Sleep

...ba href=/sleep/a/b." I ask Woosnam whether the Masters title was unequivocally a blessing in terms of his career, and indeed his life?

The 1975 Mouton Rothschild notwithstanding, was that dinner with the Augusta members, when he just wanted some beers with his mates, in some ways a disagreeable portent of the future?

"Well, winning the Masters was the pinnacle.

I'd always wanted to win a major and it didn't matter which one.

But now I had done that, I had climbed to the top of the mountain and wasn't quite sure where to go next.

The ambition went out of my life a little bit.

I should have said, 'Let's carry on and try to win more majors', but I didn't, and with the press interest and that, I lost a bit of freedom." Woosnam still has "only" one major to show for his 30 years as a professional golfer, although it might have been two had his infamous caddie Miles Byrne not forgotten to remove the spare driver from his bag before the final round of the 2001 Open Championship at Royal Lytham St Annes.

Woosnam, going like a train at the time and looking the most likely winner, was penalised two shots and his concentration derailed.

In a way, the incident stemmed from his own decency as a bloke.

Only a couple of months earlier, he had encouraged his faithful caddie Phil "Wobbly" Morbey to find more lucrative employment, on the basis that he was no longer winning the kind of prize-money to which they had both become accustomed.

Wobbly would never have left 15 clubs in the bag.

Still, theres no po...

...ba href=/sleep/a/b again.

“But as time went on, he was losing weight and then he went as white as a sheet.

We took him to the doctor, who said it was the after-effects of a virus.

But we didn’t agree with that.

It had been a couple of months, and he wasn’t getting any better.

“So we took him to A&E, told them the symptoms, and they did a blood test and kept him in overnight.

The next day, the doctor came out and told us.” Told you what?

“That he had leukaemia.

They just drop it on you like it’s toothache or something.

My wife nearly collapsed.

“It was the worst possible news – like a living hell.

You just don’t imagine it’s going to happen to you.

And when it does, you want it to be yourself, not your kid.” After the awful, numbing shock, a name then flashed through Hayward’s mind: Gary Lineker.

Why did he think of the former England goalscorer and Match Of The Day presenter?

“I suddenly remembered his son had had leukaemia and had made a full recovery.

That was the only thing I could cling onto until we sat down with the doctor so he could explain everything to us.” Nearly 10 months on, and Steve and Stacey Hayward now know everything there is to know about acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, the cancer of the blood that attacks 30 people in every million but peaks in children aged two to five.

“It’s the mildest form, and, at the age he is, if it’s clear after the next three years, there’s a 97 per cent chance it won’t come back,” Hayward says.

“He�...

...ba href=/sleep/a/b on Tuesday night (actually early Wednesday morning) after the current crop of girls lost by two points to Duke (at least it wasn’t Tennessee), especially after Barbara Turner’s tenacious performance that propelled them into overtime.

I was not much less discomfited by last week’s two-point loss by the UConn n again after heroics by senior Denham Brown sent the team into overtime against George Mason.It’s March 31 today, but March madness was over for me and most of my fellow citizens on Tuesday.

It’s tough to be a fan sometimes!

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