It was just like that as Sean O'Farrell, glowing with the warmth of victory, leaned across the counter and related to anyone who would listen how he had played golf like he had seldom played before and had walked away with the big prize. We tried to calm him down, and learn some detail of his great achievement: "Come tell me Sean O'Farrell where the gath'rin happened to be?"

He picked up the theme marvellously with: "At the old spot by the river quite well known to you and me."

It seems that the man had fallen under the spell of Sergio Garcia's renowned Putterball, and produced 45-points to win Jim Sullivan's captain's prize in the Woodenbridge Hotel society outing at home last week. A miracle. A delight.

Forget home and family and concentrate on golf.

So what is the Putterball?

Well, it is best described as a golf ball impaled on the end of a putter shaft. Use it as a putter and you have to be deadly accurate to make that ball meet the ball in play straighton and achieve a straight putt.

Even the slightest variation in stroke delivers an off-line putt.

It gives instant feedback, on the purity or otherwise of your stroke and Garcia, with the zeal of a missionary, urges one and all . . . "Join me and over 100 pros who practice with the Putterball. Use it just two minutes a day and you will make more putts."

Shades of times past when an American medicine man of golf named Phinney sent a putter to this writer via the huge tournament bag of John O'Leary, with the injunction that one should try it and then go forth and convert European golfers to the virtues of this magic wand and the "putting method" which would make it work wonders.

It came in a wooden box and inside was a square-headed putter called Phinney's One-Armed Bandit and an instruction book giving the code which would finally unlock the secret of putting.

Place the square-head on the ground behind the ball, move close while gripping the short and upright shaft with wrists locked by splaying the elbows outwards, putt by rocking the shoulders. Make 300 2-footers in succession on Day 1 of the programme. Miss one and go back to start. Not so easy as the back isn't built for such prolonged crouching.

Make 250 3-footers on Day 2 with the same penalty for a missed one, go back and start counting again. Greatness beckoned and it was still with total dedication that Royal Dublin's lovely putting green was approached with shuffling gait to attempt the target of 200 successful successive 4footers on Day 3.

One had never spent so much time on the putting green.

Still, that helpful putter found a good home when it was snapped-up by Mayo football legend Joe Corcoran during a chat on the putting green at Ballina a few years later and he went on to play great golf including a steady place on the Connacht team. Maybe it had magic after all.