Golf: The great leveller

13 April 2016 - 02:18 By Archie Henderson

How difficult, really, can it be to play golf? The ball just lies there, waiting to be hit.It doesn't hurtle at about 100km/h, possibly swinging as it comes, sending doubts rushing through your mind and putting you off your natural hitting line.Or pitching short and rearing at your head, leaving you uncertain whether to duck like a coward or swing a horizontal bat at the bloody thing like a fool.Or it can come drifting seductively before suddenly and unexpectedly dipping, or bouncing excessively - and possibly turning. But turning which way?What looks to be a leg-break can go the other way - the dreaded googly - or it can "go with the arm" and not turn at all just when you'd played for the turn.It can come rocketing over a net, propelled by graphite and catgut.Or it can fall out of the sky, from a great height, having been launched as a deadly garryowen.Then you are torn between keeping one eye on the ball and another on a half-dozen brutes charging at you with intent to maim, if not murder.It can come with force at your feet, your hands or your head. Only those who have dealt with the latter can appreciate just how hard a sphere of leather (or plastic) pumped full of air can be.All the while, the golf ball - a gentle, innocent little thing, so brilliantly white that you could not possibly miss it (or lose it) - lies submissive and inviting.Golf is easy. Even Ernie Els says so. All that needs to be done, runs his theory, is to put the ball on the fairway, then onto the green and finally into the hole.Then, one day, Els - and the bright new star Jordan Spieth - came down to earth to join us mortals and discovered that it's not as easy as they make it look.It was defending champion Spieth's quadruple bogey on the 12th on Sunday, in the final round of the Masters, that let Englishman Danny Willett through the gate, just as Australian Greg Norman had done for another Englishman, Nick Faldo, 20 years before. Both Willett and Faldo, incidentally, shot 67s in their final rounds of the Masters to win it.Spieth, aiming to become only the fourth back-to-back winner of the Masters, instead became the latest victim of Amen Corner - the stretch from the 11th to 13th that, in the past, has made or broken the leaders at Augusta.Where Spieth needed to just get past the 12th, a dangerous par three, he did what the rest of us would probably do: put his nine-iron in the water. Then he did it again, this time with his wedge. In the end, he had to get up and down from a bunker just to make a seven.As dramatic as Spieth's collapse had been, it was still Els's on the first hole last Thursday that rankled. It was then that the Big Easy became the Big Uneasy. Spieth was in the running for 48 holes; Els's Masters was over in one.It took Els six putts to get down from two feet. Never before in Masters history had the first hole been played in nine shots.Afterwards he was repentant: "If you play this game long enough it is going to make a fool out of you."Welcome to our world, Ernie...

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