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.

 

White rabbits everybody; welcome to July, it’s the first of the month, hence the greeting.  It’s after midnight, so this is, I believe, the latest I’ve ever started a blog.  Just as well I’m not bridging this morning – my bidding is eccentric and erratic even when I’m well rested and at my supposed brightest and best, so a partner is spared despair and confusion this Friday at least.  And the afternoon golf, the Friday Frolics, is hit and giggle – isn’t it?

It was blowing a bit of a hooley on Tuesday, which is how my trolley – guess who’d forgotten to engage brake – ended up in a bunker (above).  The featured image (official title), which should appear at the top of the piece, is often a source of concern to this blogger because it seems to be prone to  technical malfunctions that mystify even Mo, our expert on such matters.  With luck, you, our esteemed reader, probably don’t even notice the glitch and care less, so apologies for harping on but the picture is particularly important this week because I thought it was a bit of a metaphor for what’s happening to golf at the moment – going to hell in a handcart; in freefall; out of control; blown to blazes; whatever – and it made me laugh.  It’s also colourful, which is never a bad thing on a drab day – wish the golfers would remember that whenever they get dressed for a day on stage, in front of a global audience.  Are Greg’s Grumps (have you watched any of their ultra-defensive press conferences?) going to be sporting bright and zany team kit as they jazz things up?

Wot?  Wot’s she on about this time?  Well, of course, it’s surely nonsense from the off, since a metaphor is a figure of speech, not a picture and my grasp of such intricacies is as tenuous as my understanding of the handicapping system or the index of consumer sentiment.  Important things in my life quite often but quite beyond the capacity of a bear of little brain quite unwilling to spend its remaining years tussling with such matters.  There’s a vast expanse of ignorance to be explored and some subjects ain’t going to make the cut.

Ah, back to golf – though not as LIV knows it (no cut).  You’ll notice I’m leaving most of this Saudi stuff to Maureen but if you’d like an excoriating take on the matter, seek out Eamon Lynch on the subject on Golfweek/USA Today – his Twitter handle is @eamonlynch and he’s brill.  Also root out Pat Perez, who’s quite happy to admit he’s in it for the dosh and feels he’s won the lottery (without even having to buy a ticket as Lynch puts it).  There’s a picture of Perez at some do or other wearing a shirt that is even more ghastly and tasteless than those things the Americans wore at the Brookline Ryder Cup, though less colourful.  It’s covered with dollar bills (they may be thousand-dollar bills, if there is such a thing) and confirms PP as an IG – no, not an intelligent golf(er)* but an….Hint, the second word is Golf, India, Tango, which makes it sound vaguely exotic and much less endearing than it actually is.

*For the non golfers, IG (Intelligent Golf) is a management software system used by a lot of clubs, including WHGC.  That’s undoubtedly more than you’ll ever need – or want – to know.

We’re just golfers, Perez and his fellow mercenaries parrot, as though they’re not human, as though they live in a bubble removed from day to day life, untouched by anything going on around them.  And, you know, on reflection, that’s exactly what a lot of them do.  They’re deluded, removed from reality, cosseted (Patrick Reed excluded, of course – sarky golf reference) beyond belief with a ridiculous sense of self-importance, fuelled by the adulation of their fans and a sense that they are the special ones.

Just watch a golf tournament, any tournament, that’s on the telly for any length of time.  How often do you see a player replace a divot; rake a bunker; hold the pin (bit of an old-fashioned reference given the rules changes); put a club back in the bag – except in an angry, smash it as hard as you can way?  Crikey, it’s a bit of a surprise that most of them still tee the ball up themselves.  Look at the lordly way they hand their club back to their caddy aka their faithful retainer/batman/serf (and, maybe, strong right arm/confidant/supporter/friend but that’s not the theme here!).  It’s a bit of a miracle that some of the stars remain vaguely human and retain any sort of grasp on reality.

Perhaps I do the likes of Perez a disservice and they give generously to charity (giving is usually a given) and occasionally ponder the perennial conundrum:  Why Are The Poor Always With Us?  So we can give them donations (probably tax-deductible), feel good about ourselves and then forget about them?

I think I’m getting angrier as I get older – Roe versus Wade overturned by a load of (mostly) white men taking abortion back to the back streets; devastating floods; famines; bloody, destructive wars so much easier to start than to finish; costs going so far through the roof that people are falling through the floor; slow play…..I’ve signed a lot of online petitions recently not least because once on the list, it’s hard to get off – [one click, surely? – ed].

There’s an old joke aimed at supposedly wishy-washy liberals:  You know what happens if you stand in the middle of the road?  You get run over.  Ho, ho, ho.  There’s nothing wishy-washy about being a liberal (definition available over lengthy discussions over several nights/weeks/months over numerous beverages of choice) these days and if we can’t save the world, who can?

Well, that turned into a bit of a rant, didn’t it?  And Horowitz has long since stopped playing Mozart (CD, so it comes to an end in an old-fashioned sort of way).  Time to switch off, wash the glasses and head for bed.