When Retief Goosen finally closed the deal on him becoming Europe's top golfer of 2001 by leading the Volvo Order of Merit he did so in typical fashion. This is to say he accepted the ultimate accolade quietly, modestly and in a voice so naturally low and soft you had to lean forward and listen intently to pick up on his words.

This is the way it has been with this particular South African whose instinct is to set aside any large trumpets and to rely instead on his play and his statistics to underline the quality of his golf. This graceful, high not of humanility in an often overly-hyped world is as reassuring as is his ability to first encounter and then to overcome adversity.

It is a strength first learned as a teenager in South Africa when he discovered early that timing is everything and that being in the wrong place at the wrong time may wreck your life. Certainly the lightning strike that zapped him as he practised his game while still an amateur in South Africa taught Goosen a major life-enforcing lesson: in condensed form this amounts to 'just when you feel you have got it made in life, someone or something tends to push you over.'

Make no mistake, this electrical charge all but burned out young Goosen's body, leaving him for several weeks to reflect painfully in hospital on what had happened. What he reflected on, of course, was the ancient riddle posed to those who have been alarmingly close to a premature departure. What Goosen tried to work out 17 years ago was whether he was now lucky to be alive or if he had been desperately unfortunate to have been struck in the first place.

There is no simple answer to this elemental question but what is without doubt is that he left that hospital a quieter, more reflective and certainly a more deeply introspective young man. Even for a kid, this experience had been alarming enough to encourage the realisation that any human being, no matter how content, may be erased by a fickle, fateful moment.

It is a knowledge he has carried with him since and that has made him both stronger than most and yet more vulnerable than many, the usual, and necessary, embryonic champion's arrogance hugely diluted by that bolt from a leaden African sky. Nowhere was this fallibility, this lack of total conviction more vividly illustrated than during the US Open Championship in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Equally it was here that his strength was laid out for public admiration.

His unfortunate putting ordeal - three strokes from ten feet, for goodness sake - on the 72nd green, when this glittering Championship was within his grasp, would have crushed a lesser man. Yet while television commentators and journalists instantly quiried his ability to return the following morning to the minefield that was Southern Hills still upright, never mind in the correct mental mode to take on Mark Brooks in the only remaining 18 hole play-off in high-level professional golf, Goosen knew otherwise.

The fact is we all underestimated Goosen. While we fretted, he did two things. First, he spoke with his 'mind coach' Jos Vanstiphout, a diminutive middle-aged Belgian who once played in a rock band called The Mayfair Set. Vanstiphout spoke with his client for half an hour. "I expected to find a wreck but he was fine. He told me he knew he was playing well ad that he knew he had just missed an opportunity. Just as he was leaving he said 'You know Jos, the one thing I now know is that I can beat everyone.' The second thing Goosen did was to go to bed early. And instantly fall asleep. Extraordinary.

It remains true, however, that until this year no-one underestimated Retief Goosen more than he did himself. Despite previous success, despite his laid-back nature and his slow-burn grin, Goosen remained a golfer who knew he was very good but who constantly doubted his ability to claw his way forward and to turn good into great.

All this changed in Oklahoma. Retief admits brutally that missing the original short putt could have "wrecked my career." Instead, as he now realises, it had made him. Four weeks after America he triumphed in Scotland on another devilishly demanding course, by capturing The Scottish Open at Loch Lomond. Once again he was all focus and control, a player in charge of himself ad his emotions and who swing thus was freed to fulfil its natural potential. He still move slow but, clearly, he had learned fast as success in The Scottish Open at Loch Lomond underlined.

The following week he was 13th in the Open Championship and by the time he secured his Volvo Order of Merit Number One title with another win in the Telefonica Open de Madrid in Spain in October he had been some sort of contender every time he teed it up. This, in the wickedly contrary world of professional golf, is phenomenal.

Along the way he at last moved away from the large shadow cast by his amiable compatriot and good friend Ernie Els. All his life Goosen has moved slowly behing Els. As an amateur he was acknowledged as supremely gifted but not quite as gifted as the big man. It has been the same a professional. Even Gary Player, usually so generous and perceptive in his analysis of others, failed to notice properly the steely determination within a golfer who, to be fair to Player, seemed to most of us too ready to accept close-run failure when the really big moments beckoned ever to make the demanding journey to Makor Champion.

There is, of course, no such annoyingly smirking monkey on either of those broad shoulders now for the man who divides his domestic life betwixt the clamour of Johannesburg and the village calm of Sunninghill just down the road from The European Tour's elegant headquarters at Wentworth. "It's hard for it to sink in properly that I am the best player in Europe 2001," he whispered in Madrid, that trumpet still nowhere to be seen. "What I do know is that it's been a dream year winning a Major, the Volvo Order of Merit, The Scottish Open at Loch Lomond and now the Telefonica Open de Madrid here in the Spanish capital. I've put in a lot of work with Jos and this is the year it's all begun to pay-off."

So Retief Goosen becomes the first non-European to take the Volvo Order of Merit since Greg Norman swaggered his way ahead of everyone else 19 years ago. He goes so in the yearr that he becomes the third South African, after Els and Player, to win the US Open Championship. In modern times, of course, no European has managed to beard the Americans in their national Championship. Clearly there must be something in the South African water, although, in Goosen's case, it is more likely that there was something in the air all those years ago.

By Bill Elliott, The European Tour Yearbook 2002.

Jan 1, 2002