No matter how long you have been playing, golf can conjure up situations you have never come across before. For example, the challenge of extracting your ball from the clutches of a cactus, ice plant, heather or gorse.
Then there are the radical changes of surface to be considered when your ball lands on baked mud, a stony desert, an old road or chunk of corrugated iron. Whatever shot you choose to attempt, keep ‘thin to win’ foremost in your mind, thus protecting your wrists for the remainder of the round.
No matter how odd your current lie, a still stranger one awaits you one day. Your ball will find its way into a paper bag, onto a pile of moose dung or up close to a rather large alligator. How do you proceed?
Then there are one-handed shots, left-handed shots and toe bunts. Finally after twenty years, that high school geometry lesson pays off when you calculate the angle to bounce your ball off a wall or tree like a pool shot. Or take aim at the side of a hill having first calculated the perfect bounce back towards the flag. So, too, do those distant memories kick in when we drive past a piece of raw land just crying out for a golf hole. You can clearly see where the tee should be, where the green belongs and how you will play this imaginary hole.
Around the green, the possibilities to exercise your creativity are virtually endless. Do you run it, pitch it with spin, pitch with some roll of hit a mega flop shot that stops dead and wows the crowd. Weapons, too, offer multiple choices. A back-footed sand wedge closed down to hit a low skip and spin. Or a four-iron to run it all the way with a little top spin. Perhaps a chip and run with a utility wood or do you choose, as my friend Dick always does, to putt it form anywhere up to 30 yards off the green?
The creativity you must employ is not entirely dependent upon the elements or course because it’s also in the mind. I was once obliged to play the entire back nine with just a driver, five-wood and wedge, trying desperately to protect a substantial lead in the final round of the club championship having shanked two consecutive shots on eight and nine. So fragile were my nerves, there was no way I was going to risk another iron shot. So it was drive, bunt five-wood, drive, bunt five-wood all the way home. It wasn’t pretty but it did the job.
Even the pros are not immune to such problems and respond creatively. Johnny Miller once skipped his ball across a pond because he could not get it up in the air and onto the green from the trees he was under. I once had the pleasure of watching the great maestro, Seve Ballesteros at Wentworth make five birdies in a row. All five came from the depth of the woods and the final one included a four-iron played on his knees from under a bush, which he hit to 15 feet. Naturally, he then promptly drained the putt!
On the very short seventh at Pebble Beach, where the green famously sits on a peninsula drummed by all the elements, the legendary Sam Snead once hit a putter 120 yards down the cart path into a greenside bunker, from which he comfortably made par. Given the severity of the wind and the penalty for missing the green, he considered it the safest way to play the hole.
Who will ever forget Bubba Watson’s astonishing shot on the 10th at Augusta to win the Masters’ play off? What creativity, what vision, what execution, what a moment, all set up, of course, by a cataclysmically bad drive. That, my friends, is the real appeal of the game for all of us. One moment of genius can make up for a host of previous sins. In fact, such a moment often delivers far more pleasure than a routine par or birdie.
What was your most creative shot ever? I bet it was legendary!
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