And so the golf season rolls on jostling for space with the footie, the Rugby World Cup, the cricket, the US tennis, the cycling and sundry other endeavours.

A few of my friends will be attending the Interflora World Cup in Manchester this weekend, where qualifiers from twenty countries have spent months preparing and practising artistic creations that will blow your mind – and many a hefty budget.  It’s been described as a cross between the Olympics and the Chelsea Flower Show.  Good luck to them all – it’s wonderfully inspiring to have a chance to see passionate folk reach for the stars in their particular sphere, whatever that may be.

Frequently, however, passion and endeavour are not enough to help you achieve your dreams.

I feel for Adrian Meronk this week.  His world came crashing down on him when he failed to merit a pick from Luke Donald, Europe’s Ryder Cup captain.  Bidding to become the first Polish player to play in the biennial competition, Meronk failed by a whisker to achieve one of the six automatic berths on offer but did feel he had done enough.

He finished fifth in the European Tour points list – the top three made the team automatically;  he finished eleventh in the World Points list – the ten ahead of him made the 12-man team;  he won three times in the last twelve months and defends his Irish Open title this week at the K Club;  one of his three wins was the Italian Open on the Marco Simone golf course which happens to be the Ryder Cup venue;  and finally, he leads the category for hitting greens in regulation with an astonishing 73%.  To put that stat in perspective, Tiger Woods only achieved 75% once in his long and illustrious career and that was in 2000, his year of years.

I’m not going to enter into any diatribe over who should or should not be in.  There are as many opinions as there are golfers and, as Patricia keeps reminding me, they are the captain’s picks, not yours, not mine.  The only way to be completely sure you’re on that team is to have qualified automatically and I do hope Meronk can channel his upset and disappointment into a good defence of his title this week.  For what it’s worth, I think he’s a class act.

Another class act on display in the last seven days has been the United States Walker Cup side which overcame a three-point deficit after the first day to trounce the GB&I lads on the second day, hoovering up ten of the fifteen available points.  That all added up to a final score of USA 14.5 to GB&I 11.5 – as seen in the featured picture at the top with a proud captain, Mike McCoy holding the trophy aloft.

In the Madill household the home side’s effort is categorised as a BBU – a performance that is recognised as “brave but unavailing” and believe you me, being Irish sports fans we are very well acquainted with BBUs.  I’m readying myself for a few of them in the rugby.

Many pals were up at St Andrews for the Walker Cup and it was joyous for them being able to walk up the fairways alongside the players instead of being corralled around the perimeter, unable to get within 50 yards of those swinging and grafting.  It is simply the best way to experience high-class golf and the only time at the Old Course where, as a spectator, you really have the opportunity to experience the intricacies and nuances of the most famous course on earth.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t up in the old grey toon last weekend but I had a run of being present at four consecutive home Walker Cup matches – from 2003 at Ganton to 2015 at Royal Lytham.  Sandwiched in between those two venues were the matches at Royal County Down in 2007 and Royal Aberdeen in 2011.  GB&I triumphed in three of these clashes and lost the other by a solitary point – it really was a golden era for the home side but the overall tally still makes for dispiriting  reading if you are from this side of the pond:  USA victories 39, GB&I victories 9, with one match halved.

It does make you wonder how long such a one-sided contest can remain relevant and perhaps it’s time to do as Jack Nicklaus suggested re the Ryder Cup all those years ago and include players from continental Europe.  It’s a topic, I suspect, that is constantly lurking near the agenda of meetings of the great and the good in the amateur game.  However, with no news forthcoming at the moment from that quarter, I think we can safely assume that the 50th contest in 2025 at Cypress Point will remain a GB&I versus USA clash.

The sister is already making noises about attending and is covertly mounting a campaign to elbow the match to the top of my list of must-dos for that year.  It’s tempting………very tempting – and could my golfing education really be called complete without attending an away match?

But before that rolls around there is a great deal of nail-biting ahead for those of us who are spectators, whatever the sport or passion.

How far do you think a single-stem rose “creation” would carry me in Manchester?

I’m always on the lookout for fun, inexpensive presents for the single-figure members of the family.  No, not the golfers – don’t think any of us are that low anyway – but the under-10s, of whom there are several.  Whisper it quietly but the charity shops are a regular haunt and a rich source of gifts and the aisles of Lidl and Aldi are always worth a sweep.

The wee football above came from Lidl – there’s no disguising it, it’s written on the ball – and in the end I decided to keep it for myself.  After all, how could I explain to a football mad 7-year old that blasting a too-big ball as hard as he could with his dominant foot wasn’t going to get him to the premier league.  Fingers crossed he’s learning that elsewhere.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to dedicate myself (sort of) to becoming better at keepy-uppy. It shouldn’t be too difficult since even one or two will be an improvement; the bar is set very low.  For those of you who haven’t a clue what keepy-uppy is, it’s “the feat of keeping a football from touching the ground by repeatedly flicking it upwards using the foot, knee or head”.  You’ll see new signings at big clubs doing showy versions for the cameras.  It’s like golfers bouncing the ball endlessly on a club face.  It takes time and patience to perfect.

I can hear you asking, “Why bother?” but why not?  There must be a knack to it that’ll click eventually if you persevere…

The blue and yellow colours won’t be on show at the final of the Women’s World Cup in Sydney this Sunday because Spain beat Sweden in the semis and will now play England for the biggest prize of all.  The Lionesses, the European champions, beat Australia 3-1 in an impressive display and the blog will be cheering them on in the final.

And on Saturday this half of the blog will be making her first trek of the season down to N17 to watch Spurs v Manchester United, secure in the knowledge that it won’t be a nil-all draw – it’s one of the rules of the fixture that there should be goals, usually lots of them.  We’ll miss the sainted Harry and his goals and wish him all the best at Bayern Munich, where I hope he’ll be successful and happy.  COYS.

To cheer myself up, I rooted out my book commemorating the Spurs Double Team, ancient history now (1961) as fans of the likes of Man Utd, Man City, Arsenal and Chelsea will crow.  The pre-season photo call featured the first eleven, a far cry from the big squads of the present day.

Danny Blanchflower, the captain, who’s standing in the middle, looking over his shoulder, played for Aston Villa before joining Spurs and was a good friend of Dai’s father, who wrote for the Evening Mail.  Danny, a Northern Irishman, was never short of a word or three and became a football writer himself when he retired.

One of his most famous sayings was:  “The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning.  It is nothing of the kind.  The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

Well, winning in style, that’ll do nicely.

There hasn’t been much golf in this bit of the blog, so this is as good a place as any to congratulate Charlotte Heath on winning the Smyth Salver as the low amateur at the AIG Women’s Open at Walton Heath.  A student at Florida State University, the Yorkshirewoman finished ahead of Julia Lopez Ramirez, the European Amateur champion, the only other amateur to complete all four rounds.

“I heard my name being shouted, which is not something I’m used to,” Heath said.  “It’s a really nice feeling, having the home crowd.  I felt a lot of support out there.”

She hopes to turn professional in due course and follow in the distinguished footsteps of some of the previous winners, who include Rose Zhang, Michelle Wie West, Anna Nordqvist, Georgia Hall and Leona Maguire, to name just a few.

Congrats also to Ingrid Lindblad, of Sweden, on winning the Mark H McCormack Medal, awarded to the leading woman in the 2023 World Amateur Golf Rankings.  The graduate of Louisiana State University will be exempt into next year’s US Women’s Open at Lancaster Country Club and the AIG Women’s Open at the Old Course, St Andrews – providing she remains an amateur, one assumes.

With a bit of luck, when she does turn professional, Ingrid will become another in the long line of Swedish stalwarts of Europe’s Solheim Cup team.

Alongside Heath and Lopez Ramirez – who’ll be on opposing sides this Sunday…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.