http://www.foxsports.com.au/golf/robert-craddock-revisits-barry-burn-the-scene-of-one-of-golfs-great-meltdowns/story-e6frf3oc-1227002681955?nk=4f6ce7baef871c08b935f6e9db4c5b7bRobert Craddock revisits Barry Burn, the scene of one of golf’s great meltdowns
Robert Craddock in Glasgow The Courier-Mail July 26, 2014 
GLASGOW has been gushing with goodwill during the opening days of the Commonwealth Games, but two hours up the road there is a secluded Siberia that still feels like the loneliest place on Earth.
It’s called Barry Burn. I jumped into it last week to “celebrate’’ the 15th anniversary of one of the most dramatic moments in golfing history.
Instantly I felt vulnerable and overawed. The mossy stone walls are higher than you are. The water lapping at your feet is cold. It feels like a torture chamber. You feel trapped and helpless. And if you’re a golfer, you are.
Jean Van de Velde smiled for the cameras when he came here — inwardly he must have been terrified. It is 15 years last week since the most spectacular one-hole car crash is golf history, when Frenchman Van de Velde started the final hole of the British Open at Carnoustie with a three-shot lead and fell to pieces with a triple-bogey seven to lose the unlosable tournament in a playoff.
After spraying his drive, hitting the grandstand with his second and scrambling in the rough, he finished up in Barry Burn and watched in horror as the tide came in to cover his ball after it was initially half covered. It was pure madness but some of the best theatre golf has ever seen.
Van de Velde’s name is heard on a daily basis floating around the fairways on the gusty breezes that whip in off the North Sea, brutally tormenting golfers to the point where the course is nicknamed Car-Nasty.
“Every single day that’s all people want to know about,’’ caddie Ben Greenhill said, as one of his bag-swinging mates chips in with, “You get to the 17th and they start talking about it, then when you get to the 18th you’ll get an American ask: The French guy . . . where was he?’’
Some of the post scripts to the incident have been as crazy as the incident itself. A few months after his collapse, Van de Velde did a midwinter TV commercial playing the 18th hole exclusively with a putter.
The fairways were so icy they had to be hosed and defrosted but in conditions that would make a snowman shiver, Van de Velde went out and — wait for it — shot a six, a score that would have won him the Open by a stroke (we repeat, with a putter).
One man’s failure also triggered another man’s fame when, a day after the collapse, Carnoustie caddie master Pat Healy, then a 57-year-old grandfather of three, was asked by a newspaper to have a crack at playing the shot out of the watery burn that Van de Velde refused to play and, with mud and slush flying everywhere, earned a rousing ovation from a group of tourists when his third shot lobbed on the green.
“I did a deal that I get paid every time those photos are used and have been paid about 700 pounds and the cheques still trickle in,’’ Healy said. “Interest never dies.’’
The popular Van de Velde, in his whimsical French way, never lost his sense of humour but Carnoustie understandably rocked his life.
A month later he split with his caddie, Christophe Angiolini, and hired and fired four more in a year.
Angiolini initially didn’t sleep for a week. He had a massive drinking session in Van de Velde’s room the night of the loss where both men dissolved into tears. Van de Velde told him, “We should be proud of what we did’’ but within a month he was looking for a job.
Van de Velde also split with his wife, who later walked onto a course mid-tournament with two lawyers attempting to serve him legal documents only to be marched off, a far cry from the tender support she gave on his day of infamy.
Van de Velde is rarely seen around these parts but when he did visit a few weeks ago he told Carnoustie staff about a key thought process that explained the entire debacle.
“I did not do that much wrong,’’ he said. “I hit that two-iron off the fairway towards the grandstand knowing you got a free drop if you got trapped there.
“I never expected to hit a pole in the grandstand and end up in the rough. Twenty players hit that stand that week. Everyone else stayed there and got a drop.’’
Van de Velde accepts his lot without protest. He and Carnoustie are now as inseparable as Norman and Augusta, or Napoleon and Waterloo.