FORGIVE me if this opening paragraph is interrupted by a gaping yawn – sorry, I’ve just had to stifle a yawn – but a 2am arrival back from a drive up the road from Wentworth can make the process of chiselling out a column such a creaking, laborious trudge, it’s like heaving each individual letter of a granite alphabet on to a hod and carrying them up a bloomin’ ladder.
Some weeks, of course, this scribe can float serenely into a productive reverie and clatter out words with the gliding, elegant nonchalance of Liberace gently tinkling his ivories. But on weary weeks like this, the fingers hover uncertainly over the keys like the trembling, stalling digits of someone who has forgotten their debit card number at the ATM and are worried the thing will get swallowed.
As you can see, though, we got there in the end. Look, there’s 800 or so words cluttering up this page in front of you. And, let’s face it, there was plenty to write about from a very different BMW PGA Championship.
In the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing, the show kept going after Friday’s suspension. The dignified acts of quiet remembrance from all and sundry during Saturday’s resumption of play reflected the keep calm and carry on spirit of Her Majesty. In very unfortunate circumstances, the DP World Tour officials dealt with the whole situation with great diligence and dignity. They were rewarded with a thrilling golfing spectacle on a Sunday of captivating theatre and they got a great champion in Shane Lowry who may not win as often as he would like – who does? – but when he wins, he wins big ones.
By the looks of his social media page the morning after the night before, Lowry, in typically jovial fashion, enjoyed his celebrations and rightly so. For all the stereotypes of the cheery, down to earth, Guinness slurping, partying Irishman, though, Lowry remains a fiercely dedicated and disciplined professional. In a sport where you lose more often than you win, it’s important to savour the victories when they come along.
“You spend your life and your career getting up early every day, working your nuts off to get in these positions and when you get in these positions, it’s quite uncomfortable,” said the 2019 Open champion of the pressure of the cut-and-thrust. “It’s not the nicest place in the world because you don’t want to mess it up and be sitting in your hotel room having thrown away the tournament.”
In this game, with its complex demands and fickle fortunes, it takes a special something to emerge victorious and this was another personal and professional validation for Lowry.
The shadow, meanwhile, of LIV Golf, and the names of a posse of so-called rebels on the tee-sheet, had dominated the build-up to the European circuit’s flagship event but their presence, in some ways, added to the occasion.
Patrick Reed, for instance, may be many things in the eyes of pundits and punters but there is no denying what a talented, committed player he is. His charging 63 on the final day over the West Course underlined his competitive zeal while he spoke eloquently about the current impasse in the LIV Golf versus the status quo battle.
Reed’s behaviour was in stark contrast to that of another LIV defector, Sergio Garcia. Since jumping ship, Garcia’s petulant antics have grown increasingly erratic and the darker elements of his character have frequently reared their head.
After an opening 76 at Wentworth, Garcia withdrew with no courteous explanation and was next seen some 5000 miles away gleefully smiling for the camera at an American football match in Texas. For many, it was a move that had about as much class as a hurried toilet break at a dingy motorway service station.
Not that long ago, Garcia’s reputation plunged a few more fathoms when he was reported to have roared, “this tour is s***, you’re all f****ed, should have taken the Saudi money,” to stunned DP World Tour players in the locker room at the BMW International in Germany.
This latest act of peevishness at Wentworth is just another act in a dodgy dossier of contentious capers down the years which have included spitting in the hole at Doral and deliberately damaging a number of greens in, of all places, Saudi Arabia, during an inexcusable and prolonged tantrum that was an utter embarrassment from a golf professional.
For all his qualities – a wonderfully talented player, major champion and Ryder Cup talisman – Garcia continues to display the kind of unhinged sense of entitlement of a brattish Babylonian prince.
Funnily enough, it was at Wentworth way back in 1999
where folk got an initial glimpse
of Garcia hurling the toys out of
the pram. During the World Matchplay event there, he flung one of his shoes at an advertising hoarding after slipping on the tee. When it was returned to him, the seething Spaniard lashed at it with his foot and the volley almost sent said shoe clattering into a referee’s face.
A report of the heated palaver quoted a woman in the crowd, who said: “I think I’ve gone off him now.”
Here in 2022, there will be plenty of folk echoing similar sentiments about sullen, short-fused Sergio.
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