The Cult: ​Jean van der Velde

For a while I lived on a street that was occasionally occupied by a short, pugnacious looking man. He would have been ginger if he wasn't almost completely bald, and his face was red through a mixture of alcohol and an attitude that best demonstrated itself in the large poster of a gorilla he had stuck to the window of his front door, a caption on which read 'Sod Off'.

I only mention him because of how he walked. Busily doesn't quite describe it; he walked as if in between his house and the newsagent, where he had to go to stock up on cans, he was expecting a lot of obstacles, all of which were likely to make his day slightly worse than it already was. Shoulders hunched, arms tightly swinging. Not a walk that you'd look at and think, 'professional athlete right there. Guy's going all the way.'

And yet that was basically how Jean van der Velde walked around the Open course at Carnoustie, in straightforward pursuit of his first major title. That it was so straightforward – he was three shots ahead on the final hole – only compounds it, really. You wonder what he'd have come up with had he been 25 shots ahead.

Because he would have come up with something. Perhaps just running pell-mell back towards the clubhouse, where he would call for his driver from the caddy and then begin determinedly smashing every window in sight. You take it as something of a pre-requisite that sportsmen appearing at the peak of their fields have at the very least the mental discipline to give themselves a sporting chance when it comes down to it. They can't just be cranks, who when the game is on the line find an unstoppable urge to turn all this into a kind of Benny Hill sketch, running into posts and taking off their socks and shoes in order to test whether one can play golf in a river. But some of them are. 'How long do you suppose this will haunt you', asked one of those Americans with a voice like sincere toffee, in a documentary to commemorate Van der Velde going off the reservation. Van der Velde gave a little tortured smile. 'Oh, I guess forever.' Yup: unmistakably, something in him had done what it wanted.

Minus pressure, Van der Velde was just fine at golf. In 1993 he won the Roma Masters; in '95 and '96 he won the French PGA Championship. You can tell I'm just reading these off a Wikipedia page, because, honestly, who really cares what he did when no-one was watching? What counts is what he did when the eyes of the world were upon him, when glorious victory was in sight; the equivalent of Roger Federer deciding in a Wimbledon final to devote all his energy to deflecting his winning shots off the Royal Box. Except Federer, being a spoilsport, would never do that.

As the Brazilian Socrates, the most articulate of all football players, put it: 'Beauty comes first. Winning is secondary. What matters is joy. Those who seek only victory seek conformity.'

Armed with this philosophy, or possibly with a brain sounding at that point like one of those outhouses full of caged chimpanzees, Van der Velde surveyed the 18th hole. A gentle five-iron then a layup would have secured the trophy with room to spare; he steeled his jaw, and called for the driver.

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A conformist would see their golf of the past few days as proof enough that they deserved to win – now it was just about getting it done, and back to the clubhouse for tea and medals. But Jean was going to first make the 18th hole beg for mercy. You feel that somewhere in his mind was a desire to get that driver and knock a hole-in-one on a par 4 to seal the deal.

As a consequence, Jean played his 18th-hole golf from the shadow of the main grandstand having tried to correct his exhuberant drive, again with the wrong club. 'I can hit the two-iron', he told his caddy, some Gallic yahoo he'd known for three months, before smacking the ball off the railings the crowd were sat behind and down into the kind of grass that grows by condemned factories.

Then a bunker. And a river.

Over to commentator Peter Alliss, as Van der Velde peers down at his ball, buried in the river, where it landed after he tried to exit the rough by the grandstand. "He's surely not going to climb down in there and try to whack it out. No, no, that would be totally… no, what on earth are you doing? No Jean, please. Would someone kindly go and stop him?"

I actually feel a bit let down by what then happened. I'd have no choice but to give him 'High' entry status, if Jean had the full courage of his convictions, and had spent the next 10 shots going through a variety of clubs, creating different kinds of splashes, as he tried to perfect the formula to hit an underwater golf ball over a low wall and onto a green. But, I'd suggest, those kinds of convictions, or however you'd describe whatever non-conformist things were happening in his brain at that point, don't really afford one courage. What Jean got, after taking off his shoes and socks, climbing in, having a look around, climbing back out again and drying off his pale legs in the manner of your dad at a frigid English beach in October, was that they inscribed his name into the wall by Barry Burn. After hurling his three-shot lead into the non-conformist ether he was beaten in a playoff by Paul Lawrie.

Asked, in that same documentary, whether he'd watched the tape of his final hole at the Open, Van der Velde said: "I have seen it once or twice – but listen: I played it." I can't fully convey to you the emphasis he put on that word; it lasts a full second. Amen to that, Jean. When everyone else was there to do golf, you, helplessly, were there to play.

@TobySprigings