Bad break causes Riley to make snap decision

The scene could hardly have been less like the popular image conjured up by thoughts of Burma. We were at Wentworth for the Volvo PGA Championship where, instead of sweltering heat, the meteorological menu involved torrential rain, high winds and plummeting temperatures.

For the first time in many years the cut went out to two over par, normally level or one under is the mark around the West Course, also known as the Burma Road due to its difficulty. With a gusting wind quartering mercilessly into the players all week, the first and third holes, nominally par fours, were more realistically par four and a halves.

Wayne Riley stepped onto the third tee, his wild mane of hair bounced off his heavy jowls in the frisky wind. He waggled his Callaway driver behind his teed ball. The trees swayed rhythmically as he waggled for a second time, finally he uncoiled his driver in a wide arc and rerouted it on its downward path towards its target. A feint snap was barely audible over the sound of the swirling trees. Riley's laboured wind up had resulted in the ball spluttering to the end of the teeing area some 20 yards in front of him.

Nick `the jockey' had followed his player's pre-shot routine and eventual strike with anxiety. Instead of watching the flight path of Riley's ball as it journey up the third fairway, his chin hung low as the ball trickled to a pathetic halt in front of him. Thoughts flashed through `jockey's' head as to what caused this feeble shot.

Of course his player was even more concerned. "What happened there," Riley inquired of Nick with his beady eyes opening to their widest aperture. "I haven't even made it to the Sheilas tee." At 446 yards uphill into the wind and the first shot only covering 20 of those, things were not looking good for the bemused Australian.

He examined the club to see what had happened to it. Without scrutiny the shaft was still in tact, but on closer examination there was a crack in it. He was lucky he made contact with the ball at all given the circumstances. There was a referee lurking not too far from the third tee who had witnessed Riley's mishap and was quick to move closer to the scene and offer his professional advice.

You are, of course, allowed to get your club repaired if it breaks through a normal course of action during a round. So, if you hit a tree on your follow through while hitting a shot and break the shaft in the process, you are allowed have the club repaired. If, on the other hand, the club bends `accidentally' over the player's knee due to an excessive display of emotion, then that's the last time you can use that club.

The referee advised Wayne that he could have the shaft replaced. In fact, according to rule 4-3, he could have replaced the damaged club with any club or any shaft. Had this been any other event the manufacturers would have left the tournament site by Friday but being the PGA they had scheduled to stay for a few days longer than normal. So the opportunity for a quick shaft replacement was possible. While the referee was making haste to the Callaway wagon at the back of the range, Riley was left with the problem of reducing the damage of a tee shot with a broken shaft.

He continued with his routine over his three wood second shot. Nothing unusual with the choice of club, as most of the field were hitting a fairway wood for their second shots to the third. The difference with Riley was that even after his second shot he was still over 150 yards from the pin. He marched up the fairway with the shock of the snapped shaft, the steepness of the incline and the strength of the wind reducing his normally aggressive stride to a stunned stroll. His six-iron third landed 15 feet from the hole, his stride lengthened to its usual sprightly rhythm. A beautifully weighted putt dropped into the hole from the high side and Riley have saved par.

Meanwhile, back in the Callaway van, there was a frantic search going on for a replacement shaft for Riley's driver but by the time he walked off the sixth green the referee was there to greet him with the repaired club, some 48 minutes after the pro-lite graphite shaft had snapped.

In a manner of speaking, the episode could be described as a snap decision which went rather well for the Australian.