Hey ho, here we go again!

A few phone calls to establish that the two Madills were still in the land of the living and a couple of cheeky WhatsApps enquiring were we on a permanent holiday have encouraged Patricia and me to start tapping on our keyboards once more for our faithful blog followers.

We launched the blog back in May 2016 and the big sis suggested we try to keep it going until the Open was played at Royal Portrush, one of the clubs we joined as children and where we had hours of fun in Golf Foundation lessons.  That Open, unbelievably, was back in 2019 and this July will see Portrush’s second Open since winning its way back onto the Championship rota.  That all, rather frighteningly, means we are honing in on our ninth anniversary.  Ninth……..!  EEK!  Who’d have believed it …… and just where has the time gone?  This is turning into a seriously swift decade.

Not so swift, of course, is the pace of play on the golf course.  Quick out of the blocks as he was last week in Dubai with the standard of his play, nevertheless Tyrrell Hatton (top), in the final match, had at least a ten-minute wait on the 71st AND 72nd tees.  So, same old, same old……

The new year has commenced with the same lamentable pace of play issues as before with absolutely no serious attempt being made to address the number one drawback to the watchability of the game.  Evidence, if ever it were needed, that the golf fan is of no importance whatsoever to the professional tours.

I was pleased, however, to see Tyrrell win the Dubai Desert Classic with its instantly recognisable trophy.  I like Tyrrell;  I like his game and I hope he’s on the European Ryder Cup team this September.  I’m also slightly surprised at how his bad behaviour doesn’t seem to bother me despite it being the sort of thing my parents would have killed me for when I was growing up.

The Hatton frustration led to his smashing a tee marker and receiving a fine.  Perhaps it’s witnessing the truth of what the game means to a player and how it gets under his skin that is appealing.  Whatever it is, it is baffling to me that I don’t bristle at it.  However, I do get a little tired of the commentators’ po-faced apologies for his bad language.  Perhaps they should just have a permanent caption on the screen to mute the volume when Tyrrell appears and that way those with delicate ears could be nicely protected without the need for the aforementioned apologies.

Come to think of it, perhaps September’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black should be a silent broadcast.  The home fans from New York are renowned for their fruity language and eagerness to give their opinions on all and sundry.  Muting them would certainly make for a different kind of viewing.

The holiday season has not passed without its customary splits in the golfing world.  Brooks Koepka has severed relations (again!) with long-time coach Claude Harmon III (Butch’s son) as he searches to recapture the form that saw him win four majors in a two-year spell from 2017 to 2019 and then again a fifth title in 2023.  Pete Cowen and Jeff Pierce have been overseeing the American’s short game and putting for a while but will take over full-swing duties for the 2025 campaign.  Sometimes a player just needs to hear a different voice – even if it is largely delivering the same message.

Another split is that between genial Irishman Shane Lowry, and long-term manager Conor Ridge, founder of Horizon Sports, who has looked after the former Open Champion since he won the 2009 Irish Open as an amateur.  Shane is setting up his own management company and Conor is making a move out of management to concentrate on his other business interests.  All seems fairly affable still between the two.

I often thought that Conor Ridge was a great name for a golfer/manager as it would be an equally good name for a golf course.  It puts me in mind of the oft-told story from the mid to late nineties when a certain Scottish professional was asked,

“Do you know Tiger Woods?”

“No, I haven’t played there yet,” came the innocent answer.  It really doesn’t take a lot to amuse me.

For me the most worrying change of direction, however, concerns the young Irishman Tom McKibbin, who, it is rumoured, is about to jump ship to the LIV Golf Tour.  Perhaps by the time you read this he will have announced his decision.  His mentor Rory McIlroy has counselled him that he’d be giving up a lot for not very much and that it is a decision he wouldn’t make if he were in McKibbin’s shoes.

The money on the table is rumoured to be £4 million pounds – a nice sum indeed but how does it stack up against the ability to play in both Europe and America and have a clear run at qualifying and playing in all four majors, not to mention the Ryder Cup?  The answer is it doesn’t, so that leaves me with two questions to ponder:  Just what are his advisers thinking?  And are those of us of a certain age just completely missing the point as to what floats the boat of a supremely talented 22-year old?

Perhaps this generation of golfers, born this century, have no real understanding of, feeling for or interest in the tenets and history of the game that we hold dear and perhaps money is all that really does matter to them.  And……..perhaps the harsh truth is that it’s high time for us to accept the world is different nowadays and that we must move on and not allow ourselves to get stuck in the past.

It’ll be a sad day for us all if that is, indeed, the case.

 

 

Hello everybody.  Welcome back and happy new year.  Who knows what on earth we bloggers will find to talk about in 2025 but let’s hope it’s a bit of a magical mystery tour.  It’ll certainly be a mystery to me and is well-nigh guaranteed to be baffling to a lot of you.

For a start, I’m already a gibbering wreck and exhausted having suffered through my struggling, depleted Totspurs clinging on for a much-needed win away to Hoffenheim in the Europa League.  We’re everybody’s favourite opponent at the moment – perhaps just pipped by Manchester United, who are even worse – because as the opposition you’re pretty well guaranteed a goal or two at least.  Even shot-shy Everton scored three against us, so I had to fall back, yet again, on Dad’s mantra:  Every result makes somebody happy….Aaagh.  Gritted teeth out and fixed.

I have friends, eminently sensible people whom I envy immensely, who have no interest whatsoever in football.  They just can’t understand people’s obsession with a game that leaves them cold.  There’s no explaining why it sometimes lights up my life; often plunges me into deep gloom; makes me screech like an enraged banshee; and has me yakking for hours on end to fellow tragics.  I tell myself I don’t really care but the truth is that too often I do.  Ridiculous.

The best day of all, though, was when Spurs came to Tamworth – and I was there.  It was so exciting and as a fellow Spurs/Tamworth supporter said of the Tottenham big names within arm’s length of the fans as they trekked round the ground on the way to the Portakabin that barely passes muster as a dressing room:  “They all look like ordinary blokes when you see them here.”

They could have lost too but brought on some of the big guns in extra time, to wit Son and Kulusevski – the Tamworth players, tiring after an immense effort, had a laugh about that – and won 3-nil in the end.  It’s another local derby for me next, Aston Villa away, so we probably won’t be going any further in the FA Cup this year.

Thanks to Andy Farrington of Bradley Scott Windows for making good on his promise, made on Colin Murray’s show on  BBC 5 Live, to look after me and get me a ticket, £38 well spent.  His company, named after his sons, are big sponsors of Tamworth FC and the company name was proudly displayed on the front of the very smart shirts for millions of ITV viewers to see.

That match was my third in eight days – Newcastle (2-1 to them), Liverpool (1-nil to us, miracle), then the mighty Lambs.         Last weekend I went to Tamworth again, when there was a respectable crowd of 1400-odd (there were about 4,000 at the Spurs game) and we (!) won 3-0 against the Pilgrims of Boston United.  COYL.  Come on you Lambs.

My golf has been a little curtailed by a slightly dodgy left knee and my increasing dislike of manky, grey, damp, bone-chilling weather.  A few swift holes, then in for a hot cuppa, that’s my preference at this time of year.  A wee carry bag, six clubs and you can scuttle round almost without noticing the cold.  We’re playing a revised layout at the moment and it plays merry hell with filling in the scorecard.  Starting at the 6th is straightforward enough.  So you fill in 6, 7, 8, 9.  Then you play 13, 14, 12, 10, 11, 15 and 16 and on in – or if you have any sense you head in and avoid 17, a long, boring, undistinguished nothing of a hole.

There’s been an alert from Portstewart Golf Club that all three courses and the clubhouse will be closed tomorrow, quiz postponed and everybody advised to hunker down in the face of Storm Éowyn.  It’s expected to be one of the most dangerous storms on record in Ireland and the UK won’t be immune.  Keep safe everybody.  Might be a day for bridge in a low building built on solid foundations.

Mega bucks seem to be the order of the day at the top end of professional golf but lower down, at the grass roots, there’s been a wonderful fund-raising effort in aid of Ireland’s National Breast Cancer Research Institute.  The Play in Pink initiative is supported by clubs and societies running charity golf days to raise money for the NBCRI.  The players play in pink and I’m delighted to wear my buff, designed by Lucy Torrey and a pressie from Mary McKenna, at every opportunity.

In the general scheme of things, given the state of the world  – wars, floods, famines, storms, devastating forest fires – losing a trophy can’t rank that highly but a precious possession is just that.  Precious.  Mo Martin, who won the then Ricoh Women’s British Open at Royal Birkdale in 2014, her only big title, kept the trophy at her mum’s house in California and that family home, full of memories, was destroyed by the recent fires.  Fortunately, the people and pets made it to safety but everything else was reduced to rubble.  Sickening.  Devastating.  Hard to take in.  Rebuilding will be a long, slow process.