The season’s now in full swing for just about every golfer, no matter the standard, age or gender.  My old colleague on tour, Laura Davies, has been busy making history in Denmark by becoming the first woman to play in a men’s European Seniors Tour event.  She finished 44th, beating Jose Maria Olazabal, Costantino Rocca, Gordon J Brand and Philip Walton, all of them former Ryder Cuppers.  Fierce competitors as they all are, that must have smarted.

The competition was no less fierce at The Spire Trophy, an annual event held at the incomparable Castle Stuart Golf Links which, for the uninitiated, is situated five miles from Inverness, overlooking the Moray Firth.  The match was the brainchild of Simon Chapman, a stalwart of Walton Heath Golf Club in Surrey and Stuart McColm, the general manager of Castle Stuart.  Simon captains the visitors’ team, the Sassenachs and I was thrilled to be invited to play for the home team this year.  Actually going to an airport with my golf clubs brought back memories of those faraway days of tournament golf.  I must have got a little over excited because on the Friday I took full advantage of the superb practice facilities with Gillian Stewart who is the resident imparter of golfing wisdom.  The shock of this unaccustomed practice was too much for my system with my back locking up completely so I was unable to play at all on the first day.

I did walk a few holes, however, and was delighted to catch up with former Scotland international Sally Watson, who after four years of professional golf has decided to return to her studies to pursue a Masters degree in Business Administration in Chicago.  She starts her internship in a few weeks but rusty as she may have been, she still swings it impressively.

 

The match was 20-a-side with fourballs on day one and foursomes on day two.  I did manage to play on the second day and was carried round for the most part by my very able partner Jack Bonner, from Myrtle Beach.  We were doing OK – 2 up with 3 to go – but were reeled in by the combined expertise of the London legal duo, Darren Almeida and Alastair Hodge, who won the 16th and 18th to halve the match.  Overall, the trophy slipped neatly from the home team’s (the holders) grasp to that of the Sassenachs and our team captain Grant Sword dutifully tried to paste on a bit of a smile as he handed over the magnificent trophy.

Next stop during the week was another of my favourite places, Royal Porthcawl, for a sporadic yet regular fourball match with three illustrious members.  Pam Chugg, former tournament professional and founder member of the Ladies’ European Tour as well as former chairman of the Ladies’ Golf Union, has very current skills, however, as regards playing the game.  She is partnered by our long-standing friend Tink Graham while my partner in crime is Emer Disley.  This means the match neatly falls into a Wales vs Ireland contest but it was a one-sided affair on this occasion as we were no match for the seven birdies our opponents had in the first 14 holes.  [Obscene:  ed]

Alongside this classy golf there was also the little matter this past week of the US Women’s Open.  The championship admirably splashed its way to an enthralling finish despite the atrocious conditions and serious amounts of rainfall.  Ariya Jutanugarn, winner of the Ricoh Women’s British Open at Woburn in 2016, looked home and dry (figuratively speaking) with a 7-shot lead with only 9 holes to play.  A triple at the 10th and a bogey, bogey finish, coupled with a closing 67 by South Korea’s Hyo Joo Kim, meant the new two hole play-off format would come into play for the first time.  It took until the fourth extra hole before Ariya prevailed, doubling her tally of majors.

Further serious stuff is on the horizon, with the men’s US Open, the second of their four majors, due to start next Thursday at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, New York.  More than half the field has to qualify through sectional qualifiers and for former Masters champion Adam Scott, World Golf Championship winner Shane Lowry and former PGA champion Keegan Bradley the challenge of the 36-hole qualifier was not something any of them relished.  This trio was all successful but Bradley summed up the whole experience,  “It’s awful, really awful.  It’s humbling.  We get treated so well on Tour, and you can kind of forget what maybe minitour life was like or even Web.com.  This is a reminder of how hard you’ve got to work to be out there on the Tour.”  I shall look forward to seeing them all in action next week in person.

Finally, enormous luck to Elaine Farquharson-Black, who tweeted out the picture below, and her GB&I team who begin the defence of the Curtis Cup today at Quaker Ridge Golf Club against the United States.  More of the same from Dun Laoghaire two years ago please.

Slow play has become a habit, a bad habit if everyone who condemns it is to be believed and like all bad habits it’s a persistent little bugger, insidious and hard to get rid off, worming its way into our lives until we feel we can’t live without it.  It’s seeped into golf over the years and nowadays a 4-hour round is generally regarded as positively speedy.  There are exceptions but they tend to be last bastions.  What happened to those carefree days – within living memory of some of us who still play – of skipping round in three hours or less?  Of playing three rounds in a day?

Someone said to me recently that the introduction of trolleys was the start of the slippery slope – no, that would be too fast, the slope must be sticky, gooey, glue-like, like wading through molasses – and I pooh-poohed that notion.  But there might be something in it.  The other week I played with someone who carried and I envied him his shortcuts as I manoeuvred my trolley around greens and other obstacles.  So, perhaps we should be blaming Henry Longhurst’s mate Lord Brabazon of Tara, who, I believe, was the first man to use a trolley in this part of the world.  Mind you, I don’t think the Brab, by all accounts a force of nature if ever there was one, ever hung about, ever.

So, perhaps slow play is just an attitude of mind and we amateurs have been affected by the actions of others, the professionals who have nothing else to do but play 18 holes and, whatever their protestations, don’t care how long it takes.  Long gone are the days when pros played 36 holes and still had time to get home and give a few lessons before dark. These days, after endless hours honing their skills on the practice ground, players tend to forget that Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect (Bob Rotella) and expect perfection.

They’ve taken to playing golf by numbers, joining the dots, forgetting that golf is, in fact, a moving game, that you can make decisions on the move, as you approach the ball, assessing, calculating, factoring in the breeze, whatever, so you’re nearly ready to hit your shot when you reach the ball.  Sadly, the modern way is to start all the calculations when you reach the ball, bringing out the charts, or the measuring gizmos, consulting the caddies, or the stars and eventually, when all the post-discussion, pre-shot routines have been exhausted, hitting the damned ball.  Or not, depending on your level of expertise.

The European Tour, bless them, are trying all sorts of things to make golf more interesting and appealing to a younger audience with a notoriously short attention span.  This week they’ve morphed the Austrian Open into the Shot Clock Masters and, lo, with the prospect of an immediate penalty of one shot for exceeding the designated time, everyone speeded up.   Even notorious mañana merchants like Miguel Angel Jimenez, who likes to open a nice bottle of Rioja before assessing his options, adjusted with alacrity and no apparent dip in performance.  He had a 67, five under par, one shot behind the leader Oscar Lengden of Sweden and breezed round the Diamond Country Club course in under four hours.

Jimenez, who won the Regions Tradition, one of the senior majors, in Alabama last month, said, “It’s been very interesting.  It’s very important that you’re ready to play, if not it will catch you.  That’s the good thing, you are not wasting any time…..It would be nice to have some more time to talk a few words to your caddie but it’s nice, it’s definitely a positive experience.”

Peter Hanson, another Ryder Cupper, who also had a 67, was waxing delighted:  “It’s so nice to play out here.  The golf course is amazing and this format really brings it back to old golf, the way it was when I came out on tour 20 years ago.  We used to have a bit more of this pace.  Everyone was ready to play.  You don’t have to watch the clock, you just have to be ready to play when it’s your turn.  You can’t walk around a putt on the green four times and look in two different books.  You just have to be ready to play and just play golf.”

Every player was on the clock for every shot on every hole – there was a referee with the appropriate technology with every group – and the fastest round of the day was 3 hours 53 minutes compared with the 2018 season average (for a three ball over 18 holes) of 4 hours 48 minutes……..What was that about habits?   The average for the first round was 4 hours 13 minutes and no one was penalised for a bad time.  Wonder how long they’ll all take next week…….

I’m running out of words – even this blog has its limits – but there are three important photos this week.

First, there’s the Moss clan at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday, where Michael, recently retired from keeping things in some sort of order at Portstewart GC, received a gong from Prince Charles.

Next up is part of the photo montage that was the centrepiece of the order of service at the funeral of Angela Davies, wife of Bob (or John, depending on how you knew him).  For years, every November, Angela, Bob, Dai and I used to drive over to Brancaster together for the annual Pat Ward-Thomas Trophy.  Angela was not a golfer but married to a man who followed the careers of Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam from their junior days in Shropshire to major triumphs in Augusta, she absorbed it all.  She was a pillar of the local operatic society in Shrewsbury as a performer, choreographer and secretary.  She was a formidable organiser but her real forte was people and we’ll all miss her.

Last but never least, there’s wee Mum, who would have been – well, I won’t say, because she hated people knowing her age; we only found out when she had to apply for a passport and it fell into the wrong hands!  Happy birthday to everybody else who was born on the 8th of June.