Gods Of Golf

photos courtesy Matt Cleary

Back onto the short, downhill par-four 11th hole and there’s tennis starlet Ana Ivanovic; tall and spunky and Euro-cool. She’s knocking around with KJ Choi’s wife, who’s no taller than a medium-sized cactus. Men gaze at Ivanovic with binoculars, doing their best drooling Homer Simpson: Aaarggh – tennis.

By their 12th hole, Adam Scott and Choi have wiped the floor with Woods and Steve Stricker, seven and six. The American TV man on the portable telly thing tells us it’s “quite a surprise”. A journo mate remarks: “More like an unlubricated fisting”. But when Aaron Baddeley and Jason Day conjure to square their match after leading by two with two to go, the first momentum shift of the Presidents Cup goes the United States’ way and dominates Friday’s papers.

DAY 2 – The nor-wester of God

It’s hot and blowy, and I’m out to see Woods and J-Day and his caddy Col Swatton, who I went to school with in the ‘80s. Swatton’s been living in Golf World for a while, a peer of PGA Tour types. On the 17th the day before, Shark placed two hands on Swatton’s shoulders, fixed him with his gaze and gave him a meaningful look that could’ve said: “Don’t fuck this up or I’ll have you killed. I have that power, you know. Don’t think I don’t.”

There’s David Feherty and his sing-song Irish accent like the father from In The Name Of The Father, Pete Postlethwaite, a fine actor. “I wonder if this putt is easier to read in Korean,” remarks Feherty of a KT Kim three-metre assignment. It’s a line he uses in Tiger Woods’ computer game. I know television is show business, but can you really recycle all your gags?

A large contingent of American journos are here, their shirts loud and billowing and tucked into khaki Bermuda shorts, Florida chic. Several smoke Cuban cigars which seem to grow ever-bigger, aromatic and pungent, smouldering leaves of Cuba’s prime export, incongruous here in suburban Melbourne off the highway to Frankston.

Woods rolls in a curling four-and-a-half-metre putt on the fourth, requiring more touch than Tchaikovsky. He knows how good it is and celebrates, in that way of his, by punching an imaginary dwarf on the top of the head. Cop that, Grumpy.

The galleries are large if a little muted this early in the piece. They roar for fine golf, but there’s no American-style whooping or hollering. Shark and his rented Fanatics will later contend that they “got the crowds going” with their humorous ditties. The Australian’s Patrick Smith will contend that it was the golf that did that and that the Fanatics should be locked out. I tend to side with a mate who observes that, “In the old days they’d have been pelted with tinnies.”

Woods waves flies away. No one yells out like Yabber from The Hill to Jardine, “Leave our flies alone!” Australian sporting crowds have lost wit and replaced it with sing-a-long types in love

with being celebrities by association. Or I could be getting old.

After five holes one thing is clear: Woods is hitting greens and shaving cups, his putter simmering. When he starts making some of these six-metre putts, as he routinely did in those orgasmic dwarf-bashing days of yore, then he’ll be back to winning Majors like he never went away. Take it to the bank via Centrebet.

There’s Fred Couples, 52 and probably cooler than you. There’s Frank Nobilo, whose ancestors, according to the PGA Tour guide, “were Italian pirates who after running out of things to pillage on the Adriatic, resettled in New Zealand in the early 1900s”. Nobilo is the Internationals’ vice-captain. It’s hard to deduce what his role is other than “Be Frank”. He pulls it off, though.

Christ, it’s hot. Thirty-three degrees with a blustery nor-wester cooked over the bad-lands of the Hay Plains and rolling across RM like the hot hand of God. The greens are trampolines. The players struggle to make par. Most of us would struggle to break a hundred.

After Woods and company finish 12 holes in a nudge over five hours, I decide to rack the cue. For all the golfing goodness, it’s painful stuff. Jason Day plays slower than a palaeontologist fossicking about in a labyrinth for the dusty bones of Cro-Magnon man. The wind isn’t going to stop the more you wait it out. You can’t have hectopascals to order. Not even Shark has that power and he could have you killed.

DAY 3 – Having cake and eating it, too

It’s flogging down in St Kilda, so I eat some vanilla slice on Acland Street, where cakes are a specialty. Out to Royal Melbourne after lunch and I’m on the par-three third hole, where I stand behind three Scotsmen drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes, dressed in Fanatics’ garb, the world a madman’s joke.

I’m out to see Tiger Woods again because he’s Tiger and showing Tiger tendencies. Grrr. He’s playing with Dustin The Long and two Koreans you wouldn’t have heard of had one (YE Yang) not hit the greatest hybrid in history and beaten Woods in the 2009 US PGA. His mate KT Kim is also a fine player, jamming in putts like a schoolie’s tongue. The Koreans win one-up.There’s Phil Mickelson, who may be a very nice man, yet annoys me, as he does many Australians, with his seemingly confected “aw shucks” sugar-cane, candy-floss grin. “That’s kinda nice,” he’ll say, touching his cap, his cheeks like Alvin The Chipmunk’s. And every time he does a puppy dies. It’s a stone fact.

Mickelson’s wife is wearing silver gumboots. The weather is cold and wet and blacker than Guinness in a cave; weather like your first taste of a lemon, weather like a punch in the face. The wind ratchets up and it’s wet and slimy and nasty. But still the Melburnians hang on, knowing it probably won’t last, that there is still Great Golf and that they could yet cash in. Not me. That’s stumps on day three.

DAY 4 – Denouement

No “gimmes” in the match-play singles today, the greens are slick and it’s “game on” for the sheep station. I sit at the back of the fifth, a cracking uphill par-three with a sucker pin right that lures American balls into the bunkers like a vortex.