Peter Williams: No one in golf ever wants to play the choker

A TV commentator once called it sphincter twitching. Others, less crude, prefer to suggest it is merely succumbing to pressure. Most golfers don't deal in euphemisms... we just call it choking.

It's common as soft greens in winter in a sport where the player alone is the only one culpable in the outcome of a performance.

A golfer can't blame someone who passes, bowls or serves the ball to him. A golfer has a small, stationary object to project forward into a hole. It's not physically exerting and it doesn't require superhuman strength. So why then is golf stacked full of incidents which can only be described, cruelly, as choking ?

The subject is raised in the light of two notable additions to the annals of the subject last weekend.

At the Bay Hill Invitational in Florida, Englishman Greg Owen three putted from a metre on the 17th green in the final round to blow a two-shot lead over Rod Pampling. Then he hit his second on the 18th into a bunker, and Pampling beat him by a shot.

In this country, James Gill, the accomplished 20-year Waikato and New Zealand representative dominated the South Island Strokeplay at Balmacewan in Dunedin for 69 of 72 holes. He then three-putted the 70th for bogey, made par on the 71st and took four to get down from the edge of the green on the 72nd for a double bogey to lose the title by a shot to Leighton James.

The game is littered with similar tales. Some of them transcend golf and become part of sporting legend.

In 1939, Sam Snead needed a par five on the final hole to win the US Open. He made an eight and never won the title. Sixty years later, Jean Van de Velde had to score just a double bogey six on the last hole at Carnoustie to win the British Open. He scrambled a seven, and lost in a playoff. He hasn't won a tournament since.

Then there's the granddaddy of all chokes - Greg Norman losing a six-shot lead in the final round of the 1996 Masters to finish five shots behind Nick Faldo. He never contended for a major again.

Psychologists have published millions of words on the subject but the primary reason players choke is the variation in speed at which they play in a tense situation.

For instance, Owen rushed that second putt on the 17th green at Bay Hill in a mistake as basic as any 18 handicapper would make. Players at his level usually pause after a missed short putt, mark the ball, reset it, have a practice stoke or two before knocking it in, even from a few inches. Owen went straight to it, hit it before he was set, it lipped out and he blew his best chance of a PGA Tour win.

I didn't see James Gill at Balmacewan, nor do I know the circumstances of the chip and three putt that cost him the South Island Championship. But I played the final 36 holes with him at Taieri in Dunedin last year when he won there and watched with interest, and some alarm, as he nearly blew a sizeable lead in the final few holes through nervous, rushed putting. The same may have happened again at Balmacewan.

Caddie Steve Williams always maintains that Tiger Woods has never missed a putt he had to make in the final stages of a tournament. He said the key to that remarkable sequence is maintaining a set pre-stroke routine and not deviating from his normal pace of play.

The lesson is obvious. But for their sakes, we now hope Owen and Gill don't suffer in the same way as Van de Velde and Norman.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY