Jet-lagged, missing one flight and having had to run to catch the second, no warm-up and just a couple of swings off the tee it didn’t look promising for Jamie Donaldson.
The Welshman’s task was already daunting; to reproduce the most significant shot of his life, the 146-yard wedge from the 15th fairway of the PGA Centenary Course at Gleneagles to within a few feet that clinched Europe’s victory over the USA in last September’s Ryder Cup.
The Hotel were laying a plaque in the fairway to commemorate that shot and a crowd of media were on hand for the unveiling and the re-creation, in weather every bit as ideal as that Sunday afternoon.
The stakes were not comparable, of course. There was no Keegan Bradley battling to stay alive, no crowd gathering in great numbers as they anticipated the importance of the game, but there was still a pause as he looked down the pin, in the exact same place 28 feet on, four from the right as it had been on September 28.
Taking that wedge – “it’d be cheating to use anything else”, he quipped – Donaldson hit a super shot drifting in to land just six feet to the left of the flag. Sigh of relief, round of applausebut not good enough for some.
European Tour Productions, filming the event but just with one camera, needed a tracking shot from behind the green.
Donaldson manfully stepped up again, and this time his ball landed just a couple of feet to the right of the pin almost exactly where it did seven months ago to clinch the cup.
“Proves it wasn’t a fluke, doesn’t it?” joked Donaldson, newly back from four months playing in the USA. “It brings back great memories, being here, remembering the best year of my career. It was perfect for the Ryder Cup and it’s been perfect for me trying to imitate the shot.
“I was quite surprised. I’ve hit three shots, not warmed up and hit one closenot bad.”
There are a few commemorative plaques about the great golf courses of the world but nowhere else Donaldson would like his to be.
“Gleneagles will always be special to me, obviously now,” he said. “But I loved coming here anyway, I used to love coming to the Johnnie Walker Championship.
‘It’s such a great area and I like the golf course. I’ve had a few decent finishes here, and it was obviously very special to play a Ryder Cup here, around a golf course I like.
“Everything was on my side that week, I think.”
His memories of growing up watching the event make it “bizarre” to have played such a crucial role in it, he admitted.
“It’s weird,” he continued. “It’s great to play in it, obviously, but it still hasn’t sunk in yet that having watched it for years, I’ve now played in it.
“It looks different watching it back. When you are there, you’re soaking it in and it’s an unbelievable event. But you are concentrating so hard. Even now it’s still a bit way out there that I had the privilege of hitting the winning shot.”
Donaldson isn’t the most recognisable Top 30 player in golf even after his Gleneagles triumph, but he knows where he came from.
“I lost my European Tour card in ‘06 and played the Challenge Tour in early ‘07, to South America to play a three-week run of events and finished 31st in both the first two weeks,” he recalled.
“I won about £1200. Basically I had lost money, because of how much it cost me in travelling and the like. I remember thinking: `I’ve actually played okay here and I’ve lost money’.
“I was probably heading towards packing it in. Then the following week I just happened to win the tournament. That was a big kick up the backside.”
Now a regular inside the top 30 in the world – “I’ve been stumbling around the twenties, which is a good place to be, but I want to get past that” Donaldson is already thinking of Hazeltine in 2016.
“Once you’ve played one Ryder Cup you don’t want to miss another one, it’s like nothing else we experience in golf,” he said. “You’re going to have to play unbelievably well to get in but you know you’ve done it before.”
Gleneagles’ managing director Bernard Murphy said the plaque would provide “a lasting reminder of such a momentous week last September.”