Know anyone like this? Open tournament frustrations

Post by Sports Writer Derek Clements

IF YOU have ever sat in a grandstand a golf tournament, you will not need me to tell you about the guy who insists on commentating on every single shot, who states the bleedin' obvious and who, quite clearly, knows very little about golf and nothing at all about links golf.

And why are they always men? And why do the people they are with never, ever tell them to shut up?

Let me give you an insight into the workings of Mr Knowitall as overheard from the grandstand behind the 17th green, the world-famous Road Hole.

Mark O'Meara, a former champion and also a winner of The Masters, left his second shot short of the putting surface. He then chose to play a pitch and run, which rolled 10 feet past the hole. "Jeez. What's he doing? I wouldn't have played it like that. He should have putted it. That's cost him a five." O'Meara, of course, calmly walked up to the ball and stroked it straight into the hole.

Our friend makes no comment about this, but launches into a diatribe about how difficult the hole is and how he is always happy to walk off the green with a par four. In the next breath, he tells him companions that with his second shot at the first hole, measuring just 375 yards and almost always played downwind, he lays up with his second. So he lays up at a 375-yard par four and is happy to score a four on a hole measuring 495 yards, featuring a blind tee shot, a narrow green and a bunker that has finished the hopes of many of the world's best players.

Charl Schwartzel walks down the first fairway, located not far from where we were sitting. Mr Knowitall: "I would recognise that golfer anywhere. It's Ian Poulter."

He then turns his attention back to the 17th. "We have been sitting here for more than an hour and haven't seen a single player reach this green in two." In front of him, on the green, are two golf balls. Both have been struck to the surface in two, both have been warmly applauded.

"Oh, here's Nick Faldo coming. He won't make the cut [Faldo is 11 over par at the time] and I bet me makes a right mess of it." The Englishman, playing at St Andrews for the final time, is just short of the green in two. With putter in hand, he sends his ball towards the hole. On and on it rolls, disappearing into the hole for one of only five birdies in two days at this brute of a hole.

"That guy over there, is that Tom Watson?" he asks. The player in question has just been cheered all the way down the first fairway and on to the green. Despite three-putting the opening hole, he receives a standing ovation from everybody in the grandstand behind the green, most of us in the stand at the 17th and everybody beside the second tee. Safe to assume, then, that it is Tom Watson.

Then Matt Kuchar approaches. The affable American puts his second shot into the dreaded Road Hole bunker. "Great stuff," says our grandstand commentator. "This is the reason we've come to this hole, to see somebody in the Road Hole bunker. Is that Matt Kuchar? He is one of the best bunker players in the world. This will be no problem. Just watch how it should be done."

With that, Kuchar thins his bunker shot clean across the green and is lucky to see his ball being stopped from going out of bounds by the wall behind the green. He has now played three. His fourth shot still fails to find the green, and he walks off with a seven. "I didn't expect that," says our man. Surely not?

For reasons unknown, he then takes it upon himself to give his two companions a geography lesson. "See that lighthouse across the bay? Just to the right of that is Carnoustie. Carry on up the coast and you come to Arbroath, Montrose..." Then he yawns. This man is even boring himself!