It’s a difficult one this week, the blog.  The tech tsar is away, so I’m apologising in advance for my photos, which have been proving problematic over the last two or three weeks or so.  As one of my sisters-in-law pointed out they’ve gone from “minuscule to ginormous”, so she can only see the left half of them. In trying to solve the teeny-weeny problem, I seem to have created a monster…

I’ll have a bit of a fiddle to see if I can happen upon a solution but you may just have to bear with me for another week – and that includes the friend who got no photos at all.

With a bit of luck there’ll be some words but who knows if they’ll make any sense…

Probably not much at all since I’m starting off with a real blast from the past, to wit The Magic Roundabout.  I loved that programme, totally oblivious to the rumours about Dylan the rabbit and his alleged drug habit – “Far out, man” – and whatever Brian the snail and Zebedee got up to in their spare time, not forgetting Florence and Ermintrude and the rest of the crew.

It all started with a visit to the St Giles Hospice bookshop, to see if they had copies of a couple of books I was looking for.  They didn’t but of course I ended up buying a book and as I was mooching at the back of the shop I found something I never knew existed, a Magic Roundabout game.  It’s copyrighted 2016 but according to the blurb the game itself dates from the 1970s.  The programme started in 1963 and was a French/British co-production.  Dame Emma Thompson’s dad Eric wrote the English version and seems to have been responsible for the names and characters.  There were more than 500 showings, so no wonder even I remember it.

It’s about this stage that some people will be wondering if there’s going to be any golf anywhere and the answer, of course, oh ye of little faith, is yes.  As luck would have it I have a precious copy of Dougal’s Scottish holiday and he is taking his clubs with him on his trip back to his homeland; and here’s the picture to prove it.

The play, a Christmas special, was great fun but confirmed that I was no performer, even though all I had to do was crawl around on my knees trying to emulate Dougal channeling his inner Scrooge as he denounced Santa and refused to hang up his sock:  “Load of overpublicised rubbish, taking advantage of the poor consumers…”  He still sneaked out at the end of act one to hang up his sock.

Talking of the festive season, the LIV golfers who’ve been thinking that all their Christmases have come at once could be having second thoughts, not least because it seems highly unlikely that any of their events will be eligible for world ranking points and they’ll plummet down the standings at a rate of knots.  No doubt Greg will sue as well as rant, so the lawyers will be happy if nobody else.

Cameron Smith, the Open champion, is being touted as LIV’s next big signing – Norman was a hero of his and many other Australians growing up – but I can’t see the point.  Smith is already in the multi-million currency of choice seats and is made for life (expensive addictions permitting).  All he has to do is smile politely and sit tight, waiting until everything sorts itself out.  He doesn’t have to commit himself to anything, just chug along winning a few million here and there as he enjoys the best form of his life.  The noughts will come no matter what.

Ah well.  His choice.

The PGA Tour is making its debut in Wilmington, Delaware, President Biden’s home state, this week, an old and very successful stomping ground for Dame Laura Davies, who won there several times and her LPGA colleagues.  Prior to this week’s BMW Championship, Tiger Woods flew up from Florida for a summit meeting with other big names who have so far turned a deaf ear to the siren call of the Saudis.  No one was revealing much about what was discussed but Rory McIlroy said, “There was only one alpha in the room – and it wasn’t me.”

Tiger still rules OK.

I played golf at home on Tuesday and it was lovely to have some run on the ball – well, miles and miles of run – after the lush green fairways of Wentworth, which gave no help at all to those of us in need of it most.  Whittington looks like a golf course should look in the summer, especially a hot, dry, droughty summer.  I was in shock as I took short irons in to greens (they were green) that I usually try to reach with a rescue.  What’s more, on one or two occasions, I actually reached the green and found myself putting for what Dai always called birides.

It was a perennial typo harder to correct in the days of typewriters and Tippex; nowadays the computer fixes it for you, whether you like it or not!

Enough run to make powder-puff Patty feel like Laura D in her pomp and Spurs stealing a point at Stamford Bridge after being overrun by Chelsea for most of the game… Could life get any better?!

Sweden’s Anna Nordqvist is defending her AIG Women’s Open title this week at the home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (HCEG), otherwise known as Muirfield.  I count it as a home gig for the six-feet tall, triple-major winner who is defending the title she won in fine style last year just up the road at Carnoustie.

Anna is an honorary Scot having not long ago married her husband, Kevin McAlpine, who hails from Dundee.  Next week she is set to do it all again, this time with all the bells and whistles denied them at their first ceremony.  Retaining her Women’s Open title would surely be the icing on the top of a very tall cake at what promises to be a scintillating party.

Faithful readers of this blog (heavens, we’ve been going for over six years now!) will be aware that I’ve enjoyed an almost thirty-year relationship with the HCEG.  Across the decades we’ve had an annual match between my pals from tour days and the members who are the most hospitable and courteous hosts you could ever hope to meet.  Only four feet of snow and a global pandemic thwarted the playing of our matches in a handful of years but we have resumed them again and the competition, though perhaps not the skill level, is as keen as ever.

The majority of my Muirfield golf has been played in March and April and even in those months I always felt the infrastructure belonging to a major championship could just roll up and get started, such is the day-to-day quality and condition of the golf course.  The front nine follows an outer, clockwise circular route and then comes an inward nine, largely playing in a snaking, anti-clockwise direction.  The result is don’t bother turning up if you can’t learn to master several cross breezes and wind directions.

There is nothing “in-your-face” about Muirfield.  It is a delightfully understated course but disregard it at your peril.  It is a beguiling, teasing test, full of nuances and subtleties.  To win round here requires a great deal more than bomb-and-gouge, one-dimensional golf.  It requires nerve, shotmaking, tactical nous and short game skills.  This is why, by far, it’s my favourite course on the Open Championship rota – and this coming from a Portrush member!  Of one thing I’m certain – there’ll be a worthy winner crowned at the end of the week.

Normal life is beginning to pick up for me again (albeit slowly) after being struck down with Covid last November and last weekend I made my first solo trip for eight and a half months.  The occasion was the Dublin wedding of the son of a lifelong friend and it was strange to once again set foot in an airport, queue at security and deal with car hire – which always was the bane of my life.  To say I was apprehensive about the whole thing would be an understatement but all went well and it felt a little like getting back on a bicycle.

The bride, and her whole family, are keen golfers and members of Elm Park, one of Dublin’s, if not Ireland’s, foremost clubs, and I believe the father-of-the-bride has just become vice-captain of the club.  I have spent many happy times in Dublin playing in various tournaments at Elm Park and some of my great friends from past Irish golf teams are members there still – Mary McKenna, Ita Butler and Nano Brennan, to name but a few.  Now, that’d be a nice fourball if I ever get my toe back out on a golf course again!

I’ve been tuning in to a fair bit of the Commonwealth Games of late.  Alas, there is no golf to watch, which is perhaps something that can be rectified in the future now that we are back in the Olympic fold. Scheduling, though, would always be tricky bearing in mind how crowded the golf calendars, amateur and professional, have become.

The variety of sporting contests on show at the Games, however, is mesmerising and addictive.  It’s always refreshing to have the spotlight on any sport where the competition is full of honest endeavour and passion.  No sign here of very rich, entitled athletes becoming even richer by defeating fields with limited depths of talent.

This is proper sport – just as it is at Muirfield – and I’m looking forward to several exciting hours of compulsive viewing in front of the telly.

 

I’m missing out on two big events this week:  the AIG Women’s Open at Muirfield and Spurs’s first match of the season, at home to Southampton.  I’ll be able to keep an eye on both of them on the telly but it’s not quite the same as being there in person, soaking up the atmosphere and taking in the whole picture.

Muirfield looked fantastic from what I saw on a bright and breezy opening day and the scoring wasn’t bad either, as the world’s best women golfers got to grips with a course most of them had never played before.

No less a figure than Jack Nicklaus has the course at the very top of his list.  In the foreword to Norman Mair’s book to celebrate the club’s 250th anniversary in 1994, Nicklaus wrote:  “I liked Muirfield from the first day I played it [on his Walker Cup debut in 1959].  It is essentially a fair course – as far as golf is meant to be fair – and, as everyone knows, it has more definition than most of the links on which the Open is played.  What you see is what you get…

“I have always said that the Old Course at St Andrews is my favourite place in Britain to be playing golf because of its unique atmosphere, that feeling of history all about you.  But Muirfield is my favourite course, to me the best on the Open championship rota.”

I’m not sure how long the rounds took yesterday – the women professionals are at least as slow as their male counterparts – but Muirfield members are used to galloping round, playing foursomes properly or speedy singles and expecting to get in two rounds – and lunch – even on short winter days.  I remember playing there once (foursomes), many moons ago, when I was younger, fitter and a better player and two figures zoomed up out of the gloom, played through and dematerialised like golfing ghosts; we never saw them again!

Anyway, most of us are getting slower, much, much slower; just when and why did a 3-hour round become a thing of the past?  Forget 2-hour rounds, they’re now the stuff of legend and determined record setting.  The other day, on our ladies’ captain’s stayaway at Mottram Hall in Cheshire, I produced a ball marker that caught the eye of one of my playing partners.  “Is it biblical?” she asked, not sounding too convinced.

“No,” I said.  “It’s the time the LGU [Ladies’ Golf Union, now defunct] recommended a round should take, some time ago.”

Shamefully, many of the rounds I play these days take more than four hours.  I suppose we’ve just fallen into bad habits:  fiddling around with head covers; waiting until everybody’s ready before moving on; searching for glasses to fill in the scorecard; using a measuring device for a 50-yard shot on our home course; parking the trolley in the wrong place; and generally faffing about.  We’re also older and slower but it’s arguable that the youngsters are even more glacial.

On an historical note, I usually have at least four markers in my pocket – thanks to the incomparable Linda Bayman, which will undoubtedly come as a surprise to her.  It was the British (amateur, matchplay, women/ladies; don’t ask me what it’s called now) at Burnham and Berrow and Linda had led the qualifiers.  At one point in her first match, she was asked to mark her ball and she took ages to retrieve a marker from her pocket – I think it was raining, which made matters worse.  Her opponent’s supporters started muttering and it was clear they thought this was some sort of ploy, a piece of gameswomanship by an experienced old hand.  It wasn’t.  But I’ve never forgotten it and from that moment on I’ve overloaded my pocket with markers.

My markers and I played Prestbury on Monday, on a glorious day and we were the last visitors before they embark on a big revamp, with the bunkers in line for a major overhaul.  The diggers were gearing up and moving into position; it felt just like home!  Only hillier.  And quirkier.

Walking Prestbury on a regular basis mightn’t equip you for a career in badminton or rugby 7s but you surely wouldn’t need any rocking at night.    Even just watching the Commonwealth Games badminton at the NEC (Scotland beat The Maldives 5-0 in the mixed team event – women’s and men’s singles, women’s and men’s doubles and mixed doubles) and the 7s in Coventry (various teams running their socks off, from Australia to England to Fiji to South Africa to Kenya to Sri Lanka to Uganda – posture to die for, Esther would be delighted) was exhausting.

It’s the T20 cricket at Edgbaston that has taken priority over Muirfield and the mighty Spurs this weekend because a Commonwealth Games on your own patch is a rare beast, not to be missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was pondering the other day just what it is that makes watching sport so compelling for us all, the majority of whom have neither the time nor the talent to be actively engaged in it to any great degree.  This train of thought, of course, has been driven by the arrival of a new kid on the block in the world of golf, namely the LIV Golf Invitational series.

This week sees the playing of the third event in an opening series of eight tournaments and, so far, golf nerd though I am, I can summon up not a jot of enthusiasm for logging on to watch the action.  I did tune in to see just who would win the obscene amount of money in the first event (Charl Schwartzel and $4million) but the whole spectacle failed to ignite any real interest.  And I wondered why?

For the moment, if we can, let’s park the whole moral, sportswashing, human rights issues’ conundrum that has everyone taking entrenched positions.  After all, there is hardly any sport or global business not intricately bound up with some regime or country that has questionable human rights records.

Just what elements does sport need to contain to engage us, capture our undivided attention and mean we clear the diary of everything else?

I have realised that, for me, friendly matches don’t cut it.  Football friendlies, warm-up rugby matches and the like, even when it’s “my” team, are only useful/of interest to me as a fan as a barometer of where said team might be performance-wise at a given time.  It’s a practice for the real thing.  I am only interested in how we perform when it really matters.  That’s an important phrase – “when it really matters” – and is critical to this fan’s enjoyment.  The contest has to mean something.  It’s the difference between a pre-season friendly and a cup tie.

There is also something massively tribal about sport and it’s embedded in our DNA as far back as gladiatorial times in ancient Rome.  The thumbs up or down from the emperor would either spare a man’s life, or not, so the consequences for failure or under-performing were dire.  Sport stirs something in us that harks back to those times from centuries past.  It allows us to enjoy conflict in a controlled and more civilised manner (one hopes) than in the Coliseum, containing as it does a raft of rules within a set format.

We like to see a team or individual pitted one against the other, pushed to their limits of skill, guile and endurance.  We see the people and teams we support as part of our tribe and we passionately identify with them through their success and failure.  I know several footie fans who, in years gone by, have retired to bed for several hours or days, pulling the covers up and shutting out the world, completely devastated by a defeat to a rival.  As Bill Shankly, legendary manager of Liverpool FC famously said,  “Some people think football is a matter of life and death.  I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

An individual pursuit like golf, which sometimes seems pedestrian and slow moving in comparison to other energetic, rapid-fire, team sports often jostles unsuccessfully for column inches, soundbites and notice.  However, every other year, it positively explodes in popularity and global reach when the Ryder Cup and the Solheim Cup matches are played.  We see the best from Europe and the USA pitted against each other in fierce rivalry and this platform of sport at its most pure produces the most remarkable, unforgettable shotmaking skills under the severest pressure.

That’s because the players are playing for so much more than themselves and simple remuneration.  We, the fans, can sense it.  They are playing passionately for their tribe with every fibre of their being and they frequently can raise their games to unprecedented levels in the adrenalin-filled cauldron of gladiatorial competition.  This is the arena in which legends and legacies are formed and the evidence thereof is enshrined in the archives of our sport.

The majors are another arena in which an individual can shine in golf.  It’s an opportunity for a sportsperson to cement his/her name in the annals of the game and have great performances recorded for posterity and spoken of down the decades.  That’s why they are the most watched and most eagerly awaited individual championships of the year for the fans.  It takes something special to win a major.

So, in sport it’s quite obviously not the prize money on offer nor the amount a person is paid contractually that drives fan interest.  It’s so much more complicated than that and unless the LIV Golf model can capture the elusive criteria required it’s unlikely its business model will generate the interest and support needed to succeed.  They say their new format “has been designed with fans as the #1 priority”.

If they fail to understand and capture the essence of sport, this fan, for one, will not be watching.