But the winner each week invariably comes down to the one who has the fewest putts."
Campbell has come back from the wilderness of 1997 when he wrestled with tendon injury and played so badly he lost his European and Australian tour cards.
But he had some ordinary early rounds in this last tournament and some jittery holes at the beginning of the final round. And it was confidence - not technique - which allowed him to sink long putts on the 14th and 15th holes to make his lead comfortable.
"Right now he's in the top 10 players in the world," says Richard Ellis. "And there's no reason he can't stay there."
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.