Golf: It's a Very Difficult Game - 10 August 2001

I'm looking warily through my study window - a sheet of glass too hot to touch - at an outside thermometer nestled cosily in a strip of shade. it says 101 degrees.

And looking beyond, I see in Central Park great bulging forests of foliage seething in an atmosphere that the weather bureau gravely calls "unacceptable" and the American Lung Association says "is no fit place for joggers, respiratory patients or old folk".

Early this morning there was, panting round the reservoir, a single mad young jogger. He reminded me of my long-time doctor being asked, when the jogging mania came in, if he ever jogged.

"Only," he said, "when I'm late for the funeral of a patient who jogged."

Well I'm unpacking the last dribble of personal belongings from the very small suitcase that I travel with on the one or two times a year that I undertake a safari.

After I'd rescued some newspaper clippings, toothbrush, pills, old boarding passes, I came on a little square card, one of a series that the San Francisco hotel puts on your pillow every night alongside a couple of mints.

The cards are printed with single sentences written in tribute to the city by famous men. And the one I'm looking at now makes me wish I'd never left the Golden Gate.

It's that old chestnut: "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco".

Of course that ain't literally so but it tells something permanent about the city that the city fathers would not like intending tourists to memorise. Namely that July and August are the coldest months and all I can say for people like me, who can no longer abide the midsummer sauna of this continent, San Francisco is, in those two months, a joy to be in.

Cold means daytime high temperature 62, 3, 4 - night time 52.

My morning paper today has a half-page map of the United States. any place in the 50s is painted a pale lemon.

the wash goes through orange to scarlet and alas the whole country is scarlet to blood red - the 100s in blood red in hundreds of towns. Even the far northern coast of rocky Maine is pink - in the 80s.

But on the edge of the West coast there's a tiny sliver, no more than a wide outline, of lemon yellow - that's right.

"This is the place" as Brigham Young said, settling the Mormons - not in San Francisco thank God, though plural marriages have been known to exist in the city of St Francis.

One in particular that made its practitioner famous for a day around the world - a cable car conductor who managed to juggle five wives, each of whom was ignorant of the others' existence.

This happened when the press - there was no television then - of 51 nations were gathered with their delegates to found the United Nations, a league that would stop or prevent all wars.

We didn't bother to notice at the time that there would be no international army or even the promise of one.

But enough of the troubles. this is August, what an old newspaper man called "the sporty month", when the president of the United States sets the example by shelving the troubles and devoting a month to rest and play.

Franklin Roosevelt used to go fishing. President Ford went high up in the Rockies so he could see his drives off the tee actually go 25 yards beyond normal.

President Teddy Roosevelt went shooting in the jungles of Brazil and fitted out one room in the White House with such a menagerie of heads and tusks that his successor had to take them down so as to be able to stand up straight.

So it will not be amiss, I hope, at the beginning of this sporty month, if I devote this letter to a delicious story which, as Henry Kissinger used to say, has the advantage of being true.

It's meant, chiefly, for golfers and Scotsmen and women, though any other race, tribe, ethnic or sporting group is free to listen at its peril, since although the story is very simple, explaining the background for non-golfers might sound to some people like defining the opposing arguments in the Kyoto debate - a subject I've spent a month trying to unravel.

Unfortunately my knowledge of higher mathematics, petroleum engineering and the economic potential of solar and other non-fossil fuels is so woefully inadequate as to disqualify me for an opinion.

I must say I marvel at friends of mine whose scientific bent does not bend over to the understanding of even a molecule, who nevertheless have firm, even indignant convictions, about relative energy systems.

However, I feel on firmer ground when the ground is one that you trudge over in pursuit of a ball which at one time had a liquid centre - but then one time the club head of a driver was persimmon, now it's titanium.

Well then, two weeks ago, on a Monday evening, an event happened in California unique in the history of the marvellous mania.

The two best men golfers in the world teamed up with the two best women golfers to play a famous, weird desert course where the fairways look like irregular strips of green baize dropped in between a hundred piles of rocks deposited - by dinosaurs no doubt - on sand and scrub.

Tiger Woods was partnered by Annika Sorenstam, the splendid Swede. David Duval's partner was the Australian Karrie Webb. Who, while a year ago Tiger Woods was winning five major tournaments out of eight, to the howling applause of millions of new fans, Karrie Webb was doing exactly the same to the stupified admiration of the best golfers in the world.

The desert joust took place in the late afternoon merging into twilight and then the purple desert darkness. Why? So that the sponsors of the tournament and the club and I guess the chamber of commerce could show off a new, 600,000-watt system of high lights, which illuminated the 30 acres or so involved in laying out the 14th green and the last four holes.

Is this the California that stands on the alert for instant blackouts because of its energy crisis? The same. Then why did they have to play this game at night? Nobody I've talked to has the remotest idea.

Well the set-up - a top man and top woman against two of their kind - was new. The format of the game was so new to Americans that the run-in commentator appeared to be talking to a four year old as he explained, with kindly patience, what he called "this peculiar format".

Each team would play one ball, the man on each team would tee off - drive - on the odd holes - the first, third, fifth and so on. The women on the even-numbered holes and thereafter they would alternate strokes till the ball was in the hole.

The game was to be at match play - not accumulated number of strokes but each hole a game in itself.

If I already begin to sound peculiar or slightly daffy to Scottish listeners it's because this peculiar format is what in Scotland is called "golf" or "the golf".

It's astonishing but true that this peculiar format is very rarely played in America. I have friends who've been playing with a golf ball for 40 years and have never played golf.

And, like my oldest friend, they could not guess what it's like.

As one time he and I started to play a famous links course at Brancaster in Norfolk. As you approach the first tee there's a big board planted firmly in a sandy hillock - it must have been there for decades.

It says: "No four balls allowed on this course."

"What," cried my puzzled pal, "does it mean?"

It meant exactly what it said. If you want to know what the American game of golf is like, nobody has given a more succinct and I fear scornful description of it than the old rogue of golf writing Henry Longhurst.

After crying up the joys of match play and the competitive tension and rare friendship that can be sustained between two partners with a single ball he ends: "To share a ball with a man or woman partner gives you a fellow feeling that no amount of four balls, however successful, can ever match.

"This theory is fortified by looking at the opposite end of the scale - the four ball at an average American country club - in which all four hole out at every hole, their scores being carefully marked down because they must know at the end what they shot. The whole, infinitely dreary business taking a minimum of four hours.

"It's one of the greatest wearinesses of the flesh ever voluntarily imposed upon man in the name of recreation."

Well the game we saw that infamous Monday night took four hours also even though it was the genuine article, imported from Scotland in the long ago but since abandoned by 99 Americans in 100.

The game was long, slow and awkward-moving and extremely humiliating to the four great ones because of a totally unexpected novelty that will make this event forever memorable.

Each of the four champs played the worst game of golf any of them could remember. We saw that the incomparable Tiger can chilli-dip a 20ft chip even as you and I. That Duvall and Karrie Webb also can hit only two greens out of 18 in regulation.

That Tiger and Annika put each into such preposterous lumps of scrub, cactus, mesquite and undergrowth that they each had to play left-handed.

The whole scene gave, need I say, great joy to every hacker on earth.

My golf partner - my ex-partner - who is a surgeon who is also no slouch with a two iron, and one handicap from the championship tees at San Francicsco's Olympic Club - he gave me a parting word when I told him I thought I ought to talk about this dazzling event.

"Tell your people," he said, "that the Americans have finally discovered golf and found out it's a very difficult game."

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