Any time you’re invited anywhere by Jack and Barbara Nicklaus, you say yes please and if you’re invited to the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village in their home state of Ohio, you’re jumping up and down with delight and ensconcing yourself for the week, not just for a couple of days.  The Memorial is Jack’s baby and every year there are honourees/honorees, both playing and journalistic and there is a plaque for each person honoured.

Barbara and Jack Nicklaus, two of the best.

Maureen and I went there in 2009 – can’t believe it’s so long ago because it’s so fresh in the memory – because Dai, my husband, was one of the journalists honoured, in his case posthumously.  Fortunately, Maureen and I were still breathing and knew even before we set off that we’d never have another experience like this.  We were right.

At a lunch, Maureen was standing around when Barbara Nicklaus came up and introduced herself; then it was Tom Watson; then it was Jack.  It was golfing heaven.  The professional honourees that year were JoAnne Carner, whom I knew fairly well from covering the LPGA Tour and Jackie Burke, whose wife had been at college with Maureen, so, really, we were away in a coach.  We had breakfast with Padraig Harrington, chatted to David Feherty in the hotel bar – where he told us that his alcoholism was doing press-ups in the car park, just waiting for him to slip up – and wandered around in a delighted daze.

We treated ourselves to a facial and full make-up on the day of the presentation – I managed to keep my acceptance speech to the requisite four minutes, miraculous and think I didn’t disgrace myself in front of that consummate master of ceremonies Charlie Mechem, who is still doing the job.  He’s a long-standing friend of Jack and Barbara and was for a few years commissioner of the LPGA, making that difficult job look delightfully straightforward!  Every tour should have a Mechem at least once in its lifetime.

The incomparable Charlie Mechem, a man for every occasion.

For some reason, there was no photograph taken of me being presented with Dai’s plaque, so we ended up going down to Jack and Barbara’s house, where we had a happy snap taken, much to Mo’s disgust.  The reason?  She’d assumed all the formalities were done and had headed out to the golf course to watch Olly (Jose Maria Olazabal), dressed in her oldest sun top, secure in the knowledge that she could top up her tan and was unlikely to meet anybody that she knew.  Instead, I track her down – there are thousands of spectators and it wasn’t easy finding anyone – and haul her off to have our photo taken with our hosts.  The photo has pride of place on my desk but Mo can’t stand it – all she sees is that tatty top – and insists it has no place there, making her cringe with embarrassment.  She has banned it from the blog.

On the Saturday of the tournament, we abandon golf watching and go shopping, so when we get back, Mo stops off at the hotel reception to check the scores while I go up to the room.  Next thing I know she’s knocking on the door – why?  She has a key – and when I open it, a little indignantly, she pushes past me, gesticulating madly…..Tiger, Tiger’s next door…….She’d bumped into him, struggling with his key and an inordinate number of takeaway bags and exchanged pleasantries, congratulating him on the 68 that had got him back in contention.

The next day, he played superbly, had a 65, with birdies at the last two holes, to win by one shot from Jim Furyk.  It was a masterful performance, full of exciting shots, his fourth win at the Memorial.  Jack presented the trophy and predicted that Tiger would win his 15th major at the upcoming US Open and overtake his total of 18 major titles within two or three years…..

Tiger with Jack in happier times.

It never happened and now we have the latest, sad, sad, horrible pictures of Tiger in decline, arrested by the police, looking lost and broken, a man with no idea who he is or where he is.  He needs help and if he has any friends, he needs them now.

Ok, hands up who’s heard of the Vagliano Trophy?  I bet nowhere near 50 per cent of you have.

Well, it’s a biennial women’s amateur international match between Great Britain and Ireland and the Continent of Europe and at the end of this month the 30th contest will take place at the Bogogno Golf resort some 75 kilometres north west of Milan.  This trophy is held in odd-numbered years and the Curtis Cup, the blue riband event for women amateurs from these shores as well as for those from America, takes place in even-numbered years.  The Curtis Cup is high profile, the Vagliano Trophy, in my opinion erroneously, is not.

GB&I last won in 2005 and are attempting to bring to a halt a successful run of five consecutive victories by the multi-talented Europeans.  By contrast, the British and Irish have been successful twice in the last three Curtis Cups.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to have an American vs Continent of Europe clash?  I think the results would surprise a number of people.  After all, the talent pool of the Continent runs deep, especially nowadays.

This Italian gem will host this year’s Vagliano.

I was fortunate enough to play in three Vagliano teams, recording the full range of results – the only halved match in its history, a loss and, finally and exultantly, a win.  We were pitted against the fearsome ball-striking skills of the likes of Spaniard Marta Figueras-Dotti, now coach supreme and Solheim Cup vice-captain to the great Annika Sorenstam, herself a Vagliano team member.  We tussled with the sublime skills of France’s Marie-Laure de Lorenzi (often a futile task!) realising we were witnessing a professional star in the making.  She did, indeed go on to carve out an exemplary record for herself on the professional circuit. Believe you me, any successes against these giants of the game stay in my memory as high points of my career.

Ferocious Spanish…………

…………and French opposition from my era.

The Europeans were further strengthened by the emergence of the Swedes in the 1980s – Lotte Neumann and Helen Alfredsson, to name but two, coming to the fore, with the aforementioned Annika following on closely.  The list of classy Europeans is almost endless and a scroll down the current world rankings reveals former Vagliano team members, Anna Nordqvist, Suzann Pettersen, Carlota Ciganda, Karine Icher, Caroline Masson and Azahara Munoz.  All of them, bar none, have trained on to become successful Solheim Cup team players.

Of course, the GB&I players were no slouches either and I had numerous talented teammates over the years but two stand out.  The first was the player with whom I made my British and Irish international debut at the sublime Royal Porthcawl links.  I was paired with one of Wales’ finest, Vicki Rawlings.  Having a Welsh partner at a Welsh venue meant we took the lion’s share of the gallery with us – and the match did not disappoint.  We arrived on that famous roller-coaster final green at the end of a keen contest and were left with the task of getting down in two putts from long distance to win the match.  I staggered the putt up to four feet which was a pretty decent effort but what a tester Vicki was left with!  Her focus never wavered, she bustled about the green and confidently dispatched the ball into the centre of the cup to the delighted roars of the home crowd.  I’ve seldom seen concentration of that magnitude since.

Vicki Rawlings – SO glad she was on my side.

By contrast, I was paired two years later with Mandy Rawlings, Vicki’s sister, and the youngest of the three sisters who all represented their country.  Mandy was arguably the most talented of the trio as regards ball-striking skills but her attention was apt to wander and she would lose focus at critical times.  In the latter stages of a really tense encounter, I saw her taking Marta Dotti aside and asking her where she’d got her socks!!  Marta, who was fluent in English, was sure she must have misunderstood and looked questioningly at me.  I could only shrug as Mandy repeated her question.  The dumbfounded looks on the faces of our opponents and their subsequent confusion almost let us sneak in for a half  but they did recover their concentration to secure victory.  Any time Mandy and focus conspired to collide she was pretty much unbeatable.

Do not underestimate the enormity of the task facing this year’s GB&I captain, Elaine Farquharson-Black and her 2017 team, which consists of five Irish and three English players.  EFB certainly doesn’t.  The result may well hang in the balance but one thing is certain and that is that huge talent will be on display.  The Vagliano Trophy deserves to muscle its way to the forefront of the game and receive more recognition and exposure than it is currently enjoying.

This Trophy rocks!

The Continent of Europe – victorious in 2015.