I was hoping to be at Royal Troon this week for the 152nd Open Championship but realised while at the US Open at Pinehurst that it was a step too far for me at the moment.  There are tons of reasons why I wish to be there and, of course, for me, nostalgia always plays a part.

I attended my first Open in a working, broadcasting capacity in 1997 – at Troon – and found myself a member of the marvellous Radio 5 Live commentary team.  Over the years with them I gained a grounding that has stood me in good stead ever since.  Ken Brown was part of that crew and I remember walking the course with him and television’s Alex Hay early in the week.

I was determined to learn as much as I could from these two commentary, and golfing, idols of mine but was completely nonplussed as to what I was hearing over the first few holes.  Finally, I plucked up the courage to query just exactly why they both felt the approach to one of the early holes should be from the left-hand side.  To me, with the green sitting at an angle across the player, the obvious way in was from the opposite side.  Ken turned away with a smile at my questioning but Alex put me right with characteristic Scottish bluntness, “Maureen, you’re not actually playing in the Open – these are commentary positions we’re discussing.”

I had yet to acquire anything other than a player’s eye view of the game – you live and learn – but boy, did we chuckle over my naivety over the ensuing times we all worked together.

Troon, of course, was (and still is) the venue for the renowned Helen Holm Trophy, now known as the Women’s Scottish Open Strokeplay Championship, I believe.  It’s a 54-hole strokeplay event with the opening two rounds played on the Portland course and a final test over the Old Course for those who safely negotiate the cut.  Played in April and usually in vile weather it was, nevertheless, an easy jaunt for me over from Norn Iron on the Larne-Stranraer ferry and then up the coast to Troon.  Usually Mum would come with me and often Molly, a great friend and neighbour.

We would get ourselves a B&B in the town and there was never a shortage of good places to eat a short walk away from our digs.  One evening, early in the week, we strolled into Troon to find a dinner venue when we passed a very attractive shop window display.  The establishment was called “Regalia” and was a wedding shop.  There was a beautiful bridal outfit in the window (not a white wedding dress concoction) and we all stopped to admire it.

Molly said, “That would do Patricia for August.”

The sister was due to tie the knot in three and a half months and it won’t surprise any of you who know her to learn she “hadn’t got around” to looking for something to wear, what with all the travelling and golf writing she was doing.  We studied the outfit more closely and all decided it would be perfect.

There then followed the most anxiety-ridden three days which had nothing to do with the golf.  Mum and Molly called in to have a closer look (I was on the course) and then I had to rush down to try on said outfit, all the while trying to explain that, no it wasn’t for me, rather for my sister who wasn’t as tall and was actually a different shape and so on.  Frantic phone calls to the unconcerned bride-to-be followed and our woeful attempts to provide a description didn’t come close to making anything sound attractive.  Remember, no phone cameras to make your life oh-so-easy back then.

The three of us thought it was a beautiful outfit, but would it fit her?  Would she LIKE it?  Patricia pondered.

“Well, if you, Mum and Molly all think it’s great, go on ahead and buy it.”

Gulp – this was an enormous amount of money – £353 back in 1983 – and my hand was shaking as I wrote out the cheque.  The box had the best seat in the car on the way back home.  The bride didn’t return home until three days before her wedding and Mum and I were up to high doh waiting for her arrival and to see what she thought of her outfit.  When Patricia did arrive, down she sat to catch up on the news and have a chat until I could stand it no longer.

“Aren’t you dying to see your outfit and try it on?” I asked.  “Well, if it doesn’t fit it’s too late now” came the calm reply.  Mum and I forced her into it otherwise we’d have got no sleep.  I’ll leave you to decide if we made a good choice.

You’ll see plenty of the Postage Stamp on the Open coverage, I’m sure.

An innocent-looking little hole of 123 yards, max, but it’s got a devilish heart and when the breezes blow it can rip your soul out.  I almost strangled Mum there one year I was in contention at the aforementioned Helen Holm.  As I was criss-crossing the green, Monty Python style, on my way to taking thirteen, she unadvisedly instructed me to “pick the ball up and come on out of that – you’re holding up the entire course”.  In fact there were only two groups behind me and they were crouched down on the tee trying to keep out of the wind and rain.  It was a long, silent ten holes back to the clubhouse.

[This is a much told story but it’s always worth mentioning that Mo played the other 17 holes in one over par.  When the press – the papers covered amateur events in those days – asked for her score and she said 86, or whatever, they sighed and headed off.  “But I had 13 at the Postage Stamp…”  Back they came, notebooks at the ready.  Ed.]

Finally, it was another Troon Open – the 2004 one where Todd Hamilton proved victorious – that provided me with one of my favourite presents.  Unknown to me my late brother-in-law tasked one of the photographers with snapping me while commentating out on the course.  The result (below) was framed, packaged up and produced at Christmas.

Another lovely Troon memory.

 

 

The sister and I are in Open mode, quite a few miles from Troon but glued to the action nonetheless and trying not to be completely glued to the couch. Flicking through the Open app (I think), there was something about trying to get to 8862 steps a day for the duration of the championship.  No idea how they came up with that number or how it was to be measured and since it was already well into the first day I decided not to pursue it further.

Anyway, once you start measuring or weighing or counting it’s all too easy to become obsessed and I like to leave that sort of thing to the real athletes.  How any of them remain remotely sane (whatever that is) is a bit of a miracle.

Open days are long and tiring for everybody involved be it players, caddies, caterers, broadcasters, greenkeepers, spectators, officials, marshals, car park attendants, journalists, teaching pros, security bods, first-tee announcers, litter pickers, whoever.  And, of course, it’s 99.9 per cent certain that somebody in the last or last-but-one group will be threatening the leaderboard and keeping the press glued to their seats for fear of missing a late, usually entirely unexpected leader.

Yesterday Dan Brown, a largely unheralded (just as tradition requires) Englishman was fulfilling that role.  However, being far from the action and retired from proper deadlines, Mo went to bed and Brian and I watched the Tour de France highlights.  Having watched Shane, one of my picks, birdie the last, I was content to leave Dan (a highly successful novelist in his spare time, surely?) to his own late-evening devices.

Who knows who’ll be holding up the Claret Jug at the end but enough of my men in the draw with Maureen and Brian started well, though not all:  Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland, Cam Smith, Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Fitzpatrick and Shane Lowry.  A good start overall but a good start is just that:  a good start.  Smith’s 80, nine over par, was the real surprise.

Spending hours engrossed in the Open is all very well but last Sunday I stayed up until the early hours watching Harry Hall, an Englishman from Cornwall, win the Isco Championship at Keen Trace Golf Club in Kentucky.  It was his first win on the US PGA Tour and it took him a while – there was a five-man play-off – before he chipped in for a birdie two at the third extra hole for the most spectacular of victories.

“If you’re still with us, well done,” the Sky commentators, on their knees, said, congratulating us for our devotion.

Hall went to college at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and he wears a white cap, apparently in tribute to Jim Barnes, a fellow Cornishman, who moved to the United States and won the PGA Championship in 1916 and 1919, the US Open in 1921 and the Open in 1925 (at Prestwick).  Not a bad role model.  Barnes, like Hall, was 6 foot 4, still tall for a golfer but not as unusual now as it was back in the day.

Prior to the golf it had been mostly tennis, with Wimbledon taking centre stage.  There were some stunning matches and I was engrossed, marvelling at the skills of people I’d never heard of.  Having gone hoarse roaring as Ireland beat the Boks in Durban with a drop goal in the last seconds, to win by 25-24 (Ciaran Frawley was the man who kicked the points), I switched sports for the umpteenth time.

Before I knew it it was after 10 o’clock at night and it was 4-all in the second set and 30-all, with four women I didn’t know slugging it out on the centre court, in front of a very respectable crowd. The tennis was ridiculously good and I was screeching like a banshee; what on earth is going on?  I have nothing to do with these people!  But they were out there, playing their hearts out and I couldn’t help but get involved.

There’s no way I could sit decorously in a box if somebody of mine was out there playing; I’d have to be outside, pacing, pacing, pacing, with anxious glances at the score.  How Tim Henman’s parents spent years sitting impassively as their boy slogged away, playing his best and just not quite winning the big one…It was a mystery and an exercise in self-control above and beyond.

You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned the football – Viva España, hard luck England – not least because I have friends who love sport but have no interest whatsoever in the game and were creative enough to avoid every single kick.  Amazing.  Not surprisingly they’re baffled by my devotion to Spurs and think I’m cracked.  They’re probably right.

I’m not sure this picture will work size wise but my mate who lives in Florida and is a real eco warrior, taking people on kayaking nature trips and educating us all, posted this picture on Facebook.  It cracked me up because I love the fact that it was a “shoreline restoration project…in which we tore out a parking lot and restored it with native plants all the way down to the water…”  The land of the car losing a parking lot to plants, imagine!

I thought the bee and sunflowers at the top of the piece would bring a bit of sunshine to us all in a mostly grey summer.  It’s a paperweight from the V&A, a detail from a Japanese lacquered writing box from the workshop of Nakayama Komin 1860-1870.  It’s a birthday present from a friend and made me smile.

And so did this, from the inimitable Dave Allen:  If you want to examine what some people term ‘Irish illogicality’, perhaps the best place in the world to go to is the courts.  I watched a man, charged with some menial offence and the judge said to him:  “How do you plead – ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty’?”

And the man said:  “Would you mind awfully if I listened to the evidence?”