A frequent topic of conversation in our family, and one which has whiled away many an interesting hour, is which generation has lived through the most change in their lifetime?

I have tended to think my mother’s generation (top, born in 1920) could claim that title.  At the time of her birth there was very little in the way of vehicular transport with horses and carts still vying for position on the increasingly busy streets of towns and cities.  A few decades later she had witnessed man land on the moon and Concorde cross the Atlantic in around three hours.  She even owned a mobile phone, could text, skype and send an email through the TV console.  The internet had gained traction and was a marvel although tending to baffle her somewhat.

Her golfing life moved from wooden shafted clubs to metal-headed woods and drivers;  from hitting a collection of (oldish) balls on a practice ground under the watchful eye of the club professional to a video lesson indoors on a computerised screen with slow-motion action replay.

Her ninety-year span covered a myriad of inventions and changes to her lifestyle showing just how adaptable the human being is but since Mum’s death fifteen years ago the world has evolved even more and become almost unrecognisable.  You can now book a restaurant from your wristwatch, pay the bill with it too, if you’re so inclined, and track every step you take through every minute of every day.  You can chat and interact with your family on the other side of the world and even “share” a meal with them across the miles.

I wonder what she’d make of golf now which is striving to embrace so many differing formats.  I doubt she’d have time for the LIV golf tour – too showy, loud, greedy and classless for her tastes but I do think she’d have quite enjoyed Tiger and Rory’s TGL efforts, indoors, under lights and in a two-hour evening time slot.  The first she’d have dismissed as not being “proper” golf;  the second doesn’t pretend to be that and is a winter evening’s entertainment (although it’s not to my taste).

I wonder if – no, I’m sure she’d have been uncomfortable with the steady encroachment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into all walks of life.

Next month sees the publication of Ely Callaway’s (founder of Callaway Golf) autobiography “The Unconquerable Game”.  Ely’s son, Nicholas, has been the driving force behind this twenty plus year endeavour since Ely’s death in 2001.  He used Ely’s extensive notes, documents and recordings of the discussions the man himself had had with his four biographers to put together the book, but it is the audio version that is a publishing first in that it has a posthumous narrator.

Nicholas provided original voice recordings from his Dad and the alchemy of AI, plus two voice actors and many hours of work have now produced the senior Callaway’s voice, nuance and inflexion to a tee.  So, in the audio version of the book it is Ely who is recounting his story.  Spooky or what?

Just about the same time I was reading about Ely I came across some news from the world of motor racing.  (Who says I don’t have eclectic tastes?!)  Scott Mansell, a British former racing driver, and no relation whatsoever to Nigel, had a coaching session in a racing car.  So, what’s the big deal?  Well, his coach was AI, our new friend, aka Artificial Intelligence.  Scott described the experience as “scarily good” and proceeded to go into all sorts of technical reasons that resulted in improved lap times, first in a simulator and then on a proper track, with the driver’s performance being monitored in real time by AI.

The sentence that really piqued my interest was,  “This will change the future of learning skills.”  Scott goes on to suggest that in five to ten years time we’ll all be able to access world-class coaching (and he specifically mentioned golf tuition) at less than 1% of the current cost with a coach who never gets tired, who is always assessing our technique and who is available 24/7.

Will there be any job left on the planet that requires a human being, I wonder.  Are we potentially a mere decade away from golf coaches not being able to make a living, having being ousted by AI which will have hundreds of thousands of hours of swing patterns and solutions at the touch of a button.

Will AI learn to read their pupils as well as a human coach?  Will AI understand human nuances, motives, strengths, weaknesses, ability to manage pressure and all the subtleties that go into making a human tick?  Perhaps a human coach will be squeezed out of technical coaching completely and only be called in to deal with this “extra stuff”.  It’s scary but it does appear to be the way we are heading.

In my almost thirty years of coaching I worked with professionals and amateur international squads but at least 75% of my time was spent with the club golfer who was keen to improve and enjoy the game to its max.  I never lost sight of the fact that these folk were spending their hard-earned cash with me and it was important to me that their improvement went hand in hand with having great fun as they were learning.  Surely that only comes with human interaction?

Only time will tell, but perhaps (if I’m spared a little longer) I will switch to my own generation as the one that has witnessed the most change.  I’m interested to know if you faithful blog readers would be itching to have an AI lesson – please let me know.

One thing’s for certain – boy, am I glad I’m retired.

It’s hard to believe that the force of nature that is Liz Kahn, a pioneering suffragette if ever there was one, will be 90 on Monday.  Happy birthday Mrs K, have a great day and thank you for all those battles you fought and won on our behalf.  We youngsters owe you more than we can ever repay.  However hard we have had to fight our corner and justify our existence, we have you to thank for slashing a route through the jungle and making our working lives in golf much easier.

The indomitable Liz (her late husband David always called her Elizabeth – in my hearing anyway) was one of the first woman golf writers to concentrate mainly on the men’s professional game but she also aided and abetted Vivien Saunders, a fellow femme formidable and others in the setting up of the women’s professional tour on this side of the Atlantic.  The WPGA (Women’s Professional Golf Association), founded in 1979, is now the LET (Ladies European Tour), thriving beyond most expectations.

If you’d like to know more about all this, take a look at the LET website (ladieseuropeantour.com) or YouTube and have a look at the interviews with Liz and some of the founders and early members.  Find “Celebrating The Founders” and enjoy; there’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there.

In her interview, Liz recalls the days when you could wander up to a player, any player and ask for a chat/interview, what is now called a one-to-0ne and is held up as some sort of holy grail, a pearl beyond price.  Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson, Tony Jacklin, properly big names, some of the greats of the game, were more often than not happy to chat to golf writers, most of whom they knew pretty well.  Liz once asked Watson for an interview and was pleasantly surprised when he sought her out instead of waiting for the appointed time.  Happy days.

All that reminiscing reminded me of the time that I was at The Tradition in Arizona on the occasion of Nicklaus’s senior debut and Dai had primed Jack, a sucker for a practical joke, to wind me up.  The press conference, which included Trevino, who’d been cleaning up on the tour, was packed and when Jack singled me out – I think I was the lone woman – everybody thought he’d lost the plot.

By some miracle I’d won the Barbados Ladies’ Open Championship a few months before and was called out on that.  One of the seniors, I can’t remember which one, had questioned that Trevino was dominating the tour because he was only winning by one or two, so Lee said,  “I didn’t realise you had to win by more than one.  You don’t get paid any more.”   Then he asked me,  “How many did you win by?”

“I won by ten.”

Collapse of all parties.  “There,” Lee said, above the laughter.  “That’s dominating right there.”

I have the tape of the exchange, given to me by the Westers, who did the radio stuff.  It’s entitled “Trish, Jack and Lee at the Tradition 3/28/90” (bear in mind they were Americans) and just looking at it cracks me up.  What’s more, I now have something to play it on, having bought an old-fashioned tape machine from Richer Sounds in their recent sale.

The snapper apparently gave Dai a copy of this photograph on condition that he never published it because it was a bit risqué, all those years ago.  I came across it (and the tape) during my never-ending sorting and thought they worked well together and enough years had passed for the pic to be less than embarrassing.  We should be able to work out the year because of who’s in the picture and because Trevino didn’t win his singles – and had promised his team he’d do something to them all if he didn’t….Who said American Ryder Cup teams never bonded.?!!

I managed 13 holes on the golf course on Tuesday without too many ill effects but was glad to take my wonky left knee to the osteopath yesterday for a bit of a going over.  It is behaving much better and I was quite perky after my treatment and promised to be more diligent with the exercises prescribed by the sainted K, who keeps a lot of the golf club in working order.  She can’t do it all on her own.  It’s up to me to do my bit.

On my way home the traffic ground to a halt unexpectedly.  Blimey, not another set of temporary traffic lights; there are so many in Lichfield and environs at the moment that getting anywhere requires precise planning – or very early starts!  If it’s not HS2, it’s gas works or putting in pedestrian crossings so that punters can reach the Bowling Green (a big pub in the middle of an even bigger roundabout) without risking life and limb – and that’s before having a drink.  Friends once walked there but had to get a taxi home because they didn’t dare attempt to cross the road.  True story.  No exaggeration.

Where was I?  Oh yes, in a queue, police car on hand, for no apparent reason.  What was going on?  Then I had to laugh – and take a snap (I wasn’t moving).  A lone sheep had stopped play.  See if you can spot it.