A hot day, a cool pro, a golf lesson in the rungs of talent

The ball rises as steeply as Artemis II and falls to earth with the softness of a descending autumn leaf. This is athletic art. To be precise it’s the flop shot, golf’s version of haiku, and it’s been elegantly composed by Gregory Foo, the Asian Tour player from Singapore.

It’s April 1 and no prank is being played at Sentosa Golf Club, only a lesson administered on levels in sport. Amateurs like me forget the low rung of talent we exist on until we discover how high the ladder goes. In short, to play alongside Foo is to summon the words of Bobby Jones, who once said of Jack Nicklaus, “(He) played a game of which I am not familiar”.

Our playing instruments are similar, but Foo’s produce a superior tune. Sound matters in sport. MotoGP riders can identify a circuit just by listening to audio of gear changes. Amateurs aren’t as sophisticated yet I can tell the sweet click of the flushed shot.

My favourite tale of writers and athletes is from the 1920s. Paul Gallico, who later wrote The Poseidon Adventure, asked world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey if he could spar a round. The reply, Gallico wrote, was as follows: “He looked me up and down, then inquired in his high-pitched voice, ‘What’s the matter, son? Don’t your editor like you no more?’”

Gallico lasted a few bloody minutes. I get five non-violent hours with Foo. I also have my Straits Times editor, Jaime Ho, alongside me, along with deputy managing editor Lim Han Ming. It’s media day for the Singapore Open, whose presenting partner is The Business Times, and we all have a ringside seat to the Foo Shot Festival.

In the 1920s, boxer Tommy Loughran installed mirrors in his basement because – as author Joyce Carol Oates wrote – “no boxer ever sees himself quite as he appears to his opponent”. I shudder to think how our swings appear to Foo, but his seem oiled by practice.

Tiger Woods once spoke of hitting a “low, trapping fade” which sounded like a foreign language. But Foo can speak it, for he’s a child of “vertical planes” and “clearing the hips”, whose muscles have memorised what to do. Yet he says in a round there are only four to five shots which he hits as perfectly as he has visualised.

We talk about clubs (he changes wedges most often because he requires sharp grooves), pressure (everyone chokes), erasing bad shots (a subject mastered by Rafael Nadal) and hiring caddies. Stars fly their caddies everywhere, yet Foo, as he will in his next two events in China, must often find them from the clubs he plays in. It is a disadvantage. A regular caddie can sniff his player’s mood, spot the leak of confidence and step in.

What’s your best round, I ask.

Eight under.

Eight birdies. One eagle. Two bogeys.

And he’s No. 1,367 in the world.

Foo’s ranking may not appear flash on first look, but that’s because we live in a star-worshipping planet that can barely see beyond the top 10 (Robert MacIntyre is No. 11, by the way). But the Official World Golf Ranking goes up to No. 9,289 and there are, states the R&A’s 2024 Global Participation Report, 64.1 million adult golfers worldwide. Competition runs thicker than we think.

The higher the rankings go, the finer the margins. Foo looks an impressive hitter, driving it close to 300 yards, yet on the PGA Tour there are 109 players averaging over 300. Accuracy is another crucial metric and at the elite level, in every sport, precision has embraced absurdity. Asked once about the size of target he aimed at during a passing shot, Novak Djokovic’s hand made the shape of a coin.

And so while I award myself imaginary medals for simply hitting a green, Foo aims for tinier patches of earth, behind a pin, above a slope, marrying control and feel to intelligence and experience. To me he has the accuracy of a local Robin Hood, yet imagine Tiger Woods in his prime. In 2000, the American hit 75.15 per cent of greens in regulation, a figure yet to be matched.

On the final hole, my tee shot sails away in search of a cool dip and my iron thereafter hits a cart path and disappears into the landscape of mediocrity. Foo, politely impassive, punches an iron to birdie distance. For a snobbish game, golf can be oddly inclusive. Amateurs will rarely get to kick balls with a La Liga player, but here both tribes collide. My brother played with Angel Cabrera in 2000 in a Dubai pro-am and feels the need to remind me of it every year.

It’s an uncomfortably hot day for an education into the scales of talent and it is suitably humbling. Foo completes his birdie, I have an eight. Golf, on a watery course, is replete with all manner of mathematical indignities. Foo hasn’t changed his ball all day. I am on my seventh.