There was a man on the radio the other day who was arguing that we shouldn’t bother with the Winter Olympics because we – countries like Britain, Ireland and, presumably Jamaica and Nigeria – were no good at the sports involved, so we shouldn’t waste our time trying to compete with the snow-deep, mountain-high powerhouses.  What a slushy, wet blanket of a view.

With an attitude like that Columbus would never have put out to sea, the Vikings would never have reached Scotland, the Montgolfiers would never have taken to the air, Michelangelo would never have started drawing, imagining, inventing, it’s the sort of attitude that kept us in the dark ages while the Persians and the Incas and others were doing amazing things.  In short, no one would ever have tried anything remotely different.  So, you’ll have guessed, I think that bloke was wrong, wronger, wrongest.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the Winter Olympic athletes are stark-raving bonkers, putting life and limb in danger every time they strap on a ski, a skate or a snowboard.  How they learn their trade without breaking their neck or falling foul of Health And Safety is a mystery to me.  As someone who loses all sense of where she is after turning in a quarter of a semi-circle on solid ground, I haven’t a clue how those acrobatic half-pipers keep track of where they are or what they’re doing.  I watch, open-mouthed, in awe, muttering imprecations, as they fling themselves about.

As for the tea trayers, well they are truly off their trolley, surely.  And, don’t get me started on the ski jump.  Whatever Eddie the Eagle was – and apparently he thinks GB is spending too much on the Winter Olympics now – he wasn’t a wimp.  Just to stand at the top of one of those jumps is enough to turn me to jelly and there’s more than enough flesh to wobble wildly, if not quite enough to guarantee a soft landing.

The skiing I can understand, more or less, though my knees creak and my heart quails as they plummet downhill at ridiculous speeds with insouciant skill.  And I admire the way they stand at the bottom, heart in mouth presumably, watching the clock and hoping to hang on to a medal by hundredths of a second.  I’d hate that.  The head-to-head racing, however manic, is understandable even to the ignorant and I found myself yelling myself hoarse cheering on a Swede in the cross-country relay.

It’s all exhilarating and fun and you can see why people get hooked.  Just being in the mountains is invigorating and even if you start off at the SnowDome in Tamworth or the dry ski slope in Gloucester, if you keep persevering, you’ll end up in the snow somewhere, be it the Alps or the champagne powder of Colorado.  Even the Norwegians, the cross-country colossi, train on roller skis in the summer, so you can learn to do that almost anywhere bar the beach and some of the pot-holed roads round by me.

“That Elise Christie, she’s obviously no good, she shouldn’t be there,” said the man on the radio after the speed-skating Scot had crashed out of yet another Olympic race.  He’d picked the wrong one there.  La Christie is one of the world’s best and was in form going to the Games but a nudge here, a caught edge there and her dreams were cold as ice.  Sobbing in Sochi, pissed off in Pyeongchang, she was bloodied but unbowed.  “I’ll be back,” she said.

It’s the winning that drives Christie now but the taking part is still the most important part of sport:  without participants there’d be no sport, so every sport needs as many people as possible to play it.  The broader the base, the more likely you are to produce champions, who inspire and nourish a desire to play and compete in others.  Though sometimes it works the other way:  Switzerland and Scotland were hardly places you’d associate with tennis before the advent of the sainted Roger Federer and Andy Murray.

Also, as the All Blacks appreciate, for a sport to be really successful it needs people who understand it and really care about it, irrespective of their playing prowess.  It needs participants with passion at every level to survive and thrive.

Golf is rarely life-threatening – just make sure you’re not hit by a ball or club – or exhilarating in the way that faster sports are and you don’t have to be a supreme athlete or young to play it well.  That doesn’t make it a bad or a dull or a boring game.  Just the opposite in fact, it’s intriguing, exasperating and compelling and it’s good for all of us, especially if we can manage to keep on walking.  And it’s amazing how effective a weird and wonderful swing, devised to cope with various aches and pains, can be.

As you probably know, it annoys me that people think you shouldn’t bother with things unless you can do them well. Frankly, that is utter – and I can’t think of a better word – bollocks.  You miss out on so much fun.  Don’t die wondering:  take the plunge and try something new.

Not all bloggers are writers and not all writers are bloggers.  Patricia is a writer AND a blogger.  I’m just a blogger, but as I sit before an empty screen wondering what to say in my first post of 2018 I’m curious to feel a….well, a bit of a block.  WRITER’s block, I wonder?  Hmm, maybe I’m getting a bit closer to being a real writer after 18 months of blogging, seeing as I’m now experiencing a block?  “Just start writing and see where it takes you”,  Patricia advised.  So, here goes.

When, oh when is Dustin Johnson (not the only culprit) going to stop spitting on a golf course?  I find it nothing short of disgusting and watched his sublime performance in Hawaii last week with one hand over my eyes in expectation of the inevitable expectoration.  It’s a dozen years now since I first started working in the States and I’ve covered countless rounds in that time and walked many miles inside the ropes.  Those miles have been punctuated with several hops and skips as I’ve done my best to avoid the spitting over the ropes from the front row of spectators.  My American friends tell me it’s the tobacco-chewing culture but that doesn’t appease me – it really is awful.

Dustin is the supreme athlete and shot 65 on Sunday romping to an 8-shot victory in a tournament peopled only by winners from 2017.  He has won at least once a year for the last 11 consecutive years and has 8 wins since the 2015-16 season – more than any other player on the PGA Tour.  Last year he was in full flow until the eve of the Masters when he slipped in his socks and fell, injuring his back.  He withdrew the next day and was woeful in the majors,  with a missed cut at the US Open, tied 54th at The Open and tied 13th at the PGA.  Despite bombing out in the most important tournaments on the schedule he still managed to finish the year as world No 1.  Now, THAT was some achievement.

Three players are teeing it up this year with only one major separating them from the prize of completing a CGS (career grand slam).  To date, only five men have won all four modern majors:  Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.  Rory McIlroy will be the first to feel the full glare of the major spotlight as he tackles Augusta in April in search of a green jacket, the only garment separating him from membership of that oh-so-special club.  Hampered by injury last year he will be a man on a mission and being majorless since the 2014 Open does not sit well with him.  We haven’t seen the best of Rory yet and I predict he will bag one of the big ones in 2018 – I’m just not sure which one, and maybe the CGS will have to wait a year or two.

Next up, attempting to complete his set of majors at the US Open will be Phil Mickelson and I can’t help but wonder if that ship hasn’t already sailed.  Phil has six runner-up finishes in his national Open and would dearly love to win that particular title but time is not on his side as he turns 48 on the Saturday of this year’s championship.  Only one man older has ever won a major and that was Julius Boros who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48 years, 4 months and 18 days.  Phil needs a miracle.

The final major of the year (and the final year it is the final major because of a change of date beginning in 2019) is the PGA, the only major missing from Jordan Spieth’s resume.  To use one of Jordan’s expressions, this is “very do-able”.  And you would have to think he’s right.  In 2019 the Open Championship in July becomes the final major of the year.  Not for Jordan an agonising 8-month long wait from the last major to the one major eluding him, a fate that Rory has endured for the last three years.  The PGA comes in a run of top tournaments and majors and you can find yourself competing in it almost before you realise it.  If Rory has failed to win the Masters by 2019 he will then have nine long months from July to April until the next major, the Masters, when the focus will assuredly swing his way again as he takes his next crack at that CGS.  That’s a rolling boil of pressure which will build exponentially until he manages it.  I do think, though, that both Rory and Jordan will, at some stage, join the famous five – just not this year.

As I said, I do have Rory down for a major win in 2018.  I have Dustin down for two and I have a feeling Rickie Fowler will break his duck.  But don’t take my word for it – only fools make predictions on golf and, as you know, just about anything can happen.  Why, DJ might even stop spitting!

 

Happy New Year everybody.  Here’s hoping that we continue to enjoy our golf in 2018, playing well enough and often enough and persuading more people to become golf tragics – after all, it hasn’t really done us any harm, has it?!  Oops, that’s one semi-resolution broken – cut out the exclamation marks.

I see that golf has come top of the list of dullest sports – or bottom of the list of most exciting sports to watch – in a survey conducted by YouGov.  That’s fair enough.  The top five were athletics (drug-enhanced or otherwise), tennis, football, gymnastics (unwatchable since I read Joan Ryan’s brilliant and brutal “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes”) and rugby union, all full of movement and as a general rule, fast and furious.

Golf is, by its nature, more sedate but the team events, especially the Ryder and Solheim Cups, are compelling viewing every time.  It’ll be interesting to see if this week’s EurAsia Cup (presented by DRB-HOCOM), which starts today in Kuala Lumpur, at Glenmarie Golf and Country Club, sparks similar excitement.  Thomas Bjorn, Europe’s Ryder Cup captain for next year’s match in Paris, is in charge of a handy side that takes on Asia’s best, captained by Arjun Atwal, who’s been picking the brains of Tiger Woods re team dynamics, pairings, personalities, that sort of thing.  Atwal for one is taking it seriously.

Some people still think that golf is one of those things you take up when you retire and that’s not a bad thing to do but it’s even better when you take it up at the other end of the age scale.  You may become very good and make loads of dosh before you’re 30 or sink without trace but best of all, whatever level you reach, you have a game that you can play for as long as you are able and the friends you make will be friends for life.  There’s nothing dull about that.

I tried not to be too dull when I spoke at Formby Ladies GC’s annual dinner on Tuesday (thanks to them for the flowers at the top of the post) but I did realise how old I was and what a sports tragic I was when I mentioned Babe Zaharias and was met by a lot of very blank, baffled looks.  Most of the audience had never heard of her.  All-American can-do-anything sportswoman of the 1930s and 1940s, a multiple Olympic champion who turned to golf with great success and was an international name in the days before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest made it easy to have a global profile.  I lost confidence that Bobby Jones and Joyce Wethered would be familiar names, suddenly remembering that I’d mentioned Nancy Lopez to someone a few weeks before and they had never heard of her.  Blimey.  So even legends don’t last forever.

Talking of legends, I was sorry to hear that the inimitable Mike Britten, a long-time member of the AGW, had died.  He was a big part of my time in golf and I learned a lot from him, Gordon Richardson and Mark Garrod, all consummate reporters who knew exactly what was going on.

Small and combative, little Mickey could be very protective of his patch and at one tournament, one of the small ones we used to go to in the good old days before wall to wall television coverage, I wandered down to the 18th green where he was waiting, on his own, for David Feherty, who was having a very ordinary round.

Mickey was doing some of the Irish papers and was horrified to see me, a natural blabbermouth who couldn’t be relied upon not to reveal all to his rivals.  I was working for The Times, so our needs were not always the same.  “What you doing here?” he barked.

In truth, there was nothing much going on, so I thought I’d catch up with Feherty, whom I hadn’t seen for a while and could always be relied on for a bit of craic.

“I’ve come to learn at the feet of the master,” I deadpanned.

“Wot?” 

Mickey looked at me suspiciously, not quite sure how to take this, then said, a touch imperiously, “OK, you can stay – but not a word to Dabell.”  Norman [Dabell] also had his Irish clients, so the rivalry was real.

As it turned out Feherty had a great tale to tell, so both Mickey and I were happy.

We had a lot of fun over the years and my condolences and best wishes go to his family.

I had a root through some of my mountain of happy snaps looking for a pic of Mickey in his shorts – he was very proud of his legs and he did have a shapely pair of pins (am I allowed to say that these days?) – but came up short, so am using this lovely photo of him and his daughter Jenny celebrating his 80th birthday last year.  He loved Spain and ended his days in Andalucia, at La Heredia, his lovely place in Estepona.

It’s probably safe to say that the last time Mickey played winter golf was many years ago but it can be great fun if you get the number of layers right and the company is congenial.  On Monday, I played for Whittington at Brocton in something called the Trio League, featuring our two clubs and Ingestre.  Like most of Staffordshire Brocton was frozen but, well wrapped up, we played 11 holes and survived to tell the tale.  The bounces were unpredictable and we should have declared the bunkers GUR before setting out but it was good fun as well as providing more than the recommended daily allowance of air and exercise.

It might have been cold but it was far from dull.

 

 

 

 

I was going to do something serious for the last blog of the year but then I thought, ‘what the heck’.  After all, what’s so serious about golf, really?  There are plenty of serious things going on in the world and perhaps it’s true that life is too important to be taken seriously but where exactly does golf fall in the scheme of things?

Professional golfers have to take golf seriously because it’s the way they earn their livelihood but in their hearts they must know that they’re playing a game for a living.  They tell us how hard they work – and a lot of them do – but they and all other sports people know how lucky they are to be doing what they do, at the time that they are, earning ridiculous amounts of money if they’re successful.  The critical thing, the tough thing, is that it doesn’t make them any better than the rest of us or, whatever they might think or hope, immune from the vicissitudes of daily life.  They’re just people who are very good at hitting a little ball and getting it into a smallish hole better than most other people.

Phil, the Power, Taylor, who’s getting ready to retire after an outstanding career, is very good at darts and has earned fame and fortune because of it.  He’d have earned even more if he’d been as good at golf and the sort of shedloads that need to be counted by armies of accountants if he’d been as good at football.  A few years ago, he and the golfers and the footballers would have had to combine their sport with other things to make a decent living and there’d have been no such thing as billionaire bloggers (whatever they might be) or YouTube viral videoers or any number of odd ways of making a living.

Who knows how things will turn out?

Sergio Garcia, a prodigy if ever there was one, eventually won his first major championship, the Masters at Augusta, in April 2017, at the age of 37.  The green jacket, a bit of a Johnny-come-lately symbol of success (it’s even younger than the tournament, which is the youngest of the four men’s majors), has rarely been worn with more joy and Garcia’s name is now etched in the record books, alongside fellow Spaniards Seve Ballesteros and Jose Maria Olazabal.  Not long afterwards, Garcia’s life changed again, when he married Angela Akins.  It’s been quite a year.  And, to cap it all, the man from Castellon was a runaway winner of the Golf Writers Trophy, awarded each year by the AGW (Association of Golf Writers) “to the person or persons, born or resident in Europe, who, in the opinion of a majority of the members, shall have made the most outstanding contribution to golf during the preceding 12 months”.  Ole Sergio.

Tommy Horton, who died last week at the age of 76, never won a major or a green jacket but he was a golfer of enduring excellence, who became a Ryder Cup player, captain of the PGA and helped establish the European Tour and then the Senior Tour, where he set the standard for all who followed.  That’s a lot of good stuff and he was made an MBE but above all he will be remembered as a true gentleman.  As a tribute that’s hard to beat.

Golfers are, in the eyes of a lot of apparently sane people, completely nuts and no doubt there’s a debate to be had there.  In the nuts corner, you’d have a lot of disparate types, ranging from the likes of Tommy, Sergio, Maureen and me to the green jackets of Augusta National, the navy blue blazers of the R&A, the flip-flops of Tahiti, the skimpy work shorts of outback Oz and the muffled-up members of Whittington Heath, heading out in the snow with jackets and balls of many colours.

We’ve had a fair bit of snow in the Midlands over the last few days and our course was open yesterday, presumably because no one seriously thought that anyone would be daft enough to try and play but the Tamworth 7 are not easily deterred and there was grass visible on the 1st fairway (the 18th was a different matter), so off they jolly well went.  I think the rule was that if you lost your ball you were out but all seven battled round to the 9th and five forged on down the 10th to finish who knows where.  Being social animals, most of them also made it to the Christmas Draw Night (money to be won, delicious food to be consumed, drink to be drunk, tall tales to be told and Xmas jumpers to be unveiled by the unrepentant).

Anyway, wherever you are, thanks for reading and all the best for Christmas and New Year.  All being well, Maureen and I will be back in January, revived, refreshed and raring to roll.