It’s been a shitty few days in many ways and sitting here staring at a blank screen feeling sad and doing a lot of old woman huffing and puffing is no help to anybody.  Perhaps I should just shut the laptop lid and go to bed but it’s not December yet and sheer stubborness demands that there’s a blog for our devoted, daft friends to read on Friday morning – or whenever they wish.  Mo and I are amazed (well, I am) – and beyond grateful.

Puttering about, doing this and that but nothing very much in particular, I switched on the telly and flicked or scrolled or whatever it is we low techies (i.e. non techies) do to get to the golf.  And, lo, there were the seniors, still swinging, still competing, in the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, somewhere in America:  Bernhard Langer, Steve Alker, Padraig Harrington, Ernie Els, mostly names and players I once knew well.

I watched with half an eye because one of my current projects is to read and return all the books I’ve borrowed from friends and I was keen to finish The Tale of the Rose by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of France’s all-time heroes.  It was translated into English by Esther Allen and subtitled The Passion That Inspired The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince).

Anyway, back to the golf and the highlights thereof.  Surely something was missing?  I put down the Saint-Exupérys, large print version but a mind-boggling, eye-opening rollercoaster of a ride to us innocents abroad even in tiny print and paid more attention to the screen.  Ah, that’s it.  They’ve given up golf and only do putting.  I think I saw one neat little chip, one pitch and then it was putt after putt after putt.  Not a drive, not a fairway shot, not a bunker shot – although the commentators mentioned a couple of excellent efforts from sand by Padraig.  At the 72nd hole we saw Alker hit a poor wedge over the green, then a decent little chip and he then holed a tricky little putt to win.

Blimey, that little lot was right up there with the worst highlights package I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something.  I was aghast, incensed even and in a funny way, it cheered me up no end.  And, in the general scheme of things it mattered/matters not a jot.

Seeing Padraig also jolted me into scurrying upstairs to find this silly tile, a souvenir from the Open he won at Carnoustie.  It’s as yet unsigned but even though it was way back in 2007 I doubt he’s forgotten it, his first major championship and I’m sure he’s signed weirder things in his time.

Being a bit – ok a lot – of a weather wimp these days, I withdrew from the golf on Tuesday when I woke up to hear the rain hammering against the bedroom window.  It did ease off and one of my partners, who’s keen to test out her dodgy knee, played a few holes without needing her brolly.  I’d laid out my thermals – vest and leggings – waterproof trousers and various upper layers, plus hat and gloves but Sue C appeared in her SHORTS.  And as far as I know she hasn’t even signed up as a Christmas postie.

There’s no getting away from it:  it’s tough when friends die, especially when they’re your age or younger and last week we had to say goodbye to Dale Reid and Alison White, both Scots, both steeped in golf, both only in their sixties.  Outwardly they were very different characters but both left their mark on the game, Dale as a player, very much in the public eye and Alison as an administrator, working away behind the scenes.

So many memories, so many laughs, some irritations, so much kindness; those are the things that come to my mind when I think of them.  I’m meant to have a way with words but what are the right ones at moments like this?  They’re in there somewhere but stuck.  They’ll have to wait for another time.

In the meantime, my heart goes out to their families and friends.

And I’ve a couple of pictures to share.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please, please tell us the secret Hank, Mr Haney, sir.  Spare us years of digging in the dirt and hitting shanks and sclaffs* and make half-decent golf easy-peasy instead of an impossible dream.  This plea comes from the heart but even so I hadn’t the stamina to make it to the end of the promo; lacked the devotion to press ahead and commit to what it took; I guess I just have to admit that I don’t have what it takes; no stickability.

For goodness sake, what on earth is she wittering/whittering on about now?  Is there much more of this?  As an increasingly bored and disinterested copytaker really did say to me once – only once??! – as I was struggling to string a coherent piece together under the strains of a looming deadline and very little info of any interest whatsoever.

In the days before computers and t’internet, you used to have to file your story by picking up the phone, often reversing the charges (younger readers can give up now) and dictating your well-chosen words to a copytaker, a professional typer-up of stories good, bad and indifferent.  If you were lucky, you’d get a chirpy soul like the man who coped with Danielle Ammaccapane – enunciated carefully letter by letter – by saying, “Ah, normal spelling…”  I still love that man, whoever he was.  As for the sour woman who could do no better than the dreaded classic, “Is there much more of this?”….Well, I now feel much sorrier for her than for me.

Dai used to talk fondly – well, irascibly if truth be told – of Deaf Jim, one of the Birmingham Post’s stalwarts, who was a bit hard of hearing and used to panic when he realised that his correspondent was ringing from America.  It wasn’t as though Jim had to pay the phone bill but he took it very personally and of course, his hearing got worse.  You can imagine what that did for Dai’s, shall we say, demeanour when he was at the Masters, say, right up to deadline.

Ah, deadlines.  What a joy to have a proper cut-off time, beyond which you could do nothing more.  It’s all 24/7 now, non-stop around the clock.  Rest is a four-letter word.  No wonder AI is the in/coming thing – no need for food, sleep or reflection if there’s no human involved.

Now, where was I?  Ah yes, Hank.  I was scrolling down my emails the other day, not making much progress because I kept reading and clicking on stuff that might be interesting when I came across Hank’s 1-SHOT SLICE FIX, under the auspices of performancegolf.com but also as featured in, apparently, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, ESPN, Golf Digest and GOLF.

Hank is a big cheese in the world of coaching – legendary even – and his credentials are beyond question.  He coached Tiger Woods for many successful years until they had a big falling out and those who can afford it travel many miles and pay big bucks to have lessons with Hank.  He knows what he’s talking about.  I like to think of my stock shot, a left to right thing sometimes known as a slice (I play golf right-handed) as a wee fade, possibly a cut but who wouldn’t be intrigued by the blurb that promised nirvana:  a quick, permanent fix.

Here are some quotes:  It Takes No More Than 5 Minutes Of Practice Swings…and Then ONE SINGLE SHOT On the Range…(It looks prettier and more compelling in the original layout)….to eliminate decades of horrible slicing habits and start crushing ultra-controlled drives down the fairway…Shot after shot…consistently….

Who wouldn’t be intrigued but I started to lose the will to live, let alone improve as Hank went on and on about how good he was/is (I know, Hank, I know), how many thousands of people he’d taught over the years and then all these happy people, all men, mostly middle-aged at best, who’d spent years spraying their balls to the right (I didn’t last long enough to see if there were any lefties included) and now couldn’t slice if their lives or the lives of their loved ones depended on it.

Come on Hank, there’s no singing this week (half-term) so I’m not in a rush but please get on with it, you’ve made your point, cut to the chase, how much?  What do I have to pay for this nugget?

You’d have been proud of me – or thought I was bonkers – because I made it to the nitty-gritty.  The price was $47, a snip but there was some sort of caveat that involved signing up to Performance Golf – cancel at any time, that sort of schtick.  That’s when I gave up.

Trouble was, I thought I’d gleaned enough to try it out on the golf course and since this week’s comp was a Texas Scramble, what better test event?  Apologies partners.  Not surprisingly I didn’t get it quite right but I did hit a few drives well left – not my usual miss – and couldn’t be sure that my trusty fade would pop up whenever I needed it.  We weren’t last but weren’t that far off the bottom.  Perhaps I should have paid up.  Perhaps I should have hit a few balls on the practice ground.  Perhaps I should just have stayed in bed…

Ah well, there’s always next week.

*a stroke in which the sole of the club scrapes the ground before striking the ball; any horribly mishit shot.

 

 

The golfing landscape has changed considerably in my lifetime of playing and being involved with the game.  Some of the changes have been good and some……well, not so good, in my opinion.  Granted, however, it is possible to say that about pretty much everything in any walk of life.

Way back in the day, in the elite ranks of Great Britain & Ireland amateur female players, there were two big, big goals for the best players.  The absolute top one was to make a Curtis Cup side, representing GB&I against the might of America.  There were eight on that team.  The other was to make the three-woman team to represent GB&I at the World Amateur Team Championships (WATC), which, like the Curtis Cup, was played every other year.

Now, you’d think the blue riband team would be the World Amateur one with only three souls representing the whole of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  Not so.  I was fortunate enough to make both these teams but if only one were to be on my CV I’d choose the Curtis Cup every time.  The history, the tradition and the esteem in which this match was held meant I’d heard about it since I first picked up a club – and, being a member of Royal Portrush I had met (and played with) the great Zara Bolton, a winning Curtis Cup captain, no less, by the time I was nine.

My ambitions and focus were, therefore, very much set on the transatlantic match and it was only when I was quite a bit further up the ladder that I learned that the WATC, aka the Espirito Santo Trophy, even existed.

The 2023 edition is being played this week in Abu Dhabi, (photo at top) following on from the men last week.  The United States emerged winners of the Eisenhower Trophy, at the top of a pile of 36 teams and runaway winners of the gold medal.  Eleven shots back were Australia and Norway – fingers crossed there are a few more Viktor Hovlands emerging to grace future European Ryder Cup teams.

Each team comprises three players and the format is 72 holes strokeplay with the best two scores counting each day.  The Americans hadn’t won since 2014 but they more than stamped their authority on all-comers on this occasion.

The women’s tournament has the same format but one significant change since yesteryear is that there is no GB&I team any longer.  The four home countries each field their own teams of three players, which seems to me to be eminently sensible and fair.  If that had happened in my day, however, I would have missed out on one of the most enjoyable teams I was a member of throughout my whole career – namely the GB&I team of Belle Robertson, Mary McKenna and myself.  Even now I pinch myself to think I was alongside these two doyennes of the game, dripping in experience, titles, sublime skills……and fun.

One not-so-fun element was that Mary Mac suffered a back injury and was unable to play.  We had a very young Jane Connachan attending high school in the States at the time and she was called up as reserve and flew to North Carolina to join us.

We had the good fortune to be playing the wonderful Pinehurst No 2 course with its trademark, upturned saucers of greens.  What a privilege to play such a renowned Donald Ross-designed course, the one course out of his 400 creations where he chose to live and where he continued tweaking and refining this masterpiece throughout his lifetime.

The icing on the cake was that the sister, in the early years of her golf writing career, was at the tournament as well, covering the action for Golf World magazine.  She stayed on the following week to cover the men’s competition for the Eisenhower Trophy and that’s where she met her future husband!  I never did read her reports on that week’s golf so am unaware of the quality of her writing.  I suspect she was a little distracted.

Twenty years after playing in the Espirito Santo, I was back as part of a GB&I team – this time as coach.  A familiar figure was by my side – Mary McKenna was also back, but she, too, was in a different role, this time captaining the team.  Two of the three players were also from the Emerald Isle – Susie O’Brien and Alison Coffey – and the only “foreigner” in our group was the phenomenally talented Englishwoman, Rebecca Hudson.  By the end of the week we had renamed her Rebecca O’Hudson and were teaching her to speak with an Irish accent.  It was a very happy week and a happy team and it showed with the players bringing back a bronze medal.

The coverage we got in those days was extensive – every major newspaper in the land sent their scribes to cover the action and it was easy for folk at home to follow the action and be aware that the tournament was imminent.  Not so nowadays.

I discovered, almost by accident, that the two World Team Championship events were on over this last couple of weeks.  I trawled through the International Golf Federation website looking for the names of the players on each of the 36 women’s teams.  This was before the first-day tee times were posted.  Nothing – or, at least, I couldn’t find it.  On Thursday I spent ages trying to find a list of the first-round scoring – and only succeeded when I finally clicked on the “Watch Live” button.

Now, I don’t claim to be a digital whizz, but why are so many websites difficult to navigate?  And why are these big events prone to sliding  by us in this, supposedly, hi-tech communications era?  Saturation, perhaps?

Indeed.  Now THERE’S a topic for another day.

In the meantime, let’s see if the holders Sweden can repeat their feat of two years back and win a second consecutive Espirito Santo trophy.  They have a very special playing captain in Ingrid Lindblad, the world No 1.  It should be a great tussle.

 

Mary McKenna told me you must always have a plan in life, because if you don’t have a plan, then you can’t change it.  This particular plan all started last Friday with Mary Hafeman.

Mary H is a fine golfer to this very day and we first met when we played on opposing sides in the Curtis Cup (trophy above) way back in ………well, never mind!  Suffice to say, it was quite a while ago.  After last week’s blog, when I shared that I had actually played my first nine holes in two years, Mary sent a very encouraging comment or two, signing off with “Look forward to seeing you at Sunningdale/Curtis Cup next fall.”

Those of you who deign to plough through this blog nonsense on a weekly basis will be aware that I was with my great pal, Gillian Stewart, last week.  Well, Gillian played in that same Curtis Cup match and has played golf with Mary in the recent past when our American friend was over in the UK with a golfing group.

I mentioned Mary’s comment to Gill and we looked at each other.  “Do you fancy going?” I asked.  “Where is it?” said Gill.  “Sunningdale!” was the answer – and no further discussion was required.  It was the prod that I needed, however, because, honestly, I hadn’t looked beyond getting through my small bit of broadcasting this season and then going to Rome with the sister.

Going back to 2020, I had managed to procure a wonderful Airbnb in Conwy marina for five of us for that Curtis Cup and then Mr Covid came along and put paid to all our plans.  When the match did take place in 2021 many folk were still wary of travelling and mixing and so we hadn’t resurrected our group.  Time to rectify things.

Upon my return home I rang the great Mary McKenna, who paused briefly in the car park of B&Q to confirm her inclusion in the scheme and then swept off to buy tiles for the ensuite shower.  (Note to self – book some time with the Great One for a proper, lengthy, catch-up chat.)

McKenna (as she is known to her friends) prefers to spend her time behind the lens of a camera nowadays and she is as talented at photography as she once was with her golf clubs.  This is one of my favourites:-

Sunningdale has a bit of a special place in both McKenna’s and my hearts as we had a lovely run of five or six years playing together in the Sunningdale Foursomes, with a fair degree of success.  What makes this tournament so special – aside from the two great courses, the Old and the New, and the superb half-way sausage hut – is that it’s the only competition in the world where men and women, pros and amateurs, can all compete together.  The amateurs must have a scratch or plus handicap to enter and the field is often graced with Ryder Cup players, sometimes even current ones.

McKenna and I played in three finals, winning once and twice losing on the final green.  In one of our losing finals we played Roger Chapman and a young Ronan Rafferty and when Roger drove into a bunker up the left on the last our hopes of prolonging the match to the 19th rose.  Ronan waded into this deep bunker with a 5-iron and I idly wondered if he’d be able to gain the height required to clear the lip.

Not a problem.  With his wristy pick-up action he clipped the ball away, clean as a whistle, into the heart of the final green and that was that.  A few years later he became the first Irishman to top the European Tour Order of Merit.

Another of my favourite Sunningdale memories comes from the Women’s Open which was played there in 2004.  Karen Stupples was in the final group on Sunday and I was out commentating on her match.  She opened up with an eagle three on the first and then, after a good tee shot down the second, hit a five iron up over the hill and down to the distant, out-of-sight, green.  I was standing level with Karen when she hit the shot and she turned questioningly to me when she heard a roar from the green.  I could hear in my head phones the excited commentary as the ball found the bottom of the cup for a two, signalling an eagle, albatross start.

“It’s in!” I yelled above the noise at which point Karen leapt high in the air and fairly galloped down the fairway.  She held her nerve, held her game together, and four hours later she held the biggest prize of her golfing life, a major trophy.  And for some reason, she’s STILL the only British winner of her home Open in the last forty years not to have received an honour of some description.  My pleas, through this blog, to the various golfing bodies have so far been met with deaf ears.  Perhaps someone will listen and take action soon.

So, in the space of a week – and thanks to Mary Hafeman – I now have seven people confirmed for our house.  As soon as the eighth confirms her presence the search will begin for our accommodation.  There will be four former Curtis Cuppers in the group and, amazingly, we all played in that same match where we met Mary H.

So we WILL see you, Mary, for the Curtis Cup at Sunningdale next autumn.  Can’t wait.