By Grant Winter
The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship is unique on the European Tour in that it brings together for four days of golf the world's top professionals, as well as celebrities and leading figures from other sporting codes.
This year's tournament takes place in Scotland next week and while the entry list of players who will compete for the $5-million purse is already known, the names of the "celebs" - who take part in a separate team event - will only be announced on Monday.
But a regular in the Dunhill over the years has been Samuel L Jackson, who reckons he could have been as successful at golf as he is in acting.
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"I grew up in poor Tennessee and in our neighbourhood we used a Quaker Oats box for a football and a rock wrapped in newspaper for a baseball," the 59-year-old veteran of nearly 100 films, including Pulp Fiction, told Golf Digest magazine.
There was no way, he stressed, that a kid could play golf in those days because not only was it too expensive, but the snooty, racist clubs weren't too keen on someone who they felt didn't have the right skin colour becoming a member.
"When I did take up the game, when I was almost 50 years old, I fell in love with it immediately," said Jackson. "I've always been athletic and my golf improved rapidly. What if I'd started 40 years earlier. Who's to say? Maybe not Tiger Woods, but you'd recognise me."
Jackson sports a five handicap and as he puts it - "moves the ball out there pretty good. Not super long, but 270 to 280 yards which is definitely longer than average," he says.
"I was in the group ahead of Corey Pavin (one of the PGA Tour's shorter hitters) at the Bob Hope Classic one year and looked back to where he hit his drive. I was longer. As long as Corey is around, when someone asks if I hit as far as a tour player, I can honestly say, 'yeah, no problem'."
Jackson says the thing they call "The Zone" in golf has a parallel in acting. "Good actors reach moments where a scene happens effortlessly.
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