Sam Torrance

How come you’re sitting there with a spider crawling over you and you’re not doing what everyone else would – flicking it off?

“Because it’s bad luck to kill them and I didn’t want to kill it and I had a lovely week and now I like spiders.”

So you are superstitious?

“In a certain way. I’ll have two ball markers and generally they’ll be coins but they have to be the same coins. The reason being that if you’ve got a 10p and a 5p, for example, and on the first green you use the 10p and hole it but on the second you use the 5p and miss, then the 10p has got to be used for the rest of the day. So if I use two 10p coins then the thought never really comes into my head. Whether that’s superstitious or not, I don’t know.”

What were the early days on Tour like?

“I once flew for 24 hours and ended up further away from my destination than when I started. I was a British Caledonian golfing lion, which meant we got free BCal flights. We were flying to Kenya and then getting a connection to Zambia. We arrived in Kenya and all flights to Zambia were cancelled indefinitely, so we had to fly to Johannesburg and I believe that the flight from there to Zambia is longer than the one from London to Zambia. So we’d been flying for 24 hours and were further away than when we started.”

How was the Sunshine Tour?

“Oh, fantastic. Great days. I was once playing in a pro-am in Nigeria – the tournament’s the following week and they used to split the pro-ams up into three different events the weekend before – and ours was the only one you had to fly to. They had a coup and the airport was shut; not allowed to travel and you had to be indoors by six o’clock or you were shot. We found that the tournament was going ahead whether we were there or not so David Chillas, myself and a Swedish reporter took a taxi for two days across Nigeria. We got to the golf club 20 minutes after everyone else because they drove to the airport and flew down.”

You must have smiled and said ‘well done’?

“Oh, but what a trip, what a journey. We were going through a mud hut village when the driver nudged a cyclist who fell over, and the next thing there was hundreds of these Africans chanting and screaming around the car. I was laughing and looking out of the window thinking this was great. And then I looked in the mirror and the driver had turned white, and he put his boot down and off we went. We managed to get out of the way but in hindsight it wasn’t as safe as I thought it was.

You’re a poker man, aren’t you?

“Sore subject.”

So how much have you just lost?

“Ladbrokes put me into a poker tournament a few years ago and it was Texas Hold ‘em and I’d never played it before and got hooked. I’ve been playing online ever since, and not too successfully. I love the game.”

Do you play the cards or the players?

“Online you’ve no choice but you still watch the way people play.”

So if you’re sitting at a table?

“I never have sat at a table. No, I have done twice, but I was first out both times, which doesn’t really give you much time for ‘tells’.”

» Sam Torrance Pt.4