We have all had one of these moments

By Martin Johnson 

One of the things that makes golf the greatest game in the world is that every now and again you hit a shot that makes you positively purr with pleasure. A shot which makes the world such a beautiful place to be you can’t wait to get home and tell the wife to order the new kitchen she’s been hankering after for about a decade, and to regard all previous objections to having the mother-in-law over for Christmas as unreservedly withdrawn.

It happened to me a couple of weeks ago, which, you will be less than amazed to know, resulted in the deadly affliction which takes hold of most golfers in similar circumstances. Namely, to bore the pants off everyone in the clubhouse by droning on about it with such gusto you don’t even notice that your audience has slipped into an irreversible coma. Ergo, like it or not, you are about to have your lives enriched by the story of my nine-iron to the 15th.

It would have been a relatively easy pin to get at from the left side of the fairway, but having pushed my tee shot into the right rough, it now required a 100-yard carry over two cavernous bunkers to a flag only eight yards or so further on. So it was something of a miracle when my ball cleared them by a couple of centimetres, took one hop forward, and rolled up to a few feet from the hole.

I groaned. Quite a loud groan in fact. Because I knew precisely what was coming. “Great shot!” came the cry from my opponent. Followed by: “Bet you couldn’t do it again.” At which point I reached into the bag for another ball, dropped it with a loud sigh and a heavy heart, and prepared to try and repeat a shot that Jordan Spieth might have pulled off only one time in 20.

Allow me at this point to press the pause button briefly and put the situation into some kind of context. It was a regular friendly twoball (albeit with the hint of needle you always get when bragging rights are involved) and a match score of all square after 15. Loser to buy the drinks, as ever, and the knowledge that defeat would be made even more painful by having to listen to the winner being condescendingly nice. “I was a bit lucky today. Just made a couple of long putts, and you had a dreadful lie in that bunker at the fourth….”. That kind of teeth-grating bonhomie.

It was regulation matchplay format, except for one little twist. Which was that not only did we permit ourselves one mulligan over the course of 18 holes, but also one ‘reverse’ mulligan. Which, for anyone who may not have come across it before, is the power to require your opponent to replay a shot that he’s played far too well for your liking.

The trick, as with the normal mulligan, is sensing when the time is right to use it, and I had been fairly pleased with my own deployment of what you might call (for anyone old enough to remember the old TV show It’s a Knockout) Your Joker.

I didn’t quite dissolve into helpless wheezing, as Stuart Hall used to do when someone dressed up as Robin Hood slipped off a greasy pole and into a vat of porridge, but I have to confess to a fairly hearty guffaw at the result of requiring my opponent to replay a high-tariff approach to the par-five eighth, which needed both keeping low to avoid clattering into some branches, and moving about 20 yards from right to left to locate the green.

Amazingly, he not only fulfilled both requirements, but left himself only ten feet or so for a birdie four. And a near certain win. Accordingly, reasoning that he couldn’t do it again, I ordered a reload, and while he once again managed to keep his ball beneath the branches, this time he hit it gunbarrel straight into a bunker. And when this sort of thing happens, it turns into a double whammy.

If a modest bunker player is likely to make a mess of it, an angry, modest bunker player is a near certainty to cock it up, and after several violent thrashes, and no sign of the ball emerging,  an exasperated shout of “your bloody hole!” meant that we moved to the next in somewhat contrasting moods.

However, he still had his own reverse mulligan up his sleeve when I hit my nine-iron to the 15th, which is why I was digging into the bag for another ball even before he’d invoked it. And which is why what happened next became the source of more pleasure than I have ever previously experienced on a golf course.

The mere fact that you’re playing a reverse mulligan means that the chances of hitting as good a shot second time around are pretty slim, and sure enough, this time it was a nine-iron that once again made me gasp as the ball left the clubface, but this time in sheer astonishment that anything could look quite so ugly.

The number on the bottom of the club when I addressed the ball was definitely a nine, but when the ball left the clubface, I felt I had a good case for suing the manufacturer for stamping a nine onto a loft that clearly belonged to a two-iron. And as it cleared the top of the two bunkers by approximately half a centimetre, I estimated its speed to be a Star Trekkian Warp Factor 5.

However, the only object barring its path to the impenetrable forest behind the green – the flagstick – now took a decisive part in the final outcome. The ball crashed into it roughly halfway up, plunged to earth so violently that it took a chunk out of the hole below, and after appearing to have come to rest right on the lip, it toppled in for an eagle two.

I will not, on account of wishing this to remain a publication fit for family consumption, repeat any of the words my opponent chose to commemorate the event, but suffice to say that his chosen phraseology involved no hint of congratulation on a difficult shot well executed. “Nice reverse,” I said, albeit from a safe distance, and that’s the only problem with reverse mulligans. You can run out of people to play with pretty quickly. ­

*This article was published in TGP on Wednesday October 21