Ten Moments in golf decade(iii)

3) Still on a personal note, another memory of playing club golf at the Milnerton GC will be the strange behaviour of my golf ball on an especially windy day. I managed, with the help of the South Easter, to reach the raised green of the par-five eighth in three and was in with a great chance of making an easy birdie from four feet. But as I approached my ball and began lining up my putt, a strong gust blew it away, the ball just missing the hole by a fraction of an inch before finally coming to rest in the fringe at the back of the green some 30 feet away. "Play it as it lies" I was informed, but guess what? Before I could do that. It blew away again, running 30 yards down the incline at the back of the green. I won't tell you what my eventual score there was, but I will say it wrecked any hope I had entertained of winning that day's Monthly Medal.

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2) On a personal note, golf never stops reminding me that it is a carbon copy of life. You can never be sure of what is just around the bend and this was once more brought back with a resounding bump recently at my scenic, Milnerton Golf Club's seaside links course where Table Mountain, the city centre of Cape Town, Table Bay and Robben Island are all clearly visible from many of its 18 holes. I had just hit more shanks with my irons and more worm-burners with my metal woods than I had in years in what I reckon I will always rate as the worst warm-up session of my life, when, with my confidence seemingly shattered, I went out and shot a four-year best 79 off a 16 handicap in a betterball stableford competition.

Worsts in Golf Decade

1) The Tiger Woods fiasco has to be the strongest memory I'll have of the 2009 golf season. He was the last person I would have picked out had I been told that one of the US PGA Tour's top ten golfers would end up being portrayed as a serial philanderer with a list of somewhere around a dozen women who would allege to having been bedded by this seemingly goody two shoes. Just days before his bizarre car crash and the series of scandals that followed it, I had written a blog wondering what to give Tiger for Christmas? I said here was a man with everything. A great career that had brought him fame and enormous wealth, a jet aircraft, a luxury yacht, mansions galore, and perhaps most important of all, a happy marriage to a beautiful wife who had given him two hugely appealing children. How wrong can you be!