GOLF:BY THE time the Johnnie Walker Championship had concluded on Sunday, Patrick O'Shea, our 2010 Golf Masters winner, knew he had overtaken the top two managers in the competition, but, he said, "I felt a bit panicky about someone coming from nowhere".
Well, he might have left it a bit late to challenge our leading teams, but Darragh Lapthorne came from absolutely nowhere in our final week, as the impressively titled Tiger and Six More Gimps won a gobsmacking €555,250 at Gleneagles.
That was enough to lift our Waterford manager from 191st to 16th overall – if he’d started out a place or 50 higher he might have given Patrick serious cause for panic.
Darragh’s Gleneagles dream team consisted of winner Edoardo Molinari, runner-up Brett Rumford, Miguel Angel Jimenez, who took a share of third, all three players who tied for seventh – Damien McGrane, Bradley Dredge and Marcel Siem – and Nick Dougherty, who finished just inside the top-50. How about that?
Congratulations, too, should possibly go to Lords of Da Bling who finished last in the competition, never a mean feat. King of Da Bling’s charges (aka Conor) finished with earnings of €476,035 – about €80,000 less than Darragh amassed in a single weekend.
It would be true to say Lords of Da Bling started as badly as they finished, unlike Patrick who opened the competition with a line-up that featured three of our top seven earners – Jeff Overton, Graeme McDowell and Francesco Molinari – and two more, Ricky Barnes and Rhys Davies, who came 18th and 24th in the list. Vaughn Taylor and John Merrick completed the original line-up.
It was, as Patrick told us, only after McDowell won the US Open (below) in week 11 that he started making transfers.
Hugh O’Connor lad a less successful time of it – “afraid my teams failed to fire, as usual” – so he tried to take his mind off things by composing a few golfing odes, one as splendid as the other. We particularly enjoyed his plea to Colin Montgomerie for a wild card pick:
“Well, we all want that
Cup to come home,
Back across the Atlantic foam.
If he wants to pick me
I assure him I’m free,
I’m just sitting here making up poems.”
Finally, the Golf Masters has its poet laureate. See you all next year.
