Lesser-Known Golfing Diseases

It is perhaps a mark of golf’s long-established role as a perfectly adequate substitute for life that, like life, it comes fully armed with its own set of major illnesses. While other major sports have mere injuries, some of which (e.g. tennis elbow) they have somewhat arrogantly claimed as their own, golf is different: it has fully-fledged diseases, exclusive to its grassy environs. Who has ever heard of “Nuggle Fist” (boxing), “The Duhs” (football) or “Inman Wrist” (badminton)? Nobody, because they don’t exist, although no doubt they would, if any of the sports involved were more capable of crushing a man’s spirit. Golf, however, is fertile territory for the mind of the hypochondriac. It is a rare – and, presumably, very happy – golfer who is not familiar with the shanks or the yips, just as it is a rare person who has not had a severe headache and been convinced he has a brain tumour or woken up with swollen underarm glands and hastily diagnosed himself with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

“It’s really just about getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible,” Peter Alliss will often tell us, puzzling from the safety of his commentary box over why the game isn’t simpler, but there is more to a statement like this than meets the ear. As a former yips sufferer, Alliss has to tell himself things like this, to keep the demons away. Even when golf seems simple, thoughts of debilitation and decay are never far away, and it’s at times like this that you wonder whether the mind rules the body or the body rules the mind. Take me, for example. Not long ago, after a couple of shaky three-putts, I diagnosed myself rather hastily with the yips. By the time I’d realised that I was wrong, and that the real problem was merely that I had drunk too much coffee that morning, it was too late and I really did have the yips. It sometimes seems we know too much about our golfing ailments. But could it actually be the case that we know too little? We talk plenty about the yips and the shanks and – more recently – the chyips, but are we wrong to focus purely on the Big Three? It would be foolish to remain unaware of cancer, AIDS and heart failure, certainly, but they are not the only diseases a person can succumb to, and it would be equally foolish to stay ignorant of some of the smaller, yet often equally insidious, illnesses associated with golf. With this in mind, I feel it my duty to provide a guide to some of the game’s underreported maladies:

Worldowesmealivingitis
Most common in – but not exclusive to – men over the age of forty-seven, particularly those who have been through two or more expensive divorces. Frequently compared to the modern real-life disease, ME: partly because it can be such an energy-drainer, and also because there are some schools of medical thought that still believe it is an entirely make-believe affliction. In fact, the defining trait of Wordowesmealivingitis is that the victim remains entirely unaware of his malady. “Did you see that? Did you? Over the cellophane bridge!” he will say, as a shaky putt misses the hole by a full nine inches. “Can you bloody believe it? I must be the unluckiest player alive!” he will rage, as his scuzzy four-iron tee shot takes a straight bounce into a gorse bush, instead of magically veering back into the fairway at right angles. At times like this, it might be tempting to correct the Worldowesmealivingitis sufferer, but this could be disastrous, leading to a hurled lob wedge, or, at the very least, the emission of a strange low growling noise for periods of up to fifty-six minutes. “What’s important to remember about Worldowesmealivingitis,” explains Dr Thomas Placebo, a specialist in golfing ailments from the University of Dog Springs, Arkansas, “is that, despite its superficial resemblance to mere grumpy ungraciousness, it is an illness and its afflicted should be treated with the same sympathy and care as sufferers from other illnesses – particularly if they have a large piece of metal in their hands at the time, or have recently had a hefty insurance claim on their BMW 5 Series.”

The White Cold Humphries
Cold day? Thin six-iron shot? Feeling like icy electricity is pinging up and down the inside of your forearms? Chances are, you’ve got the White Cold Humphries. Just as there is no evidence to suggest that the WCHs are debilitating to the player in any long-term manner, there is also no evidence to suggest that they are readily curable – although it is thought in some homeopathic golfing circles that wearing some really big mittens between shots can help.

Repetitive Waggle Syndrome
Not common, but ignore it at your peril. RWS is golf’s equivalent of a stammer. Does it come from stage fright? Childhood traumas? The conviction that the rubber grips on your clubs are covered in strawberry jam? Nobody is quite sure. The affliction was exemplified by the trials of Sergio Garcia, who, at his most distressed point, during the 2002 season, was averaging around 21 waggles per shot, and earned the nickname “waggle boy” with unfeeling American galleries. Garcia is cured now, but others have been brought to their knees by RWS, often letting it leech into the rest of their life and lead to such conditions as Chronic Necktie-Adjuster’s Syndrome and Nervous Road-Crosser’s Disorder.

The Cranks
“Great shot!” you say to your playing partner, as his long-irons bisects the fairway. “Neh, didn’t quite get it,” he replies. Perhaps he is talking rubbish. Perhaps, on the other hand, he’s being truthful, and he is suffering from an attack of the cranks. Like a much, much less extreme version of a shank, a crank is a shot that comes out of a part of the clubface a half millimetre away from the centre, towards the hosel: a discrepancy only discernible to the person who has hit it. What makes it officially a “crank” as opposed to merely a shot hit slightly out of the heel of the club is its frequency: a crank sufferer is only a crank sufferer if he hits at least nine or ten cranks per round. In fact, many crank sufferers claim to have never hit a good shot in their lives. Those who have never suffered from the cranks have called them bunkum but, to the sufferer, they can be unbearably niggling. However, it is doubtful that, even at their worse, they are as niggling as the typical crank sufferer’s habit of greeting a crank by using the phrase “Heel do!” then pointing to the neck of their club, just in case their playing partner didn’t get the fact that they were replacing the word “he’ll” with “heel” for comic effect.

Golf ‘Flu
Many experts have claimed that the suggestion that there is a brand of influenza endemic to one sport is poppycock. Nonetheless, golf ‘flu, much like man ‘flu, has its advocates amongst the golfing medicine profession. Unlike real ‘flu, it spreads quickly, with little warning. Classic symptoms include first tee shivers, a feeling that your drives are only travelling 67% of their rightful distance, and the tendency to break out in cold sweats – particularly when you’ve just arrived at the club and seen that your regular threeball partners have crossed their names off the competition sheet and been replaced by two pub landlords who jingle change on your backswing and suffer from one of the more extreme strains of
Worldowesmealivingitis.

Golfcommentaryitis P72.
It starts innocently enough: you’re on the couch, putting the worries of the office behind you. You crack open a cold one. You’re relaxed. Your brain is empty of thought. But that brain is now a receptive thing: a virtual Velcro patch to which the conversational lint floating around the golfing airwaves can easily stick. Be careful. Telltale symptoms of Golcommentaryitis P72 – also known as Burble’s Disease - included finding yourself staring wistfully at squabbling ducks and saying “steady on now, steady on” in a voice suggestive of pleasant, low-grade senility; suddenly referring to people in films and on TV who you have never met by their complete names (e.g. “Jonathan Adam Belushi, you do crack me up!”); overusing the phrase “cor blimey oh riley”; and throwing screwed up bits of paper at dustbins, missing, then discussing where the missile “finished” and how “you just can’t legislate for that”.

Montgomerie’s Non-Linguoma
A less deadly version of Golfcommentaryitis, this time involving the sufferer thinking he has made erudite, articulate point, only to look back later and find that he has actually just used the phrase “as it were” a lot, and spouted a lot of airy nonsense. Frequently confused with Woosnam’s Non-Linguoma, the disease where the patient finds himself compelled to use the phrase “y’know” every sixteen seconds. Not known for any serious long-term affects, but highly irritating all the same.

Bodypopalitus
Involves the player labouring under the delusion that, by contorting his body into a variety of shapes, he can affect the flight, bounce and roll of the ball after it has left his clubface. A recent survey showed that 87% of golfer suffer from this disease in a mild form (e.g. kicking a leg out in the hope that doing so might make a putt dive into the hole); the real worry is when it manifests itself to such an extent that, in watching the flight of a perfunctory wedge shot, the Bodypopalitus casualty will begin to resemble a breakdancer performing a move on a Brooklyn street in 1982. However, there is a school of thought that claims that there is nothing intrinsically harmful to the golfer about Bodypopalitus (see Ballesteros, Seve, US Masters, 1980 and Garcia, Sergio, USPGA Championship, 1999).