Tour pros often say that the golf ball doesn't curve anymore. Sure. Tell that to Bubba Watson, who won the Masters because he's creative enough and has enough confidence and feel to curve the ball any which way he wants. He hit a wedge from more than 150 yards out of the right trees on the second extra hole of his playoff - the 10th at Augusta - against a game and disciplined Louis Oosthuizen, hooked it some 40 yards, and in the end had two putts from 12-feet to win his first major.
How can you not like Watson? He says he has attention deficit disorder, he sees and feels the shot he wants to hit, and he goes at it. He's mega-long, and he has so much touch that, well, he's also a mega-artist.
This doesn't mean that Watson doesn't do plenty right in terms of the mechanics of his swing. He couldn't hit the shots he hits if that weren't the case. The laws of physics and aerodynamics determine the flight of the golf ball. Watson is simply preternaturally gifted, and he senses what he wants to do with the golf club at impact. He also must sense and feel deeply what he wants his body to do to get the clubface where he needs it to be.
In fact, Watson might be the quintessential golfer to show that the so-called fundamentals of golf aren't the true fundamentals at all. Here's a guy who can face far left or far right, and do whatever he wants with the ball. Maybe alignment doesn't matter as much as it's supposed to matter. You get the feeling Watson, a lefty, could set up 50 yards right of his target, and hook the ball 50 yards.
The shot he hit on the 10th hole was miraculous in a way, but not surprising given what Watson has shown he can do with the golf ball. He stands there with his pink-shafted driver with the pink clubhead, and he launches the ball in all directions - whatever he sees in his mind's eye.
Even swing coach Hank Haney was impressed by what he saw on the second hole of the playoff. He tweeted, "Honestly, I knew Bubba had that shot, but that was unbelievable to do it."
Watson is one interesting guy. He doesn't like to examine his swing, he rarely beats balls on the range, and isn't into swing drills. He's also got a Canadian connection, in that his wife Angie is from Toronto. Watson has the course record at the Bushwood Golf Club in Markham, Ont., a club that is as different from Augusta National as one can imagine. It's a down-home course and club that is all about fun and golf as a game. Bubba golf, that is.
The club's website has a posting about Bubba. Why not? He shot 61 to set the course record when he played Bushwood in July 2006, his rookie season on the PGA Tour. His scorecard is posted on the website. Meanwhile, the club's mascot dog is named Bubba.
Asked during a clinic that's also posted on the Bushwood website, Bubba said he doesn't do them.
"That makes it a job," he said. "I just wanna have fun."
He has fun by shaping shots and hitting whatever is in his mind's eye. In that way he's reminiscent of the late, great Seve Ballesteros, who won three Masters and would have turned 55 on the very day that Watson won his first green jacket. Ballesteros, by the way, thought that alignment was seriously overrated when it came to golf fundamentals.
Here's a revised fundamental as the Canadian season gets underway: Have fun. Play golf as if it's a game, even on Masters Sunday. Golf the Bubba way. Be creative. Enjoy your own way to your own green jacket. Somewhere, there's a lesson in the way Bubba plays golf. Hey, maybe it's in that word "play."
RELATED LINK: More blogs from Lorne Rubenstein
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein