Thank God for women’s professional golf and France’s Celine Boutier who sails serenely on and who delighted us with her skill and sportsmanship as she annexed the Freed Group Women’s Scottish Open Presented by Trust Golf to her résumé last Sunday, her second title in as many weeks.  She is an oasis of calm and a welcome relief from the turbulent, choppy waters of men’s professional golf which seems intent on killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

This week the PGA Tour announced its 2024 schedule dressing up its events with fancy names.  The calendar of events contains eight “signature events” with a first prize of $4 million dollars.  Very nice, you say.  Well, yes – if you can get in to them.  These bumper rich fields will only allow between 70 and 80 players, as opposed to the 144 or 156 players who can currently tee it up in a full-field event.  And, five of these eight tournaments will have NO CUT!

And guess what!  All that lovely money, which even the last player will earn, counts towards helping that player get into the next “signature event”.  There will be increasingly limited opportunities (an oxymoron if ever I heard one!) for those outside the top eighty or so to break into these events.  Sounds very much like jobs for the boys and very soon it’ll be a bloomin’ sight harder to drop out of the top eighty that it is to break into it.

Does this small field, no-cut, everyone-gets-paid model sound familiar to you?  It’s what the PGA Tour railed against and dissed last year as they fought to overcome the threat of LIV golf.  Ah well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

The tour claims that the fans (that’s you and me) will welcome the fact there is no cut as there is no risk of some of the world’s best having departed the weekend on their private jets.  Just what planet are they on?  Sport is all about competitiveness and jeopardy and the quality of your play having some consequence and meaning.  Despite what the tour thinks I’m sure most golf fans feel that way.  So, no, I for one HATE the no-cut, small-field syndrome.  It’s a disease that, once allowed to take hold in multiple events, will spread like a cancer.

Anything that stifles competition is bad and it is totally unacceptable that you can be in the top 150 or so of your profession and have limited playing opportunities.

I could go on.

I will, in fact, go on.  The same PGA tour has decided they will not back the proposal from the two world governing bodies, the R&A and the USGA, to limit the distance the ball can travel.  This would not apply to the ordinary golfer like you and me – just the elite player.  But no.  It doesn’t seem to matter that golf courses have to be stretched to around the 8000 yard mark, with the attendant operating costs, to provide a decent modern test for the pros.  The equipment available outstripped the courses many moons ago and yet the tour doesn’t want to upset their players just at the time they’re having to court them after their dismal volte face as regards the LIV problem. The endless five hour plus rounds look set to continue and even expand.

The PGA tour is nothing without its players and they are increasingly pampering them to keep them on board.  They mustn’t be upset at all costs.

I’m upset.  I’m upset that a major part of the game I’ve loved for so long is going down the tubes – and all for greed.

I’m now going to go and pour myself a strong gin and tonic and watch the AIG Women’s Open from the wonderful Walton Heath.

Now, can Celine pull off a hatrick of titles?

 

 

 

Usually, when a player has won a tournament, we’re given a complete rundown of what clubs they have in the bag – Callaway, Ping, Titleist, Taylormade, Yonex, Cleveland, Wilson, Cobra, Srixon, whatever.  Lie, loft, shaft, all that stuff.  As a serial non-winner, I’m not often asked what my weapons of choice are and it wouldn’t be my specialist subject on Mastermind.

However, sitting at the computer with the clubs safely tucked up in the locker a few miles away, I can exclusively reveal that my driver is a Taylormade several iterations old, 10.5 degrees of loft; two up-to-date Ping ‘woods’; four Ping irons (I’ve forgotten the number, 426?); a SeeMore putter, specially fitted to suit my singular stroke.  (In my defence, surely every golfer’s putting stroke is singular, unique to them?)

Playing in the frolics last Friday I noticed that my clubs were a little grubby and since I was playing away the next day, in a needle match against one of the nephews and his dad, I took them home to give them a good clean.  And then I had a lightbulb moment.

Ever since a wonderful game at Birkdale a few weeks ago, I’d been mourning the loss of one of my headcovers, a classy leather number from Walton Heath.  I presumed I’d dropped it on the golf course but nobody in the groups behind us had found it and sadly, no one ever handed it in.  Mulling it over, I thought that not just disappointing but a little odd – although a visitor could have put in their bag and forgotten all about it.  Ah well, one of life’s little mysteries.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps the headcover wasn’t lost at all, perhaps it had been with me all the time.  I emptied out all the pockets, ran the rule over my assortment of tees and markers and some rather grubby balls, found something mummified that turned out to be a very, very old banana skin, tipped the bag upside down and shook it very hard.

And lo, out it fell, my long-lost cover, which had spent several weeks stuffed snugly at the bottom of the golf bag.  Eureka.

Walton Heath will be in the golfing news next week when it hosts the AIG Women’s Open and the players are in for a treat of a test.  Let’s hope they remember that heather always wins (don’t be greedy and think you can do anything but play safe) and let’s pray for some decent weather.  Next year the championship will be held at St Andrews (the Old Course), so it’s going from the sublime to the sublime.

As the regular reader knows, the Rules aren’t my strong point, so I had to seek clarification from an expert when a friend outlined the following scenario:  Playing the 5th at WHGC, with its elevated green, she couldn’t quite see where her ball had finished, so she gets up the hill, sees a ball, assumes it’s hers, plays it and then one of her playing partner says, “This is your ball, over here, on the green.”  Oops.

Turns out it was a random ball, from who knows where and didn’t belong to any of the threesome playing the hole.  How to proceed?  How many penalty shots?

Rule 6.3c is what you need.  Each player is responsible for identifying their own ball before playing a shot, so you ignore the shot with the wrong ball, play the correct ball and add a penalty of two shots.  Simple.  That the wrong ball was random and didn’t belong to any of the group is irrelevant. A red herring.

No doubt you’re wondering how the match with the nephew panned out.  I was playing with his father-in-law and we always struggle to keep our ultra-competitive opponents at bay despite being the better golfers…Nephew Robbie doesn’t play much, a few times a year but he hits the ball miles, quite often in the right direction and is capable of racking up more than his fair share of pars, with his dad chipping in now and again.

That makes the handicapping tricky but I solved that conundrum by appointing myself sole arbiter of strokes, deciding on Robbie’s allocation on the basis of where his drive ended up.  Admittedly, it meant that I was highly unlikely to be on the losing side and so it proved, though as usual it was a close contest, fiercely fought.  We shook hands on the 16th, honour intact…

This week, in between showers and downpours, I made a concerted effort to tackle my pots and loaded up numerous bags with soil and rubble for the journey to the tip.  Who needs weights or a gym?  I’ll soon be stronger than I’ve been for years, which should help my golf no end – once the aches and pains fade into nothingness.

Sue Spencer, of Whittington and Sally Sketcher, of Trentham, got a mention in dispatches last week for winning the Brenda King Foursomes at Royal St David’s but I didn’t have a photo to mark their triumph, so here they are with the spoils of victory.  It’s not a bad backdrop.

 

 

The regular reader (many thanks for your perseverance and support) will have realised by now that I’m a sad soul  – but I’m quite happy with that.  For instance, the other day at Hoylake, aka Royal Liverpool, I spent several happy minutes watching people trying to sink a putt (best of three) along a humpback length of matting.  If they sank one, they’d win a golf ball (a Titleist proV1 admittedly) and be entered in a draw to win a Scotty Cameron putter.  Men, women and children were lining up to have a go.  Some came close but no one holed out while I was watching.  We all had fun, though.

That was on Wednesday and the place was packed but it was a glorious afternoon, absolutely perfect for wandering around, checking out the new and already dreaded 17th in relatively benign, sunny conditions.  “It’s 130 yards and they’re scared of it,” Sir Nick Faldo said.  Mind you, even he, three times winner of the Open, admitted that he was glad he didn’t have to play it.

When I played the little fecker (the 15th in the normal scheme of things), it was blowing a hooley and I knew I hadn’t a hope in hell.  I hit quite a good shot, some sort of finagled rescue but it went over the back into a ghastly sandy wasteland and I thinned my next effort into one of the front bunkers.  The ball eventually re-emerged in my hot little hand.  Nul points.  Who knows what carnage it’ll cause this week.

 

The sainted Rory (don’t worry I know he’s only human and fortunately he still seems to be well aware of that too) was playing with Tyrrell Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland and they were followed by quite a horde.  One young man who’d manoeuvred himself into a good spot close to the action told his mates, “I’m going to shout out my undying love for him (Rory).”  They didn’t give him any stick or laugh,  just nodded.

On Sunday, Rory had pipped home hope Bob MacIntyre to the Genesis Scottish Open title in a thrilling finish at the Renaissance Club, near North Berwick.  The left-handed Scot from Oban had set the target thanks to a brilliant birdie at the difficult 18th but the Ulsterman grabbed the spoils with two cracking iron shots at the 17th and 18th and two birdie putts.  It was his first win in Scotland as a professional.  Hope it doesn’t scupper his chances of winning at Hoylake…

Here in Lichfield on Sunday night we celebrated Rory’s victory with a spectacular fireworks display.  Well, officially it was to mark the end of the Lichfield Festival, nearly a fortnight of performances of all sorts.  It’s a great opportunity to widen your musical horizons and on Sunday two of us took the chance to watch and listen to Hsuan Wu, a young percussionist from Taiwan.  She graduated with distinction from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and is already a seasoned collaborator, exploring not just music but dance and drama.  She wowed us and baffled us in equal measure.  Quite amazing.

It was a very busy sporting Sunday and I scuttled home from the concert to watch the Wimbledon final, keep an eye on the golf and cricket and the Tour de France, not an easy task, hence the g and t, in a Singapore sling glass from Raffles Hotel, unbroken after all these years.

This was the last week of term for our singing class and I, who can ill afford to do so, had missed several sessions because of my gallivanting,   Should I just knock it all on the head or take a deep breath and dive back in?  I dived back in.

It was great fun, even though we started with a piece I’d never done:  Thank You For Being A Friend.  Lovely song but blooming complicated and I didn’t make much of a fist of it.  What’s more, we finished with Abba’s Thank You For The Music, which is also too hard for me and makes me laugh when we get to this line:-

“I have a talent a wonderful thing ’cause everyone listens when I start to sing…”

All I have is visions of rooms clearing in seconds as people rush for the exits…

Years ago our school music teacher – yes, we had one – wrote on my report:  “Shows no aptitude for this subject.”

Nothing much has changed and I’m just grateful to Helen, the boss, a soprano with perfect pitch, who keeps us in order, more or less and Clare, the pianist, who is beyond talented.  How they can tolerate such a musical incompetent is beyond me but I’ll see you next term.

It was well received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my nearly nieces (the nephew’s long-time partner but not yet married) made the mistake of asking me where I’d been on my travels, so I told her.  “Blimey,” she said, “you need a holiday to recover.  Time to relax.”

Suppose that’ll mean a few trips to the Horse and Jockey, whose hanging baskets are a blaze of colour (see above).

I was only away for two weeks but it seemed longer, perhaps because there was quite a lot of dotting about.  Train from Lichfield to Inverness; car to Dornoch for a few days there; bus to Inverness; coach to Glasgow; plane to Belfast International; car to Dublin; ferry to Holyhead; train to Chester; train from Whitchurch to Lichfield (via Wem and Crewe).

“That’s expensive,” the woman from the Woodland Trust (doing a promotional stint in Lichfield) said when I told her about the train to Inverness.  She has relatives in Perth and found the cost of taking her own family up to Scotland by train prohibitive.  A senior rail card helps a lot and I missed mine when I left it under the mattress at my friend’s in Dublin and had to do two journeys without it.

The dreaded online booking just requires you to indicate that you have a railcard but the inspector – they’re still using real people on the trains but who knows how long that will last, given the imminent disgraceful culling of  ticket offices – needs to see the card.  Of course, if you’re buying a new one, you’ll probably have to store it on your phone.  Heaven help me if I ever leave that under a mattress.

Even I, Luddite though I am, have got used, however reluctantly, to storing tickets on my phone –  footie, cricket, theatre, you name it.  I’ve still not quite cracked inputting my golf scores on my phone – the signal persists in cutting out at crucial moments, m’lord – so it’s just as well that I haven’t played many competitions recently.  My partner and I wimped out on Tuesday, very wisely, as it turned out – about half an hour after our tee time, the heavens opened and we’d have been washed away.  Thank goodness they have a couple of roofs at Wimbledon these days.  Some of the tennis has been spellbinding.

The Lichfield Festival is in its second week, so friends and I managed to squeeze in a couple of performances.  First up was Mick Doran, principal percussionist of the English National Opera orchestra, with his A-Z of Orchestral Triangle Playing.  It was a brilliant, classy performance, funny, informative and poignant and I’ll never underestimate the triangle again.  Look out for Mick at the Proms and elsewhere, though goodness knows where the ENO is going to end up.

The golf nerds out there will know that another of the world’s famous Mick Dorans is an outstanding caddy, who has won numerous tournaments, including Ryder Cups, working for Lee Westwood, Costantino Rocca, Justin Rose and Eddie Pepperell, to name just a few.  Look out for Mick at the Open at Hoylake.

Post triangle, we went to a concert featuring two musicians from Africa, one of whom, N’famady Kouyaté, from Guinea, is now based in Cardiff.  He plays the balafon, a traditional wooden xylophone and he didn’t have his band with him, just his phone to provide the accompaniment.  His balafon didn’t seem to cause him too much trouble, seemingly a relatively low maintenance instrument, fairly easily portable.

Gaspar Nali, from Malawi, had to do a bit more tweaking and wrestling and mopping of his brow.  He plays “a one-string home-made three-metre long Babatoni bass guitar with a stick and an empty beer bottle”.  He also plays a cow-skin kick drum and sings.  Quite amazing.  Not too many of us in the audience spoke Chichewa, so we hadn’t a clue what Gaspar was singing about because he didn’t give us a synopsis but it all sounded brilliant.  There was dancing by the end.

The Knife Angel is also in Lichfield this month, raising awareness of the horror of knife crime and the devastation it causes.  The huge, impressive statue, incorporating thousands of blades collected by police forces across the country, was created by sculptor Alfie Bradley at the British Ironwork Centre.  It’s an amazing place in Shropshire, on the A5, more or less opposite Oswestry Golf Club.  Read all about it – and more – at britishironworkcentre.co.uk.  Alfie also has his own website.

Better squeeze a bit of golf in, so many congratulations to Matteo Manassero on winning the Italian Challenge Open at Golf Nazionale in Viterbo.  It was the Italian’s second win on the Challenge Tour this season – his wife Francesca, a non-golfer, caddied for him both times – and marks a bit of a revival for the man who once took the European (now the DP World) Tour by storm.  Now 30, he had won his four main tour titles by the age of 20, the first in 2010 at the ago of 17 years and 188 days after an outstanding amateur career.  He’s still the youngest winner in tour history and has not lost hope of rejoining the top flight.

You can’t keep a good Italian down and it was great to see that Federica Dassu, who played on the tour with Mo and has been at the heart of Italian coaching for years, popped up at Woodhall Spa this week where the seniors, men and women, have been braving some wild weather.   Thanks to Sue Spencer for sending the pic of her and Feda (left).