'Golf', wrote Bernard Darwin, the world's first great writer on the game, 'being a cold, calculating sort of game gives perhaps more scope for folly than any other. We have all the time in the world to make up our minds as to what is the wise thing to do, and then we do the foolish one.'

Sometimes these 'foolish' things go beyond using a driver when you should have played safe, going for the green when you should have laid up or chipping when you should have putted (or vice versa!). There is no more infuriating, frustrating or unexplainable game than golf; it can engender great anger and bring a grown man to a meltdown.

Your common or garden hacker gets away with the odd, in some cases frequent, blow-up, but when you play for a living, on TV, breakdowns are cruelly captured on record.

Sadly that's the case for Hennie Otto whose epic brain explosion continues to flit around Google and YouTube.

It had happened so fast that officials had to ask to see footage to count the putts. Otto had taken six putts which gave him a score of 10 on the hole.

Otto's relationship with the spectacular course designed by renowned American golf architect Robert Trent Jones Jnr was tempestuous. The first time the 'Wild' bogey got to him was in 2001. After shooting the lights out with a 63 in the pro-am he eased off to a 70 in the opening round and then blew out to 80 in the second, a 'slam-the-trunk' situation which in pro parlance means you've missed the cut and have to pack your clubs in the boot of the car.

But Hennie's rage had not dissipated by the time he got to the car and he didn't just slam the lid of his boot. He was seen to snap every one of his clubs in two and stuff them back in the bag.

Leaving the course across the steel suspension bridge over the Mtamvuna River, Otto stopped, hauled out the offending bag of clubs and tossed them into the river – echoing a favourite Bernard Darwin story of a large Scottish golfer who felt he had unravelled the mystery by putting one-handed with a club cut down to be no longer than a hammer.

Like most hopeful remedies it let him down in the end and, missing one on the 9th at Muirfield, he hurled and shattered the offending instrument against the adjacent stone wall and cried: 'You little *******! Never presume upon my good nature again.'

In 2002 Otto made his way down to the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast again and got his own back by winning his first title of note, the Nashua Masters.

But the wicked wiles that Trent-Jones is known for got him again and his 2005 disaster made it onto the reel of 'Golf's Great Tantrums'.

As is often the case in the telling of quirky stories, the two incidents are lumped together, but Otto put the record straight, if that's what you could call it, in a 2008 interview with Barry Havenga of SA Golf Digest magazine by explaining that the two 'meltdowns' actually bookended a victory.

Otto, an excellent rugby flyhalf who played for the Boksburg first team while still a teenager, is a fighter though and went on to record 14 career victories – including the SA Open in 2011 and the Italian Open twice.

And he is not alone among South Africans when YouTube trots out golf's gaffes. Ernie Els suffered a mental blackout when he six-putted the 1st green on day one of the 2016 Masters to run up a nine and even the great Arnold Palmer and Tom Weiskopf have single-hole scores of 12 and 13 (on the par-three 12th at Augusta after dumping five balls in the creek) in their records.

Els' best TV blooper, however, is an all-time classic.

Playing in the 2008 Dubai Desert Classic at Emirates Golf Club, he felt he had miscued his drive at a driveable par four and exclaimed: 'Ag, don't pull it you doos!'

To which English commentator Steve Beddow, who knew only too well what it meant as he had often been to South Africa, innocently asked Denis Hutchinson, 'What's a 'dooze' Hutchy?'

Hutchy, perhaps because he was incapable of doing so, uttered not a sound.

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