Kaymer won four times in 2010, with his other victories coming in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, the KLM Open and the Alfred Dunhill Links. He followed up with a similarly arresting 2011 season in which he won in Abu Dhabi for the third time in four years and set a WGC event, the HSBC Champions in Shanghai, alongside his Major.
That spring, he spent eight weeks as the world number one but, where others would have been celebrating, he felt less than comfortable in that position. "For me," he said, "it wasn’t the right time. I was the number one but I didn’t feel like it."
His concerns were mostly down to his game and how it was still "work in progress". He confirmed how he was doubly aware of the shortcomings every time he turned up at Augusta where his habitual left-to-right flight was never going to be the answer. He missed the cut in each of his first four years at the Masters and last year he missed it again. By then, though, he had dedicated himself to mastering a draw under the eye of his coach, Gunther Kessler.
Because of the remedial work, his 2012 season was nothing to write home about and he accepted as much: "Sometimes you just have to do the things that feel right. They may not make sense to other people but that doesn’t matter. Not as much as it should matter to you.
"I don’t want to look back in 10 years and think, maybe, I should have done this, that or the next thing."
Shortly before the Ryder Cup, when the story went the rounds that he was thinking of standing down on account of his poor form, he was quick to set the record straight. He had indeed asked questions of himself but, on the eve of the contest, he made it clear that he was well and truly ready to do battle.
His week was not the best until it came to the end. That was when he made that six-footer which secured a famous European victory.
"It was," he says, feelingly, "such a fine line between being the hero and the biggest idiot."
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