Drive for dough (by kind permission of Golf Quarterly)

“Drive for show, putt for dough”. Every weekend that old saying rings round golf clubs as members enjoy the banter of their own games, or watch as the professionals win with a hot streak on the greens. Top players, after all, seem able to recover from the most wayward of drives; there is no recovery from a missed three-footer.

Yet there’s another side to this story which struck me most forcibly on the 18th tee at the Muirfield Open in 2013 as the Championship leader Phil Mickelson arrived in all his pomp. Phil was preparing to hit what was to be his most important shot of the day at one of the great finishing holes in golf. Thousands of spectators had crowded into the stands around the green, but there were probably only about 10 or 15 of us around the tee with a close-up view of a man under the most extreme pressure.

Mickelson smiled and grinned at us as he waited for the fairway to clear. Then he put his game face on and proceeded to lash an enormous drive (albeit a massive blow with his fairway wood) down the middle of the fairway, before marching off into the amphitheatre ahead to meet his destiny. Had he failed to hit the fairway, if he had gone deep into one of the bunkers on either side that so compress the landing zone, or hooked into the savage rough beyond, he might conceivably have lost the tournament there and then. What he did on the green only mattered because of what he did to get there.

The really great courses make enormous demands on the players when set up in their full championship rigour. Long and straight drives are essential. Unkempt rough and penal fairway bunkers close the usual escape routes. Putting will matter when the player reaches the green, of course, but the tournament may be lost long before then. You cannot win the Open at Muirfield, Carnoustie or Royal Lytham without being able to drive the ball well. Anyone standing on the final tee needing a four to win the Open at one of those formidable links will be praying for one more good and true hit to give themselves a chance.

Mickelson triumphed with his magnificent blow down the 18th at Muirfield, but others have been less successful there. Paul Azinger in 1987 laid up short of the cross bunkers, as he did not trust himself to thread the ball between them. Nick Faldo, on the other hand, had utter confidence in his remodelled swing and hit a wonderful drive between the bunkers. Faldo was therefore able to hit his second shot into the heart of the green to ensure his 18th consecutive par; Azinger, having to hit a much longer shot, was bunkered right resulting in a second consecutive bogey that left him a shot adrift.

In 2002 the Open at Muirfield culminated in a four-man play-off for the title, but two other men would surely have joined in the fun if they managed to reach the fairway with their last drives of the day. Journeyman Gary Evans, who had never won one tournament on the European tour, let alone the Open, had survived an astonishing drama on the 17th where he parred the hole after losing a ball. He stood on the final tee leading the championship at that point. Evans tried to play cautiously with a 2-iron off the tee (“Anything to get it in the fairway; I didn’t care how far back I was”) but hit a desperate shot into trouble and could do no better than a five (missing the play-off by a shot). Padraig Harrington did use a driver, feeling he had to hit that and a wedge stone dead to win, and rejecting the idea of laying up for a medium iron into the middle of the green and then being left with say a 20 foot putt. Sadly he drilled his drive into a fairway bunker from where he had to play out backwards. He too finished a shot back. The postman never knocked again for Gary Evans, though Padraig did achieve redemption five years later at Carnoustie.

Arguably the 18th at Royal Lytham represents an even tougher finish than the last at Muirfield. In 1958, nearly 30 years before Sandy Lyle finally won at Royal St George’s, Eric ‘Bomber’ Brown, a legendarily abrasive character, was set to end the long wait for a Scottish champion until his tee shot on the 18th found the deepest of the fairway bunkers. The Bomber compounded his misery by three-putting, but it was the drive that undid him.  Then in 2012 the smooth figure of Adam Scott completely unravelled as he bogeyed three holes in a row before, inevitably it seemed by then, he too found sand off the 18th tee. With that went any hope of the par he needed to tie with Ernie Els.

Of course the one and only Seve Ballesteros simply went so far left on the hole in 1979 that he took all the bunkers out of play. In the words of Peter Alliss, ‘He’s given it an almighty crack....way to the left... the spectators bob’ or, as Seve himself put it on that epic final day, ‘Everything was under control except the tee shots’. But then Seve always was the exception that proved the rule.

It was Tony Jacklin who sublimely provided one of one of the great sporting moments of the 1960s with his last drive at Lytham in 1969. Tony said he stepped up to the ball and said to himself that he simply had to ‘go to it’ and that this was the moment of truth. He knew that not a thing must enter his head, no thoughts of fame or fortune. He had been driving brilliantly all day, and it never crossed his mind to play safe with an iron or three wood – he felt any throttling back might let a seed of doubt niggle at his concentration. With the nation waiting with bated breath, he hit a gloriously long and straight drive up the middle of the final fairway. It was surely the shot that won the Open.

Of course golfers have to hole the putts to nail down the tournament door down or finish off a match. But the match and the tournament may be long lost before you reach the green. Colin Montgomerie has been quoted as saying that if he could hit one shot per hole for the average amateur, hitting the drive would make far more difference than anything else. A good drive gives you a chance of glory, a bad drive finishes you off for ever.

Ben Crenshaw’s great teacher Harvey Penick said ‘The woods are full of long drivers’ – and as someone who plays most of my golf on links coures, I would say so are the fairway bunkers. Harvey was thinking that you should practise your short game more but, with respect to the great man, my conclusion is slightly different. If you want to win the really big ones on the great courses, you must be able to drive the ball true and far. Get out there and practice with the big stick and forget about fiddling about for hours on the putting green!