THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

Bill Elliott looks back on a memorable week in St Andrews, reflecting on two very different putting performances and two very different farewells

Well, in the end it was almost everything I'd so eagerly anticipated. So near and yet, actually, so far. How did you feel? I felt rather upset with myself for not properly applauding the final-round brilliance of Cameron Smith. Oh, my hands clapped, my face smiled, all that stuff, but somehow it didn't fit properly into the picture.

Something was missing. This was, after all, the 150th playing of the most relevant golf competition on the planet and a time for real celebration. And yet beneath the noise and the clamour and the occasional, pleasing outburst of merry chaos as the fans swayed this way and that and the dust rose from the pounding of all those feet, there was a weird sense of imbalance and of something absent.

Smith, as Aussie as a barbecued prawn, his

nature as instinctively anti-establishment as that of any of his pals from the land Down Under, was undoubtedly an exceptionally worthy winner. His final-round 64 was a masterclass in ambition, nerve and, above all, the dark, if basic, art of simply putting the ball into a hole from whatever distance his skill and the contrary, dried-out Old Course bounce offered. But still.

Drives often ran a further 100 yards, the balls tumbling this way and that, sometimes to a player’s eager advantage, sometimes to their frustration. It was a situation that called for a delicate touch, an inner belief and a magical sense of distance control. On this final Sunday, Cameron Smith had these virtues better than anyone else, although only ever so slightly better than the apparently irrepressible American alongside him on this Sunday, New York’s Cameron Young.

A tale of two putters