Trick-Shot-Jodie was
on the loose and playing to the gallery.
I’m being kind in using that phrase. You see, she could never be accused of playing to the
fairway, or the tee, or the green – or anything remotely resembling a game of
standard golf as you would recognise it.
Perhaps she was playing some perverse form of lay-ups but as I didn’t
know or recognise that style of play at this point of my incipient golfing
career, my best conclusion was that she was playing to the gallery. And she certainly stopped players in
their tracks and made them gasp – but I really wouldn’t like to be drawn on the
quality of admiration that was being expressed in those gasps. Shock and awe might be the closer
ingredients but as it was mainly men who were nonplussed by her antics and we
being female, we were easily able to discount their contributions and play on.
Being polite by
nature, I did compliment her on her winsome ways with her whack attack on the
ball. At one stage, instead of
responding to her usual request for the rescue club, I passed her a spade and
shovel. I felt the ground would be
safer if she attacked with these implements. And she certainly outplayed any strong male that day: the size
of her pitch marks and divots were way beyond anything I’d ever seen. In fact, if golf was scored on size and
number of divots taken, Messrs Watson, Kaymer and McIlroy could hang up their
golfing gear. And her pitch marks
were something else. At one point
so deep was the indentation, I thought we were heading for Australia. Concave does not do those marks any
justice.
Straight lines did
not feature much in her maverick style of play either. She had a definite drive
towards crisscrossing zigzags and a star-studded supernatural attraction for
trees. In truth, one stand of
trees looked like they’d been attacked by a colony of beavers on a dam building
expedition. For the uninitiated,
we don’t have much in the way of beavers in the UK and those we have are only
fossils. This was the crucial
point at which I quit yelling ‘fore’ and capitulated into that well-worn cant
of ‘timber’. Trick-Shot-Jodie
could certainly show those lumberjacks a thing or two about felling trees. Our recent Storm St Jude had a lesser
deleterious effect on the tree population of Seckford than the effervescent
Jodie onslaught.
And things didn’t get
any better. Picture this: we’re
back in the trees – for the umpteenth time. TSJ’s ball is now lying on rough ground, snug between
well-spaced trees. Easy peasy
pitching wedge shot between the trees, back onto the fairway. Or so it would seem. But TSJ only operates by Murphy’s Law
which clearly states that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it did. By now, I’d become chief adviser and caddy. I handed her the necessary iron. Reader, I really can’t tell you what
happened next. Jodie has this
swing that is faster than anything even Dustin Johnson can produce. Suffice it to say, she swung, she
didn’t miss the trees, she did end up on the fairway - but the ricochet landed
her a good thirty yards further back towards tee off than our original starting
point. I cried. Big, big, BIG fat tears of laughter. My abs worked harder that game then any
gym session I’ve ever undertaken.
Now if you’ve ever
had the burning need to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – and I have to
confess it’s not high on my shopping list – then this was the moment, the coup
de grace. Her standard of play
made me look ‘professional’ – relatively speaking that is. I have a feeling in my erudite waters
though that it will be long and many a day before I look that good again. Perhaps if I have a shot at believing
in miracles or take up praying to St Jude....... He is, after all, the patron saint of hopeless cases and
golfers. Hmmm! He might have met his match in Jodie
and me. But here’s hoping.
