It’s a small shift. Sometimes it can happen in the quiet of a hotel room. Or out on the range where a million swing thoughts combine to send a little white speck soaring into the blue sky. But when it does, it’s the golfing equivalent of a Michael Jordan slam dunk.
Trevor Immelman made that shift on the European Tour this year. And the sound of that mental ”click” is beginning to be heard around the world.
”Since my amateur career there’s always been a lot of interest in me,” says Immelman from his London base of Richmond, overlooking the Thames River. ”I knew I had the talent and everybody else knew I had the talent.”
We’ve known this since he first picked up a club at the age of five, never doubting his potential as we watched him grow up within the concentrated arc of a golf swing.
We saw his mother carry his golf bag when he played in the United States Masters as an amateur, and we marvelled at his confidence playing practice rounds with a superstar such as Ernie Els.
”But the biggest mental challenge for me was to realise that I had to get out of my own way. Sometimes I was just trying too hard and thinking too much.”
When Retief Goosen got out of his own way, he won a major. When Els did the same on the back of a lengthy majors drought, he won the Open.
Early this year, Trevor Immelman stepped aside for himself. And the golfer who emerged went on to claim two second-place finishes in the French Open and the Scandinavian Masters, as well as a host of top 10s and top 20s that have propelled him to 14th on the European Tour’s money list and just outside the top 100 on the world rankings.
”And the great thing is I’ve still got a good few tournaments left this year,” says Immelman, who is the one person not surprised by his form this year.
”I always knew I had it in me. In my mind, this is how it’s supposed to be. This is what I expect from myself. It’s satisfying to keep putting myself in contention, because that’s where I feel comfortable being.
”My main goals at the start of the year were to finish in the top 15 on the European Tour’s money list and within the top 50 on the world rankings. That way I qualify for all the majors next year and play in all the World Golf Championship events. And obviously I also want to win a tournament.”
Immelman came desperately close to claiming that maiden European Tour victory during the recent Volvo Scandinavian Masters in Sweden. But the South African’s bogey at the last sent the title the way of Northern Ireland’s Graeme McDowell.
”I’ve come through that initial period of finding my feet on the tour, getting used to the weather and travelling and so on, and now I feel like I can win any tournament I tee up in.”
To take his game to the next level, Immelman made the difficult decision of splitting with his brother and long-time coach Mark.
”That was hard because my brother has helped me a lot over the years. But we both felt that with him based in the US and me over in Europe, it was going to be difficult going forward. I think we also knew we’d gone as far as we could together.”
About five months ago, Immelman joined the Harmon fold and began working with Claude Harmon, son of Butch Harmon, the man behind the swing of Tiger Woods.
”Claude obviously has a lot of experience having worked with his father. We’ve been working on my consistency, my short game and my driving accuracy. And I’m beginning to take those changes to the course with me. So I feel that first win is really close now.”
The early signs that Immelman was getting out of his own way came when he beat Els down the stretch in the 2000 Vodacom Players’ Champion-ship in Cape Town.
”That was a fantastic moment for me. I’ve known Ernie since I was five years old, and he’s taught me a hell of a lot. That win came at a time in my career when I was struggling to find my feet. I’d just managed to get my European Tour card by finishing within the top 15 on the Challenge Tour’s Order of Merit. It’s good to know that I can compete with golfers of Ernie’s stature.”
More recognition of this came in this year’s Open Championship, Immelman’s first major as a professional and where he finished tie 43rd. ”The whole week I had this feeling that I deserved to be there,” he says.
There was one very big ”click” heard from Els at Muirfield that week. But if you listened carefully, you would have heard another slightly fainter one come rolling across the windswept links.
”I’ve just got to let the hard work and talent come through and not think about it too much. It’ll happen shortly.”
} The revolution will be televised
^ Steven Wells thought golf was a hotbed of fascism until Che Guevara intervened. Now he’ll be cheering for Europe in the name of international socialism
It’s the Ryder Cup. Golfers from that bit of the Asian land mass where all the white folks live, versus a team from the New American Empire. And security is tighter than a dead ferret’s chuff. The Yanks are all flying their own private jets to the tournament. And if Bin Laden does try to sneak in, then he’ll have his food, drink and transistor radio confiscated. Sensible precautions. But if (as some idiots are claiming) ”Osama is the new Che Guevara”, does that mean that he automatically hates golf? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is probably not.
”Golf,” as Oscar Wilde so wittily put it, ”is the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” No, hang on. That’s not right. It was Peter Ustinov. Anyway, the point the avuncular raconteur was making is that golf — more than any other sport — sucks, mings, pongs and like totally blows fascist chunks.
There’s the anti-Semitism and the racism, the blimpish misogyny and the spirit-withering conservatism. There’s the bizarre fact that it draws a TV audience of millions despite being totally unwatchable (white ball, white sky — hello?). And the appalling fact that every year literally millions of cute little monkeys, tiger cubs and darling baby alligators are ruthlessly bulldozed into a bloody endangered-species purée just to make way for yet more fricking golf courses.
But mostly it’s the clothes. Tennis has Serena Williams in that Jessica Rabbit-tight Lycra cat-suit. Football has the superbly muscled thighs of Nuno Gomez. And golf has Tiger Woods. Who is almost certainly a hunk. But who dresses like Andy Williams. Because he has to. Because them’s the rules.
(And, yeah, I know all the fashion people are running around screaming that ”Pringle is cool!”, but they are mad. In the head. Official.)
PJ O’Rourke once dismissed claims that he was a ”Nazi” by correctly pointing out that nobody has ever fantasised about being tied up and shagged brainless by a Guardian reader. And it is equally true that while lesbians and heterosexual men have Anna Kournikova, and gay porn is awash with images of half-naked soccer bods and coyly pouting gridiron steroid-jockeys, nobody, of either sex or any sexuality, has ever whacked one off while thinking about golf.
In short, if Iain Duncan Smith was a sport, it would be one where you use a metal stick to whack tiny white balls that are made from literally thousands of tightly wound elastic bands. Which explode with terrific force if you try to peel them. Which, perversely, is actually quite exciting.
On balance, however, one is forced to agree with the chap who claimed that ”golf is the reason that God invented lightning”.
Or so I thought. In fact, so secure was I in my smug, blinkered, liberal golfophobia, that I once pointed out to a golf-crazed lefty that golf must suck because George Bush Snr plays it. And Che Guevara never did.
Within 24 hours I had been e-mailed a photo. Of Che and Fidel dressed in dead cool camo clobber. On the golf course. Smoking huge cigars almost certainly made from tobacco leaves rolled on the sweaty thighs of sultry socialist virgins — and playing golf.
This was swiftly followed by another, showing an impressively bandoleered Zapata tooled up with a ”mashie niblick”. And another showing Leon Trotsky wearing 1940s proto-Pringle and loudly checked plus-fours. And yet another that (it was claimed) was an artist’s impression of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels enjoying a pitch’n’putt sesh on the Southend sea-front, circa 1863.
Images of Lenin, Garibaldi, Gramsci, Oliver Cromwell, Wat Tyler and Rosa Luxembourg soon followed. And they were all playing golf. By now I was getting suspicious. But the original Cuban photo checked out: it was definitely genuine. There was no way round it. Che Guevara — the sexiest rebel who ever lived (apart from Kurt Cobain, obviously) — played golf.
Which means, of course, that Ustinov’s infantile and ultra-leftist analysis of the sport has to be abandoned. Golf — despite all the evidence — is not inherently fascist (in the strictly non-sexy sense of the word of course). No, the scientific application of the dialectic reveals that golf is, in fact, an area of human activity no less likely to be liberated by the inevitable victory of the proletariat than any other.
In which case the question that must be asked is — what and where are the progressive forces in modern golf? Should we, for instance, celebrate the fact that nowadays Woods would be welcomed with open arms in the ”19th hole” of any Surrey golf club? Even if his extended family were made to wait outside where they would inevitably be threatened with arrest and then moved on by the police?
And would a victory for the Europeans in the upcoming Ryder Cup be in any way likely to impinge on the essentially phallocentric war-lust of an increasingly rampant United States imperialism? And therefore make it even ever so slightly less likely that George Bush Jnr will launch his insane and irrational planned attack on Iraq?
And, perhaps most importantly of all, what will golf be like after the revolution? Well, you’ll have to carry your own fucking bags for a start. And the balls will be bigger. And fluorescent orange. And there’ll be like crazy-golf style giant windmills all over the place. Which will be wired into the international grid. Which’ll lead to the eventual abandonment of all nuclear and fossil-fuel-based energy-generation technology. Which, in turn, will be great news for the surviving cute little monkeys, tiger cubs and darling baby alligators. Which we could then farm and eat — thereby solving world hunger at a stroke.
But most importantly, golf in a sexually liberated, post-revolutionary society will be as horny as heck. The current genital-withering crooner-wear will be gradually replaced by ultra-tight and multi-zipped George Michael-style black-leather jump suits. And peaked caps. And jack-boots. And the ”19th hole” will no longer be the sole preserve of blimpishly bitter, gin-pissed, red-faced misogynist Powellites only capable of maintaining erections if savagely thrashed with wet fish by cold-eyed and cynical East European sex workers dressed as ”Nanny”.
No: it’ll be a crèche-facilitated and all-abilities-access pan-sexual disco playing the music of The Clash, Asian Dub Foundation, Atari Teenage Riot, Sham 69, Ms Dynamite, Joan Armatrading and Billy Bragg.
Which is why I — along with all true socialists — will be glued to my TV set cheering on the Europeans during the Ryder Cup.
Honest. —