It was just a crazy shot I saw in my head: Bubba Watson

The new US Masters golf champion, Bubba Watson, has never had a lesson in his life - and he's not the only athlete to benefit from the absence of coaching, says Jim White

Gerry Lester Watson Jr has been "Bubba" from the moment he was born, when his father likened the newborn's chubby cheeks to those of a character in the film Police Academy. Yesterday, as the big-hitting golfer from Florida broke down in tears on his mother's shoulder after he won the Masters in Augusta, his nickname was flashed across the globe: Bubba the Blubber.

For Watson, the tag is utterly appropriate: this is a sportsman as relaxed, convivial and light-hearted as his moniker suggests. With his all-white outfit, his pink-shafted putter, his broad beam of a grin, he presents the image of a man still in touch with the possibility that sport might be something to be enjoyed, a bit of fun. Bubba - the polar opposite of Tiger.

He won the right to wear golf's most prestigious item of clothing - the green blazer of the Masters champion - with a shot that had his audience scratching their heads at its improbability. His drive from the tee on the second hole of his play-off against the South African Louis Oosterhuizen landed in the middle of the woods that flank the Augusta fairways. Stuck in the trees, it seemed impossible that he could recover.

But Bubba looked undaunted by his lie. He chopped down on his ball with barely suppressed savagery and somehow bent and arced it out of the mess and back not just to the fairway but to the green, spinning to within a few feet of the hole.

It was a shot so audacious that you could spend the next year scouring the coaching manuals and find no trace of it. "It was," said Bubba, "just a crazy shot I saw in my head." Which is, in fact, the only place he has ever seen golf shots. This is a player who is entirely self-taught, who has never in his life consulted a book to tell him how to play. When he first showed an interest as a youngster, his father told him simply to go out and swing, to do his own thing. And he has done ever since.

In modern sport, this feels almost heretical. This is a champion who has never had a coaching lesson. Not once has he had his drive deconstructed or his putting analysed. What goes on in his mind as he addresses the ball - and he admits he suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder - is solely of his own construction, as unschooled as his magnificent mane of Seventies hair.

In a sport that is increasingly in thrall to the cult of the coach, Bubba stands out like a beacon. Every amateur hacker is told that the only route to improvement is via the expensive services of the professionals. Tiger Woods established the pattern, his game honed by experts from almost the time he could first walk. For him, every tournament has been approached like a military campaign, a team of coaches hatching his every move. Bubba merely goes out and hits that little white ball as hard as he can. No wonder the galleries cheered his elevation on Sunday: it seems far more authentic, more appealing to our sympathy for the underdog to see the unschooled player triumph.

Of course, Watson is not the first golfer to achieve success by following his own instincts. Sam Snead and Seve Ballesteros were both self?taught. And all three developed their own trademark shot because no one was telling them they were doing it wrong.

Joe Cole, the England footballer, was like that, once. Cole played only in the street until he was 11, trying things out, learning how to master the ball his own way. He had no contact with the game's received wisdom until he was signed by West Ham as he left primary school. He now believes the instruction he received thereafter may have inhibited his skill. Coaches concentrated on what he couldn't do, he says, rather than encouraging what he could.

There are countless similar examples. When he tore round the Iffley Road running track in Oxford on May 6 1954, Roger Bannister had never been told how to run. Indeed, every coach at the time would have insisted he was wasting his time: the prevalent assumption in athletics was that the human body was not able to withstand the rigours of running a mile in under four minutes. A trained doctor, Bannister preferred to trust his own instincts.

So did Micah True, the ultra-distance runner who died last month. He established that it was possible, without any expert diagnosis of his technique, to run hundreds of miles at a time, often in the most rigorous of conditions. And Sam Waley-Cohen, who beat the finest array of professional jockeys ever assembled to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup aboard Long Run last year, did so as an amateur. Unlike his riding-obsessed rivals, he devotes most of his time to his dentistry business. He rode in the race because his father had trained the horse and wanted to keep things in the family.

Kane Waselenchuk, the world's number one racquetball player, has based his entire career on the idea that coaching acts as a brake to talent. The Canadian is a disciple of the Bulgarian psychologist Georgi Lozanov and his notion of "Suggestopedia": this is the concept that everybody has the capacity to be a genius, but that the conventional approach to coaching - with its emphasis on correcting faults - intimidates development.Waselenchuk invents his own shots, and then improves them through trial and error. He never checks to see if he is doing it properly.

Champions like him challenge the coaching business, with its self?important assumptions, such as the necessity of thousands of hours of practice as a youngster, the primacy of the sports psychologist, even the essential need for the coach. "You get some sports science graduate from Keele University telling you you'll be better if you jump through this hoop 20 times," says Cole. "Sometimes you think: actually, I kind of know what will make me better."

Pierre Thomas, an American footballer with the New Orleans Saints, is another with little patience for coaching. He trained himself as a player while at college, producing a schedule that involved running up a hill near his rooms wearing a backpack filled with books. By a nice irony, he now sells manuals explaining to others how they can learn from his self-schooled methodology.

Fortunately, Bubba Watson is not yet intent on proselytising about his style; what works for him, he says, might not work for anyone else. Instead, he will maintain his happy-go-lucky charm, whacking the ball in a manner few of us have seen before, and even fewer of us could copy. As the self-made champion in the world's most heavily coached sport, his renown is certain to grow from here.

Not that he is looking for the limelight. "I don't play golf for fame," he said as he pulled on the champion's blazer. "I just wanna be me and play golf. I'm just Bubba." Just Bubba: if he were ever keen to enter the market, it would make the perfect title for his first coaching manual.