I jumped for joy on the course at Whittington Heath on Monday, before the snow arrived in earnest to threaten life and limb let alone golf.

Bev Chattaway and I were engaged in our Winter Foursomes semi-final against the redoubtable sisters Anne Fern and Rachel Rowe, giving seven shots, on winter greens on the frozen fairways.  A few days earlier, I’d been so vociferous in stating that we hadn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell that our revered president, who hails from Wales, said he’d buy Bev and me a drink of our choice should we lose.  “Done,” sez I and we shook hands.  Rather to my surprise, he did not add that if we won, we’d be buying him a drink of his choice.

Well, again rather to my surprise, we did win and, really, I should buy the pres a drink, not least because Ireland had beaten Wales – just – at the weekend, to have us all trying not to think about a Grand Slam.  After all, if the Scotland that mangled England at Murrayfield turn up in Dublin a week on Saturday, they’ll be hard to beat and England are no pushover at Twickenham.  But I digress, which will come as no surprise to our regular reader.

I didn’t jump up and down because we won – by that stage we were all so cold we hightailed it to the clubhouse as quickly as possible – but because something wonderful had happened at our 8th hole.  It took a while to sink in.  Anne and Rachel had won the 7th hole, so Anne had the honour and hit a decent drive.  I hit next, not in any trouble and we all set off from the tee, Bev and Rachel a few yards ahead of Anne and me.

Suddenly, I did a double take and stopped in my tracks.  Wait a minute, there’s something  different here, what on earth is it?  When I realised what it was, I started screeching and lepping up and down like a mad thing, a bit like watching Ireland v Wales at the weekend, a shameless, unedifying display that mystified my companions, who thought I was in pain.  Ecstasy more like.  Because they’d gone.  All of them.  At long, long last.  Hooray, hooray, hoo-bloody-ray.

For far too long they had been the bane of golfers of all ages and stages, invisible to the longer hitters but far too often the ruination of almost everyone else.  Every round you’d see people, bum in the air, poking around in a desperate attempt to even see their ball, let alone retrieve it.  As for playing it.  No chance.  And now they were no more, scrubbed out, defunct, deceased, destroyed.

The 8th has become a proper golf hole again.  It looks different, better.  You can see its lovely, subtle shape and most of us will still have more than enough trouble getting a par four.  Harry Colt, who designed the original, might even give a satisfied smile of recognition.

The offending gorse bushes, they that no longer have to be feared, that are no more, were just in the wrong place, plonk in front of the tee at a perfect length for the shorter hitters.  It wasn’t their fault that someone, at some time, thought they were a good idea.  Off to the side, right or left, no problem but where they were, in the middle, lots of players could hit their No 1 stonker and where would it end?  Unplayable, in amongst the prickles.  There was no viable alternative route and that, no matter which golf architect you consult or erudite tome you read, is an absolute no no.  You’ve got to give players, whatever their skill level, a route to the hole.

Everybody sees things differently and there are lots of people who hate winter golf.  As long as I’m well wrapped up I love it.  It reminds me of growing up at the seaside and playing a fast, hard-running course, keeping the ball low, pitching and running and using a putter from all over the place.  You learn that the vagaries and irritations of the bounce are an integral part of the game, not a random source of annoyance.  And, as a putter with a longstanding ropey stroke, bad greens with lots of lumps and bumps tend to suit me.

Also, when it comes to foursomes, when it’s your partner who has to get you out of trouble, it helps to have a Bev on your side, a 4-handicapper who can come back from two weeks off, including a skiing holiday and make the game look so ridiculously easy that you wonder why you make it look so ridiculously difficult.

 

 

 

There was a man on the radio the other day who was arguing that we shouldn’t bother with the Winter Olympics because we – countries like Britain, Ireland and, presumably Jamaica and Nigeria – were no good at the sports involved, so we shouldn’t waste our time trying to compete with the snow-deep, mountain-high powerhouses.  What a slushy, wet blanket of a view.

With an attitude like that Columbus would never have put out to sea, the Vikings would never have reached Scotland, the Montgolfiers would never have taken to the air, Michelangelo would never have started drawing, imagining, inventing, it’s the sort of attitude that kept us in the dark ages while the Persians and the Incas and others were doing amazing things.  In short, no one would ever have tried anything remotely different.  So, you’ll have guessed, I think that bloke was wrong, wronger, wrongest.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the Winter Olympic athletes are stark-raving bonkers, putting life and limb in danger every time they strap on a ski, a skate or a snowboard.  How they learn their trade without breaking their neck or falling foul of Health And Safety is a mystery to me.  As someone who loses all sense of where she is after turning in a quarter of a semi-circle on solid ground, I haven’t a clue how those acrobatic half-pipers keep track of where they are or what they’re doing.  I watch, open-mouthed, in awe, muttering imprecations, as they fling themselves about.

As for the tea trayers, well they are truly off their trolley, surely.  And, don’t get me started on the ski jump.  Whatever Eddie the Eagle was – and apparently he thinks GB is spending too much on the Winter Olympics now – he wasn’t a wimp.  Just to stand at the top of one of those jumps is enough to turn me to jelly and there’s more than enough flesh to wobble wildly, if not quite enough to guarantee a soft landing.

The skiing I can understand, more or less, though my knees creak and my heart quails as they plummet downhill at ridiculous speeds with insouciant skill.  And I admire the way they stand at the bottom, heart in mouth presumably, watching the clock and hoping to hang on to a medal by hundredths of a second.  I’d hate that.  The head-to-head racing, however manic, is understandable even to the ignorant and I found myself yelling myself hoarse cheering on a Swede in the cross-country relay.

It’s all exhilarating and fun and you can see why people get hooked.  Just being in the mountains is invigorating and even if you start off at the SnowDome in Tamworth or the dry ski slope in Gloucester, if you keep persevering, you’ll end up in the snow somewhere, be it the Alps or the champagne powder of Colorado.  Even the Norwegians, the cross-country colossi, train on roller skis in the summer, so you can learn to do that almost anywhere bar the beach and some of the pot-holed roads round by me.

“That Elise Christie, she’s obviously no good, she shouldn’t be there,” said the man on the radio after the speed-skating Scot had crashed out of yet another Olympic race.  He’d picked the wrong one there.  La Christie is one of the world’s best and was in form going to the Games but a nudge here, a caught edge there and her dreams were cold as ice.  Sobbing in Sochi, pissed off in Pyeongchang, she was bloodied but unbowed.  “I’ll be back,” she said.

It’s the winning that drives Christie now but the taking part is still the most important part of sport:  without participants there’d be no sport, so every sport needs as many people as possible to play it.  The broader the base, the more likely you are to produce champions, who inspire and nourish a desire to play and compete in others.  Though sometimes it works the other way:  Switzerland and Scotland were hardly places you’d associate with tennis before the advent of the sainted Roger Federer and Andy Murray.

Also, as the All Blacks appreciate, for a sport to be really successful it needs people who understand it and really care about it, irrespective of their playing prowess.  It needs participants with passion at every level to survive and thrive.

Golf is rarely life-threatening – just make sure you’re not hit by a ball or club – or exhilarating in the way that faster sports are and you don’t have to be a supreme athlete or young to play it well.  That doesn’t make it a bad or a dull or a boring game.  Just the opposite in fact, it’s intriguing, exasperating and compelling and it’s good for all of us, especially if we can manage to keep on walking.  And it’s amazing how effective a weird and wonderful swing, devised to cope with various aches and pains, can be.

As you probably know, it annoys me that people think you shouldn’t bother with things unless you can do them well. Frankly, that is utter – and I can’t think of a better word – bollocks.  You miss out on so much fun.  Don’t die wondering:  take the plunge and try something new.

Not all bloggers are writers and not all writers are bloggers.  Patricia is a writer AND a blogger.  I’m just a blogger, but as I sit before an empty screen wondering what to say in my first post of 2018 I’m curious to feel a….well, a bit of a block.  WRITER’s block, I wonder?  Hmm, maybe I’m getting a bit closer to being a real writer after 18 months of blogging, seeing as I’m now experiencing a block?  “Just start writing and see where it takes you”,  Patricia advised.  So, here goes.

When, oh when is Dustin Johnson (not the only culprit) going to stop spitting on a golf course?  I find it nothing short of disgusting and watched his sublime performance in Hawaii last week with one hand over my eyes in expectation of the inevitable expectoration.  It’s a dozen years now since I first started working in the States and I’ve covered countless rounds in that time and walked many miles inside the ropes.  Those miles have been punctuated with several hops and skips as I’ve done my best to avoid the spitting over the ropes from the front row of spectators.  My American friends tell me it’s the tobacco-chewing culture but that doesn’t appease me – it really is awful.

Dustin is the supreme athlete and shot 65 on Sunday romping to an 8-shot victory in a tournament peopled only by winners from 2017.  He has won at least once a year for the last 11 consecutive years and has 8 wins since the 2015-16 season – more than any other player on the PGA Tour.  Last year he was in full flow until the eve of the Masters when he slipped in his socks and fell, injuring his back.  He withdrew the next day and was woeful in the majors,  with a missed cut at the US Open, tied 54th at The Open and tied 13th at the PGA.  Despite bombing out in the most important tournaments on the schedule he still managed to finish the year as world No 1.  Now, THAT was some achievement.

Three players are teeing it up this year with only one major separating them from the prize of completing a CGS (career grand slam).  To date, only five men have won all four modern majors:  Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.  Rory McIlroy will be the first to feel the full glare of the major spotlight as he tackles Augusta in April in search of a green jacket, the only garment separating him from membership of that oh-so-special club.  Hampered by injury last year he will be a man on a mission and being majorless since the 2014 Open does not sit well with him.  We haven’t seen the best of Rory yet and I predict he will bag one of the big ones in 2018 – I’m just not sure which one, and maybe the CGS will have to wait a year or two.

Next up, attempting to complete his set of majors at the US Open will be Phil Mickelson and I can’t help but wonder if that ship hasn’t already sailed.  Phil has six runner-up finishes in his national Open and would dearly love to win that particular title but time is not on his side as he turns 48 on the Saturday of this year’s championship.  Only one man older has ever won a major and that was Julius Boros who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48 years, 4 months and 18 days.  Phil needs a miracle.

The final major of the year (and the final year it is the final major because of a change of date beginning in 2019) is the PGA, the only major missing from Jordan Spieth’s resume.  To use one of Jordan’s expressions, this is “very do-able”.  And you would have to think he’s right.  In 2019 the Open Championship in July becomes the final major of the year.  Not for Jordan an agonising 8-month long wait from the last major to the one major eluding him, a fate that Rory has endured for the last three years.  The PGA comes in a run of top tournaments and majors and you can find yourself competing in it almost before you realise it.  If Rory has failed to win the Masters by 2019 he will then have nine long months from July to April until the next major, the Masters, when the focus will assuredly swing his way again as he takes his next crack at that CGS.  That’s a rolling boil of pressure which will build exponentially until he manages it.  I do think, though, that both Rory and Jordan will, at some stage, join the famous five – just not this year.

As I said, I do have Rory down for a major win in 2018.  I have Dustin down for two and I have a feeling Rickie Fowler will break his duck.  But don’t take my word for it – only fools make predictions on golf and, as you know, just about anything can happen.  Why, DJ might even stop spitting!

 

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.