WELL OUT OF IT..

From our Golf Correspondent

Now that the Ryder Cup has made its stuttering start at rain soaked Celtic Manor, I caught up with Snopper to find out what the less than average golfer thought of the worldwide event that the Ryder Cup has become.

Snopper`s disappointment at being overlooked by Captain Montgomerie as one of his picks was taken as read, but in truth I detected a note of relief that he had not made the team this time round. "Well," he opined, "I guess if truth be told, my self-appointed handicap of 28 and my last round of 96 left me with only an outside chance. But I wouldn`t have fancied the rain down there in Wales....or the pomp and circumstance, the parades, the speeches, the tv interviews.....and as I`ve never had a caddie in my life I wouldn`t have been too sure what to do with him.....and I think there might be strict rules about how many balls and clubs you can have which wouldn`t have suited my game very much. No, I think I`m well out of it to be fair," he concluded with his usual magnanimity.

Mind you, he did hit upon something that had at least some semblence of reason to it. "You know the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games and stuff like that? They all have seperate but related competitions for the less able members of society and I think its high time there was a kind of Ryder Cup type competition for the less talented among the golfing fraternity. I might be in with a chance then."

And with that frightening prospect chasing frantically in search of the fairways of my mind, I left him to it. You see, it`s one thing to have delusions of adequacy, but quite another to have delusions of even approaching inadequacy.