I was lucky enough to be standing about a metre away when slow-talking Kentuckian Josh Teater treated us to a mini master class in keeping cool yesterday.
It came on the 18th green, his final hole on what should have been a stellar day, when, with an ounce of luck he could have equalled Peter Fowler's sizzling course record of 10 under 62, set at the Open in 2007.
Instead, Teater headed to the scorer's room to sign for a more modest 65 (if going seven under can fairly be described as modest) but knowing that it could have been even worse.
Standing on the lofty 18th tee, Teater was in the hottest form of his short career, having notched nine birdies, four of them in succession (11 to 14), and then back-to-back efforts on the tricky 16th and the challenging 17th.
If he was excited as he walked off the 17th, well, it didn't show, but not so his caddy.
While players are ferried up the steep path to the 18th tee, from where you can almost get altitude sickness, caddies traditionally pass their boss a driver and head down the fairway to watch the next shot.
But Teater's sidekick was so pumped after the latest birdie he just bounded up the hill, bag over his shoulder, and was waiting on the tee when the trio of pros arrived in a golf cart.
"I was pretty calm, just trying to keep hitting the fairways and greens and make the putts, but my caddie might have been a little more stirred up than I was," Teater said.
Instead of driver, Teater opted for what he hoped was the safer option of a three wood and promptly dunked his Titleist in a left-hand hillside bunker.
Worse was to follow. He gambled (and lost) on reaching the heavily protected green with his second shot, mangled a sand wedge from the depths of the cavernous right-hand bunker and then settled in over his ball down the back of the green among the spectators and TV power cords.
It was a simple scenario. He had to chip it in to save par and walk off with a 63, but the tightly cropped grass kept grabbing at his 60-degree lob wedge during several nervous practice swishes and the odds on pulling off such a miraculous shot jumped to about a million to one.
Make that 10 million. Teater swung hard, tried to follow through to give the ball enough elevation for a soft landing on a downward slope to the hole.
Instead, he bladed the ball like any self-respecting 36 handicapper and it sailed across the green and back up the fairway about 20 metres.
I waited for the muffled curse, the angry swatting of the club into the ground, the anguished groan.
Nothing, well nothing audible.
Teater looked up, sneaked a look at his caddy and trudged back across the green.
That was the defining moment for me because, even if he was internally hemorrhaging, Teater's expression never changed.
He walked up to his ball, contemplated, briefly, that he might take at least three more shots to get down (for a triple bogey seven) but, instead, calmly chipped it across the green, down a slippery slope, pulling up just 30cm from the hole, for a tap-in six.
It was, as he wryly observed later, "a great up and down for six".
