Thanks to Global Golf Post’s indefatigable Colin Callander, a Scot who, through experience and necessity, understands the vagaries of sporting life, I discovered that the Sunningdale Foursomes took place last week.   I used to cover these things in the dim and distant past when the event itself, with its unique format, was crammed full of big names getting in a bit of pre-season competition at one of the world’s great golfing venues.

It all started in 1934 and any old combination of men, women, amateurs and professionals will do – providing they can play a bit.  Nowadays, the male pros play off plus 1, the male amateurs are scratch, the women pros 2 and the women amateurs 4.  Same tees, full difference.

Peter Alliss won it twice, with Jean Donald, who had also won twice with Tom Haliburton.  In 1968, Max Faulkner, Open champion in 1951, at Royal Portrush, which makes its comeback as an Open venue this year, was runner-up with his son-in-law Brian Barnes, who won the Senior Open at Portrush in 1995 and 1996.  They were soundly beaten by a very young Warren Humphreys and a slightly older John Davies, a Sunningdale member of some renown and no little skill.  Remarkably, Max had won the Foursomes way back in 1950.

This year’s winners were the Swedish amateurs Linn Grant and Maja Stark, the first Continental pair ever to win the title and the first women since Julie Hall and Helen Wadsworth in 1997.  In fact, the Swedes became only the fifth all-female pairing to win and it was a damned close run thing.  In the final, they beat 16-year old Joe Sullivan, from Chartham Park in Sussex and his professional partner Louis Hirst, from Banstead Downs, on the 18th and in the semis they were taken to the 20th by Cameron Clark, of Moor Hall (Sutton Coldfield, just down the road from here) and David Higgins, of Waterville.

The first women to win the title, in 1982, were Christine Langford and Mickey Walker, who beat Mary McKenna and Maureen Madill by one hole in the final.  The same four reached the final again two years later and this time the all-Ireland combo won 3 and 2.  Mo and Mary, who’d established themselves as Sunningdale specialists, reached the final yet again in 1986 and lost, by one hole, to Ronan Rafferty and Roger Chapman.  In 1988, they lost in the final again, beaten 5 and 3 by Carl Mason and Andrew ‘Chubby’ Chandler.  Not a bad run.

In her heyday, McKenna could hit the ball miles, not always in the right direction but she had the perfect approach to foursomes.  Having launched a massive drive off in to the boondocks, she’d pick up her tee and say, simply, “Yours, partner.”  If anyone wants to know the secret to playing foursomes, that’s it, encapsulated.

Of course, McKenna, an outwardly gentle and affable soul, was also, like her partner, fiercely competitive.  One year, they were in prime form and mangling some poor father and son combo on the New Course so badly – 8 up after nine – that Mo began feeling sorry for the opposition.  Her partner put her right.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  No letting up.  I’ve always wanted to win a match by the sausage hut.”  They duly won the 10th hole to win 9 and 8.

McKenna was leaning against a post, munching her sausage sandwich contentedly when Sam Torrance, who was playing with John O’Leary on the Old Course, leaned against the other side of the post, sarnie in hand and said, out of the side of his mouth because he didn’t know if the opposition were about or not, “How are you doing, Mary?”

”We’re finished,” McKenna said in a similarly conspiratorial tone, without looking round.

Sam nearly choked.

Corinne Dibnah and Dale Reid, who both knew how to play a bit, won in 1990 and  for us nerds it’s fascinating scrolling through the list of winners and runners-up, coming across familiar names like Gillian Stewart, Luke Donald, Trish Johnson, to name just a few.  It’s a hard old trophy to win, given the vagaries of the weather, 18-hole matchplay and the foursomes format itself and long may it last.

Earlier this week it was announced that the Senior Open Presented by Rolex will be back at Sunningdale (Old) next year and there are few better places to play or to watch golf.  The seniors are at Royal Lytham this year and the women are at Woburn and they’re fortunate that they’re not restricted to the strictly links rota of the Open.  They – and we, the spectators – can enjoy the best of both worlds.

 

 

Welcome home.  Is it good to be back?  Well, yes, I think so but it’s a bit weird to return to reality after six weeks away when the most pressing decision was really not very pressing at all.  Where were we going to eat?  Did we need to visit the wine shop (cellar door prices, in rand)?  Anyone fancy a hike?  Had the mother of the bridegroom (Pam V) found her outfit yet?  Another visit to Tallulah’s then?  Lunch at the market?  Coffee almost anywhere?  Wine tasting?  Wine tram?  Breakfast at Cafe Bon Bon?  Cocktails at (Sir Richard Branson’s) Mont Rochelle?  Lounging by the pool?  Ready for another book?  Golf?  Gym?  Wine?  Football?  Rugby?  Outdoor concert?

It’s hardly surprising that coming home is a bit of a shock.  I put my washing out but there was no one there to lob it in with theirs; it’s still lying around waiting for someone – that’ll be me I suppose – to put it in the machine.  The unpacking isn’t straightforward because there’s a lot of it – thank you Emirates for not charging for the excess – and shows me that my drive towards minimalism is lacking in, well, frankly, drive.  The floor is still rippling like the ocean wave – must ring the insurers – and the clock on the boiler is all to, well, not quite clock but what’s a road to ‘l’ between friends….

As you can probably tell, I’m tired and confused.  Tired because, although there’s no jet lag involved from South Africa, it’s a long, long journey and confused because I’ve started listening to the parliamentary debates on Brexit and am now retreating, baffled, bewildered but definitely not bewitched.  Think I’ll concentrate on tai chi, bridge and golf from now on.  That’s more than enough for me and my remaining brain cell.

At first glance, from the clubhouse, all looks serene at Whittington Heath but there are diggers everywhere, gouging, lifting and laying, reshaping, adding bunkers.  The winter eclectic’s been abandoned because the course is never the same, with tees and greens changing on a daily basis.  Every round is an adventure but the general consensus is that it’ll be worth it, that another course of genuine quality will emerge from the chaos.  And who could quibble when there’s a Ditch Witch about?  Hope she’s staying on.

We saw very few non-white golfers in South Africa – perhaps we were playing in the wrong places at the wrong times – but the latest missive from the ANNIKA Foundation featured a young woman who made my heart soar and made me think that the future’s in safe hands after all.  She’s called Kaiyuree Moodley and represented South Africa at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires last year.  She shared second place in the ANNIKA Invitational USA in January (after a three-way play-off) and although she won’t be 18 until next month, she sounds remarkably mature to me.

Kaiyuree fell in love with golf at the age of four when her parents gave her a set of plastic clubs and she advises girls  following in her footsteps to “enjoy the game and don’t focus too much on your scores.  If you love it, the good scores will come.”

She’s keen to promote the game at home and said, “I love the fact that the ANNIKA Invitational is played in Europe, South America, North America, Asia and Australasia but I want to speak to Annika about the possibility of bringing the tournament to our continent.  But it will take more than that to get more young girls interested in the sport.  It starts at grassroots level.  Golf is an expensive sport and there needs to be a definite drive to make sure that young people who are interested are supported and nurtured.”

Kaiyuree’s favourite golfer is Bruce Koepka – “I love his tenacity” – but her role model is the late Nelson Mandela.  “Madiba, as we refer to him, took the approach of forgiving his apartheid tormentors and today my life is filled with opportunities that my parents didn’t have.  I am considered a born-free in South Africa – this refers to people born after our first democratic elections in 1994.  Even more special is the fact that I was born on this day, Freedom Day, the 27th of April.”

There’s no sign of Kaiyuree’s name in the scores after yesterday’s first round of the Investec South African Women’s Open at Westlake Golf Club in Cape Town where the players were blown to blazes by the Cape’s notorious southeaster, with gusts of up to 50 kilometres an hour.  The only two players to break par were Lina Boqvist of Sweden and Sarah Schober of Austria, who were on 71, one under.  The event is co-sanctioned by the Sunshine Ladies Tour and the LET (Ladies European Tour) and familiar names well in contention include Lee-Anne Pace, Kelsey MacDonald, Michele Thomson, Lydia Hall, Annabel Dimmock, Carly Booth and Meghan McLaren, who’s just won in Australia, to mention just a few.

Finally, congratulations to Michelle Wie who’s just got engaged to Jonnie West, who works for the Golden State Warriors and is the son of Jerry West, a former NBA great (I quote, not being a big basketball fan but presumably Jonnie knows all about sporting celebrity and its pitfalls).  One headline, rather inelegantly, read:  “Michelle Wie off the market after getting engaged.”  That aside, it’s lovely news and let’s hope they have a long and happy marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to believe but this will be the last blog from South Africa, where we’ve started to see clouds and even rain as the locals move from summer into autumn and tease us that they’re getting us into training for going home.

Fortunately, on Wednesday we got our timing right and headed for Table Mountain on a clear day (see pic above).  I’ll spare you the gory details of the drive in to Cape Town from Franschhoek, suffice it to say that the driving here is anarchic and if there are any rules, apart from no holds barred, I’ve yet to grasp them.  The drivers are bad enough but you then have to factor in pedestrians, cyclists and motorbikers who make things up as they go along and give us newbies the heebie jeebies as we rack up the near misses and cardiac arrests.  No wonder Christian Barnard, the heart transplant pioneer, born in the Karoo, operated here.

You need a stout heart and strong legs to climb Table Mountain, which towers over the city, giving views that make even the rush hour gridlock palatable and we had two people who were up to the task.  Brian, Maureen’s husband, is an old hand at this particular game and he led Gillian Stewart, inveterate of Inverness, a multi Munros bagger back home in Scotland, to her first ascent.

Pam Valentine, the former Wales international who is heading home to become ladies’ captain at Wrexham, decided that the cable car was the sensible route to the top and I agreed.  There’s a squats machine at the gym near the house but developing the leg power to climb Table Mountain probably needs a bit more than looking at said machine and pondering how exactly it works.

Going up on the cable car with its revolving floor may seem like cheating but it’s fantastic in its own right and there’s a definite wow, wow factor as you hit the top,  where you could spend all day and not run out of things to see and learn.  We did a bit of abseiling, hang gliding  and mooching while waiting for the climbers……

Anyway, Pam and I had already had a busy week having driven to Hermanus and on to the Cape of Good Hope on Monday and played golf at Metropolitan, slap bang in the middle of Cape Town, on Tuesday.

It was a murky old day for most of Monday and it was hard to tell the sky from the sea at Hermanus, so we called in at the golf club, a proper, old-fashioned sort of place that was hiving despite the persistent drizzle.  Pam and I both made slightly daring purchases, helping to keep Annika in the style to which she has become accustomed.

The next day, at Metropolitan, a 9-hole course that is a bit more than that, Pam, Gill and I were guests of Tegwen Matthews, capped numerous times by Wales and GB and I and now resident in South Africa.  Wales managed an honourable half with the northern Celts thanks to Teg’s majestic near 2 at the last, an intimidating par 3 guarded by water and bunkers.  Though how anyone of her calibre can be playing off 7 and getting a shot is beyond me!

Sadly, frustratingly, Maureen’s back prevented her from travelling down let alone playing, which was a shame because she, Teg and Gill had last played together for GB in the Commonwealth Tournament at Lake Karrinyup in Perth (Australia) back in the early 1980s.  Young though we look, Teg, Pam and I had all played in the junior home internationals at North Berwick in – wait for it – 1971.  Gill’s a bit younger, so didn’t play for Scotland until later.

The others trained on to bigger and better things but the great thing is that we’re all still playing and enjoying our golf in beautiful places.  Whenever Mo and I get irritated with the game and its foibles and failings, we remind ourselves of all the friends we’ve made and the fun we’ve had and remember that the game itself is not to blame.

Finally, to mark the end of our South African adventure, I’ll share my paddle at the Cape of Good Hope, the most south-westerly point in Africa, not quite where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet but near enough.  I had the clubs with me but it was dark by the time we got to the nearest golf course.

It’s a good day to be blogging inside because the sun is blazing down out of a cloudless blue sky and it’s about 40 degrees Centrigrade.  “I hope you’re not doing anything outside,” we were warned.  “Stay indoors.”

I did go to the gym – I know, I know, the heat must be addling my brain cell – for my second session of Pilates and we were using those big, squidgy exercise balls, just to make things more entertaining.  If I have a core, it’s being given a rude awakening and a bit of a battering and I’m looking forward to a much improved golf swing and at least 20 yards on my drives when I get home.  Either that or it’ll be all I can do to deal the cards at bridge.

 

That’s another thing about the heat – fat fingers, which is not what a typist with big hands and a small keyboard wants.  We went hiking the other day, up behind the La Motte vineyard, leaving the air-conditioned cool and calm of the elegant tasting rooms behind.  It wasn’t a long hike, just a couple of hours but it was at midday (!) and there wasn’t much shade as we trekked past pristine rows of sauvignon blanc, merlot, shiraz, chardonnay all growing away under the Wemmershoek mountain range.  By the end, my fingers had swollen noticeably but I’m reliably informed that that’s because of the increased blood flow to the peripheries in an attempt to keep me cool.

Our first round of golf in South Africa was also at midday but we were in buggies – never thought I’d be so glad of one of the condoms of golf, as Dai called them – and there was a proper wind, two to three clubs, to keep things cool.  Thanks to Rae Hast, who teaches there and looks after the club dogs Ash and Belle (see the featured pic at the top), we played at Erinvale in its picturesque setting with views of the Hottentots Holland mountains, all the way down to False Bay and Cape Point, which we visitors thought was Table Mountain.  That’s a bit further round – as we geographers say – and is a challenge for another day.

I was lucky enough to play with Rae and all three professionals claimed to be very rusty.  It barely showed and even with my shots I had to work hard to hold my own, as you’d expect.  Mind you, after drawing a veil over my first attempt off the fairway with my 5-wood – my partner’s heart must have sunk – I did hit a lot of good shots off the broad-bladed kikuyu grass and even managed some respectable pitches off the unfamiliar grass.  I’ll spare you my attempted close-up of the kikuyu because the picture editor is reaching the limits of her patience when it comes to my illustrations.

 

Brian, who is not a golfer but had been at a friend’s wedding reception at Erinvale years ago, enjoyed watching the proper players in the group and loved the walk, especially the hilly back nine, which is the one we played first.  You don’t need to be a golfer to enjoy this place and it’s sometimes hard to concentrate on the golf rather than the views.

Gary Player designed the course, which opened in 1995 (just a few years after Whittington, which was founded in 1886) and has hosted top tournaments both amateur and professional ever since.  The great thing is that it’s enjoyably playable by us lesser mortals too and the light and airy clubhouse – not ostentatious – was a comfortable, welcoming place to be.

It’s funny what the locals take for granted.  There was a bird with a thin, curved beak, a bit like a curlew’s to my eyes, pecking away on one of the fairways and I was keen to take its picture.  “Oh, that’s a boring old bird,” Rae said, “it’s got a loud squawk and sits on the roof.”  It also makes house calls, as we discovered when we found two of them pottering around in the garden, beside our swimming pool.

And, dull or not, no bird that is called a hadidah can ever be called boring.  Apparently it’s also a word that can be applied to this column and its assorted inconsequential meanderings.  Perfect.  Hadidah.  Until the next time.