Patricia and I sampled a smorgasbord of delight last week with a visit to Portrush that delivered on every level.  The ladies’ branch had invited the sister and me over to celebrate my award, made earlier in the year, of honorary membership of the PGA, aka the Professional Golfers’ Association.  To me, it was truly humbling that they should even think of doing such a thing.

It’s always a treat to return to Portrush – and I feel so lucky to be close to clocking up sixty years of having been a member there………….whereas it’s only been a mere forty years since I became a member of the PGA.

A little info about the PGA of Great Britain & Ireland.  It is the world’s oldest PGA dating back to its formation in Victorian times – in 1901, to be precise.  That means this year the association celebrates its 125^th anniversary and much of its early progress was driven by the efforts of the Great Triumvirate of J H Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid who were determined to raise the status of the (in those days) men who played the game for a living.  Records back then show that membership figures read:  59 professionals and 11 assistants.  Nowadays there are 8,500 men and women pros working across 80 countries and there’s an intake of 300 assistants each and every year.  Remarkable changes and remarkable growth.

I was so very fortunate that my first experience of golf professionals was with two fine gentlemen, one the pro at Portrush and one at Portstewart.  PG Stevenson or Stevie as he was universally known, was one of the relatively early members of the PGA when he took up his post at Portrush in 1922 and, as well as being in charge of all things golf, he oversaw the summer golf foundation coaching for many decades.

Johnny Hunter took up his position at Portstewart in 1948 so was well established there by the time I started to annoy him on the practice ground.  He and Stevie were both full of old world charm, had an infinite love for the game, were great teachers and good listeners.  How lucky I was that that was my first brush with the profession.

When I look back it was a remarkable stroke of luck and geography that Patricia and I started our golfing lives as junior members of two such wonderful golf clubs.  If that hadn’t happened I suspect it would have been unlikely that we would have made our careers within the game.

Mum and Dad were long time members of the Portstewart club and my sister and I both became members when I was eight or nine years of age. There wasn’t a big junior section at the time – a decent handful of boys for sure but Patricia and I were the only girls.  We were warmly welcomed in to all the ladies’ competitions when we had handicaps but girls our own age were rather thin on the ground.

Over at Portrush, however, there was a thriving junior golf schedule with Golf Foundation lessons and boys’, girls’ and mixed competitions virtually every week in the summer holidays.  There were a number of wonderful women members of Portrush who drove these initiatives and I often wonder did they ever really realise the influence they had on so many young lives.  Dorothy Glendinning, Zara Bolton, Nancy Kincaid, Henrietta Bell and Pauline Higgins are some of the names etched in my memory banks and to whom I owe so much.

It was Dorothy Glendinning who rang Dad up and asked him to “send the girls over”.  It was so exciting to make the big four-mile journey to Portrush and to be included in with all the other children.  The following week Dorothy rang up again with the same request – Dad would never have been so presumptuous as to expect that we would be included because we weren’t members of Portrush.  It mattered not a jot to these wonderful pioneering women if we were members or not – but it did to Dad, so very quickly, Patricia and I found ourselves members of two clubs.  About a fiver each.

We grew up thinking all golf courses were like those we played at Portstewart and Portrush.  Talk about being spoiled!

In the intervening years we have both done a fair bit of travelling – Patricia more than me with several annual forays to Oz and to Japan, not to mention to all over the States, whereas I mostly tended to be more European based.  We each have our own favourite places and courses but are in total agreement that any opportunity there is to return to that special stretch of coastline on the north of Ireland must not be missed.  We are never disappointed.

I was more than a little surprised to receive honorary membership of the PGA – it truly came at me out of left field but I am really chuffed to bits.  I was doubly chuffed, however, to return to Portrush to celebrate there with so many old friends.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It’s wall-to-wall golf this week with the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, so the telly keeps switching itself off because it thinks we’ve fallen asleep or gone out or gone to bed and forgotten to press the red (as in stop) button.  In truth, it’s been doing that for a few weeks, what with the surfeit of Wimbledon, World Cup football, cricket of various formats, rugby union, the Tour de France, motor racing (suppose it’s Formula 1 officially)  and occasionally a bit of news.

England not reaching the World Cup final was disappointing but no surprise:  after all, they’ve only ever done it once.  In 1966 (in case you hadn’t heard) when they won, at home.  Argentina, the defending champions, have been in six finals and won three; Spain, the other finalists, are in their second final and have only won the title once, in 2010.  Out of the whole wide football-playing world, only eight countries – EIGHT – have ever won the World Cup.

If England can gather their thoughts and battered bodies, leave the recriminations – and more measured analysis – for another time and get the better of France to win the bronze medal, it’ll be a triumph.

Thomas Tuchel is getting it in the neck for being too defensive the moment England went ahead against Argentina in the semis – and perhaps he was; his team certainly retreated too far and gave a battle-hardened, talented team a chance to batter them into submission.  It was never going to be a beautiful classic but it was a great contest and, ultimately, for England a gut-wrenching, sickening BBU (brave but unavailing).  They were beaten by a canny, crafty team with more tournament nous and an inner drive England couldn’t quite match thanks to a combination of Messi, the Malvinas and being defending champions.  Of the four managers in the semis – Lionel Scaloni (Argentina), Luis de la Fuente (Spain) and Didier Deschamps (France) – Tuchel is by far the least experienced at this level and in the end it showed.

And, it you’re lucky, that’s probably it for football in the blog until my treks to Spurs start again in August.

This coming Sunday, all being well, the 154th Open champion will be lifting the venerable Claret Jug aloft at sun-scorched Birkdale after a long and tiring four days of competition.  Just before the final of the Women’s Amateur at Muirfield, at the end of last month, Andrea Revuelta, a Spaniard who is a student at Stanford in California, was asked  for her thoughts on links golf.

“You have to toss everything you know about golf in the trash,” she said succinctly, just about summing up the trials and tribulations of tackling any of the Open venues.

It was a bit chilly and very windy at Muirfield, with thunderstorms causing delays as Revuelta eventually went down to Valentine Delon, of France, by 3 and 1.  No chill is forecast this week for Southport and environs and even with a wee bit of breeze a fast, hard-running track poses a very different challenge from the day-to-day stuff of professional golf.  It can scramble the thought processes of the calmest, most level-headed individual – and there are few enough of those about at any golf event let alone a major.  They’re usually to be found at the top of the leaderboard at the end.

Maureen and I are no longer working at the Open so it’s sometimes hard not to feel like yesterday’s women whenever we travel to attend the AGW (Association of Golf Writers) dinner on the Tuesday evening and (in my case) the AGW AGM on the Wednesday morning.

The R&A’s state of the nation address is immediately after the AGM and I like to stay to hear what the chief exec, in this case Mark Darbon, has to say.  A super keen security man tried to throw me out – lack of the correct accreditation, the AGW badge (or insignia as our constitution has it), being deemed insufficient – and I was only saved by a kindly official old enough to know me from a past life…I began to feel like one of those tins you find at the back of the cupboard, well past my use-by date.

Still, I shook off the rust and that glitch aside, we did have a great time and met up with lots of friends from all over the world.  The dinner was fab – many thanks to the R&A for a proper champagne reception and our secretary Matt Cooper for keeping calm and carrying on.  There’s still nothing like an Open for bringing people together.

 

Before I forget, many congratulations to Haeran Ryu, the Korean who is on a major roll at the moment.  Last Sunday, she beat Canada’s Brooke Henderson at the first extra hole to win the Amundi Evian Championship, just two weeks after winning her first major title at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.  “This is just a dream right now,” she said, “because before for the three weeks I don’t have a major championship but now two in a row.  I’m so happy and I can’t believe it right now.”

To lower the tone a bit, I had a fair amount of ear wax removed from my left ear the other week and pretty squidgy it was too.  It was lovely not to feel that I was living in some sort of weird half-world bubble and to be able to hear properly again – or so I thought.  The sainted brother-in-law, who is in charge of food and beverage during Open week, said something and I responded, “You’ve got corns?”

Not quite.

“I forgot the prawns,” he said…