Did you catch any of the final day’s play on the Old Course last Sunday?  It was the denouement of the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship and while I was delighted that Frenchman Victor Perez procured his maiden professional win it was the pro-am team competition that really captured the imagination.  The McIlroys, Rory and Dad Gerry, were in hot pursuit of Tommy Fleetwood and his amateur partner Ogden Phipps who set the clubhouse lead at 39 under par.  Rory finished with six consecutive birdies, finally providing the support to Gerry’s stellar play, to tie the leaders.  Family McIlroy had to settle for second, however, as the tiebreak was decided by the better professional score and Tommy had finished at 19 under to Rory’s 15.

Still, it was a lovely 60th birthday present for Gerry.  My interest was piqued, however, when Sky Sports’ Tim Barter asked Rory if the duo would play next year for Gerry’s 61st birthday.  “I don’t have any real ambition to play again.  I’m happy enough with what we’ve done,” came the reply.

I found that a little puzzling until I read later of the Ulsterman’s criticism of the European Tour course set-ups as being too easy.  He stated:  “…if the European Tour want to put forth a really good product the golf courses and set-ups need to be tougher.”  He added:  “There are no penalties for bad shots” and “I don’t feel like good golf is regarded as well as it could be.”  He summed up his frustrations with this:  “I’m honestly sick of coming back over to the European Tour, shooting 15 under par and finishing 30th.”

Well said, Rory!  But I’d go further.  It’s not the set-up of the courses that needs to change first.  Rather, it’s time for a serious reining in of the equipment and time, I think, for a tournament ball for professional play.  That’d be a good start.  Why can’t each manufacturing company be charged with producing a ball that is defined by rigorous conditions which would primarily limit distance?  That way the great courses can still be played as their designers intended without the need for adding ridiculous length.

It’s the prodigious distances that the modern professional hits the ball and the fact that many tournament venues require nothing more than a 9-iron second shot at par 4s that make many of the tests too easy.  The artificial “tricking up” of some of our great venues, purely to increase the difficulties for the professionals, is not the answer.

So, that leads us to a word much reviled by the powers-that-be – bifurcation.  This would mean accepting two sets of rules, one for the pros and one for the amateurs.  Allow the amateurs to take advantage of all the technological advances there are with clubs and balls – but not the professionals.  The advancement of today’s equipment makes it difficult for the really top players to separate themselves from the pack.

The supreme skills required to be a really good long-iron player or to have the ability to move the ball both ways are dying out due to the test the pros face on a weekly basis.  The current recipe for success is hit it as hard and far as you can, be a good wedge player and have a good short game.  That’s fine, but what happened to the skills of playing mid- and long-irons into par 4s and sometimes from straggly rough that gives the player a sporting chance?  More searching than bomb-and-gouge from ankle deep stuff.

Strategy will play a bigger part too.  The modern game is becoming boring to watch and rounds are taking forever, not least because of the courses being stretched to their limits.  Rein back the equipment, limit the ball and the skills required will subtly alter, making the sport multi-dimensional and watchable again and our great courses will remain relevant.  Bifurcation is not a dirty word, it’s a beautiful word.

Changing tack slightly, my great pal Mary McKenna and I were guests of Mo Richmond at her Ladies’ Captain’s Day and Dinner last week at Royal Liverpool.  I didn’t realise that they had actually partnered each other in Curtis Cup foursomes many moons ago but I always knew they were two of the best amateurs that these islands have ever produced.  They could each have made a success in the professional ranks but chose to follow other career paths and, according to them both, without any regrets whatsoever.

We were royally entertained and had a lovely evening swapping golfing stories and experiences with a very vibrant, jolly membership, some of whom we’d known for decades and some of whom we met for the first time that evening.  I think I speak for everyone present when I say we could listen all night to Mary Mc, whose passion for the game is undimmed.  These get-togethers are to be treasured and once again I found myself silently sending thanks to Mum and Dad for introducing me to the greatest game of all.

I’ve been so distracted this week that it was two days before I realised that Spurs, the team I’ve supported for more than 50 years, had been thrashed 7-2 at home by Bayern Munich on Tuesday.  At this rate we’ll be out of Europe well before Brexit.  We’ve been showing signs of a disturbing disintegration recently and I knew that there was something seriously wrong when my Arsenal-supporting neighbour said cheerily, “What about that Spurs result then?”

I made some sort of knowing grimace and scuttled back inside to look after my visitors, thinking, “Oh dear [or similar], we must have got tonked 4-nil or something……..I’ll check the result tomorrow morning……”

My visitors were two old schoolfriends who aren’t sports tragics and since one of them had travelled all the way from Perth in Australia, you can understand why there was a bit of a results blackout as the three of us set about catching up on the past 50-odd years.

 

Tricia and I were very impressed because Alison, who now lives in Essex and is a member of a running group, was out the door at half past seven every morning to go for a run round the park.  We weren’t tempted to join her.  We settled for a leisurely cup of tea.

After leaving my guests at the station yesterday morning – they were heading up to Durham to visit another old schoolfriend – I went to tai chi, then called in at the golf club to watch Ireland beat Russia in Kobe and see if I could spot anyone I knew in the crowd.  Several friends have travelled out to Japan for the Rugby World Cup, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility to spot them.  At least we won and got a bonus point (for scoring four tries), to recover, at least partially, from Japan beating us impressively in our last match.

On reflection, my teams aren’t on the best of runs at the moment but at least that result ignited the tournament.  (Is that an example of the latter half of my old school house motto:  Modest in victory, cheerful in defeat?!)

Talking of defeat, GB and I’s PGA Cup team lost to the USA at Barton Creek Resort in Austin, Texas, last weekend, having raised hopes of a famous victory by leading 10-6 going into the singles.  The Americans came roaring back and won the final session 8-2 to regain the Llandudno International Trophy and prevent a GB and I hat trick of wins.

It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that it was 20 years since the Americans, captained by Ben Crenshaw, a proud Texan, engineered their famous comeback from a similar deficit in the Ryder Cup at Brookline.  There was, I hope, no repeat of the more infamous, premature, invasion of the 17th green by the American team when Justin Leonard holed his monster putt against Jose Maria Olazabal.  If there was anyone who might have followed Leonard in, it was Olly but he had to wait so long for the green to clear that even he hadn’t the remotest hope of holing his 20 footer.

You could write a book about Brookline – in fact several people have – and the last day alone provided enough material for a library of theses on sporting conflict, team unity, the art of captaincy, crowd control…..You name it, Brookline had it.  The next Ryder Cup, at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, in a year’s time, will be – well, who knows what it will be?  Competitive; feisty; contentious; noisy; close?  Probably all those things.  Everything but dull.  The respective captains are Padraig Harrington for Europe and Steve Stricker for the United States and it would be hard to meet two more civilised souls or two fiercer competitors.

Eventually, there’ll be books of course and Harrington’s will undoubtedly run to several volumes, one for every press conference.  They’re probably just finishing the transcript of the captains’ get-together on Tuesday.  Like many of us Irish, Padraig is a bit of a talker and it’s fair to say that his mind moves in mysterious ways.  Baffling sometimes but never dull.  It should be an interesting and entertaining 12 months.

To finish on a positive note after the unpredictable nature of recent results,  Ireland won the Women’s Senior Home Internationals by the narrowest of margins on the sainted, if rain-soaked turf of Rosses Point.  The home team halved their match with England on the last day, so they had 2 1/2 points each, having both beaten Scotland and Wales.  The Irish just shaded it on count back 12-11.  The weather wasn’t at its most benign, so there were no foursomes on the second and third days of the matches, just five singles.  Well done to all the teams and hearty congrats to captain Valerie Hassett and the women in green.

The old joke is that if you can’t see Ben Bulben when you’re playing Rosses Point (aka Co. Sligo GC), it’s raining and if you can see the mountain, it’s about to rain.  Mary McKenna managed this great photo despite what the R and A website described as “adverse weather”.

 

 

 

 

 

I know I’m getting older – along with everyone else – and time is rattling past a darned sight quicker than a Solheim Cup fourball but I can’t believe it’s already two weeks since Europe’s teetering-on-the-edge win in Perthshire.   Suzann Pettersen’s clubs will probably be on eBay by now, Charley Hull has got married – congratulations to Mr and Mrs Smith, wishing you every happiness – and everyone else has scattered far and wide, clubs in tow, airlines permitting, swinging away wherever they can find a fairway.

All the people involved will remember the great last gasp at Gleneagles for as long as they have a memory but it’s already being consigned to history as golf moves on, the Rugby World Cup attempts to muscle in on football’s dominance and apparently there’s a lot happening at Westminster, involving Supreme Court rulings a lot more calm, considered and impressive (unanimous even) than the unedifying cat-calling – and worse – on the floor of the House of Commons.  Just because rugby’s become obsessed with big hits do the rest of us have to spend our time being unremittingly confrontational?  I still talk far too much but I’m trying to listen more – honest – and learn what’s behind  any apparently nonsensical, indefensible opinion……Going well so far….

Nelly Korda, who was one of the US stars of the show at Gleneagles, along with her big sister Jessica, moved on to the Continent where she won the Lacoste Ladies Open de France at Golf du Medoc, near Bordeaux, by a whopping eight shots from Celine Boutier, the Frenchwoman who won all four of her matches on her Solheim debut at Gleneagles.  Korda won 48,750 Euro and Boutier 29,250, so bear in mind that not all golfers are being showered with gold.  Of course, if they got their weight in wine as well, that’s not to be sneezed at, even if the winner is a slim Jim.  Useful for presents if the players are teetotallers themselves.

It’s back to business this week for Catriona Matthew, Europe’s Solheim Cup captain, whose post-victory interviews included an appearance on Woman’s Hour, where she coped womanfully and diplomatically with Dame Jenni Murray’s obvious disinterest in golf.  Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.  Catriona usually presents a quiet, calm, reserved face to the world but she has passion and competitive fire in abundance and even she couldn’t hide that as her team pulled off an incredible win on her home turf.

I hope she’ll be in charge again at Inverness in Ohio in 2021 and I hope Juli Inkster, captain of the USA for the last three matches, will stick to her decision to stand down.  She’s been terrific, winning twice and losing narrowly in Scotland but she has the sense to know when enough is enough and it’s time to train up her successor.

Let’s also hope that Tiger Woods has enough sense to ignore the siren voices that are encouraging him to be a playing captain at this year’s Presidents Cup in Melbourne.  Surely no captain in their right mind would pick Tiger, the reigning Masters champion admittedly but a man with a body so broken that even his iron will couldn’t guarantee it would stand up to the rigours of team matchplay.  If he adds himself to the team roster, he’ll be handicapping himself as a player and a captain and confirming that the whole thing is just an expensive exercise in – well, in nothing whatsoever.  Tiger was once unbeatable, the superman of swing but those days are gone and he should concentrate on being a super skipper, non-playing.

Inkster and Woods may – or more likely may not – be heartened to learn that the USA mangled Europe at Whittington Heath last Saturday, on Ladies’ President’s Day (there should be enough apostrophes there to satisfy Lynne Truss, author of the best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves and confuse any greengrocers still taking on the supermarket’s*).  It was a bit odd waving the Stars and Stripes and shouting USA, USA, USA instead of Ole, Ole, Ole but my partner and I tried our damnedest, played well and won a golf ball.  Well, two golf balls – one each.  And we were a long way from winning the bucket and spade awarded to the player who was in the most bunkers.

A few days later, after a month’s rain in ten minutes, or some such statistic, we played a Texas scramble at Drayton Park GC in Tamworth and the bunkers, oh happy day, were out of play because most of them were flooded.  The course itself had coped remarkably well and we didn’t come off mud up to the eyeballs.  We all came off dry, smiling and feeling we’d played nicely but we didn’t come within a sniff of a prize.  It was a shotgun start but none of us heard the shotgun (or the hooter or whatever was meant to let us off the leash) – water in the works perhaps.  One of the rules was that the person whose drive was chosen could not hit the second shot, so it meant that you had to think about where you wanted to use your big bombers – if you were lucky enough to have any.  It was designed to give the shorter hitters a chance and had the added advantage of speeding up play.  Another great day.

Finally, please give a cheer for the club professionals who will be having their nerves shredded in the PGA Cup in Austin, Texas this weekend.  GB and I are going for a hat trick of wins against the USA and the visiting captain Cameron Clark is from Moor Hall GC in Sutton Coldfield, just a few miles from where I’m writing this.  Cameron was playing in 2015 when GB and I won in California and he was a vice captain at Foxhills in Surrey two years ago.  He and his team are now used to winning and the Americans are so worried that they called in Austin native Ben Crenshaw, twice the Masters champion and the winning Ryder Cup captain at Brookline, to rally the troops.

 

*Is this a deliberate mistake, a shameless smart Aleck’s idea of joke or is it just a weary error, missed by an editor longing for her bed?

 

I’ve been suffering from stress this week, first-world stress admittedly but stress nonetheless.  My home insurance is up for renewal and I’m not happy with the supposedly sainted John Lewis, my current insurers, Which? recommended no less – if I’ve understood all the small print correctly, which is far from guaranteed.

The flooring in the lounge, the supposedly sainted Karndean, is rippling like the ocean wave, making me feel like Captain Pugwash and visitors who aren’t great sailors decidedly queasy.  Even copious amounts of ginger tea – good for settling landlubber tummies – haven’t helped.  There’s no getting away from it:  the floor will have to come up and that means clearing out all my stuff, a prospect to make the strongest heart quail.  My insurers?  Not interested.  Badly done; not their problem……Oh.  What’s the point of having them then?  Aren’t they there to help in times of need?…….

What’s more, according to the local broker I spoke to – face to face, hooray – if I’ve had a claim turned down, which I have, that puts me in bad odour (I paraphrase) with potential future insurers.  Oops.  Discussing the options with the broker made my head spin and when he asked me – an ageing old doll admittedly but one who’d told him that she owned a laptop, an iPad and, heaven help us, a smart phone – if I did email, that did it.  I took several deep breaths, I tried to remain calm, I eventually replied civilly in the affirmative – and then I snapped.  And took him to task.  He looked baffled.  He had no idea what he’d done, why I was taking umbrage.  He’s probably still baffled.  But if he isn’t, he’ll be a better broker.

Then, the next day, I heard the sad news that Bev Lewis had died, at the age of 71 and my insurance woes were put in their proper place, off the stress list altogether.  Bev, in her quiet, unassuming way, was a pioneer who represented all that’s good about golf, an Essex girl who gave the county a good name, not remotely showy or bombastic but staunch and steadfast, kind and patient, reliable and thoughtful, funny and passionate.  She was the girl who started on the local pitch and putt course and became the first woman to be captain of the PGA, familiar with places like Augusta National.  She bought her first driver from a junk shop; played her first round of golf in open-toed sandals; won the Essex Championship at her first attempt; turned professional as a founder member of the WPGA (now the LET); became its chairman; won a couple of times; became a coach (a PGA Master Professional), a broadcaster, a writer, an after-dinner speaker and a referee.

She wrote the foreword for Dai’s and my version of Teach Yourself Golf and said, “The image of golf is that it’s for the rich, an elitist sport and it just is not.  You know what Ken [her husband] and I see all around us in golf?  We see people having fun, so much fun and that’s what golf can be for everyone.”

Ask people about Bev and they use words like welcoming, helpful, encouraging, generous……Alan Walker, a good friend and himself a captain of the PGA, said, “I will remember her as a beacon for all that is good in a person – someone who always did the right thing, acted with courtesy, humility and professionalism and her enthusiasm for golf and life was overwhelming.  We have lost a beautiful person.”

Our hearts go out to Ken and all Bev’s family and friends.

I’ve come to the conclusion that at times like this the best we can do is enjoy our lives, cherish our family and friends  and do our best to live life to the full.  That might mean sitting in the garden watching the butterflies on the buddleia,  trekking in the Himalayas, hitting Las Vegas or helping out at the local food bank – or all of those things.  Who knows?

Yesterday I played in Whittington Heath’s Captains’ Charity AmAm, in support of Newlife, the charity for disabled children.  It was a beautiful, slightly chilly, breezy morning, the company was good, the golf was pretty good and despite a couple of dodgy holes we ended with 90 points, spot on for the format – two scores to count from four, 90 per cent of handicap, men off the white logs, women off the red with two shots added to their handicap because we’re using the men’s stroke index.  The non-golfers will have left already!  One of the game’s many authorities has an iron rule of thumb for this format:  you’ve got to average five points a hole to have a chance.

Well, we were out early and led for quite a time but in the end we were pipped by a four who finished with what can only be described as an unbelievably theatrical flourish.  The 18th, for reasons that include a new bunker that is destined for another hole, is now a par 5 for the men as well as the women and the winners surged to the top of the leaderboard with an outrageous NINE points on that one, crucial hole.  An eagle 3 and a birdie 4 by guys who both had shots did the job and we were relegated to the runners-up spot by a single point.  Hey ho.

Probably the worst part of my round was losing a precious commodity, a relative rarity – in this country at least.  Bearing in mind the prestigious occasion and the stellar company, I opted to play a new ball and chose one of the Honmas I’d been given at the AGW dinner at Portrush.  Honma’s the Japanese company with a mole in the logo and they make exceedingly expensive clubs – Justin Rose is one of their men – as well as balls.  I was three quarters hoping that the balls were also exceedingly expensive, maybe two or three times more than other balls but that doesn’t seem to be the case, although our pro’s shop doesn’t stock them.  So I just lost a ball, not the crown jewels, when I skited mine off the 7th tee into the ferns in front of my nose.

Our 7th is a longish par 3 and there are bunkers to carry if you’re to make the green.  Mostly I have to take my driver, assiduous gym work notwithstanding and yesterday there was a strong breeze against.  My last swing thought was “I could do with Jordan here” as I attempted my version of a long-drive launch and hurtled the ball off the heel into oblivion.  So much for delusions of distance.

Fortunately, Jordan Brooks, our long drive maestro, did a bit better at the latest World Championship in America and finished third.  He really is world-class.