What does a Saturday at the Crans golf tournament look like?

If I tell you Ashun Wu, Zander Lombard or Manuel Elvira, does that mean anything to you? No and that’s quite normal. If I tell you Georges, Daniel or Patricia, does that mean anything to you? No, unless it is a member of your immediate family. All six, however, have one thing in common: Crans-Montana and its golf tournament. The first three are players totally unknown to the general public and the other three are spectators present on Saturday and totally unknown to the players…

The Crans golf tournament (Omega European Masters by its official name) ended yesterday Sunday at the very end of the afternoon after four exciting rounds blessed with sumptuous, not to say too hot, weather. Year after year, at the beginning of September, the sporting event traditionally benefits from exemplary and almost insolent weather. It is the oldest European tournament to be contested every year on the same course. It attracts more than 50,000 people, including curious people, more or less enlightened amateurs, specialists of all kinds, sponsors and customers, all forming an inspired but not always inspiring crowd placed under the blessing of the Gods of golf. A sport which suffers from prejudices and preconceived ideas but which provokes immense emotions not to mention a level of stress which sometimes reaches paroxysm. And for the skeptics, yes it is indeed a sport and not something rich people do who screw up the planet by wasting water and maintaining mysterious lawns (fairways or greens). That’s said.

It is difficult to measure the abysmal gulf that separates the level of a professional golf player from that of an enlightened amateur. This chasm is only growing in the world of sport: today, little geniuses destined for a possible golf career are spotted right out of the cradle and, some of them, benefit from a mental coach from the age of 12. Not sure if that would be desirable. In tennis, you have a racket and a ball and you already have a multitude of different shots. In golf, you have a smaller ball, 14 clubs that are racquets, and you can invent millions of ways to play each shot. It is endless and extremely complex.

An afternoon at the edge of the greens of Crans delivers varied and contrasting emotions. There we meet marshals (those who say “silence”) who know the route better than anyone. We discover on a green, a little abandoned by the public, Sergio Garcia, who was one of the best players in the world, missing a putt that every golfing spectator would have thought he could succeed and even from further away… The same people restore hope in the human race when they say “Hey, I’m going to try this shot” when this shot is totally impossible for them to reproduce. Hope gives life. And the most desperate who have abandoned all hope of progress and willingly take refuge on the terraces or other VIP areas which have recently flourished on the course. They indulge in drinking, sometimes more than necessary. The “silence” of the marshals no longer affects them.

We must also talk about the men in the shadows in Crans. Saturday around 3:30 p.m., emerging from who knows where, dozens of machines went up the rue du Prado – mowers, smoothers, blowers and I don’t know what else – in order to restore the course for the next day. Far from the spotlight, gardeners carry out immense and necessary work.

So it is with the Crans golf tournament, a mixture of beauty (the site is exceptional), silence all the same, missed shots and magic shots, enlightened comments and hopes to come…