I turned pro many moons age – in 1986, to be precise, and for almost all of my tournament playing days I was a Ping player.  Back then, Ping were already huge supporters of the women’s game. They were one of the very few companies who not only provided their players with equipment but they were first to instigate a bonus pool which was shared out according to results.  As women professional golfers we were taken seriously and so many of us have so much to thank Karsten Solheim, the founder of the company, for.  Karsten was a trailblazer in multiple ways and had a proven track record in the women’s game long before the advent of the now world-famous biennial contest between Europe and the United States which is played for the Solheim Cup, a tribute to him and his wife Louise.

So, at one time in my life the road to Gainsborough and the headquarters of Ping was one that was well travelled by me.  Patricia and I took that self-same road last Wednesday for me to go and have a club fitting.  I had decided it was time to invest in some new clubs and when a couple of my colleagues (Ken Brown being one) suggested I look no further than Ping it was Gainsborough I was pulling up on GoogleMaps.  I realised with a jolt that it was probably the thick end of 20 years since I’d last been there and I was curious to see their latest clubs and club-fitting gizmos.

We presented ourselves at the appointed hour at Ping’s European Fitting Centre at Thonock Park where everything is state of the art.  Awaiting us was Adam Wainwright, a plus 3 Linclonshire county player and expert club fitter. I put myself in his hands as Patricia roamed around snapping pictures and keeping us supplied with hot drinks on a dank, dismal November afternoon.  Adam’s patience was second-to-none, only surpassed by his knowledge and ability to explain his thinking as he guided me through rigorous testing of various combinations of heads and shafts.

I realise that many of you reading this may well be of the mind that you’re “not good enough” to go and have a club fitting.  Banish all those thoughts at once!  There was a time I would have thought that a couple of good lessons would help a player much more than any club fitting, but no longer!  If anything, the lesson and the fitting are natural bedfellows and your golf is bound to improve with clubs that not only fit you but are fit for purpose.

Ever since I can remember Ping have always presented the winner of any professional tournament using one of their putters with a gold-plated replica of said putter.  This is a tradition still carried on today and the company keeps their own gold-plated copy of the winning model in their vaults.  Must be getting pretty crowded in there now!

I wasn’t the only one taking a trip down memory lane on Wednesday.  It was also quite a considerable time since Patricia had visited Gainsborough, having been in the past a much more frequent guest at the US HQ out in Phoenix, Arizona, along with Dai, her late husband.  With Patricia writing for The Times and Dai being the golf correspondent for The Guardian their globe trotting days frequently took them Stateside and they always did enjoy a close friendship with the Solheim family and Bob Cantin, for many years Ping’s head of communications (or some such all-encompassing title; Patricia, typically, has forgotten his official title).  They hosted the Solheims frequently as their guests at the AGW (Association of Golf Writers) dinner during the Open each year and played in numerous Ping Pro-Ams round the lovely Moon Valley golf course, scene of Annika Sorenstam’s 59, which Patricia was there to report on.  Relationships in golf tend to be deep and enduring,

So, the result of our trip is now that a set is on order – driver through to four wedges.  Hmmm, may have to revisit and look at the putters next time!  And it’s definitely high time to get Patricia fitted properly and prise her away from Dai’s cast-offs that she’s currently got in her bag.  That may well be a jaunt for the New Year!  So, if any of you are considering investing in your golf games for 2020 I thoroughly recommend you start with a club-fitting session.  It makes perfect sense.

I gave up worrying about the LET (Ladies European Tour) a long time ago.  It has been around, in various guises, since 1979, sometimes bounding along, sometimes limping but it has always survived, clinging on to existence, limpet-like, sustained mostly, probably, by sheer bloody-mindedness and determination.  A bit like the suffragettes.

Golf, particularly professional golf, is not a necessity, it’s an indulgence.  Like all sports it has always relied on patronage, aka sponsorship and most sponsors aren’t sponsoring out of the goodness of their hearts but because they see a commercial opportunity; they can make money out of golf.  At the moment, they’re churning most of their money into men’s golf, with the women picking up what they can but all being well, that could be changing.

It’s a slow process but you never know, the men could be pricing themselves out of the market.  The money they’re making is ridiculous, embarrassing even and their standard of living would be more than comfortable even if their prize money slumped to half its current level.  Of course, some players might have to downsize to a mini-mansion or up their game but they’d still be able to make a more than decent living.

A few days ago, in an article in Golfweek, Stacy Lewis, a former world No 1, who’s had a good career, winning two major championships, wrote about the disparity between what the men and women earn.   She lives in Houston and was at home for the men’s Houston Open, watching all the courtesy cars whizzing around, huge crowds massing for an event that featured $7.5 million dollars in prize money, with a field that “didn’t have a single player inside the top 30 in the world competing”.

Lewis pointed out that the biggest prize in women’s golf is the $5.5 million on offer for the US Women’s Open.  She worked out that over a season the women play for roughly 17 per cent of what the men do.  In the proper workplace, according to the latest report from Payscale.com, women make on average 79 cents to every dollar earned by a man.  Whichever way you look at it there’s room for improvement.

In the WPGA handbook of 1981, Peter Alliss, the WPGA president, was bullish:  “There can no longer be any doubts. The WPGA tour is here to stay – and getting stronger all the time.  If in 1979 we suffered the usual teething troubles of a new venture, last year saw us go a very long way towards silencing those who had little faith in our ability to survive….”

Barry Edwards, the executive director, said it was all systems go for a booming 1981.  He wrote:  “Women’s professional golf was hiding under a bushel before the emergence of the WPGA in 1979.  It did exist in Europe but in such a small and insignificant form that most people simply ignored it.  The WPGA changed all that.  This is a booming sport and all those instrumental with its launching can feel justly proud……

“It may not be long before we receive more entries from the United States.  Indeed, the USLPGA are very interested in our growth and plans are well ahead for a Europe-USA biennial match being organised……”

It took until 1990 for the first Solheim Cup to hit the schedule and it’s now a serious sporting contest as this year’s match at Gleneagles proved, showing that women’s golf can draw the crowds and hit the headlines.

Handbooks are a bit passe (sorry, not sure how to do an acute accent, or any other sort of accent) in this digital, electronic age but they’re an interesting record of a tour’s progress.  In 1997, the Women Professional Golfers’ European Tour was billed as the American Express Tour; a year later we have the ELPGA, the European Ladies’ Professional Golf Association – “the launch of a new name and a new era for women’s professional golf in Europe”; the next year, 1998, it was the Ladies European Tour, apostrophe ditched and the emergence of “a new-look circuit”;  by 2000 it was the Evian Tour……..I may have given up paying close attention to the behind-the-scenes politicking about this time and at least there were plenty of good players around, including the incomparable Laura Davies, Liselotte Neumann and Alison Nicholas, who won the US Women’s Open in 1997…….

Now, at the end of 2019, with the LET in another limping-along period comes news of a merger with the LPGA, “a long-term partnership to significantly grow awareness, sponsor support and professional playing opportunities for women in Europe……..The combination of the LET’s European expertise and relationships in the region, with the LPGA’s global strength and worldwide exposure and their shared vision for the future of the women’s professional golf and growth of the game, provides the core ingredients to ignite a tour loaded with upside potential.”

Well, who knows what that’ll all mean in practice in years to come.  In the meantime, the LET Order of Merit will be called the Race to Costa del Sol from next year and the prize money of the Andalucia Costa del Sol Open de Espana Femenino will be doubled.  It’s a start and Marta Figueras-Dotti, chair of the LET Board, was optimistic.  The Spaniard had a distinguished playing career on both sides of the Atlantic before becoming a coach of some renown and is a passionate promoter of the game in general and the women’s game in particular.

“Two teams, joining for one common purpose, will create opportunities we simply could not have pursued on our own,” she said.  “At its foundation this joint venture is about creating opportunities for our members to pursue their passion and their careers as professional athletes.  In just the 60 days since we began working on this joint venture, we have already seen a dramatic impact on our LET Tour schedule – an impact that will be a positive result for virtually all of our LET members.”

Mike Whan, commissioner of the LPGA, said:  “We have experienced incredible growth in women’s golf in the US and this is an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate and expand the game in Europe as well.  I’m excited that this is something we will build together with the LET.”

Here’s to a prosperous future.