The Long and the Short of It

So tentative in fact that David Feherty seized the chance to poke fun at him at the 2012 Tavistock Cup.

"He’ll soon be putting with a live rattlesnake," announced the Irishman to a giggling gallery on the first tee.

Feherty’s comment served as the worst of set-backs. "I suppose," mused Els, "that David’s got to try and be funny in his position but it’s all too easy to poke fun at people in distress, which I was."

Els digressed to talk of good players who had escaped any significant spell in the putting doldrums, with Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player at the top of his list. Ben Crenshaw and Brad Faxon were the next to come to mind before he thought again. He had seen Crenshaw, once the greatest putter of them all, going through a ‘putting low’, with the same applying to Faxon. “But they were not where I was," he claimed. "At one stage, I was as low as low can go."

It was after he failed to qualify for the 2012 Masters that Els looked for something beyond the long putter and hit on the idea of sharpening his hand-eye coordination.

He had started to think long and hard about the part played by this combination in rugby and cricket – and very quickly came to the conclusion that it could work for him. Especially since he had noticed from studying old videos that he had lost the art of focusing on the ball.