Well, that’s it for us now too.  It’s our turn again to enter this strange, lockdown world that we are periodically required to inhabit.  It means, of course, no golf, so last Tuesday our fourball endured every sort of weather imaginable to complete 18 holes, knowing it’d be our last for a while.  The final six holes were played in a whirlwind of hailstones which meant there was no reluctance whatsoever to leave the greensward and we pretty much ran up the hill to the clubhouse to get dry and have a bowl of soup.  The clubhouse, however, is not the welcoming place it used to be.  The lounge is set up with a dozen or so tables for one, all suitably distanced, with chairs all facing forward.  It’s reminiscent of a school examination hall and woe betide any person who turns their chair through 90 degrees for any reason whatsoever.  That, we are assured, is breaking the law.  Four weeks away from the course will be difficult; four weeks away from the clubhouse with its current regulations will not.  Roll on more normal times.

Once again most of us are going to be left with a little more time on our hands than usual.  The other day I saw on Facebook that a great pal of mine from Oz, Dennise Hutton, was celebrating a birthday.  (I think there’s a very good chance that I won’t be using FB too much in the future.  I’m starting to read the book, “Zucked:  Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe.” by Roger McNamee.  Big sis tells me I’ll never use FB again after reading it, because of how they use your data……but I digress…..)  Back to Dennise.

We met way back in the 1970s when D came over with the Australian team to play in several European tournaments, including the British Amateur and we have remained firm friends ever since.  I’m convinced all Australians are born with the travel gene in them.  Or perhaps it’s just that their beleaguered parents start brainwashing their little horrors from an early age with phrases such as, “WHEN you leave to go overseas…..” and “You WILL be visiting Aunt Susie in London….”  Whatever the reason, loads of talented Aussie players beat a path to the Ladies’ European Tour in the early days and it was on tour that we really cemented our friendship, often staying in the same place and frequently enjoying dinner and a nice glass of something together, along with a veritable barrel-load of laughs.

D worked hard on her game and it paid dividends when she won back-to-back titles on the Ladies’ European Tour.  Her first win was a matchplay tournament in Spain when she beat yours truly in the final on the last green.  I don’t remember much about the match except we halved the first sixteen holes of the 18-hole final with D breaking the deadlock on the 17th.  She rode the wave of that victory to a win the following week at Biarritz in France, home ground of the multi-talented Marie-Laure de Lorenzi.  I thought I had a photo of her wins somewhere but having just been up to the attic to look, I have beaten a hasty retreat back down, totally defeated by the mountain of boxes, old suitcases and abandoned holdalls with faded logos, all overflowing with junk. That task may well have to head my “lockdown list”.

Another talented Australian pal, who came straight from college in the US to play in Europe, was Anne Rollo, nee Jones.  Anne also won on tour – at the, sadly, recently closed Patshull Park near Wolverhampton, where we had a tour event for a number of years.  Softly spoken and blessed with terrific looks, Anne was a sponsor’s dream and was never less than immaculate on the course.  I seem to remember she got very nervous in tournaments at one time but she overcame that to become a winner.  After living in England for a number of years Anne returned to Australia and Sydney and, like Dennise, forged a tremendous business in the hitherto male-dominated world of top-class coaching.

Earlier this year Anne and Dennise decided to join forces, forming a company together, ProGolfGals, to further their love of coaching and helping people improve their golf games.  Their mission statement would appear to include having maximum fun at the same time.

I urge all of you with time on your hands (and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t at the moment!) to look up their ProGolfGals site and their YouTube channel for brilliant tips, entertaining chat, equipment advice, fashion info and much, much more.  They run a number of coaching weeks and I’ve never seen a pair who seem to surpass even their pupils’ capacity for the amount of enjoyment they get!  It’ll cheer you up no end on what Dad used to call the LDDBC, (the long dark days before Christmas).  They bring boundless energy to everything they do and shame me with how much they are still learning, still expanding their knowledge and still improving.

In this world, which seems to have grown larger again since travel restrictions were imposed, it’s fun to be able to check in with your pals’ lives and see how much success they are enjoying on the other side of the globe.  They both still play a pretty mean game, as you will see on one of their YouTube videos but my all-time favourite was when they filmed themselves watching the denouement of the 2020 Women’s Australian Open.  I fear alcohol may have been involved – but Aussies are spoiled for choice when it comes to a decent drop of wine!

Watch and enjoy.  It’s nice to know that something good thing has come out of 2020.

The only thing I’m going to promise this week is that there won’t be a bracket in sight.  It was pointed out, by a woman who’ll remain nameless, that there was far too much stuff in parentheses last week, that it was confusing and sometimes, horror, the brackets were in the wrong place.  Now, that is confusing and I apologise for any aberration.  I’ve spent years trying to curb my penchant for convoluted constructions, not always successfully and since blogs are the ultimate self-indulgence and I’m the editor, things have gone from bad, bad, bad to worse.  And, a word of warning, it’s likely to continue….

There’s often nothing nicer than golf on a brisk autumn day but that’s off limits for a lot of us in another lockdown.  Still, I was delighted to see that Darren Clarke, now, officially, an old codger, managed his first win on the PGA Tour Champions, in the TimberTech Championship at Boca Raton in Florida.  He finished one shot ahead of Jim Furyk and Bernhard Langer, so it wasn’t easy.   It’s hard to imagine but Darren’s last win was the Open Championship at Royal St George’s, way back in 2011, a long time for a player of his talent.  That Sunday in Kent was a magical day, filthy weather, blowing a hooley, Darren in his element and uncharacteristically, preternaturally calm, playing beautifully, in the zone.  Me out there in every item of clothing I had with me, cheering silently when I saw Dustin Johnson, a real danger, launch his second shot at the 14th miles out of bounds on the right and take a bogey 6 instead of a birdie or, even worse, an eagle.  It was worth delaying the long, tedious journey home from a venue that’s best reached from France to see DC lift the claret jug and wait even longer to congratulate him in person.

It’s taken him 40 attempts to beat the old boys, who can still play and are as fiercely competitive as it is possible to be.  He’s got a new caddie, with a famous name, Sandy Armour, brother of PGA Tour player Tommy, who’s having to adapt to the Ulsterman’s ways, as his boss explained:  “He’s getting to know me and that’s pretty difficult to do with my tantrums.  At 52, sometimes I act as if I’m 12 or 13.  It’s just getting to know your player, when to speak and not to speak, how much help to give him.  He’s adapted unbelievably quickly and he’s done an amazing job.”

Ah, so the infamous Clarke tantrums are still alive and well and bubbling under, just waiting to erupt.  Double bogeys at the last hole used to guarantee an explosion, though, in fairness, few golfers, at whatever level, are at their most affable after a bad finish.  Ideally, you leave them be to cool off but sometimes that’s not possible.  In Japan once, covering the event for the Irish papers, Darren was the man I had to speak to and I trekked down to the 18th and waited patiently, getting colder.  It did not go well.  Yer man barrelled past me, head down like an angry bull on the charge, muttering “the head’s off, the head’s off,” and I tramped back to the press room, muttering imprecations.  “If the arrogant git ever does that to me again,” I said to Dai, “I’ll go through him for a shortcut.”  At least as furious as Darren, I ranted on and Dai, sensibly, took me at my word:  he did the Irish interviews for the rest of the week.  Happy days!

On a less uplifting note, I played in our stableford competition on Tuesday and trailed in a sorry 34th with a measly total of 24 points, just 14 behind the winner.  There was a lot of pre-comp confusion over the handicaps because we were operating under the new system and some of us had no clue what we were meant to be playing off, so our long-suffering handicap team told us just to write down the gross score and they’d do the rest.  What stars.  Many, many thanks.  Devotion above and beyond.  Anyway, I seemed to be off 11, down from 13 and well out of anything remotely resembling a comfort zone.  Shouldn’t have taken the team too long to tot up my total…I’ll either have to take up tai chi full time or put Mo’s tips into practice.

By the way I forgot to mention P. G. Wodehouse on my reading list last week, a ridiculous oversight.  His characters may be from another world  but you’ll recognise their modern counterparts nonetheless.  The other morning, in bed with a cuppa, I started reading Stephen Potter’s “The complete golf gamesmanship” in bed and couldn’t stop.  What’s not to love about this, talking about his mixed foursomes partner Mrs King-Porter, when they were playing a match against the Rimmings:  “Another thing Kingers did even I found quite deeply distracting.  Rimming and I were pretty silent in this foursome because we knew our concentration would be taxed to the uttermost.  But Kingers, as if to show how superior women were as a social animal, and what fun they had in life generally, would during the match start four new subjects of conversation with Mrs Rimming with such bubbling enthusiasm that I must admit that I have slipped unobtrusively behind them to find what it was about; but somehow the words bounce off one’s brain, and I forget them instantly…”

Or this nugget, in the chapter “Primary Play”:  “In the twenties the average age at Mid Surrey was high, and they knew it.  There was said to be a Death Expectancy Chart above the Secretary’s desk.  I do know that in the doorway, only half hidden, was a hand ambulance in wickerwork for collecting coronaries in the summer months.”  Perhaps, on reflection, not such a laughing matter for many of us of maturing years….

 

 

I’ll end with a moniker that Potter or Wodehouse would have swooped upon:  Miss Jones, who appeared in the blog last week in the arms of her proud parents, has been named exuberantly.  She is now Jemima Persephone Rose.  Exult.