Ahead of the 1988 Masters Greg Norman, Ballesteros, Lyle and tournament debutant Woosnam played a practice round and, needing an edge, they made a match of it: Seve and the Shark versus Sandy and Woosie.
It would have made good television. The Australian and the Spaniard were ranked Nos. 1 and 2 in the world, Lyle and Woosnam were third and fifth. If the match needed a title the underdogs had it, muttering the words “Shropshire versus the World” to themselves with a smile as they walked to the first tee.
The match was halved but a few days later Lyle went to bed with the 54-hole lead by two strokes. Unfortunately an allergic reaction to the Augusta pollen was keeping him awake. “No problem,” said his wife-to-be, Jolande, an expert in reflexology. “I’ll tickle your toes.”
And as she did so Lyle’s mind drifted back to the 1986 Masters when he had played alongside Jack Nicklaus during the Golden Bear’s famous victory.
“I cannot overemphasise the level of noise,” he later explained. “It was quite unlike anything I have experienced on a golf course before or since. That memory intensified my desire to experience it again in the future, but this time as the centre of attention.”
The next day he needed all the inspiration he could muster as he found himself tied with Mark Calcavecchia and stood in a fairway bunker on the final hole.
“His emotional state was like a fire drill in a Chinese brothel,” wrote Peter Dobereiner in The Observer. “He commanded this turbulence to cease, gathered his thoughts and played the shot of the championship right over the flag.”
It was a 7-iron that whipped the ball from the top of the sand over the imposing face, carrying 143 yards to the centre of the green where it stalled on the slope.
Millions of television viewers in Britain listened to the commentary of Alliss, who suggested that gravity was about to play a helping hand.
“That could spin,” he said. Musgrove’s friends and family later told him they were blowing air at the television to help it along. Households across Shropshire urged it to move. The entertainer Russ Abbot, Lyle’s Wentworth neighbour, almost brought a chandelier down on his head amid the excitement of screaming for the ball to spin.
Alliss was still convinced. “It could spin,” he repeated. “It could go. This could go …”
Finally, it did. Not, perhaps, finishing as close to the hole as many thought, but Lyle had created a winning opportunity that he grabbed, holing the clinching birdie before performing an emotionally drained and half-hearted Highland jig.
Tickled toes, inspiration and a funny little dance: it was a very Sandy Lyle way to become Britain’s first winner of a green jacket.