The Open returns to "Car-nasty" this year for the first time since 1999

By Matt Slater Golf editor

Maurice Flitcroft, perhaps golf's most famous unfulfilled talent, reached the great clubhouse in the sky last month after a 77-year round on life's links.

It was a good effort from the chain-smoking Englishman - particularly as his jobs included stints as a stunt man, high diver and crane operator - and his name will live on thanks to the various societies and trophies that are named after him, the patron saint of bad golfers.

But there is a nagging feeling that Flitcroft was a man ahead of his time: not just because of his reality TV-like grabs for, as he put it, "fame and fortune" without the customary talent, but also because the one thing he most wanted, the chance to strut his stuff on the finest fairways known to man, is now on offer to golfers of his less-than-stellar abilities.

After gripping the club like he was intent on murdering someone, Flitcroft hoisted it straight up, came down vertically and the ball travelled precisely four feet James Howard Flitcroft's playing partner

The brainchild of Hampshire businessman Ross Honey, International Pairs is now nine years old and probably the world's largest competition for club golfers. But most importantly, for modern-day Maurices, the men's competition is open to 24-handicappers and the women's to 32-handicappers.

Win through your club competition and national semi-finals and you qualify for the 2007 International Pairs UK Final at Carnoustie on 16-17 October, three months after the world's best players convene at the feared Angus course to compete for golf's most prestigious title, the Open Championship.

The winning pair at "Car-nasty" qualify for next year's world final. The 2007 edition is at Fairmount St Andrews, which boasts an Open qualifier among its links.

It was, of course, Flitcroft's attempt to qualify for the 1976 Open that first brought him to international attention. And it was his four subsequent attempts, the last coming in 1990, which kept him there.

Van de Velde did a passable impression of Flitcroft in 1999

Thirty-one years ago, the then 46-year-old Flitcroft decided to test the "skills" he had spent just 18 months honing at the local beach and playing fields by applying to take part in that year's Open at Birkdale, largely because he thought his game would improve when put up against "Jack Nicklaus and all that lot".

Not having an official handicap - as his only forays onto an actual course had been via the gap in the fence on the 2nd hole - he could not enter as an amateur. So he ticked the box marked "professional", paid his �30 entry fee (his wife lent him the cash) and headed off to Formby for local final qualifying.

What happened next is the stuff of Open legend, just as much as anything the 19-year-old prodigy Seve Ballesteros or eventual winner Johnny Miller achieved that year.

Playing partner Jim Howard didn't realise it at the time but what he was watching was history in the making.

"After gripping the club like he was intent on murdering someone, Flitcroft hoisted it straight up, came down vertically and the ball travelled precisely four feet," said Howard.

"We put that one down to nerves, but after he shanked a second one we called the R&A officials."

Did Howard want them to enforce the "trousers down" rule? No, he wanted Flitcroft disqualified. "It wasn't funny at the time," harrumphed Howard.

Fortunately, from a romantic point of view, our hero could not be stopped. Well, not until he had clocked up the worst round in the Open's 147-year history.

I don't want to make excuses but I left my four-wood in the car - I am an expert with the four-wood Maurice Flitcroft

One witness described his 49-over-par 121, a conservative estimate as the scorer lost count on a few holes, as a "blizzard of triple and quadruple bogeys ruined by a solitary par".

Hacker, charlatan, time-waster, trespasser even, Flitcroft was all these things, but one thing he was not was a shrinking violet.

When the world's golfing media got wind of the fireworks at Formby they decamped from the practice rounds at Birkdale and descended on Flitcroft. A star was born.

The score, Flitcroft explained, "weren't a fair reflection" of his play. He had been suffering, apparently, from "lumbago and fibrositis".

"But I don't want to make excuses," he explained, before making one, "I left my four-wood in the car. I am an expert with the four-wood, deadly accurate."

Michelle Wie aims for the clock at Formby, where it started for Flitcroft

One hack of the journalist variety tracked down Flitcroft's mother and told her about Maurice's historic performance. "Does that mean he won?" she asked.

When told otherwise, she said: "Well, he's got to start somewhere."

And she was right, because it was just a start for Flitcroft and the Open. Not cowed by the Formby fiasco, he applied to play in the 1977 qualifying tournament.

This time, however, he was stopped from playing by the R&A, the Open's organisers, and told he had been turned down as there was no proof he had improved.

With his name now ringing alarm bells at the R&A, Flitcroft attempted to blag his way into the qualifying event undercover.

One year he was American pro Gene Pacecki (as in "pay cheque"), another he was Swiss pro Gerald Hoppy. And in 1990 he turned up at Ormskirk as James Beau Jolley - he was "looking at a par", after opening with a double-bogey and a bogey, when an R&A official caught up with him on the third.

Sadly, none of these aliases ever really worked, largely because he couldn't disguise his game. But there were signs of improvement - to within International Pairs perameters, anyway - towards the end of his golfing "career".

Invited out to the US to play in a tournament named in his honour - an event which featured a green with two holes to give everybody a chance - Flitcroft scored in the low 90s. He also described the trip as the first time he and his wife had been out of the house "since our gas oven exploded".

Now if he could have found himself a good partner and then dovetailed to perfection with that partner, Flitcroft could have been an International Pairs success. After all, the 2004 winners from Wakefield played off 20 and 10.

And at �5 to enter, the competition is considerably cheaper than the �60 Flitcroft (or was it Beau Jolley?) paid to play two and a half holes at Ormskirk.