The
Johnnie Walker Classic is Asia's most prestigious professional golf event with
the strongest field. James Spence, a golf writer & photographer resident in
Hong Kong, lifts the lid on what it is like working inside the ropes at a top
golf event.
The
Johnnie Walker Classic recently staged at the Pine Valley course in Beijing was
that rarest of things in Asia: a wind delayed tournament. Despite deep azure
blue skies and a pleasant temperature of 17C, play was halted on the Thursday
morning and did not resume until Friday. Most spectators would have already
missed the key action of the week as the eventual winner, Adam Scott, had
opened a gap on the field, never to be filled, with a remarkable opening 10
holes of 3 under par. By 10.30 that morning Scott was already back in the
locker room, cooling his heels.
Professional
golfers hate weather delays. Caught betwixt the course and the hotel, the
uncertainty of it all seems to shake their cores. Accomplished nappers crashed
out on the locker room floor, the only part of the clubhouse where they are not
bothered by spectators, club-members, promoters or media types. Others played
cards. Miguel Angel Jimenez eased a double corona out of his cigar case. Ernie
Els made the effort to drag his great frame up to the Great Wall. By
mid-afternoon the practice ground was beginning to overflow as golfers took up
positions on the extreme wings of the facility. A group of Thai golfers
including Thammanon Srirot, and Prayad Marksaeng were having fun trying out a
demo driving iron supplied by Mizuno. When they tired of that they let their
caddies have a hit.
But
even practicing has its limits and for those that have given up chasing the
answers in the dirt, the remaining option for most was the half hour bus trip
back to the official hotel.
For
many that means an evening of studying the hotel ceiling while surfing in a
desultory fashion the sanctioned television channels. The massage parlour did
reasonable business where the joint-cracking Thai massage was more popular than
the alarmingly labeled "back-salt-rub", a body treatment than sounded
more suited to a Portuguese codfish. The Chinese restaurant saw little traffic
with just a few intrepid Spaniards and Swedes taking the local option. A few
caddies gathered in the Italian restaurant next door which, if a little safe,
was still a stronger choice than room the room service menu which featured
dishes from every part of Asian bar Northern China. Despite being a well run
international standard hotel, it was difficult to guarantee an unbroken night's
sleep. A construction crew, which only came to life at 11pm, appeared to be
lurking in an upper room. Loud door crashes and the occasional scream
penetrated the night.
Down
in the breakfast room the professional golf world was colliding at the cereal
bar head-on with the quotidian lives of international business people. The
former group for the most part slim, tanned and techni-coloured and the other
haggard and careworn. While the golfers tend to breakfast in ones and twos,
caddies are more convivial. The main topics amongst the international caddy
force at the moments seems to be electronic gadgets. Later that day I overheard
one pro chastising his caddy on the practice green "Why don't you shut up
about your MP3 player and go pick up some balls for me ?"
Friday
was clear and breezy but then Saturday was becalmed. The only thing that wasn't
moving on moving-day was the wind. The Badaling mountain range and the Great
Wall with it disappeared behind a curtain of smog. The commentators from The
Golf Channel tactfully referred to the sulphurous haze as mist and cooed
appreciatively as a nuclear sunset took hold at the close of play.
Several
of the better known of the international players were getting progressively
more rattled by the army of inexperienced local photographers who were firing
off their cameras before and during their swings. Michael Cambell and Retief
Goosen were tetchy throughout, Thomas Bjorn's caddy barked his way around and
the busiest man on the first two days was Zhang Lian-wei's caddy who was using
his pudongwha
forcefully. Although the images that accompany this article were taken by me, I
don't (fortunately) try to make a living out of snapping golfers at golf events.
The people that do operate in a fiercely competitive business despite the high
barrier to entry formed by the phenomenal cost of their equipment. On the first
two days the photographers outnumber spectators on many parts of the course. As
they are all chasing the same results with similar equipment, relations tend to
be gruffly cordial rather than overtly friendly. Golf tournaments bottleneck on
the last two days as interest concertinas on the leaders. Every photographer
must capture an image of the winning golfer having just completed his round,
which accounts for that unsightly scramble down the 18th fairway. Although some
images do get taken up by news agencies for good money very few have any
enduring appeal and most end up in the electronic trash basket.
If
pursuing the golf gets too arduous, correspondents can always retire to the
media tent which is a thing of modern wonder. The degree of organisation and
information flow in what is a temporary tented structure would do an
international accounting firm proud. From any of the workstations you have a
good view of an indoors leader board, a hole by hole live scoring system that
covers all players which is arranged down one full wall of the tent, a computer
programme that allow you to slice and dice the data any which way and the
voices sometimes informative, sometimes hectoring of the TV commentators Julian
Tutt and Warren Humphreys . If golf wasn't quite your sport and you weren't
quite sure what you were doing at a tournament and was fearful of missing
something, the media tent was the place to be.
Back
on the course, Adam Scott's golf was sublime throughout, Goosen was contending
and Montgomerie threatened to get close for a while. However it was remarkable
how out of sorts most of the international elite was. Thomas Bjorn who expends
a great deal of time soothing the mental demons with positive mind shaping
exercises was prone to slippage in self-esteem, chattering to himself in a
bluish tint of Danish. Sergio Garcia made quite a few unusually tentative
putting strokes for one with such a naturally bumptious personality,
Montgomerie was suffering the perennial trouble of getting the ball up to the
hole on the greens, Goosen was coming over the ball occasionally and not
putting as well as he is want to and Els was still trying to process some
subtle changes to his posture and swing.
The
leading lights on the Asian tour had come into this tournament with plenty of
gander having just dispatched the Japan team 14 1/2 to 9 1/2 at the Dynasty Cup held at Mission
Hills. Zhang Jiang-wei had gone on record with some perky comments about
wishing to beat Ernie Els having dispatched Shigeki Maruyama 3&2 in the
final day's singles at Mission Hills. He didn't get a chance but fared well
enough in his first day's pairing with Goosen and Bjorn. Zhang had at the edge
on them both before slipping back to a putative 'half' with Bjorn on -1,
lagging Goosen's 69 by 2 strokes. In the end the Asians faded on a course that
proved vulnerable to the strongest power hitters. The top five: Scott, Goosen,
Campbell, Stensen and Sterne share the characteristic of being very strong and
long. Credit therefore to Thongchai Jaidee who placed 16th and Prayad Marksaeng
who placed 23rd. Thongchai seems well placed to attain his next targets: to
win outside of Asia and scale into
the world's top 50 and hence be invited to play at the US Masters.
The
main taking point of the pros was the 6th, a lightly protected 174 yard par 3
with a distinct camber off the back. More famous for the vast expanses of sand
on his courses, on this occasion Jack Nicklaus has designed a hole where the
main hazards are the slopes that carry the ball away from the hole. It drove
the players to distraction. Overall the course, built for China's
"CEO-class", was not proof against the longest players. The rough was
short and it was striking how Goosen and Scott could generate enough spin from
the rough to stop the ball dead on fairly firm greens. The par 3s contained their share of
challenges, the wind - when it wasn't blowing too strongly - defended the
course to some extent as did the smallish, heavily cambered greens that despite
being laid with a temperate grass proved to have some grain and got crusty in
places. In the end the breezy final day meant that Scott's level par 72 and a
final total of 270 was good enough to win.
The
toughest part of the golf writer's assignment is extracting any marrow out of
an interview with a professional golfer. While a televised interview is
mutually self-enhancing and delights golfers' sponsors, the written version has
less appeal and most professionals approach it as a necessary chore. Shorn of
the immediate gratification of televised pictures, many golf writers search for
the darker sub-plots and join the dots on perceived rivalries. Woods versus
Mickleson, Mickelson versus Singh, Mr. vs. Mrs. Montgomerie.
Just
about the worst question you can ask is of a professional golfer is what they
think of the course. Despite the continuing popularity of "signature"
golf courses designed by pros, they aren't really programmed to appreciate golf
courses and the warmth of their
answer will be in reverse proportion to their score. They spend all
their golfing lives over the ball shrinking all the possibilities down to one
form of contact, one flight, one destination. Good professionals are better than us at banishing all the
multitudes of tangents and dire results that gives our mental life over the
ball such colour and vividness. We comfort ourselves with the thought that, in
doing so, they
are blind to the extraneous beauty and manifest dangers of golf holes and we are the ones with
imagination.
Not
all the Asian Tour players are entirely happy about the increasing numbers of
co-sanctioned events springing up in Asia as the tougher competition inevitably
means that fewer local names makes the cut. For spectators, the far sighted
practice of the European and Asian Tours is a boon. As last year's Hong Kong
Open and this year's Johnnie Walker Classic has shown there is no better place
than Asia to see some of the game's leading practitioners close up, whether
from inside or outside the ropes.