If you cast your eye over the golfing schedules at this time of year, the venues read like the exotic wishlist of a golfer with time – and money – on his or her hands:  Bahamas, Doha, Qatar, Dubai, Oz coming up……….sounds heavenly!

It set me thinking back to my own forays into the exotic some 20 years ago when playing the Asian Tour.  A stray thought popped into my head and, not really believing it could be accurate, I went and rummaged in the nether regions of a very old filing cabinet.  And blow me, there it was – a folder marked “Asia Correspondence” stuffed with faxes (remember them?) and notes chronicling the tournaments, travel, sights and sounds of a unique and very challenging run of tournaments, our very own “Asian Swing”.

The long-forgotten Asian journal

We started off in Taipei, moved on to Manila, then Bangkok, KL and finally Indonesia.  “Gosh, it was great fun, wasn’t it?”  I mused to myself as I settled down to leaf through this stash of memories.  The following jumped out at me instantly and is an extract from a fax to Patricia, sent from The New World Hotel in Manila.

Our Manila base – the second stop on the tour

“I’m not happy – I’m playing badly.  I can’t stand mucking about like this.  This was my day – up at 5.00am, on bus at 6.00am, arrive at club at 7.00am for my 10.25 tee off.  Didn’t get started till 11.00 – we were last off in a fourball.  Off course at 4.30pm (it blew a gale from 10.00am onwards), back on bus at 5.00.  Arrived at hotel at 6.15 and the same timetable to look forward to tomorrow.  Remind me to never, ever consider doing this again.”

Hmm, methinks I detect a bit of a “poor me” attitude there.  I HAD forgotten the awful travel arrangements, however.  The courses were usually a minimum of an hour away from the tournament hotels and, no matter your tee-off time, you had to catch the provided transport and all travel together to the course.  It was considered too dangerous to do otherwise.  It did, however, mean that every player was at the course all day every day for as long as play was taking place.

And then, another reminder of the travel we endured between tournaments.  Here’s another extract from another fax on the occasion of leaving the first tournament in Taipei:  “Because Thai Airways are part sponsors of the tour we flew to Manila via Hong Kong and Bangkok with an overnight stop at the airport there – a total of 18 hours travelling.  And, wait for it, a direct Taipei/Manila flight is ONE hour!!!”

Ah yes, it was pretty grim, come to think of it.  But we did have some deliciously exotic and interesting food – didn’t we?  Cue another fax extract, this time to my niece, Emily, from The Ambassador Hotel in Taipei.

Never did acquire a taste for sea urchins!

“Last night we had a big dinner hosted by the sponsors.  It was fifteen courses of Chinese food, most of it inedible, with things like sea urchins, which are like big fat worms.  Half of the stuff we couldn’t recognise but it was fun experimenting.”

That was written during the first week of a five-week tour.  In week five I found this entry in my notes:  “Boy, I can’t wait to get home and have a decent steak and a bottle of good red wine.  I don’t want to see a grain of rice for a year!”

All this leafing through old notes and faxes has made me wonder if my 2017 specs just happen to be a very strong prescription of the rose-tinted variety?  It was certainly an arduous tour and it was essential to acquire a degree of resilience.  Your time was not under your control, so routines and attitudes had to be adaptable and fluid.  But, heck, it WAS great fun.  I saw escalators on a golf course for the first time in my life and on the few days we did manage some sightseeing a whole new cultural world was laid out before us.

Clubs already waiting on the next tee.  Wow – caddies AND an escalator!

And I’ll never forget the surreptitious queuing outside the tournament director’s door at the end of the week to collect your winnings – all paid in US dollars and in cash.  And how could you not enjoy spending time with a host of great players and friends?  Many of them notched their first wins in Asia before moving on to further success worldwide, thanks in large part to the experience gained and skills honed on the Asian Tour.

Now, where’s the TV remote so I can look at the golf in Dubai?

Thursday night is draw night at Whittington Heath Golf Club and as I left the club a few hours ago, on a dark and stormy night, without any winnings (although my dancing partner was £150 richer!), I started thinking about Australia.  Not only is it likely to be warmer there but there’s some high-quality women’s golf going on, with more to come in the next couple of weeks.

Trouble is, looking at the schedules, down under is all asunder.  The words that spring to mind, to an observer who is much more distant than she once was, are the usual ones:  money (or the lack thereof), politics, turf wars, egos undoubtedly.  It’s all too bitty and split when the women would surely benefit from everything being better organised and connected, with at least a suggestion of being thought through and joined up.  Ah well, cloud cuckoo land is as good a place as any to go walkabout.

Aditi Ashok in action. Legend in the making?

The current tournament, the RACV Gold Coast Challenge at Royal Pines, is under the auspices of the ALPG (Australian Ladies Professional Golf), so it’s fairly small beer but it does at least have Aditi Ashok, the young Indian who is showing signs of being a proper player, leading the way.  She led after a hot and humid first round, alongside local amateur Karis Davidson, who has the example of fellow Queenslanders like Karrie Webb, Greg Norman, Wayne Grady, Corinne Dibnah and Ian Baker-Finch, to mention just a few of a long, distinguished line, to inspire her.  Michele Thomson, a Scot from Aberdeen, where conditions tend to be different, completed the leading trio.

Royal Pines used to be a fixture on the LET (Ladies European Tour) schedule, with sizeable, enthusiastic crowds following the likes of Webb, Laura Davies and Japan’s Ai Miyazato but it’s no longer an LET event, for whatever reason.

Karrie Webb, one of Queensland’s and Australia’s best.  Legend.

The LET season starts next week, in Australia, at 13th Beach Golf Links at Barwon Heads on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria, not too far from Melbourne.  The event is the Oates Vic Open and is also sanctioned by the ALPG and the PGA Tour of Australasia, with the women and men playing in alternate groups on the same courses for equal prize money.  Well done Golf Victoria!  Let’s hope there’s some good, entertaining golf and the event becomes a fixture.

The next official LET tournament will be at Mission Hills in China in March, starting on St Patrick’s Day but the next event in Australia will be in two weeks’ time:  the ISPS Handa Women’s Australian Open at Royal Adelaide, billed as the second event of 2017 on the (US) LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association) Tour.  It was also on the LPGA schedule last year but it was No 2 on the LET (after the ISPS Handa New Zealand Women’s Open, which has also disappeared from the European list but pops up on the LPGA list at the end of September, with a new sponsor.)  I hope you’re keeping up!  Even allowing for complications, contractual or otherwise, something, somewhere, is not quite right.

If Europe, which has been the proving ground for so many players from the southern hemisphere over many years, is unable to keep the Australian and New Zealand Opens on its schedule, shouldn’t the alarm bells start ringing?  Perhaps the bell tolls for the LET.  Or perhaps not.  It’s kept going against the odds since its inception, so who am I to worry about its future?!

There was good news from the Bahamas, where Mel Reid finished in a tie for 13th in the first event of her first full season on the LPGA Tour.  Keep an eye on her this season.  She’s been through a lot but is still standing, still swinging and still smiling.  Professional sport is a wonderful way of earning a living if you’re good enough and keep well but it is unrelenting and can be very cruel.  It’s also addictive and very seductive, constantly whispering saccharine nothings in your ear.

Brandie Burton, once the next big thing in American women’s golf, won a mere five titles, though two of those were majors, the du Maurier Classic (now defunct) in 1993 (when she won three times) and 1998.  The Californian played on five Solheim Cup teams but her career was blighted by injury and she retired in 2010 and essentially gave up golf until last year.  Wrist trouble, four back surgeries and a neck fusion will do that to you.

Brandie Burton due back in action in Arizona in March. Legend.

Burton is now 45 and eligible for the Legends Tour, so she’s venturing back onto the fairways and will be making her debut as a veteran in Arizona next month.  Welcome back and good luck.  Enjoy.