Apologies to Lionel Shriver, author of “We Need To Talk About Kevin” for nicking her title and also to the Open Championship for associating it with the monstrous Kevin.

The Open has not yet become a monster but it is a behemoth and not long ago I (and numerous others) had an email from the R&A asking for ideas for improving the Open. Well, on closer inspection, there wasn’t that much room for suggestions, it was more about your Open and sports-watching habits in general.

Not being a corporate, big business being, it seems to me that quite a few of the R&A’s recent decisions have conspired to make the Open less open, to make it, frankly, more dull and boring and uniform, more about money-making than making golfers, or golf fans, of non-golfers.

The most appalling decision was to ditch terrestrial television, at a stroke (a very bad stroke) slashing the audience by millions. People have to work much harder to find the golf now, which is why many of them will end up not bothering at all. Perhaps the numbers will be made up eventually as we oldies die off and are replaced, if all the promotional campaigns work, by on-line-streaming, tech savvy, social media junkies who play most of their games on a device with a screen. Golf is all about connectivity after all.

By far my favourite worst decision, however, was the corporate sanitisation of the exhibition/merchandise tent, although perhaps I should thank the R&A for turning it into a place I don’t have to visit any more and saving me a shedload of money. (Although I do usually go in once, for a quick recce, to confirm that it’s still a soulless temple to Mammon.)

In the tented village at Troon last year, there was a big advertising poster thing featuring a family of four clad in the R&A’s favoured brand and I couldn’t help wondering how many hundreds their bill would come to. Luke Donald is lucky that he doesn’t have to clothe himself at his sponsor’s prices but, of course, you do get 10 per cent off if you pay with a particular card.  That applies to ice cream and food too and you will need more than loose change to keep yourself fed and watered at Open prices.   I think they’re iniquitous but no doubt some diligent number crunchers beavering away at their spreadsheets will say that the figures make sense.  Not to those of us who crave a bit of variety, a smidgeon of flair, a hint of the unexpected and value for money they don’t.  But at least the main event didn’t disappoint, with Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson putting on the performance of their careers in the last round.

Unparalleled golfing excellence notwithstanding, I have a friend who won’t be going to the Open again because of the boozing.  “Too many pissed up lads,” he said.  “I don’t want to be in the middle of it any more.  And the crowds prevent any decent view of the golf.”  So that’s him off the attendance list.

You have to be canny and clued up to watch golf at the big events and staying sober throughout a long day in the fresh air or the hospitality tents can be a big ask for those who are there for the day out and haven’t signed the pledge. Encouraging the crowd to feel involved can be a double-edged sword if they take heckling and partisanship to extremes and start interfering.  Not everyone knows what the limits are.

Mind you, I was sorry to hear that the Bolly will be gone at Birkdale, or at least its champagne tent will. Bollinger didn’t sell enough bottles at Troon apparently.  I hope I’m misinformed because I have many happy, if slightly fuzzy memories of long, entertaining, informative sojourns therein, particularly on a Saturday when no deadline loomed.  One non-golfing friend still waxes lyrical about her visit to a particularly wet and windy Muirfield (welcome back to the rota by the way) when the weather saved her from having to watch any golf at all and she babbled the afternoon away on a sea of bubbles.

 

Golfers have a long association with drink – though today’s highly toned athletes seem to be more abstemious than their predecessors – and I love the story about Harry Vardon and his response to the woman from the Temperance Society who knocked on his door and tried to persuade him to sign on for abstinence.  Vardon drew himself up to his full height and said: “Madam, I have never knowingly been beaten by a teetotaller.  I bid you good day.”

Slainte.  Happy St Patrick’s Day everybody.

IMPORTANT NOTICE:  THE RULES OF GOLF HAVE NOT CHANGED – YET.  YOU CAN STILL HAVE YOUR SAY.

This is not a joke.  Every man, woman and child who plays golf has until the end of August this year to influence the game’s rules makers at the R&A and USGA, who plan to introduce a brand new rule book in January 2019.  If you have what you think is a brilliant workable solution to the knotty problem of stroke and distance, for example, they’re dying to hear from you.  If you have a particular bugbear, get in there and make sure they include it in their deliberations.  The official announcement of the biggest overhaul of the rules since 1984 was made on Wednesday afternoon and I know that at least one of the members at my golf club was on the phone to St Andrews on Thursday morning.

Some of you will know that there are currently 34 rules and 1200 decisions, so no wonder a lot of us are confused.  The aim is to cover the same ground but more succinctly and clearly, to make things easier to understand for all golfers, amateur and professional.  The quest started five years ago and that sounds like a long time to deliberate but in the world of rules it’s almost Farah-esque it’s so speedy.

The men at the forefront of this transformation are Thomas Pagel, the senior director of rules and amateur status at the USGA and David Rickman, who used to be the main rules man at the R&A but now rejoices in the rather grand title of executive director of governance and chief of staff.  An engaging, courteous person who seems to be blessed with endless patience, Rickman said, “We’re a bit unapologetic about taking our time.”   He pointed out that golf is “a self-regulating game played in over 200 countries around the world, so this is a complex process and we need to get it right.”

There are tournament professionals who think they should be a law unto themselves and make their own rules but their representatives have been involved in the discussions since the beginning and a central tenet of this whole process is that a single set of rules benefits the game worldwide.  Bifurcation, thankfully, has been booted into the boondocks, with no hope of a free drop.

There are lots of apparently sensible changes mooted:  no need to attend the flagstick; permission to chuck all loose impediments out of a bunker not just bits of paper and cans; players to line themselves up, without help from their caddy; ok to repair spike marks on greens; play when you’re ready (match play apart).  There are others that raise my eyebrows more:  dropping the ball from an inch above the ground; penalty areas; the double par rule.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the details are on randa.org and usga.org and there’s a hashtag thingy (which I can’t find on this computer) golfrules2019.  Feedback and evaluation forms are available in seven languages, so there’s no excuse for not taking part.  It’s your game, after all.  But, please, do NOT lobby for free drops out of divots.  Golf is an outdoor, cross-country game and in essence, you should play the ball as it lies, bearing in mind that you can get bad outcomes from good shots and good outcomes from bad shots.  Suck it up!

Most golfers, I think it’s safe to say, pay scant attention to the rules.  It’s not that they cheat, they’re just not interested, most of the time.  They can pick up a rule book, for free, at their club but I’d bet (if I was allowed to) that most members don’t bother.  And golfers who aren’t members anywhere may not know that there is such a thing as a rule book, let alone what it looks like or where to get one.

I know someone who ditched the rule book in her (golf) bag to make room for an extra packet of jelly babies and someone else, with a bigger bag, who keeps the book for matches against other clubs “just in case, even though I’ll probably not understand it.”  This is an intelligent woman but she wasn’t being disingenuous:  the rules do take some interpreting, especially in the heat of battle.

Appearances notwithstanding, some research sometimes goes into this blog and yesterday I made the surprising discovery that dry and tedious though the rule book is, the Decisions are a great read, laugh-out-loud funny, entertaining and informative.  You could do worse than keep one by your bedside to cheer you up and help you fall asleep with a smile on your face.  I’m not joking but my friends probably had it right when they said, “Get a life!”

 

 

 

Rumour has it that some of the keenest minds in golf, to wit the rules makers of the R&A and the USGA, are attempting to simplify the blighters.  Good luck, after all these years of making them more and more complicated and adding decision upon decision upon decision as they try to cover every eventuality.

The late, great Peter Dobereiner – he used to call me Eric for reasons now lost in the mists of time and red wine – once set out to re-write the rules and gave up, I believe, because even he, with the best of intentions, found them getting longer and more complicated.  Even so, the denizens of the governing bodies should read everything Dobers ever wrote about the rules (I refuse to give them a capital R) because he is scathingly funny on the subject as only the truly knowledgeable can be.

In ‘Dobereiner On Golf…and more’, edited by Robert Green and Ruth Dobereiner, Peter’s daughter, with a foreword by Seve Ballesteros, there are a few pieces on the rules.  At the end of one, entitled simply ‘What is a stroke?’ there is an editors’ note:  “One of Peter’s favourite pet peeves:  the phrasing of the Rules of Golf.  They gave him, and his readers, endless hours of amusement.”  A footnote to a piece called ‘The true definitions of golf’ reads:  “Another example of Peter’s pre-occupation with the absurdities of the rulebook.”

The opening paragraph sets the scene:  “It has been sagely established by George Bernard Shaw, unless perchance it may have been some other witty blighter such as Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward, that the invention of private languages, as practised by all the learned professions, constitutes a conspiracy against the public.  If the law was written in plain English, all lawyers would starve.  Golf is guilty of the same con trick….”

There follows a glossary of common golf terms and here is a definition of what the word ‘Forwards’ means in golf (there is a long riff on this in ‘What is a stroke?’):  “Backwards, as in the definition of a stroke:  ‘A forward movement of the club, etc’ when it really means the first movement from the top of the backswing which is, of course, backwards.”

In the interests of fairness and research, I double-checked the current rule book (effective January 2016) and as far as I can tell forwards still means backwards.  Try writing your own definition of a stroke and you’ll probably start sympathising with the rules makers.

More research was required because I couldn’t remember how many rules there were originally.  My guess was 13 but detail has never been my strong point (although I do try, sometimes).  Anyway, I didn’t use Google or DuckDuckGo (my current search engine of choice).   I went old school and brought down a pile of books, including Charles Price’s ‘World of Golf:  A panorama of six centuries of the game’s history.’  It was published in 1962, the foreword is by Bobby Jones and it’s a miracle that this blog has appeared on time because it’s not just fascinating, it’s a brilliant read and without an uncharacteristic display of iron discipline, I’d have given up writing and continued reading.

And you know what?  I was right.  For once.  Hooray.  There were 13 rules to begin with because all games need rules, to try and settle disputes and set limits.  The thing about that, of course, is that people try to find ways round the rules or come up with things you never thought of, so you have to be more specific and so on and so on and so on.  Then you get people who don’t necessarily break the rules, just bend them – which leads to joys like Stephen Potter on gamesmanship, another must read for rules makers and anyone who’s never heard of him.  Genius.

In trying to be equitable, when in essence there’s nothing intrinsically fair about golf, or life, the rules people have gone into so much detail that it’s become the devil, to understand and administer.  And people like Simon Barnes, who was for many years the chief sports writer of The Times (London) and a disliker of golf and its mores, could thunder about the game’s “seismic pomposity” and call it “the game of the man who thanks God that he is not as other men are.”

Many of us golfers are, as you know, women and I’ve always been a bit sad that Simon detests us but then he writes this (a propos an incident involving a 16-year old Michelle Wie in her first tournament as a professional) and I find myself cheering:-

“That’s golf for you.  A golfer must have a deep respect for rules.  More:  a worshipful respect for the rules.  In golf, rules are not devices for running a contest:  they are a fetish, a matter of faith, a religion….

“Rules!  Rules about clothes, about behaviour, rules about balls, rules about clubs, rules about women, rules about rules.”

If he’d stopped there, I’d have kept cheering but he carried on:-

“Rules for the suffocation of individuality, of creativity, of artistry, of all those dangerous things that we don’t want in our world, the only world in which grass looks like a nylon carpet.”

Ah, this is a man who doesn’t know golf at all and has no interest in trying to understand it but, of course, he was writing a column called ‘Thunderer’ and the object was to go in all guns blazing.  That doesn’t mean that we golfers should ignore his comments, because our rules do us no favours.  Or is it just our interpretation of them?

 

 

Thinking about the blog this week has been making me feel a bit blah and irritable, cross in an indeterminate sort of way.  I’ve been sad and down since hearing about Dave Musgrove’s death the other day – given the current rate of attrition, this could easily turn into an obitblog – but deep down I know what’s been annoying me.  (I was tempted to use another expression but just in time remembered my resolution to reduce my swearing!)

It’s all this stuff about golf being too dull and boring and needing to jazz up its image, to get its act together and appeal to a younger demographic, to try different formats and liven things up.  I heard European Tour boss Keith Pelley on the radio the other day – couldn’t see if he’s still rocking those blue-framed specs – hyping up this week’s bold new event in Perth (the sunny one in Western Australia) and then I heard myself, shouting at the radio.  Oops.

“Don’t blame the game.  It’s your fault; it’s professional golf that’s to blame, with its interminable diet of 72-hole stroke play events, week in, week out, all over the world, now televised day in, day out (yawn, yawn) in its tedious entirety.  It encourages players to be risk averse and, above all, slow, slow, slow.  It’s not golf that needs livening up, it’s your players.”

We amateurs, certainly in Ireland and Britain, have always tended to play matches with our friends and even mix our competitions up with different formats:  greensomes, foursomes, Stableford (oh happy invention), the odd Texas scramble (fun but always long for some reason).  For the pros, however, it’s the spirit-sapping tyranny of the card and pencil.

And how slow they’ve become at it.  Now that they’ve nothing else to do, no shop to run, no members to teach or placate or beat up (on the course), nothing to do but play golf, they don’t care how long they take about it.  They may pay lip service to speeding up but they won’t bother their eye, continuing to waste the time of rules officials like the legendary John Paramor, a man of infinite patience, who was recently awarded the Christer Lindberg Bowl for Services to European Golf by the PGAs of Europe.  Perhaps the Tour should unleash an impatient Paramor, an angry bull elephant permitted to trample any slowcoaches into the turf no questions asked.  Paramor on the rampage, that would be a sight worth seeing.

Sadly, the only thing likely to help is penalty strokes, lots of them, applied ruthlessly and relentlessly but no tour player is going to vote for that and they will continue to dawdle and footer about to their wallet’s content and the game’s detriment.

Because, worst of all, the rest of us will follow their example, taking hours longer to play than we should, forgetting that golf, invented in Scotland, where it is often bitterly cold even in the summer, is a game played on the move for fear of hypothermia.  Too many people seem to have forgotten, or never learned, to think and calculate as they approach their ball, so that their decision about the next shot is nearly complete by the time they reach the ball.  If you mostly play on your home course, why do you need long deliberations over what club to hit from a position you’ve been in thousands of times?  You don’t.   As my aunt used to say, “Just get on with it, dear!”

Anyway, on reflection, I think that Keith Pelley and I are probably on the same side because he’s trying to remind everyone, not least his players, that golf, big business though it’s become, is FUN and a game for everyone, from toddlers to totterers.  If you’ve got time to spare, seek out a copy (undoubtedly remaindered) of Teach Yourself Golf by David and Patricia Davies, who try to share the sheer enjoyment this frustrating game has given them over the years.  For a start, we’d never have met without it!

This train of thought raises other issues, including providing people who are new to the game with places to play.  We don’t need more ‘championship’ courses, we need more munis that are accessible and well run.  That takes money that councils don’t seem to have any more, failing to appreciate that if golf is available to all, it has health and social benefits that could be invaluable.  Perhaps the R&A could use some of its Open money to fund local, low-key, accessible nine-holers; could help councils keep open their munis; and could help ensure that people taking up golf and developing a taste for it, have places to play and progress.

The professional tours, the sponsors and the governing bodies need some serious joined-up thinking if the game is to thrive as it should.  If it’s beyond the wit of man, perhaps we women should step up to the tee.