Golf career put on the long finger

Caddie's Role:Brazil is a great place to go for a bit of plastic surgery, they say. The Brazilians don't mind a bit of a nip and tuck; a buttock enhancement is particularly popular with the locals.

The English golfer Andrew Raitt, with whom we had the pleasure of playing last weekend at the Humewood Links outside Port Elizabeth, is feeling great after his extended trip to Sao Paulo for a bit of surgical enhancement. In fact I have never seen him looking so well.

Andrew is tall, athletic and well proportioned. Hard to see why he needed any adjustment. It is only when you look at the little finger on his left hand that you realise why he spent so much time visiting a surgeon in Brazil.

Andrew's little-finger story began 12 years ago about three weeks after he turned professional. He was at his local club, approached a member's Alsatian dog and ended up having to pick up the end of his finger from the ground and rush to hospital. The dog had bitten it off, but thankfully didn't have a taste for it.

Of course it was an awful start to a hopeful young pro's career. Over a decade later he is still dealing with the effects of the severed digit.

He hasn't played golf for the past two years and he is ecstatic to be back in contention at his chosen profession after such a long and painful absence. He had to give up watching golf on television because it was too frustrating for him.

In August of this year he visited his surgeon for the last of four months of daily visits to have the screws turned in the finger after his third operation. This time they had taken some of his hip bone and inserted it in the finger.

When the court case following the Alsatian assault went against him, he lost his house and his car in the legal battle that ensued. He separated from his wife and probably would be entitled to be just a little bit bitter about the whole incident, but he is not.

He smirked when he said he is happy not to have his house to deal with anymore. While others haggle over the property, Andrew is back doing what he loves best: competing on the links.

He played on the European Tour intermittently from 1999 to 2004 with a sore pinky. It wasn't so much the finger as the left arm that seemed to cause most of his discomfort. If he made the swing he wanted, his left arm would pop out of its shoulder socket. As he was going through the court case he managed to shoot 21 under par at the Tour School in Spain, thereby seriously impairing his argument that he had been disabled by the bite.

You right-handed golfers may be aware that trying to grip the club firmly without a little finger entails serious compromise. This is what Raitt was trying to argue in court.

He finally got the ex-golfer Andrew Murray to testify about the vital necessity of a fully operational little finger to a right-handed golfer. Murray could not persuade the courts either.

In 2001 Andrew went to Brazil to play some events. He was practising his putting on the Wednesday before the tournament with Kenny Ferrie. The tournament director approached the young pros and asked them if they could play in the pro-am as two others had pulled out.

This is seen as a privilege for a young pro (until they realise what a chore the weekly pro-am can be). They both agreed and Kenny was overjoyed when he found out one of his partners was Ronaldo the footballer. Andrew, in contrast, thought he had drawn the short straw again; he was to play alongside some medical doctor.

The doctor turned out to be the surgeon Jose Luis Pistelo, who has a particular expertise and daring in difficult hand surgery.

He took a look at the problem finger and told Raitt to come back to Brazil and stay in his house and he would perform the necessary surgery.

Three operations later he is finally getting back to where he needs to be as a golfer.

Raitt had his hand in a clasp for four months last year, making it virtually impossible to do anything. He had intended to practise tai-chi during his four-month convalescence in Sao Paulo but realised he was incapable of any such physical activity after the operation.

When the clasp finally came off in August he went to the buffet at a restaurant, picked up a plate and balanced it in his left hand like he had never been able to do for 12 years. He knew then the final operation was really going to help him.

Andrew finished tied-fifth at the South African Open at Port Elizabeth last week.

We have all heard of the heroic efforts of golfers battling their demons in order to conquer the game. Not many have gone to the lengths to which Andrew has gone, against his own surgeon's advice that the risks of operating were very high, and come out with such good prospects.

Pistelo has given Pele successful surgery on a damaged wrist. He has performed miracles on a leading businessman's young child who was born with no thumbs; the doctor managed to rejig the child's tendons so that his index fingers function like thumbs.

Now he has given some promise back to a golfer who has had his career on hold for the past decade with an enhancement that one does not normally associate with average Brazilian makeover.