I see that the lovely Brandt Snedeker (the computer nearly slipped in the surname Sneaker) has had a 59 in the first round of the Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Well done him.

He holed a 20-foot putt at his last hole (the 9th) to hit the magic mark, to finish 11 under par.  I have to admit that when I switched on the telly yesterday afternoon to have a look at the golf (NOW tv is doing one of its Sky Sports deals, so I was tempted in), I noticed that Snedeker, who was on the 9th hole, had a wee (-10) by his name.  That can’t be right I thought, it must be something to do with his place in the FedEx Cup standings or some such esoteric thing.  Even though one of his playing partners then had (E), for even, beside his name, I dismissed it and switched off!   More fool me but at least I can console myself with the thought that I really was there, on the golf course, in person, when Annika Sorenstam had her 59 at Moon Valley, in Phoenix, Arizona, all those years ago.  Snedeker has joined a distinguished and not all that long list on the PGA Tour but Annika is still up there (or down there) on her own on the LPGA.

Still, pride of place this week must go to Ali Gibb, a 51-year old, six-handicap member of Croham Hurst GC in South Croydon, Surrey.  Last Tuesday, she became the club champion for the umpteenth time but, remarkably, in her 36 holes, she recorded THREE holes-in-one.  That’s right, she HOLED IN ONE THREE TIMES in two rounds, twice at the 5th, 127 yards and once at the 11th, 160 yards.

Ali described the day as “weird….very, very strange.”  She finished her first round with a 9, started her second round with an 8 and in the course of the day had every number from 1 (THREE TIMES!) to 9.  “Our pro Adam [Aram] came up to me  and said, ‘I’ve had one hole-in-one in 42 years, you’ve just had three in five hours.”

Well done Ali on the golfing achievement of the week.

Congrats also to Iceland, who won the mixed team event in the European Championships on the PGA Centenary Course at Gleneagles.  Vladis Thora Jonsdottir, Birgir Hafthorsson, Olafia Kristinsdottir and Axel Boasson were the gold medallists, a shot ahead of the Great Britain 3 quartet of Meghan MacLaren, Liam Johnston, Michele Thomson and Connor Syme.  The men’s gold was won by Pedro Oriol and Scott Fernandez of Spain and the women’s by Sweden’s Linda Wessberg and Cajsa Persson.

I watched a little bit of the Gleneagles golf, behind the BBC’s red button, because the main channels were devoted to the athletics, swimming, diving, cycling, all of which featured world-class performers.  Golf’s main men and women were mostly elsewhere but I didn’t see too much of the USPGA either because we couldn’t get it on big telly. (I believe even those who are good with cables, streaming and the like also had difficulties.)

On the wild west coast of Ireland, at Ballybunion, Scotland won the women’s home internationals – I remember them looking good, if a little inexperienced, at Little Aston last year when Ireland won – and England won the girls’ internationals.  Further east, at Whittington Heath GC and probably a tad lower down the golfing scale, the mixed open was won by Darren Hall and Helena Rean, who is such an Aston Villa fanatic that she has it written into her contract that football takes precedence over EVERYTHING.  To look at her, she looks quite sane and sensible….. Not that I’m upset that my partner and I were pipped by a point……

I don’t know if Renee Powell and Katharine Whitehorn, two formidable women from different spheres, have met yet but they’re about to be immortalised at the home of golf by the University of St Andrews, founded in 1413, which is giving them a hall of residence each.  Renee Powell Hall, 205 rooms and Whitehorn Hall, 184 rooms, are due to open in October.  Powell was given an honorary degree by the university in 2008 and in 2015 she became one of the first female members of the R&A.  She was the second African American to play on the LPGA tour and is now a renowned teacher, specialising not just in golf but in life.

Whitehorn, a CBE and giant of journalism, is a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge and was elected (by the students) rector of the University of St Andrews in 1982, the first woman to hold the post.  I nearly spoke to her once  when I spotted her at a Women In Journalism get-together but my courage (always in short supply) failed me.  After all, would she really want some gibbering eejit stuttering, “You’re Katharine Whitehorn.  I think you’re wonderful, an inspiration.  And Cooking In A Bedsit helped me through uni.”  No wonder I bottled it.

But Cooking In A Bedsit, a small, battered, bespattered paperback that has departed this world (or at least my copy has), was a lifesaver, wherever it may rank in the great woman’s oeuvre.

Finally, I couldn’t resist using this photo for its sheer, unadulterated joy.  The golf at the European Championships may have been a bit low key for most of us but it really mattered to those taking part.  And that’s what counts.

 

It was a blustery, breezy day on a fast, hard-running golf course yesterday and my partners and I handled the conditions better than anyone else, to win the captains’ charity am/am by a single point.  So, well done to everyone who played, particularly for raising a couple of thousand pounds and more for Alzheimers, which is this year’s charity and coping manfully – and womanfully – with the conditions.

Admittedly, Whittington Heath is not Shinnecock Hills but it is probably more like this week’s US Open venue than most of the courses the pros play in their day to day life on tour.  It makes you think; it makes you have to trust your judgement, not just the yardage chart;  it makes you assess the camber, the roll, the breeze; and it often makes you hit shots you don’t really want to hit; it makes you mad because not every bounce will go your way; and sometimes it’ll seem positively unfair.  In short, it’s proper golf, golf at its most sporty, its most testing, its most irritating and if you get it right, its most exhilarating.

I’m not quite sure how I ended up in such exalted company but playing my sixth round in seven days (it was choir on Wednesday) I was easily the least inspired member of the four ball and just watched in awe, mixed with gratitude, as my partners produced the fireworks.  Jill Harris, playing off 21, represented England at table tennis in the Commonwealth Games and is starting to get to grips with golf.  She had two gross birdies and got on the card (two scores from the four to count) an impressive 13 times.  Team captain Susan Sims, a Scot with John Daly’s grip it and rip it mentality, hit some astounding shots and Sue Gartland, working her way back diligently from injury, is starting to look dangerous again as she adjusts to her new physical limitations (bit like Tiger, though think Sue’s putting is better at the moment).

We were, I admit, extra chuffed to win because we were the only all female team and, not having been able to go on any of the suffragette marches on Sunday – playing a match at Hinckley – I felt we were at least flying the flag!  Bit pathetic I know but every little helps.

We lost at Hinckley – good luck to them in the next round of the Taskers – but I’ve never arrived at a golf club in such enjoyable style.  The mini, even one of those modern super-sized mega minis, couldn’t cope with three of us plus golf clubs and trolleys, so the camper van it was.  Marvellous.  Might make a habit of it, it’s such a sedate way to travel – and you can see over most walls and hedges.  Thanks to Chris for doing the driving.

Although we lost, 4-3, we weren’t disgraced and it was disappointing to get home to discover that the GB&I Curtis Cup team was going down the tubes with barely a whimper.  The visitors lost all eight singles on the last day, so congrats to the USA on their victory and back to the drawing board (and the practice ground and the putting green) for the Brits and Irish in preparation for the next match, at Conwy in north Wales, in 2020.

Many moons ago now, at Prairie Dunes of blessed memory (give me half a chance and I’ll regale you yet again with the details of that glorious moment in Curtis Cup history), Trish Johnson was a fresh-faced amateur, sweeping all before her as she won four points out of four.  An invincible.  Thirty-two years later, she’s still competing and winning, this time on the Legends Tour, in the grandly named Suquamish Clearwater Legends Cup presented by Boeing at White Horse Golf Club in Kingston, Washington.  She won by five strokes from Lisa Grimes of Arizona, with Michelle McGann, the Floridian who was known for her hats, third, two shots further back.

Reluctantly – I like to keep you guessing – I’d better explain the wee picture of a green-painted building at the top of this post.  It’s there to remind me that I’m about to start so I’d better keep going.  Heaven help me, I’ve joined a gym!  I blame Sharon, my next-door neighbour, who was extolling the virtues of this place called Gymophobics and how it had helped her tone up and lose inches (in all the right places) in no time at all.  Feeling old and flabby despite, or perhaps because of, all the golf, I called in and with a huge amount of trepidation signed up.  My initial assessment is this afternoon and I’m not looking forward to the tale of the tape or the weigh-in.  I may or may not keep you posted…

Finally, here’s a photo of my favourite sign of the week, en route to the 1st tee at Hinckley.

 

 

 

 

 

Slow play has become a habit, a bad habit if everyone who condemns it is to be believed and like all bad habits it’s a persistent little bugger, insidious and hard to get rid off, worming its way into our lives until we feel we can’t live without it.  It’s seeped into golf over the years and nowadays a 4-hour round is generally regarded as positively speedy.  There are exceptions but they tend to be last bastions.  What happened to those carefree days – within living memory of some of us who still play – of skipping round in three hours or less?  Of playing three rounds in a day?

Someone said to me recently that the introduction of trolleys was the start of the slippery slope – no, that would be too fast, the slope must be sticky, gooey, glue-like, like wading through molasses – and I pooh-poohed that notion.  But there might be something in it.  The other week I played with someone who carried and I envied him his shortcuts as I manoeuvred my trolley around greens and other obstacles.  So, perhaps we should be blaming Henry Longhurst’s mate Lord Brabazon of Tara, who, I believe, was the first man to use a trolley in this part of the world.  Mind you, I don’t think the Brab, by all accounts a force of nature if ever there was one, ever hung about, ever.

So, perhaps slow play is just an attitude of mind and we amateurs have been affected by the actions of others, the professionals who have nothing else to do but play 18 holes and, whatever their protestations, don’t care how long it takes.  Long gone are the days when pros played 36 holes and still had time to get home and give a few lessons before dark. These days, after endless hours honing their skills on the practice ground, players tend to forget that Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect (Bob Rotella) and expect perfection.

They’ve taken to playing golf by numbers, joining the dots, forgetting that golf is, in fact, a moving game, that you can make decisions on the move, as you approach the ball, assessing, calculating, factoring in the breeze, whatever, so you’re nearly ready to hit your shot when you reach the ball.  Sadly, the modern way is to start all the calculations when you reach the ball, bringing out the charts, or the measuring gizmos, consulting the caddies, or the stars and eventually, when all the post-discussion, pre-shot routines have been exhausted, hitting the damned ball.  Or not, depending on your level of expertise.

The European Tour, bless them, are trying all sorts of things to make golf more interesting and appealing to a younger audience with a notoriously short attention span.  This week they’ve morphed the Austrian Open into the Shot Clock Masters and, lo, with the prospect of an immediate penalty of one shot for exceeding the designated time, everyone speeded up.   Even notorious mañana merchants like Miguel Angel Jimenez, who likes to open a nice bottle of Rioja before assessing his options, adjusted with alacrity and no apparent dip in performance.  He had a 67, five under par, one shot behind the leader Oscar Lengden of Sweden and breezed round the Diamond Country Club course in under four hours.

Jimenez, who won the Regions Tradition, one of the senior majors, in Alabama last month, said, “It’s been very interesting.  It’s very important that you’re ready to play, if not it will catch you.  That’s the good thing, you are not wasting any time…..It would be nice to have some more time to talk a few words to your caddie but it’s nice, it’s definitely a positive experience.”

Peter Hanson, another Ryder Cupper, who also had a 67, was waxing delighted:  “It’s so nice to play out here.  The golf course is amazing and this format really brings it back to old golf, the way it was when I came out on tour 20 years ago.  We used to have a bit more of this pace.  Everyone was ready to play.  You don’t have to watch the clock, you just have to be ready to play when it’s your turn.  You can’t walk around a putt on the green four times and look in two different books.  You just have to be ready to play and just play golf.”

Every player was on the clock for every shot on every hole – there was a referee with the appropriate technology with every group – and the fastest round of the day was 3 hours 53 minutes compared with the 2018 season average (for a three ball over 18 holes) of 4 hours 48 minutes……..What was that about habits?   The average for the first round was 4 hours 13 minutes and no one was penalised for a bad time.  Wonder how long they’ll all take next week…….

I’m running out of words – even this blog has its limits – but there are three important photos this week.

First, there’s the Moss clan at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday, where Michael, recently retired from keeping things in some sort of order at Portstewart GC, received a gong from Prince Charles.

Next up is part of the photo montage that was the centrepiece of the order of service at the funeral of Angela Davies, wife of Bob (or John, depending on how you knew him).  For years, every November, Angela, Bob, Dai and I used to drive over to Brancaster together for the annual Pat Ward-Thomas Trophy.  Angela was not a golfer but married to a man who followed the careers of Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam from their junior days in Shropshire to major triumphs in Augusta, she absorbed it all.  She was a pillar of the local operatic society in Shrewsbury as a performer, choreographer and secretary.  She was a formidable organiser but her real forte was people and we’ll all miss her.

Last but never least, there’s wee Mum, who would have been – well, I won’t say, because she hated people knowing her age; we only found out when she had to apply for a passport and it fell into the wrong hands!  Happy birthday to everybody else who was born on the 8th of June.

Techy, technical stuff has never been my forte; throw data at me and I duck.  For goodness sake, I still don’t know what a buffer zone is, having always assumed it was the most unfathomable of unfathomables, something to do with England batting collapses, Tottenham’s inability to win semi-finals, the Middle East crisis or whatever the modern-day equivalent of the Schleswig-Holstein question is.  Wasn’t it Palmerston who said, in all seriousness, that he was one of only three people who ever understood what that was all about and added, “Two are dead and I have forgot.”  Imagine any prime minister being that honest now.

Anyway, the golfing side of the blog has been neglected because I’ve been wrestling, belatedly as ever, with the implications of the new General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force today, Friday 25th May 2018.  Quoting from one of the many (and varied) missives received on the subject:  “The GDPR is European Union (EU) legislation that will apply to all EU member states and covers how organisations [and, one has been led to assume, disorganisations like this blog] collect and process their customers’ personal data.  It is designed to increase the control that people have over how their personal data is used and put more responsibility on organisations that process personal data.  Following the UK’s vote to leave the EU, the UK government has confirmed that GDPR will continue to apply to the UK after…” [Insert the B word that I’ll no longer mention and is proving even messier than anticipated.]

Updated privacy policies seem to be part of the deal – although I think it was Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian who brilliantly highlighted how little privacy any of us have in these online, e-centric times – and our opening bid is presented here, with the caveat that we can only hope that the technical bods on our side – WordPress, Green Geeks and associated blog builders/hosters/advisers – can counteract the myriad foreign forces and lone teenage geeks holed up in impenetrable bedrooms who see this blog and its readers as a rich source of invaluable, vital info.

Here goes and please forgive me if there is a lack of legalese:-

Privacy Policy May 2018

Our madillgolf blog stores your email address so that we can send you the blog posts you’ve subscribed to on a Friday morning.  The emails that include one of Maureen’s tips include a link to the madillgolf You Tube videos.

We don’t ask for your name or address, we don’t share or sell the data we have and we do our best to keep everything safe.

If you have any concerns, questions or problems, you can email Patricia or Maureen on madillgolf@gmail.com. 

And if you no longer wish to receive our weekly emails, just click on the unsubscribe button.

Also, as you’ve probably already noticed, we use cookies, which are, apparently, vital to the good health and management of a blog or website and are, we’re assured, sugar-free.

That’s it, hope it’s enough to satisfy the legislation and those of you who’ve ploughed on in the hope of coming across some golfy stuff – the computer, which is almost in its dotage in laptop years, kept wanting to write “goofy”  and who am I to argue with such insight?

On the golf front, I liked Thomas Bjorn’s Ryder Cup vice line-up, announced at Wentworth in the run-up to the BMW PGA Championship.  If the worst comes to the worst in Paris in September (25th-30th), Padraig Harrington and Graeme McDowell should be able to talk the Americans into knots.  Not sure what the Irish for Ole is but am sure Padraig does – and if he doesn’t, he’ll come up with something creatively off the wall.

They’re not quite as big or as manic as the Ryder Cup but the World Amateur Team Championships (WATCs), aka the Espirito Santo (women) and the Eisenhower Trophy (men), are taking place in Ireland this year, for the first time, at Carton House, Maynooth, not far from Dublin (the splendid trophies are in the photo at the top of this blog).  The Espirito is first, from August 29th – September 1st, followed by the Eisenhower, from September 5th – 8th.  Three of Ireland’s finest, Maria Dunne, Paul Dunne and Mary McKenna, were at the 100-day launch this week and this is a great chance to see the world’s best amateurs in action and try predicting who’ll go on to bigger and better things.  Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia, Rory McIlroy, Jack Nicklaus, Annika Sorentam, Juli Inkster and Suzann Pettersen are just some of the big names who’ve competed at the WATCs.  There’s also the enjoyment of a national team competition, which adds to the excitement and tension.  What’s more, admission is free.

I met my husband at the WATCs so I’m a great fan.

Finally, on an immodest note, my partner and I won the Seniors (no denying that designation) Mixed Open at Whittington Heath yesterday with 40 points.  The count back went to the last three holes, so Mike’s putt for a par 4 on the 17th, which teetered in to the hole on its last gasp, was crucial.  Thank you partner.