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.

 

I don’t have Sky any more, for a variety of reasons.  Cost, for one, plus the fact that they lied to me, then set the debt collectors on me, not actions designed to endear a company to its customers, so I swore a great oath never to enter into another contract with them.  Most important of all, however, was my fear of incarceration:  I’m not sure I’d ever get out of the house.  I’ll just wait until the end of this over; better have a look at the tennis from Australia; rugby from hemispheres south and north; golf, of course; and still lots of footie.  Good grief, is that the time?  Where has the day gone?

Anyway, I was up at the golf club watching a bit of the golf from Dubai, trying to keep up to date and I had to laugh at the first images I saw.  A very cross-looking player was striding purposefully (is there any other way to stride?) in the wrong direction (i.e. away from the fairway), leaving the course in her wake.  I don’t think she’d finished with the course for the day but was off in pursuit of a very, very errant shot, not for the first time, judging by her demeanour.  Her fury and irritation radiated from the screen.

The Omega Dubai Ladies Classic at Emirates Golf Club, the last event of the LET season, is a far cry from the round robin at WHGC – there’s sun for a start and sparkling sub-par rounds by the halfway leader Anne Van Dam, of Holland, Scotland’s Kelsey MacDonald and Europe’s No 1 Georgia Hall, still playing well but jet-lagged and not-so-fresh from winning her LPGA card in America.  But it’s all still golf and that’s why I laughed when I saw that disgruntled player.  We’ve all, whatever our level, been there.

I was there just this Tuesday past.  I was playing Pamela, a good friend, in the round robin and she had, she told me, played rubbish the previous day.  Oh, oh, bad news I thought – and I was right.  She played rather nicely, close to her handicap if not below and since I had to give her seven shots, I was always up against it and lost 4 and 2.  It wasn’t the losing that hurt, it was the chipping and putting that was beyond execrable.  I didn’t have any shots that sailed off the map, sending me trekking into the boondocks and I hadn’t spent hours on the practice ground honing my skills but it was hard to keep the annoyance and frustration in check as my ball rarely came within a beagle’s gowl* of the hole.  Time to look at Mo’s tips again, perhaps even practise them!

Dubai was followed by the men’s European Tour golf from South Africa, the Jo’burg Open and there was a professional golfer smiling, doing a little dance of joy because he’d holed a putt for a birdie.  He looked as though he was enjoying his work.   He was a South African called Omar Sandys and he was five under par at the time.  As the commentators said, it’s not so easy looking happy when you’re five over but concentration is hard work – and golf does require concentration at key moments.  I got to thinking how few golfers, professionals especially, ever look as though they’re having a good time on the golf course.  Perhaps they feel that to be taken seriously, you have to look serious.

Or perhaps it’s just that most of us look serious when we’re concentrating.  At choir, we’re always being told to inject a bit of joy into our singing but because we’re not very confident and are learning things that are new to us, we tend to be a bit cautious and downbeat and the singing suffers.

On reflection, that could be the key to better golf:  make sure the joie de vivre comes first, release the tension and let the performance follow.  Mmmm.  Maybe I’ll just change my putter.

*Footnote:  It has been brought to my attention that a translation might be needed, so here is the definition of beagle’s gowl from John Pepper’s  stikkinout Ulster-English Dictionary:  denotes proximity, within hearing of the barking beagles during a hunt:  ‘I told him he wasn’t within a beagle’s gowl of the price I was looking for the car.’

I wasn’t going to mention Tiger, having left that to Maureen but it’s impossible not to because they’re talking about golf on 5 Live, Radio 2 and writing about it in the newspapers, places where the game is usually now treated as a four-letter word, not to be mentioned without the use of asterisks instead of letters.  And it’s all TW’s fault, the mentions that is, not the asterisks.  He’s looking well too, if the photos are anything to go by.  Fit, beaming, unrecognisable from the sad, dead-eyed face in the police mug shots of not so long ago.

Tiger played golf to win, with a one-eyed, single-minded determination that raged like a forest fire.  Beth Daniel once said of Betsy King, a committed Christian and a controlled, outwardly more or less emotionless competitor, always on an even keel:  “Betsy burns inside.”  Tiger burned inside and out, never hiding the fierce and fearsome competitor.

He loved the battle and he loved winning but above all he loved – and still loves – the game.  Somehow or other, for some reason or another, it got under his skin, it implanted itself in his DNA, in his gut, wormed its way into his very core.  When his carapace was at its hardest and most impenetrable, the only possible way to get a wee glimpse of the human being inside, behind the public mask, was to ask about a particular shot, be it an all-out, Daisy-pulled-it-off effort that defied belief or an apparently more straightforward effort that Tiger pulled off so perfectly that it was easy to miss the degree of difficulty and the skill, precision and nerve involved.

When it comes down to it, he’s just like the rest of us:  a poor, besotted golf tragic.

In the first round in the Bahamas yesterday, Tiger returned a very respectable 69, three under par, more than enough to keep everyone interested.

Elsewhere in the world, there’s still lots of golf going on, in shirt sleeves in Australia and Mauritius, which looks lovely on the telly when you’re feeling the chill here in England and other parts of the currently disunited kingdom; at Daytona Beach in Florida where there’s the nerve-wracking final stage of the LPGA Qualifying Tournament; and in Japan, in Nagoya, at Miyoshi Country Club, there’s the Queens presented by Kowa, a women’s team event between the tours of Japan, Europe, Australia and (South) Korea, the powerhouse of women’s golf.  I won’t even try and explain the exact format but it’ll be tough and competitive and whoever wins will have played good golf.

Out in Oz, Alastair Cook, England batsman supreme (though suckered out hooking early in the second innings of the first Ashes test in Brisbane), prepared for the second test in Adelaide by having his first-ever hole-in-one, at Royal Adelaide I believe, though Kooyonga GC is also lovely and would be a fantastic place to have your first ace.  A lot of cricketers are good golfers and find the game easy, up to a point but, often, not as easy as they think they should.  They’re still hooked though (sorry Alastair).

Closer to home, we had our Christmas comp at Whittington Heath on Tuesday, which was still in November but, hey ho, ho, ho, sometimes that’s the way the diary crumbles.  Seasonal jumpers were not obligatory but even those of us who like to wait until December to start the countdown made the effort.  I had to go in search of something cheap and cheerful, previous garments having fallen apart, run out of battery life or shrunk in the wash.  My sensible Scottish streak resented that I had to sneak into double figures price-wise but given the dancing classes on Mondays (thanks to my partner Mike and our fellow dancers and teacher Sam for their patience and forbearance) and the addiction to Strictly, how could I resist it?