The Olympics continue to inspire, captivate and mesmerise in equal proportion.  Perhaps not QUITE so much for me, the Olympic golf.

Admittedly, that is probably partly, or indeed, largely, my own fault.  I didn’t realise that the golf was shown on a couple of subscription channels.  Neither did I realise that if you had a Sky Sports subscription (which we have) you could access the Discovery+ channel and watch the golf. (Some can, some can’t.) So, I, like countless others, was relying on the BBC and/or BBC  iplayer and was frustrated at the tiny bit of dipping in and out that that afforded us.  I pretty much only saw the last four holes of the men’s event when Jon Rahm was finishing off his implosion and Scottie Scheffler was busy rounding off his impressive string of birdies.

Congrats, however, to Scottie on winning the gold.  His tearful and emotional medal ceremony showed just what it meant to him, stirring emotions that I’m not sure even the majors can touch.  Silver medallist Tommy Fleetwood (above) is at this moment enjoying a family holiday and no doubt reflecting on an experience that will stay with him for the rest of his life.  And I must say I was heartened to learn that Hideki Matsuyama won the bronze, the very medal that eluded him last time when he lost out in a seven-man play-off won by C T Pan of Chinese Taipei.

As for being captivated by the men’s Olympic golf – that wasn’t helped by the broadcast I saw.  And yes, as I’ve said, mea culpa, but I WAS looking out for the golf.  I know I’m somewhat technically and digitally challenged but I’m not the biggest numpty either and it had passed me by as to where I could access more continuous coverage of the grand old game.  It took me until day eleven of the games to discover that for some reason our Eurosport channel has burst back into life when we ditched it years back.  At present I’m not expecting to see much coverage of the women’s golf until the final day (Saturday) but perhaps I’ll live and learn and have a little more success with my watching of the girls vying for the medals.

My latest, most heartwarming, takeaway from this feast of sport has been Kellie Harrington, Ireland’s phenomenal 60kg boxer defending her title and claiming her second Olympic gold medal.  She works five days a week from Monday to Friday cleaning in a Dublin hospital and trains in the afternoons and at weekends.  The converted Court Philippe-Chatrier at Roland Garros was awash with Irish supporters who were rewarded one hundred-fold with Kellie’s victory and the celebrations looked set to continue long into the night.  She even serenaded them all with a victory song!  Isn’t it all a joyous relief from the current men’s professional world of golf?

Olympics notwithstanding, my absolute favourite event is getting gratifyingly closer and in three weeks time I’ll be at Sunningdale to watch the Curtis Cup match between the GB&I team and the team from the USA.  The eight outstanding female amateurs comprising each of these two teams will meet in a three day contest that will decide the destiny of the trophy for the next two years.  The US have a healthy lead in the overall standings,  – well, it’s close to domination really, having 29 wins to 8 for GB&I, with three matches halved.

We’ve never let that stand in the way of the true meaning and spirit of the match, however, and the Americans are in complete accord as the United States Golf Association (USGA) website states, “the true meaning of the Curtis Cup Match has never been overshadowed by the results and the Match has always been regarded as a vehicle of international friendship and understanding.”

For past players like myself it’s a week to renew old friendships and marvel at the skills of today’s players.  The home team was announced in the past week and amazingly seven out of the eight players are first timers on a Curtis Cup team.  Scotland’s Hannah Darling is playing for the third time.  There are three Irish players this year, two Scots and three English who boast the world No 1 Lottie Woad and sisters Euphemie and Patience Rhodes from Burnham & Berrow.  Seven of our players have attended or are attending college in America, the outlier being Lorna McClymont, runner-up in this year’s Women’s Amateur Championship, who is at Stirling Uni, alma mater of her captain, the much decorated, and former Curtis Cup player, Catriona Matthew.

It’s all a far cry from my lone appearance back in 1980 when I was the only player to have attended college in the States.  If I’m not mistaken, however, my team was the last one before this one to boast three from the Emerald Isle amongst its number – Mary McKenna, Claire Robinson, nee Nesbitt, and myself.  I must go and see if I can root out the team photo.

Finally, an update on my Olympic golf watching.  I have subscribed to Discovery + and am now able to watch on my laptop – streaming on the actual telly buffers too much.  That’s what happens, I’m told, when you live in the back of beyond and are challenged from a band-width perspective.  Anyway, happy days indeed.

At this stage neither the Brits nor the Irish are up to much but it’s shaping up to be a great ole tussle for the podium.  I wonder if  Frenchwoman Celine Boutier will be able to absorb all the attention and support of the home crowd and turn it into a medal-winning performance.  She opened with an incredible seven under par 65 but stumbled rather to a second round of 76.  That’s golf for you – and that’s what can happen all too easily round this course, Le Golf National, where we witnessed such a fabulous Ryder Cup match back in 2018.

It’s all bubbling up rather nicely for a grandstand finish and if Celine can effect a recovery, just imagine the scenes on the final day with all that water to be negotiated on the final hole and the whole of France holding its collective breath.

Should be compulsive viewing – if you can find somewhere to watch it, that is.

Ok, so I’m going to start this week’s blog with an apology.  An apology, that is, for being negative.  Negative about golf.  Negative about the sport I love and have been involved with my entire life.  Negative about Olympic golf.  Negative about men’s Olympic golf in particular.

I do understand that it is important to have a presence in the Olympics to access and open up a flow of funding into the sport at grass roots level.  I also get that the Olympics can help “grow the game” (horrible expression), potentially exposing folks to the sport who may never otherwise have taken it under their notice.  This is particularly important now that in these islands there is absolutely no live golf on terrestrial television.

But what a botch the powers-that-be have made of it all.  The 72-hole format is, by and large, one of the most boring in the game.  Please don’t give me that guff about the players liking it as it identifies the best player.  How often does the highest-ranked player in the world (i.e. the best player) win in any given week?  Rarely!  And if this IS about drawing more people into the game, why not put on some kind of exciting matchplay format which is much more compelling from day one?

The last fortnight I have been royally entertained by such diverse sports as hockey, eventing, swimming, badminton, gymnastics, sailing, diving, table tennis, track and field and all sorts of cycling to name but a few.  Thank goodness Hideki Matsuyama missed an 8-footer on the last for the bronze medal.  At least a frisson of excitement was generated by the seven-man play-off for third spot.

Part of the appeal of watching a lot of the sports with which I’m not overly familiar is the inherent admiration for athletes who put everything on the line in order to peak at a certain time in what is normally a four-year cycle.  I just can’t summon up the same enthusiasm for a sub-standard field of sixty players, many of whom have little hope of booking a tee time in the sport’s four majors.  And for the few truly world-class players who ARE there there have already been four opportunities this year to nab one of golf’s greatest prizes.

Men’s Olympic golf is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance to stamp your mark on the game.  Phil Mickelson has played in more than 100 majors in his long career and I guarantee every one of them had a stronger field than last week at Kasumigaseki Country Club.  Perhaps that is why so many of the top players eschew the opportunity to play Olympic golf – they simply can’t drum up the desire to do so when in their minds there are four superior prizes on offer each year.

If Olympic golf is to be long-lasting and successful in terms of fighting its corner against all the other sports that are vying for the attention of our young people, then it needs a revamp.  Ditch the strokeplay element and come up with a more mano a mano approach that is stimulating and exciting for the spectator.  And to elevate the importance of the Olympics to a golfer build the tour calendars that year around the Olympics.  Make Olympic golf the jewel in the crown, the focal point of every fourth year, not an event shoehorned in amongst other majors and soul-less, yet important money-spinners like the Fed-Ex Cup play-offs.

If there isn’t a real desire to showcase golf, engaging all the players and making it inconceivable that they would choose to miss the Olympics and if there isn’t the will to step up and make the best use of this stupendous global platform then we are indeed missing a trick.  If that is the case, golf’s return to the Olympic arena may well be short-lived and deservedly so.

The women, to their credit, have a different view of Olympic golf but it still requires innovative thinking and proper positioning in tour schedules to make it fly, no easy feat as the women have five majors to contend for each season.

I do hope golf adapts and makes the most of this opportunity to be on a stage that is bigger than a single sport can ever be.

Watching the Olympics is bad for your body image if you’re a bit of a couch potato and it doesn’t take many seconds of taekwondo or rugby sevens or hockey to get me out of puff, so I’m trying to concentrate on the mental side of things and calm my mind – hence the lavender at the top of this piece.  One, two, three…..breathe; exhale; relax…

On top of everything else, it’s not easy trying to watch the Olympics with an eight-hour time difference and most of the events in the middle of the night here in England.  Even worse, the Beeb haven’t got unlimited rights so the wall-to-wall, sport-to-sport coverage we’d got used to during Olympics past just isn’t there….I gave in and signed up to Eurosport but it’s not quite the same, although it’s less GB-centric, which is good for the overall, less edited view.

Many years ago, when the Olympics were in Seoul, I worked nights for a week – couldn’t even manage the full fortnight – and one of the best things was heading home at eight in the morning when everybody else was trekking in to work.  I ate dinner with the rest of the household but it was my breakfast really and as they settled down for the evening I headed out to work.  The killer was when I had to switch back to normal hours the following week and my system was out of kilter for days.

This time I stayed up once to watch the rugby sevens but decided that some sort of hybrid sleep pattern was unsustainable and that I wasn’t going to commit to the full creature-of-the-night cycle.  Several days later I’m still recovering…..so goodness knows how people in Skibbereen are coping and rowers all over Ireland, what with the women’s four of Emily Hegarty, Aifric Keogh, Eimear Lambe and Fiona Murtagh winning bronze and Fintan McCarthy and Paul O’Donovan confirming their favourite’s billing by winning gold in the lightweight men’s double sculls.  Wow.

To me, Skibbereen was always Eileen Rose McDaid (now Power) territory but golf seems to have been superseded by rowing, for the moment.  Nothing much trumps Olympic gold, silver and bronze after all.  A major just might and you never know, now that golf is in the Olympics (for who knows how long), it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that golfing gold could end up in Skibbereen one day.  Over to you Mark Power, son of ER and Eddie (and golfing boys and girls yet to be inspired) and, of course, the IOC.

And, for the meantime, over to Shane, Rory, Leona and Stephanie.  Oh, what a pity that there’s not a (mixed?) team element to Olympic golf, it would be so much more fun than individual 72-hole strokeplay.  Add in a mix of formats – foursomes, fourball, singles – well, that would be terrific.  A bit complicated perhaps but well worth the trouble, something different, something special, which is exactly what the Olympics should be.

Japan should have been the perfect place for Olympic golf to make a statement, to establish itself as something worth watching, even before Hideki Matsuyama won the Masters and launched himself in to the sporting stratosphere and beyond.  The Japanese love their golf and have for years, revering their stars, women and men, perhaps well beyond what is good for any human being.  This year, however, people are competing in a near vacuum with no fans, not even teammates from other sports.  My goodness, Rory’s not even wearing a hat (head too small for team issue apparently).

Sepp Straka, of Austria, who’s in the 160s in the world rankings, was in the gold medal position after the first round of the golf at Katsumigaseki Country Club.  He managed a round of 63, eight under par (no bogeys), aided and abetted by his caddie, his twin brother Sam, the elder by a couple of minutes.  If that isn’t special, I don’t know what is.

Jazz Janewattananond, of Thailand, the man with possibly the best name in golf, was second, one behind, with Thomas Pieters of Belgium and Carlos Ortiz of Mexico two behind.  Paul Casey, who’s been in good form in recent weeks, had a 67, a solid start to his bid to emulate Justin Rose, who won gold in Rio.  McIlroy had a 69, as did Open champion Collin Morikawa and Shane Lowry had a 70, alongside Tommy Fleetwood.  It’s all to play for.

Many miles from Tokyo, in a more accessible time zone, in county Antrim, there’s another very special tournament, with a name that doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue:  the ISPS HANDA World Invitational presented by Modest! Golf Management.  It’s a tri-sponsored event, with players from the European Tour (men) and the LPGA and the LET (women) – 144 men and 144 women playing for the same prize money at Galgorm Castle GC and Massereene GC.  Well done Niall Horan for using your passion for golf  to help others achieve their golfing dreams.

Finally, the very best of luck to Janet and David, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, who are now in charge (?!) of Barney, an eight-month old springer/collie cross.  Not much relaxation in prospect for them.  Pass the smelling salts.

 

 

The Olympics, for all the faults, including overblown self-importance and corruption, are a global phenomenon like few others and now that golf is in, it has to up its game and work damned hard to stay in.  Rugby sevens was brilliant, with Fiji fantastic, who wouldn’t want to play; golf was ok.  It was saved by the passion of the South Koreans for its women; the excellence of the indomitable Inbee Park, who defied injury and huge criticism at home not only to compete but also to stride away with the gold medal; and the proper battle between Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson for top of the podium.  Those coming second and third beamed from ear to ear.  That’s special.

Maureen thought amateurs should take centre stage but that’s not an option these days; the Olympics are a professional environment, with the successful athletes well funded and putting hours of work in every day, all proper jobs, if any, on hold.  Jessica Ennis-Hill, Katie Ledecky, Laura Trott, Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, Michael Phelps et al are not amateurs.  They might all become golfers though and that is one of the game’s strengths.  It’s addictive.  It’s alluring.  It attracts athletes and competitive animals as well as us abysmals.

The Japanese are mad about golf and will turn out in droves to watch in 202o but please, please do something about the format.  (We won’t mention the dire commentary large parts of the TV watching world were lumbered with.  See Twitter for details.)  Perhaps the IOC wanted golf to play it safe in Rio but in Tokyo there must be a team format and it must be mixed.  Don’t give us a load of blah-flum about ‘growing the game’ and keep the men and women apart, playing individual stroke play.  I sat cheering at handball, rugby sevens, even water polo because it was team stuff, nation against nation and golf, a sedate spectacle mostly, needs that extra element to spice it up.

There are plenty of formats to draw from:  World Amateur team championships, European team championships, Dunhill Cups:  stroke play with two or three scores to count; stroke play leading to match play; medal match play.  Women and men in the same team, playing at the same time, perhaps even in mixed groups, shock, horror.  They all, the women especially, have four years to learn how to play quicker.  Perhaps we could have a shot clock or, my favoured method, a set time for a round, say, four hours.  The stopwatch is clicked when the first member of a group is called forward and clicked again when the last member of the group putts out.  For every minute or part thereof over the time, every player in a group is penalised a shot.  If they’re under the time, they can donate something to a designated charity or, for Olympic purposes, subtract a shot from their total.  Referees could tear up their ridiculous, useless timing sheets and concentrate on monitoring the punch-ups as the speedsters were agitated beyond endurance by the snails.

When it comes down to it, golf is a game for everybody and that’s what we’ve got to get across.  The Olympics, by their very nature, take golfers out of their comfort zone, so go further, mix it up, literally, show the world that it’s competitive, fun and inclusive.  Isn’t that the whole idea of being part of the five-ring circus?

If the golf in Tokyo is still 72-hole individual stroke play, with the men playing one week and the women the next (what happened to ladies first anyway!), it’ll be a travesty and we’ll have to put on the hard hats again and keep banging against that brick wall……

In the meantime, congrats to Maria Verchenova, one of the few Russians competing in Rio, who not only won the hat-wearing gold but had a round of 62, to show that she could play decent golf as well.  And congrats to Leona Maguire, who did herself and Ireland (and Duke University) proud in Rio and received the 2016 Mark H McCormack Medal (awarded to the No 1 player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking) from Lydia Ko (No 1 in the Rolex Rankings, the women’s world rankings).  Maguire also won the women’s McCormack Medal in 2015.

And, far away from Brazil, at the Pete Dye Course at French Lick Resort in Indiana, England and Arsenal Solheim Cup stalwart Trish Johnson got the better of Juli Inkster at last, winning The Legends Championship (presented by Old National Bank) at the 6th hole of a not-so-sudden-death play-off.  Even a Spurs supporter like me could not forbear to cheer.