INFANTILE GOLFING PRODIGIES SPRINGING UP IN CHINA
FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WEBSITE
By MATTHEW NORMAN
If the veteran Chinese golfer Guan Tianlang strikes spectators as careworn and subdued when he tees off at the US Masters next month, small wonder about that.
By MATTHEW NORMAN
If the veteran Chinese golfer Guan Tianlang strikes spectators as careworn and subdued when he tees off at the US Masters next month, small wonder about that.
For those long past the conventional age of retirement, the major tournament
can be a hideous torment. The body may be still be in fine shape, but all
too often a fragile mind betrays it.
Tom Watson, who came so tantalisingly close to winning the 2009 Open
before blowing it on the final green and disintegrating in the play-off like
Greg Norman on chokeabolic steroids, would tell you that.
If Watson seemed pretty ancient, at 59, to come within a putt of taking the
title four years ago, today, with hindsight, he looks like Methuselah’s
great grandfather.
So startling is the sudden stampede of ever more infantile golfing prodigies
from China, in fact, that you cannot help feeling that Guan, by waiting
until 14 to qualify for his Masters
debut, has left it too late; that at his great age, he is far better suited
to the role of PG Wodehouse’s Oldest Member, consoling younger men about
their hooks and slices from the comfort of the clubhouse armchair.
One junior compatriot to whom Guan might want to offer avuncular advice is Ye
Wocheng, the latest holder of the youth record after qualifying for the
Volvo China Open many years before he can drive a car. O Ye the Little Waif
is 12. That, to spell it out lest anyone thinks that this must be a typo, is
T.W.E.L.V.E.
One often comes across tournament golfers dropping their balls, of course, but
until now this has invariably followed an encounter with a less hormonal
hazard than the onset of puberty.
How young the next record-holder will be is anyone’s guess. But if Ye’s parents should have defied China’s one-child-per-family policy to present him with a male sibling, we should probably be guided by Edmund Blackadder’s response to Pitt the Younger’s threat to run his own brother as a candidate against him in the Dunny-on-the-Wold by-election.
“And which Pitt would this be?” asks the Regent’s mordent butler. “Pitt the Toddler? Pitt the Embryo? Pitt the Glint in the Milkman’s Eye.”
With any belief-beggaring golfing development, the most sensible recourse is invariably to ask oneself what Peter Alliss must make of it.
In this case, one assumes that the Socrates of the 19th will take a typically well-balanced attitude to a future in which Clearasil’s sponsorship of the US PGA is followed by the Happy World Of Haribo TPC event at Sawgrass, and then by the SMA Formula Milk US Open.
On the one hand, Alliss will regard anything that heightens the public’s interest in the game as something to be welcomed. On the other, he would wish to offer the caveat that outlandishly precocious talents, as Michael Owen’s retirement reminds, have a nasty habit of hurriedly fizzling out.
Take Richard II, who so courageously put down the Peasant’s Revolt (the 14th century equivalent, according to Dr David Starkey, of winning the Grand Slam) at 15. That early promise evaporated, however, and after a descent into vengeful tyranny, he was deposed and dead at 33. So something for Ye to ponder there.
Perhaps he is already musing on the perils. Although he was delighted with his achievement, one also detected a certain world-weary relief. “I have dreamed about this,” he said, in an early contender for Sporting Quote of the Decade, “since I was boy.”
How distant childhood innocence seems to him now as he contemplates that it will not be long before he is supplanted by a golfer whose Norland-trained caddie has no option but to ditch the pitching wedge, and carry a teething ring in lieu of the 14th club.
With time running out, the pressure on Ye to make the cut will be horrendous. But if it all goes disastrously wrong and he does a Rory McIlroy, at least he will have a more convincing excuse for not completing his round than a troublesome wisdom tooth.
Once again, the guiding light is the Blackadder version of Pitt the Younger, who told the Commons: “Mr Speaker, Members of the House, I shall be brief, as I have rather unfortunately become Prime Minister right in the middle of my exams.”
How young the next record-holder will be is anyone’s guess. But if Ye’s parents should have defied China’s one-child-per-family policy to present him with a male sibling, we should probably be guided by Edmund Blackadder’s response to Pitt the Younger’s threat to run his own brother as a candidate against him in the Dunny-on-the-Wold by-election.
“And which Pitt would this be?” asks the Regent’s mordent butler. “Pitt the Toddler? Pitt the Embryo? Pitt the Glint in the Milkman’s Eye.”
With any belief-beggaring golfing development, the most sensible recourse is invariably to ask oneself what Peter Alliss must make of it.
In this case, one assumes that the Socrates of the 19th will take a typically well-balanced attitude to a future in which Clearasil’s sponsorship of the US PGA is followed by the Happy World Of Haribo TPC event at Sawgrass, and then by the SMA Formula Milk US Open.
On the one hand, Alliss will regard anything that heightens the public’s interest in the game as something to be welcomed. On the other, he would wish to offer the caveat that outlandishly precocious talents, as Michael Owen’s retirement reminds, have a nasty habit of hurriedly fizzling out.
Take Richard II, who so courageously put down the Peasant’s Revolt (the 14th century equivalent, according to Dr David Starkey, of winning the Grand Slam) at 15. That early promise evaporated, however, and after a descent into vengeful tyranny, he was deposed and dead at 33. So something for Ye to ponder there.
Perhaps he is already musing on the perils. Although he was delighted with his achievement, one also detected a certain world-weary relief. “I have dreamed about this,” he said, in an early contender for Sporting Quote of the Decade, “since I was boy.”
How distant childhood innocence seems to him now as he contemplates that it will not be long before he is supplanted by a golfer whose Norland-trained caddie has no option but to ditch the pitching wedge, and carry a teething ring in lieu of the 14th club.
With time running out, the pressure on Ye to make the cut will be horrendous. But if it all goes disastrously wrong and he does a Rory McIlroy, at least he will have a more convincing excuse for not completing his round than a troublesome wisdom tooth.
Once again, the guiding light is the Blackadder version of Pitt the Younger, who told the Commons: “Mr Speaker, Members of the House, I shall be brief, as I have rather unfortunately become Prime Minister right in the middle of my exams.”
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