The nearest I ever got to teeing it up with Tiger Woods came at an old disused railway station in the centre of Chicago.

It was on the eve of the BMW Championships, one of the big money playoff events at the end of the PGA Tour’s Fed Ex Cup series, and I’d somehow managed to get a seat at the pro-am dinner.

It was a fabulous old building in the heart of the city and there must have been 40 tables each eager to know who they would be paired with for the following day’s play.

There was a table on a big stage with what amounted to a leaderboard with all the pro am teams listed. On the table stood a lottery machine full of balls with numbers on and once dinner was over the process began.

It was all very simple really. The first ball out of the machine would correspond to one of the table numbers. They would then be able to shout out which player they wanted to play with.

Imagine that? Fancy a game with Justin Rose, Sergio Garcia or even Jordan Spieth? For a keen golfer this was a lottery that you wanted to be in, and the kicker was that no one was allowed to pick Tiger Woods. He was going to team up with whichever table number was the last to come out of the machine.

This, of course, meant that we were all praying for our number to be announced, but as more and more of the big names were selected, that eagerness started to be tainted with trepidation.

“Who would you pick now,” said one guy on our table. The others, being American, had their heads in their hands as Spieth, then Phil Mickelson, followed by Dustin Johnson (the eventual winner) were all selected. I had my head in my hands when Justin Rose, Luke Donald and a young Rory McIlroy were all picked.

Table 11 picks Retief Goosen. “You all think he doesn’t chat much,” said Paul Casey, who was up on stage and whose job it was to entertain the throng with sound bites on each player. “But put a glass of wine in his hand and you can’t stop him. And don’t forget to get him to show you his wrist. He has a burn on it where a watch was fused to his skin when he got struck by lightning.”

There was a distinct turning point in the evening when all the tables turned from willing their number to be announced to hoping that it wouldn’t be. It was the Tiger effect. Suddenly, everyone started realising that they might be teeing it up with Mr Woods in the morning and then wondering whether their game could cope with such intense pressure.

I can’t remember what my table number was, perhaps 13, but we were well into the sweaty palms moment when our number came tumbling out, got read out by Casey, and the spotlight was focused on our table. Sadly, the words that came out weren’t Tiger Woods, but Charley Hoffman.

I want to say so near yet so far, but that wouldn’t be fair on Hoffman who turned out to be a very friendly host and not at all the Californian surfing dude that he appeared  with his long flowing blond hair.

Hoffman’s a birdie machine. Back then he was ranked outside the top-100 on the PGA Tour for both driving accuracy and greens in regulation, but when the opportunities came by, he gobbled them up like a Labrador thrown a cup cake. No one had holed more birdie chances the season before, hitting 993 greens and walking off them 327 times with a move up the leaderboard.

“Aggressive golf sometimes pays off. Phil [Mickelson] has shown that,” he pointed out. “To win on the PGA Tour, you have to make birdies. Sometimes, there are consequences to that.”

Our partners in the pro am were a chap involved in the motor trade from Detroit and another who was reputed to be quite keen on cooking, at least that’s how Charley described them. Because I quite fancy myself in the kitchen and can even whip up a quick roux in order to make a parsley or cheese sauce, I approached Thomas Keller over the opening holes and said something like ‘I hear you can cook a bit? What’s your speciality?’.

Of course, once googled later on, he turned out to be the American version of Gordon Ramsey. The most decorated chef in the States with 7 Michelin stars to his name can do a whole lot more than ‘cook a bit’.

The Pro Am passed without major incident which is more than can be said of an excursion to a racing track courtesy of BMW. I’d asked to get an interview with Ricky Fowler who invited me to sit next to him as we took a car out for a spin.

Notebook and pen in hand, I asked my first question as we pulled away which was something along the lines of ‘have you driven on a race track before?’

It might have been the fact that we were both wearing crash helmets which somehow upped the ante, fuel injecting our egos as we became some sort of rally car duo where I tended to shout ‘brake’ as he hit the accelerator.

As a result, the notebook became more of a scribbling pad of indecipherable utterances that had been shouted across the revving of the engine. I was living life in the fast lane and had the photographic evidence to prove it.

My other trip to Chicago was a good deal more sedate and was bizarrely borne out of a game we’d all got a bit hooked on at work. Someone had discovered that a very small chunk had been taken out of the carpet in my colleague’s office. It was barely bigger than a 10 pence piece which meant that the deft touch to hole out from six feet had to be of angel like proportions. I’m telling you, any pace on the ball as it collided with the hole was enough to make it pass on by without falling in.

We created all sorts of holes from tees all over the floor plan, all of which ended in this tiny blemish. Amazingly, late on a Friday when normal hours were over, we even had the editor involved stroking putts down the corridor to finish perfectly placed outside the relevant office door.

What has this got to do with Chicago? Well, we discovered that (this could only happen in America) the World Office Putting Championships actually existed and were being held in the ‘Windy City’.

This, of course, is the American use of the word world, which means everywhere in the United States. When I got there, I was introduced to the organisers and shown the course.

Well, this was office putting on an entirely new level. Several entirely new levels to be exact because the final hole in this down town Chicago skyscraper involved playing your ball onto the elevator, going up several floors, and then holing out in front of the CEO’s office door. Prior to that we had people evading bins, putting under desks and even between the legs of a PA who worked in the building and did have extremely good legs.

Indoor office sport had been a bit of a thing at Golf World and about the time of the move from Oxford Street to Islington there was enough empty space to create our very own cricket pitch.

Wrapping some scrunched up paper in Sellotape made for a ball and a tube for picking up balls became a bat. I’ll never forget another former editor coming in to bowl and lengthening his run up by disappearing down a side corridor. You could see his fingers appearing around the corner of the wall as he looked for extra purchase to catapult him on his approach. Full speed as he evaded a chair and a desk, his untucked shirt flapping in the air, revealing rather too much belly, a look of determination on his face. It wasn’t a good time for the group director to pay a visit, although the batsman’s masterful clip off his legs, sending the ball over his head, was indeed a stroke of brilliance.

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