Cigar Swirls and Manly Curls: Miguel Angel Jimenez

Darren Clarke strolls serenely into the stuffy, sepia sunset of golfing history, contentedly puffing on a panatela. It is another ambler and cloud-creator who is more watchable, quite unique and un poco loco: Miguel Angel Jimenez. Even his name has a wonderful, lilting cadence; his motions are part of a greater circadian rhythm that pulses away to gentle ripples of applause, soft whooshes of club heads and the cream liqueur tones of Peter Alliss.

Visually, he looks like some Spaghetti-Western extra patrolling a craggy border region on horseback; perhaps an honourable Andalucian mounty or cheeky Mexican mercenary. He parades proudly around the green, plump as a pigeon, white-glove in hand, ready to slap the face of some wag failing to observe golf etiquette. His wavy hair, when unleashed, lends the appearance of Marco Pierre White in pimp’s clothing.

Darren Clarke’s reported annual spend on cigars is £25,000, making Jimenez’s estimated outlay the equivalent of smoking rolled Damien Hirst sketches. You cannot imagine Clarke and Jimenez being forced out of a non-smoking clubhouse into the teeth a wild coastal squall to huddle amongst a wispy bonfire of struck matches. No, instead these middle-aged Machiavellian men are serial drawing room recliners, arms outstretched on high-backed, studded leather, with chino-trousered legs akimbo, regaling tales of eagles, as if Aesop, or of albatrosses, as if Ancient Mariners.

However, in their company, after the fifth scotch and fifteenth Havana, one might find one’s eye a-glazing, the watercolour depictions of 18^th century golf (top-hatted caricatures of men with moustaches, sticks and dogs) blurring, clubhouse fire crackling, heartbeat slowing and, suddenly, the reprise of a familiar hypnotic mantra: Peter Alliss stating: 'You are feeling very sleepy'.