Johnson column: I doubt Bubba’s hit many railway lines before Troon slump

By Martin Johnson

There are a couple of ways to experience that lump in the throat feeling during an Open championship at Royal Troon. The first is to win the thing, and the second is to buy a ticket for the Glasgow to Ayr commuter train and open the window when it’s whistling past the 11th hole.

Bubba Watson had probably never hit a golf ball onto a railway line in his life until he got to Royal Troon, but he managed it twice on consecutive days in The Open. Fortunately, there wasn’t a train coming at the time, otherwise we might have had a passenger complaining that he didn’t order a hard boiled egg with his breakfast bap only for the buffet car steward to point out that it was actually a Titleist 2.

Links golf. Don’t you just love it? The American golfer Ryan Moore had played in six previous Opens before Troon, experiences which have clearly left him sufficiently traumatised to walk onto the first tee on Thursday and inquire whether it was within the rules to use a compass. Which it was.

For most people, a course planner from the pro shop is pretty much all they need to get around, but you can only assume that Moore took one look at Troon’s bunkers and decided there was a decent chance of getting lost inside one of them. And so, a box of distress flares being a bit too bulky, he slipped a compass into the bag.

One of the things that makes the Open stand out is that it has a far lower “Go In The Hole!” count than the three American Majors. However, on the rare occasions some halfwit in the Troon gallery felt obliged to bellow golf’s No 1 inanity, there was a more than decent chance of a ball doing precisely that. The hole in question being very deep, and full of sand.

There’s not a links course on the planet with more subtly evil bunkering than Troon, the Old Course included, and by the time the cream of the world’s golfers headed out of town on Monday morning, there was barely enough sand left in the bunkers to fill an egg timer.

Apart from his two visits to the railway line, Bubba’s first taste of Troon’s most celebrated hole, the par three eighth, was not an experience he’d have enjoyed very much. Leading the tournament on Thursday morning, at five under par through seven holes, Watson’s tee shot into the coffin bunker cost him a triple bogey six, from which he never recovered. For Bubba, the Postage Stamp was a case of philately getting him nowhere.

On Saturday, the hole measured precisely 100 yards, which was 200 yards less than the par three eighth at Oakmont for the US Open. And yet it was a harder test, with Sky’s cameras regularly honing in on golfers playing sideways and backwards just to get the ball out of the sand. Sand which is a good deal harder to splash out of than on a regular European Tour event, where the stuff is specially manufactured to make life so easy for the pro golfer you can almost hear them purr with pleasure when their ball goes into one.

When I’m in a bunker on my own course, my playing companions hurriedly make themselves scarce, as on the rare occasions my ball decides to come out, it does so like a low flying heat-seeking missile, capable of knee-capping anyone foolish enough not to be cowering behind a nearby tree.

However, when I played in a pro-am ahead of the British Masters at the Forest of Arden, I paid three visits to sand, and my ball not only came out first time every time, but, on the second hop, spun to an abrupt halt. Colin Montgomerie, first out on Thursday morning, is a pretty good bunker player, but he required two attempts to get out at his first hole, the second from his own footprint. And a Monty footprint makes the Abominable Snowman’s look relatively dainty.

On Friday, the 2003 Open champion Ben Curtis managed to rack up a six-over-par ten at the third, six of those shots coming in three different bunkers. It was pouring with rain as well, just to add to his good humour, and even if he’d succumbed to his initial instincts upon leaving the green (“I wanted to go jump in the ocean”) he wouldn’t have got any wetter.

The very first Open at Troon, in 1923, was won by a chap called Arthur Havers, who won by a single stroke after holing out from a greenside bunker at the 72nd. Others have less pleasant memories of bunkers on their final hole, not least Greg Norman, whose final shot in the 1989 play-off flew over the clubhouse path and out of bounds.

The Postage Stamp didn’t appear to bother Gene Sarazen too much, who was 71 years of age when he played it in a total of three strokes in two rounds in the 1973 Open. However, in the 1950 Troon Open a German amateur Herman Tissies required 15 strokes to do it in one round…

Tissies made a kind of guided tour of the hole, visiting all three greenside bunkers en route to the second highest score at a single hole in Open history. It took him three shots to deposit his ball into bunker No 1, five shots to emerge from it into bunker No 2, two more to plonk it into bunker No 3, and two more to get out of that one. In the circumstances, it was a triumph of inner strength for Tissies to take no more than three putts to finally hole out.

You have to wonder, though, whether Tissies could have done it in, say, a comparatively respectable 13 had he had a compass with him. And getting back to the Ryan Moore business, a chilling thought occurs. What happens if the likes of Jordan Spieth and Jason Day get wind of it?

These are golfers who already find it impossible to hit a ball without consulting a caddie, a yardage chart, the wind direction, the Shipping Forecast, the morning paper horoscope and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. So if a compass is allowed, why not – given that these guys take so long that navigation by the stars would be a handy accessory – a sextant? The R&A must act. And fast.

Tagged Bubba Watson, Martin Johnson, Royal Troon