Olazabal gets Augusta chemistry going too late

Well, we didn't get it right, quite - but, hey, what's less than a fistful of shot between friends?

In this small corner of cyber-space last week, we picked Jose Maria Olazabal as the man to lead the European Tour class of '06 into their campaign for the Masters and, sure enough, he did so. OK, so he failed to win the title, but then Phil Mickelson was playing a different game and different golf course, was he not?

Yes, he had been the last European to win the most romantic, if not in our admittedly-biased eyes, the greatest of all the major championships. The good old Open, or as you guys insist on calling it, the British Open, gets our vote in that particular poll. But no matter, for that is not the issue at hand.

Ollie did it 1999, by two strokes from Davis Love III. And for a long, long time leading up to Sunday's denouement, he looked capable of making it three green jackets in his spot in the Augusta National closet.

Golf, as those of us who have ever played the sport, is a game of "if-onlys", but the fact at the end of four days of sun and more than the occasional shower was that if Olazabal had not a thrown in a 76 in the first round and had, instead, recorded a level-par 72, he would have found himself in a play-off with Mickelson come Sunday evening.

Actually, in the light of his subsequent circuits of the course and his handling of its manifold perils, a 72 would not have been an unreasonable opening round. Just look at what he did after that initial hiccup - two 71's and a final-round 66, the low card of the week and three better than Mickelson could manage in four rounds.

Indeed, if Tim Clark had not pulled off that brilliant, if unlikely, holed bunker shot on the 72nd hole, a tournament would have ended the same way for the second week on the trot following Mickelson's victory in the BellSouth Classic with Olazabal tied for second. It took - literally - a stroke of brilliance from the chunky little South African to prevent coincidence from becoming fact.

Olazabal's record in this tournament is a remarkable one, given that the highest he has finished in any of the other three majors is third, which he has twice achieved in the Open Championship. The reason for that might be that he has never been less than mercurial off the tee. Let's not mince words, over the years he's been crooked as often as he's been straight when hitting his balata off a little wooden peg.

It's a self-evident truth that in the past it hasn't mattered as much in the Masters as it has in the other three members of the Big Boys' Club. In the days of yore there was never much rough at the Masters, although that has changed somewhat in more recent times.

No, what was needed at Augusta, and still is, if to a slightly lesser degree, is a facility with irons and a wizard's touch on and around the greens, both talents of which Olazabal still possesses in abundance.

It is an ability that goes beyond the arcane requirements of producing, time and time again, a swing that needs to be almost metronomic in its regularity. It calls for powers of imagination that transcends the mundane and, at its best, approaches the realms of magic in its complexity, wit and wisdom.

Well, Ollie's got that. Ask him how he manages to conjure up shots that sometimes defy ordinary logic and he won't be able to answer the question. Why? Because he doesn't know, that's why. It comes from deep within him in a wondrous communion between mind and muscle, sinew and sensibility.

It is a gift that he shares with his golfing soulmate, Seve Ballesteros. Both men come from the north-east corner of Spain, a land that is as full of ancient mysticism as that other redoubt of the inexplicable, Ireland. They are sorcerers in a sporting context and they should be celebrated by all of us who love golf.

Serendipitously, it is to Ireland that Olazabal will surely bring his infinite subtlety in September. He was already virtually assured of his Ryder Cup place before this week in the state of Georgia. This result only serves to cement his place in Ian Woosnam's team.

It will be his seventh appearance and his first since 1999. A few years ago, he would have admitted that it was all over for him after his much-documented fight against the terrible incapacity he had suffered in his feet and legs, a time during which the limit of his ambition was to walk again, never mind play golf.

Not any more. Ollis is back. He celebrated his 40th birthday on February 5 this year. Truly, for this remarkable athlete, life is beginning afresh.