By all accounts, both Great Britain & Ireland and the USA are approaching this weekend’s Walker Cup at Royal Lytham with the kind of meticulous, attention to detail that would make the cartographers at the Ordnance Survey look slap-dash.
It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the hosts had a pre-match pep talk from Europe’s Ryder Cup-winning skipper Paul McGinley, a man who took on the captaincy role at Gleneagles a year ago with a forensic eye that used to be the reserve of Quincy. “Paul knows a winning formula,” said Cormac Sharvin, one of five Irishmen in the GB&I line-up.
Of course, in this flummoxing game of fluctuating fortunes, there’s no E=Mc2 equation for golfing success but Team USA’s Bryson DeChambeau could probably work one out. He is majoring in physics at college, after all, and goes to scientific lengths to gain that extra edge over his rivals. Soaking his balls in Epsom salts to find which ones are out of balance? You can stop giggling up there at the back. “On average, there are four balls out of a dozen that I won’t play,” said the 21-year-old, who joined Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Ryan Moore as the only players to have won the US Amateur Championship and the NCAA title in the same season. “I’ll spin the ball in this salt solution to see where the heavy side is. Sometimes the centre of gravity isn’t exactly in the middle of the ball. Then I find out how much it's off-balance by putting lead tape on the top of the ball to see how much mass it takes to flip it over. If it takes too many milligrams of lead tape, then I won’t play the ball.”
Why of course you wouldn’t. As the golf writers just about choked on their own brains trying to follow DeChambeau’s lesson of the day, the man himself was continuing his education in links golf. “I’d never played it before this week,” said the Californian, who always wears a Ben Hogan-style bunnet during competitive rounds and has all of his irons and wedges cut to the same size, approximately to that of a 7-iron. He’s certainly not your average golfer.
Before venturing across the Atlantic, DeChambeau and his US team-mates had a morale-boosting meeting with the great Arnold Palmer, the seven-time major winner known as ‘The King’. Upon checking in at Lytham and heading down the coast to nearby Hillside for a loosening batter about, they met a Scottish ‘King’ from a different ball game; Kenny Dalglish. “Did I know him before coming here? No I did not,” said US team captain, John ‘Spider’ Miller. “But when Kenny was walking up the fairway I was informed of his record, the stature he has and his nickname of ‘The King’.
“He was kind enough to come over and meet all the team. I could see he was a fierce competitor. When I shook his hand, mine just disappeared.”
Talking of hands, Nigel Edwards, the GB&I captain, knows the Lytham links like the back of his. “I know just about every blade of grass,” said the Welshman after years spent competing here as a player and now observing the new generation in his role as skipper. This intricate knowledge would, no doubt, have went down well with the aforementioned McGinley. “I met Paul in Portugal at the start of the year and he said ‘if there’s anything I can do to help then I’ll be delighted,” said Edwards. “It was very enlightening for the players to meet him.”
Rather like DeChambeau’s lesson in golfing physics.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here