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    Bunker Mentality

    Can Ginola become a golf pro?

    Isn't it amazing how some people seem to be blessed with all the talent in the world, as well as devilishly good looks and a highly attractive and desirable personality?

    If Bunker Mentality wasn't one of these itself, it would really hate former Newcastle and Tottenham football star David Ginola for being the type of person who ticks all the boxes.

    Men want to be him, women want to with him etc... etc.

    It also just so happens that he is exceptionally good at golf, so good in fact, that he is hoping to turn pro.

    Bunker Mentality discovered this news on the Daily Mail website in between stories about an X-Factor singer called Wagner - who looks like a cross between Mickey Rourke and Bill Bailey - and some bloke who had a tooth removed from his ear.

    Ginola - who apparently just casually took up the game in his friend's back garden back in 1992 (wouldn't we all love such a back garden) - has worked his handicap down to four, and he is now hoping to be playing off scratch by the time he turns 50 so that he can play for a senior tour card.

    He is now 43 years old, and as he no doubt gets a fat wedge every time he pops up on TV, he should have plenty of free time to spend on the golf course to try and fulfil his dream.

    He told the paper: "I have seven years left to get my card. I would love to be able to say every day 'let's go to work' and then go out and play golf.

    "To go from four to zero you have to work in a different way on all the small aspects of the game and that is time-consuming, but if you want to do it you have to go into the bunkers for hours on end with a million golf balls and practice.

    "I first started hitting balls into a net and thought 'this is nice, I like this'. So I started playing a little bit, no lessons, just practising after watching a Nick Faldo video at night and then in the morning I would try and remember what I saw and use it."

    Whether Ginola will stick with his golf ambition remains to be seen. He seems to be a man with a short attention span: bouncing from footballer to actor to wine-maker to promoter of USB memory sticks and shampoos.

    He even allegedly once got tired of keeping up maintenance payments to a daughter he had with a mistress; but, given the purely addictive nature of golf, BM reckons this is one pursuit he might be able to stick with.

    Ginola is now happily married but he still might want to take some advice from another celebrity golf enthusiast, Hugh Grant, who once blamed his golf addiction for his fluctuating love life.

    "When you say to a girl 'I play golf' her eyes glaze over. I do feel guilty about my golf," Grant told the Daily Express last year.

    "You know you're a sad case when you spend your spare time reading books on putting or going on YouTube to watch slow motion golf swings.

    "I'll get out of bed in the middle of the night and practise my swing in front of a mirror. I'm obsessed and it's destroying my life. Golf is an addiction.

    "I've decided the most addictive element is the physical sensation when in a rare moment you hit the ball flush in the middle of the club."

    BM knows how you feel, Hugh!

    +++++

    Comeback of the week: Well done to Padraig Harrington for winning his first event since the 2008 US PGA Championship at the Iskandar Johor Open in Malaysia. "Every time you win, it is important but when you haven't won for a while it does add a bit more emphasis to it. It makes it all the more memorable," explained the Irishman.

    Stat of the week: Rocco Mediate became the oldest wire-to-wire winner of a US PGA Tour event since records began in 1970, at the age of 47, in winning the Frys.com Open. And maybe BM should take the comeback of the week award off Harrington too  - it was Mediate's first Tour title since 2002.

    Round of the week: Or maybe it is Australia's Richard Green who should get the comeback honour? He overcame a seven-shot deficit following the third round to win the Portugal Masters by two strokes thanks to a final round 65.

    Shot of the week: We go back to Mediate as he hit a pitching wedge approach from 116 yards that spun back into the cup on the par-4 17th hole in the final round. What made it all the more remarkable is that it meant he had an eagle in each of his four rounds.

    Silly tournament name of the week: The Frys.com is an awful name, while the CVS/pharmacy LPGA Challenge that the women played this weekend is equally bad. However, the next stop on the US PGA Tour takes the biscuit as the players line up for the... wait for it... Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open.

    About Bunker Mentality

    From the top of the golfing tree to the grubby roots of the game which bind us all together, Bunker Mentality will be there: It’ll tees up slices of news, and send them fizzing back down the neatly-trimmed fairway of opinion with more punch than a Tiger 2-iron stinger, more spin than a Mickelson wedge – and more bottle than John Daly.

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