The rumble of the Ryder Cup juggernaut is growing ever louder and by the time this blog is posted we will only be a handful of hours away from the opening tee shot being dispatched into the Wisconsin air.  Emotions will be high whether that first drive is taking place in a reverential, cathedral-like silence or in that first tee cauldron of noise so beloved by Bubba Watson.

It’s amazing, however, just where in sport you unexpectedly come across emotion that is as pure as anything found on the grandest stages of all.  Last Sunday I thought I’d tune into the final knockings of the European Tour’s Dutch Open which was being played at Bernadus Golf, Cromvoirt.  At the heels of the hunt it looked like a comfortable win for Sweden’s Kristoffer Broberg, but simply looking at the final scoreboard and seeing a three-shot victory doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of this particular story.

Broberg had won before on the European Tour – back in November 2015 – but had struggled in the intervening years with numerous injuries and surgeries and a spectacular lack of top ten finishes.  So it seemed like fairytale stuff when he took an eight-shot lead into the final round – and opened with a birdie.  That was probably his last comfortable moment for the next four hours.  That substantial lead ebbed and flowed, receding at one point to two measly shots as Broberg fought his game with an exterior, at least, that looked reasonably cool.

A priceless chip in from a sandy lie for a bogey and a crucial birdie on the penultimate hole meant that Broberg led by three shots going down the last.  What looked like a regulation par 5 to those of us watching on from home belied the enormity of this achievement and what it meant to the 35-year old Swede.

It all came out in his interview with Sky’s John Morgan.  Broberg  was Borg-like in answering the first couple of questions but at Morgan’s gentle probing as to what the last six years had been like for him, the floodgates opened and his inner state was revealed to us in all its gulping, can’t breathe or speak, rawness.

Here was someone in front of us who had literally given his all and the cool shell he had so carefully preserved for so long fell away.  He was unable to string a sentence together to tell us what the last six years had been like for him…..Finally, he managed to sob “six years of hell” as he stumbled off to the recorder’s office to check the scorecard through watery eyes.

He wasn’t the only one with watery eyes and I found myself uplifted by his triumphs over injury, circumstances, disappointments and set-backs.  What a privilege it is to share, in a small way, these wonderful moments in a person’s life, all through the medium of sport.

Watching the huge crowds of Dutch spectators and the lines of marshals all bedecked in their orange shirts took me back to my many happy times of playing in the Dutch Open.  The first time I played in the Netherlands we played at The Royal Hague golf course, a wonderful, slightly old-fashioned test that examined every part of your game.  I didn’t at that time have a regular caddy on tour (lack of funds, I suspect) but I was beginning to play quite well and decided I would ring ahead to the professional to organise a local caddy for myself.  The pro was an Englishman and he was kind enough to give me the lowdown on the course with particular reference to the subtleties of the greens.  He assured me he would sort out a caddy.

The Tuesday of tournament week I arrived at the course and decided on an evening nine holes to acquaint myself a little with both the layout and the caddy.  Imagine my surprise, then, when my caddy turned out to be a ten-year old boy!  Ah well, I thought, perhaps he’s the Junior Champion and off we set to the first tee.

Walking along the path to the opening hole I thought I’d better find out a few things about this lad.  The conversation went something like this:-

“So, are you a member here?”

“Oh, no.  I’m not a member here.”

“Ah, where are you a member?”

“I’m not a member anywhere.”

“Oh, right.  You’re not a member.  I expect you’ve played here a lot, though?”  I was basing this on the fact that I was sure the pro had sourced someone who would be a whizz at reading these subtle greens.

“No, no I haven’t.”

With mounting alarm I ploughed on.

“Ah.  Where DO you play?

“I don’t play.”

At this point I took a few deep breaths and reminded myself that some of the best caddies I had ever encountered were the girl caddies in Asia and none of them actually played the game.  It was time for the most critical question of all.

“Well, I expect you know the course well?”

At this point, with the insouciance of youth, he delivered a line that rendered me speechless and that I’ve never forgotten to this day.

“No, I don’t,” he said.  “But don’t worry – there’s no need.  All the holes are numbered!”

 

Footnote:  I changed my caddy and only finished runner-up in the tournament.  Who knows what would have happened if I’d stuck with the pro’s choice!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The great thing about writing a blog, especially when it’s a self-indulgent exercise like this one, is that you can write about whatever you like, absolutely anything that takes your fancy.  You’d like it to take your reader’s fancy too but if they’re a friend and signed up for the long haul, that’s not vital.  They’ll skim through, raise their eyes to heaven and hope for something better next time.  If there’s a snort, a laugh, an expletive along the way, so much the better, job done, you’ve got their attention briefly, a bit of a reaction and a lot of a connection.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that this week’s blog is beyond self-indulgent because mostly it’s about me, me, me.  A few weeks/months ago I signed up for a couple of club fittings at the golf club, the first with TaylorMade and the second with Ping – stop me if I’ve told you this before.  Both makes were great, improving my numbers (swing speed, distance, launch angle – ho, ho, ho because the figures were so woeful as to be verging on non-existent but we can’t all be Bryson).  I plumped for the Pings mainly because they felt great and it was quite a while since my TaylorMade fitting and I couldn’t remember enough to compare properly. I’d like to blame age but muscle memory, that sort of thing, has never been my forte.  An athletically gifted friend once told me that I lacked “kinaesthetic sense”.  I looked it up in my trusty Chambers dictionary (my spelling was better than my movement and muscle control) and decided he was right.

Before I go any further, let me stress that this blog doesn’t go in for product placement and doesn’t make millions from endorsements – in fact, doesn’t make anything at all, from endorsements or anything else; it’s a labour of love…The wee picture at the top of this piece (fingers crossed because technical glitches have occurred in the past) is called the featured image and this week it features my new clubs, neatly ensconced in their pristine headcovers.

I picked them up from the pro’s shop last Friday, on my way to the 1st tee and chucked my old “woods”, G5s of Dai’s, in to the boot of the car with a lack of sentimentality that would have warmed the heart of Cruella de Vil.  Well, no point in saving the new weapons for a special occasion; these days every round is special, a real treat; who knows when the next lockdown might be sprung upon us?

I hit a decent drive down the 1st, a bit of a miracle considering the poor excuse of a warm-up (a couple of creaky swings with a couple of irons clamped together) and decided on the rescue, 26 degrees of loft, protective plastic packaging still on the face and head.  The ball ended up in the left-hand bunker guarding the green but I stood in the fairway going, “Wow, wow, wow.  What was that?!!”

Several decades of technology, that was what, as it turned out.

At the 2nd, a par 3 where I usually finagle some sort of effort with my driver, I took the new 5-wood, 17.5 degrees, packaging removed and my jaw dropped as I launched something approaching a golf shot onto the green, 18 feet from the pin.  Still in shock, I three-putted but I was converted.  I was – am – an evangelist for club-fitting and upgrading the antique sticks.

“How much is it?” one of my partners, an ever-practical Scot, asked.

“Dunno,” I said, “but I’m hoping it starts with a 1…”

Some hope.

The price was still on the shaft and it started with a 2, closely followed by two 9s….

Ah.  Well, it is at least 20 years since I bought a new set of clubs and I suppose prices have to keep up with the technology.  And the shots I hit in the course of nine holes were worth every penny.  It was, heaven help me, exciting!

Even the mishit shots went well enough, as you’d expect nowadays with clubs that are designed to be forgiving.  Dai used to call them TYKs – Thank You Karsten(s) – after the late Karsten Solheim, inventor and founder of Ping, pioneer of perimeter weighting, the patron saint of the less-than-perfect ball striker.

The new clubs didn’t get an outing on Tuesday because my playing partners and I took one look at the weather and decided we’d more than paid our dues over the years and didn’t need to venture out in rain that showed every sign of maturing rapidly  from wetting to soaking.  Wimps, some might say but we were wise wimps – it was foul.  Congrats and kudos to those who played and persevered to the end.

I’ll keep you posted with my progress (sorry!) and am really looking forward to the arrival of my new irons – round about Christmas I’m told, if I’m lucky but at least that’ll give me time to save up the wherewithal.  It really will be like being a kid again, all excited to see what Santa’s brought.

Let’s hope the novelty never wears off….

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a very weary blogger who sits before her keyboard, aware that there’s unlikely to be enough golf in this piece to satisfy the sister.  Golf usually requires a bit of research and because I was playing in a club match I’ve only caught a few glimpses of the first day of the AIG Women’s Open (even had to check the title after years of inserting a British somewhere along the line) at what looked like quite a benign Carnoustie, if chilly, judging from the bobble hats and waterproofs on show.

At one Open there, there was a wonderful aerial photo of the last two or three holes, three of the toughest finishing holes you could ever wish to play with anything more than a few quid or some beers on the line.  I thought, “Great, I’ll study this pic and work out how to play those holes”, factoring in my limitations of course.  I looked and looked and looked – and still had no clue how any vaguely normal being could negotiate them with any certainty.  I think Justin Rose birdied the last, a brutal par 4 as many will attest (pas de noms, pas de drill de pack), all four days the year Francesco Molinari won.

Ben Hogan travelled to Scotland early and spent two weeks absorbing every aspect of the course prior to his comprehensive Open victory in 1953.  He finished four shots ahead of his fellow American Frank Stranahan, an amateur, Dai Rees, Peter Thomson and Antonio Cerda (blimey, some research!) – a Welshman, an Aussie and an Argentine who were no joke when it came to golf.

Harold Riley, the artist who is one of Salford’s most famous sons, then 18, walked every step of the way with Hogan (I think), sketching, awestruck and recording his admiration for posterity.

From the sublime to the faintly ridiculous.  The main reason I’m cream-crackered is that I trekked down to north London (from Lichfield) on Sunday to watch Spurs play Manchester City in the first league match of the season.  They increased the seating capacity at the swanky (see my pic at the top of this piece), state-of-the-art (but far from glitch-free) Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (think that’s the official designation, it’s certainly no longer White Hart Lane), so I bought myself a season ticket.  It was now or never and there are some advantages to being an old codger, such as getting seats half price.

I mulled over the travel options, decided against risking Sunday trains and opted to drive….I chose the M6, M1 (is there a reason why the exclamation mark is above the 1!!!?)  It was a route I used to travel regularly but that was decades ago and nowadays I go to great lengths to avoid the M1.  To begin with, all went well, then there was a delay at junction 11a where there’d been some sort of prang and we crawled along for a bit because of the lane closure.  I don’t know how serious the accident was but on reflection missing a football match would not rank as the worst thing to happen on a Sunday.

By this time, I’m wondering if I’ll make the 1630 kick-off and stop at something called the London Gateway to stretch out my aching bones, go to the loo and ponder the rest of my route.  Mostly I like to do it the old-fashioned way, with a map, only using the phone (my car is too aged and basic – it has wheels and an engine – to have a built-in sat-nav).  Mo once threatened to buy me some sort of directional gizmo for Christmas but I put her off, insisting that was the equivalent of buying me an iron and an ironing board.

Anyway, I decided against the M25 and renewed my acquaintance with the North Circular.  The last time I was on it, heading home from a game at Royal Mid-Surrey, I exulted in the thought that I’d be dead before I had to use it again.  Bits of it ran ok but there was a lot of stop start and I eventually bailed out down to Wood Green (are you getting the impression that this was not the most meticulously planned excursion?)  By the station I saw a load of people in Spurs shirts making their way up the hill so I took a left, another left and another left and found a parking space.  The phone was called upon and lo and behold I was about 150 yards from White Hart Lane.  Miracle of miracles.

Off I trek and am starting to worry that I’ve got my 50-50 chance wrong and turned right when I should have turned left (by Dai’s reckoning I got 90 per cent of my 50-50s wrong), when I spot two people getting out of a car, one in a Spurs shirt.  “Are you going to the match?” sez I, feeling suitably pathetic.  “Yes,” they say.  “Where is it,”  I say, feeling even more pathetic.

They point in the direction I was heading (phew!) and say that it’s quite a long way.  “Fifteen minutes?”  (hoping they’re not great walkers).  “More like thirty.”  And off they stride, having assured me that it was straight all the way.  I thought of John Jacobs when I realised that at least getting back to the car was just like the golf swing:  two turns and a swish.

I got there with half an hour to spare but several queues (nothing seamless about electronic ticketing in my seat’s neck of the woods) and a lot of swearing (not me, there were plenty of others willing to do that and the man next to me had two children with him) later, I found my seat, several minutes after kick-off.  City were battering our goal but we survived somehow and went on to win 1-0.  “Fantastic,” messaged a friend in Ireland, “worth the price of the full season ticket.”

And she was right.

Going home I took the A10, A14, M6 – it rained a lot of the way – and staggered in the door, exhausted but exhilarated at 2300.

Still, alternative travel arrangements are on the agenda and it turns out the young man in the farm shop has a brother who is a Spurs season ticket holder and goes to every home game…..

 

 

 

 

 

For the first time for ages I played 18 holes three days in a row and by some miracle improved on each occasion, even hitting the odd shot that could pass muster as something approaching a proper golf shot, one of those things that makes you think all is not yet lost.

It was a real treat to play Hollinwell, the Notts Golf Club, again – it’s a pleasure just to turn down the drive on a lovely morning and see a proper golf course spread out before you.  Sheer bliss.  But you need to be on your mettle to have any chance of scoring well – the rough is not to be trifled with and if you can’t navigate your way round the bunkers, you’d better be a wizard with the sand wedge.

I believe the club, which has hosted many top-class events in the past, including Open qualifying, is – or was – having difficulty staying on that rota because the R&A insists that they must now have women members.  The trouble is, apparently, that the women are perfectly happy being members of Notts Ladies, a separate entity that’s been around since 1891.  A case of egalite, liberte, impasse, perhaps…(apologies yet again for failing to find the acute…)

Enid Wilson, who was born in 1910 in Stonebroom, just over the border in Derbyshire, played a lot of her early golf at Hollinwell and the ladies’ course is named after her.  A formidable competitor, Enid won the British Ladies Open Amateur Championship (as it then was) three times in a row from 1931.  She was a fascinating character who wrote about golf for the Daily Telegraph and numerous magazines and had several books to her name.  She was great company if you dived in and braved her rather prickly, no-nonsense manner.  At least you were never in any doubt as to what she thought!

She once told me that she trained like a boxer for the big competitions and would lose at least a stone during a championship.  When I played with her at Crowborough, her home course for many years, she described my backswing, succinctly, accurately and damningly as “a non-event”.  Then in her 80s, she still enjoyed the game but laughed that she and her fellow octogenarians all had trouble staying on their feet after hitting a shot – their balance was shot to pieces.

Enid, who played in the first Curtis Cup match in 1932, was not afraid to express her views in the most trenchant manner and when the veterans Belle Robertson and Mary McKenna were named to the team for the match at Prairie Dunes in 1986, she wrote, rather unkindly, “Bring out your dead” and said she’d eat her hat if they did any good.

Admittedly, the Americans had won every contest from 1960 on but GB and I upset the odds with an emphatic victory in the heat in Kansas and Robertson and McKenna, paired together in the foursomes, were unbeaten.  It was the triumph that all their years of team toil, littered with BBUs (brave but unavailings), deserved.  The team tried hard to persuade Enid to eat her hat but I’m not sure they succeeded.

Just another reminder that this year’s Curtis Cup is at Conwy in north Wales at the end of the month, August 26th-28th, more than a year late because of the pandemic.  If you want to buy a ticket, you have to do so before next Friday, the 20th.  See randa.org for details (not panda.org as my computer is trying to insist, in black and white, of course).  Elaine Ratcliffe is the GB and I captain and is plotting to regain the trophy the USA won back at Quaker Ridge in 2018.  The encouraging news is that the home side won in 2016 at Dun Laoghaire and at Nairn in 2012 and here are the women attempting to continue that trend:-

A Curtis Cup year is a good time to revisit all our yesterdays and for your delectation and delight I include some photographs from Fairway and Hazard, Douglas Caird’s pride and joy and a source of many happy hours of browsing and reminiscing.  There were extensive trials to select the team for 1970 and Belle, Mary Mc, Kathryn Phillips and Dinah Oxley led the way.  Happy but undoubtedly nerve-wracking days.

There was no stinting on detail – or opinion – in those far-off days.  Here’s a sample:  “Of course, Mrs Robertson was quite superb getting 23 out of a possible 26 points.  She left Sunningdale unbeaten and that surely was a tremendous achievement.  Mary McKenna, the Irish Champion, charmed all who met her and delighted the spectators with her great power, her determination and her temperament.  She has the three vital essentials of a top international.

“We have always mentioned that eighteen year old Kathryn Phillips was a great fighter but none of us ever saw her play better golf than on that final morning….”

And so it goes on, fascinating stuff for us golf tragics.

Finally, also from F and H, a couple of tips for the Friday morning bridgers.  May you have good hands….

Some sound advice.  Aunt Agatha isn’t always right apparently!