The caddie, with her familiar pony-tail bobbing in the air, walked to where her "master" was standing on the putting green and handed him one end of a carpenter's line. Fanny then took the other end to the hole, pulled it taut and snapped it, so making a chalk-line from ball to cup.
Nick Faldo, who had already missed several efforts from eight feet, proceeded to putt ball after ball along the chalk-line. It was his latest attempt at trying to groove a stroke that effectively deserted him, not long after that dramatic victory in the US Masters almost two years ago.
On that occasion, when he closed a six-stroke gap on Greg Norman in the final round, Faldo had only one three-putt on the notoriously dangerous greens over the four days. Last Saturday, at Doral, he four-putted from 20 feet, missing twice from no more than two feet.
Close observers of Faldo in recent months claim his body language is publicly admitting an inability to make two putts per hole. He is 12th on the USPGA Tour this season in fairways hit, at 75.9 per cent, but is 115th in putting.
Faldo's plight is reminiscent of the man on whom he has modelled his playing career. In the 1956 US Open at Oakmont, Ben Hogan was seen trying a variety of putting strokes before three-putting the 72nd green to lose by a stroke to Cary Middlecoff. Hogan had missed from 30 inches on the previous hole.
"You shouldn't win when you miss like that," said the Hawk, who admitted he was trying to find any stroke that would give him an outside chance of getting the ball into the hole.
Faldo, meanwhile, remains typically stoic. "I know that I haven't performed well this year, but I still have plenty of wins in me," he said. "I've just got to be patient."
But it is a year and eight months since he last finished in the top-10 of a major championship: he was fourth behind Tom Lehman in the 1996 British Open. And Augusta, where he missed the cut last year, is only a month away.
"Tommy Bolt's putter spent more time in the air than Lindberg." - Jimmy Demaret, commenting on the notorious temper of the 1958 US Open champion.
Golfers are amazing people - and no mistake. The point was brought home to me on reading that Clint Eastwood has his own fan club on tour. And I don't mean that they're fans of Eastwood the actor, which would be entirely understandable. No, these misguided souls are fans of Eastwood the golfer.
Now I've seen the bould Clint hit shots at Pebble Beach, and it's safe to say that, playing off 18, he wouldn't attract a queue of Irish fourball partners. Certainly not if they were interested in winning prizes.
Mind you, he keeps a useful trick or two up his sleeve for tight situations, as I discovered in a recent chat with Mount Juliet's Kate MacCann. She told me of a visit Eastwood made there about 18 months ago and of a fourball in which one of his opponents was a totally besotted Irish fan named Johnny.
As it happened, Johnny had a four-foot putt on the 18th to win the money. Whereupon Dirty Harry drawled: "I'm sorry but you've forced me to do this. OK Johnny, go ahead and make my day." Needless to report, the ball never made even nodding acquaintance with the hole.
When Philip Walton stood dormie three against Jay Haas in what would prove to be the decisive singles of the 1995 Ryder Cup, the whole of Europe was urging him to victory. And a fair few so-called neutrals as well. But there was unexpected support from one of the most successful American players at that time.
In a recent US television interview, John Daly admitted that he bet on a European win at Oak Hill. A self-confessed compulsive gambler, Daly claimed he made the bet - he declined to reveal the amount - because, as the reigning British Open champion, he was angry at being left out of the US team.
Indications are that confessions of this nature may be good for the soul, but damaging to one's public image.
Johnny Miller is so badly afflicted by the yips that he has decided to play in only five US Seniors tournaments this year. He became eligible for the tour on April 29th of last year, his 50th birthday, yet made only two appearances, finishing an undistinguished tied 44th and tied 23rd.
So, he will continue in his role as the brilliant anchorman on NBC's commentary team. Explaining the malaise which eased sufficiently to allow him to gain a memorable win the Pebble Beach Pro-Am in 1994, Miller said: "You stand over a 10-foot putt and no matter how hard you try, you can't take the putter away from the ball.
"Everything freezes. You lose all sense of how hard to hit the putt. Finally, the putter bolts away from the ball and then forward with an uncontrollable jerk. Your mind leaves your body as though you're in a movie watching somebody hold the putter for you. It's the scariest shot in golf."
By his own admission, Max Hastings is allergic to golf and cats. "Ten pennyworth of lead can deal with the latter," he wrote recently in the Daily Telegraph. "Golf, on the other hand, is always with us, along with its dreadful clothing, customs, jokes, enthusiasts and snobbery."
Long before he moved to his current job as editor of the Evening Standard, however, Hastings admits to having had a most rewarding experience on a golf course somewhere in Kilkenny. And since it occurred 20 years ago, the course wasn't Mount Juliet.
It seems he had been waiting an eternity for a foursome on the green, when a colleague prevailed upon him to hit - "You're not going to get anywhere near them". In the event, Hastings proceeded to hit "the only perfect golf shot of my life". At a belated cry of "fore!", one of the foursome lifted his head.
The culprit takes up the story: "My ball smote him full toss in the midst of the temple. He dropped like a stone. I was terrified, of course. I assumed I had committed manslaughter on the links. But when that man woke up, a good minute later, amid his dazed stupor he announced calmly: `Don't worry about a thing. Anybody could have done it. Think no more about it', and staggered off to his car.
"It is unjust to say that Bill Deedes (former editor of the Daily Telegraph and golfing partner of Denis Thatcher) is golf's only white man. That doughty citizen of Kilkenny in the Seventies remains my hero. Yet the Nineties being what they are, I have a horrible feeling that if I did the same thing again today, he'd sue." And I have a horrible feeling Hastings is right.
This day in golf history: In 1936, Bob Charles was born in Carterton, New Zealand. Until Phil Mickelson gains the major successes to prove otherwise, Charles remains the most successful left-hander in the history of the game, having won the British Open at Royal Lytham in 1963.
In the same year, he was the first left-handed player to win on the USPGA Tour. Yet he is naturally right-handed. Like Mickelson would do a generation later, he started golf left-handed as a five-year-old, standing to the ball in a mirror-image of his parents. His greatest asset was to become a silken putting stroke, which saw him complete 11 successive rounds in 1972 without three-putting.
Charles was the youngest winner of the New Zealand Open, which he captured as an amateur in 1954, when he was 18. Now, having won almost $8 million on the US Seniors' Tour, his remaining ambition in golf is to regain the New Zealand Open in 2004, 50 years after his first triumph.
In brief: A welcoming message from Nick Faldo and the addition of 20 new courses feature in the latest issue of Open Fairways. Further details from 0801247 471277 . . . The Central Remedial Clinic are planning their annual Classic for Portmarnock Hotel and Links on June 26th . . . Brendan Cooling of the Hibernian GC reports splendid progress at their home in City West, where the clubhouse has been fully restored less than five months after a fire.
Teaser: In playing from a bunker, a player touches a bare earth wall of the bunker with his club on his backswing. What is the ruling?
Answer: The player touched the ground in the hazard in breach of Rule 13-4b. The Note to Rule 13-4 permits a player's club to touch an obstruction (such as an artificial wall) on his backswing. However, an earth wall of a bunker is not an artificial wall.
