As you can see from the wee green picture above I haven’t the foggiest notion, not a baldy, how to take a selfie.  Just look at the eyes and the startled, bug-eyed expression.  When I asked Maureen to do her technical stuff and put it in the blog’s media library for me, her reaction was immediate and explosive:  “FFS! [whatever that means]  Noooooooooo!”

“Don’t worry,” I told her, via WhatsApp, “all will tie in.  How do you take selfies anyway?!”  That message took a while to write properly because I was crying with laughter and could hardly type.  My choice of photos is often the bane of Maureen’s blogging life and, being a big sister with a rather unedifying nasty streak, I was delighted she reacted in the expected fashion.  That’s one of the problems with big sisters:  having known you since the day you were born (if you’re lucky), they know all the buttons to press, no matter how old, mature, sophisticated and wised up you have become.

“I’m NOT putting that in !!”

Eight minutes later.

“It’s in!”

Thanks sis.

St Patrick’s Day having been cancelled (something stirring vaguely at the back of my brain cell tells me that that’s a Latin construction:  Rome having been stormed, that sort of thing; Boris would know and so would Fanny G, our small but formidable Latin teacher….)  To continue, a friend, Irish, was in self-isolation, so I thought I’d go round and cheer her up with a bit of greenery and an approximation of an Irish jig.  Luckily for her – and her neighbours – it was dark by the time I got there, so there was no jig and no one could see that I was wearing my Rugby World Cup 2015 tee shirt and hat plus a very aged ILGU scarf as my bandit’s mask.

Just as a by the way, there being no sport on offer now and certainly not a contact sport like rugby, do you think Johnny Sexton might have the yips?  The kicker supreme had two successive shockers in his last international, not just mistimed but butchered, so…..?  The yips can affect all sorts of people doing all sorts of things, not just people trying to putt, or drive, or play the violin, or serve, or hit the dartboard, or whatever, from a standing start.

Most golf, like everything else, is at a standstill at the moment – though I think the women are still playing on the Cactus Tour in Arizona – and Mike Whan, the commissioner of the LPGA Tour, who continues to impress his members and the rest of us with his calm, clear-eyed, open approach, gave his reasons for calling off tournaments from a very early stage.  Talking to Rich Lerner on the Golf Channel, Whan said, “I think we probably cancelled [the Asian events] more out of uncertainty than certainty….because we didn’t know what we were dealing with, we decided to make that decision.  In hindsight, thank God we did.  But it wasn’t because we had all the information……”

Things had got a lot worse – global catastrophe anyone? – and people were better informed by the time the LPGA announced that they were postponing the Volvik Founders Cup in Phoenix, Arizona, the Kia Classic in Carlsbad, California and the first major of the season, the ANA Inspiration in Rancho Mirage, California.  Perhaps the first two events could have gone ahead, with precautions and without fans, Whan said but, crucially:  “Can I live with it if I’m wrong?  If I’m wrong, I live with that for the rest of my life.

“If it’s a decision that’s wrong the other way and we should have played, I feel terrible about it but I can live with that.  This is a decision that I might not like but I don’t think I’ll ever regret.”

Put like that, putting golf on hold for the time being, however agonising, has been a no-brainer for every commissioner or chief executive of every tour.

In a video recently, Whan, relaxed and casual, sitting outside as though at a family gathering (no one else in shot though), not behind a desk in a suit and tie, said that the LPGA’s greatest ever season (from the point of view of prize money, events, television coverage) was “on a break for all the right reasons.

“We needed to do what we could to make sure that we weren’t part of any kind of spread of this virus…….We’ll use golf to pull us together not pull us apart…….We’ll work through this together…….Hang in there, live together, love together…..”

Social distancing permitting, of course.

The good thing about golf at the most basic level is that you can play it on your own or if you’re with friends, operate at the advised distance of two metres apart.  You’re outside, in the fresh air, getting exercise and company, all the elements essential to your health and wellbeing.  No handshakes afterwards though and certainly no hugging or kissing and you can forget the drink in the clubhouse.

At Whittington our clubhouse will be closed for the foreseeable future after today, which might be inconvenient for us members but is a darned sight more worrying for the staff whose livelihoods are at risk.  The knock-on effects of this virus are amazing and the chaos it’s caused is mind-blowing.  It’s like a war someone said, so why bother with nuclear weapons when you can cause mayhem and panic for virtually nothing?

We’ll need billions to sort this all out, so that’s good:  we can cancel our nuclear programme; ditch the ill-conceived (yes, I’m biased) HS2 project; and lo, there’ll be billions billowing towards regeneration, rehabilitation and resurrection.

And there’s one immediate, very minor benefit from this whole thing, something that’s very dear to my heart, the abolition of one of golf’s most laughable, ridiculous and pompous edicts:  “NO CHANGING SHOES IN THE CAR PARK”.

They may think it’s only temporary but, rest assured, there’ll be no going back……..

 

It’s been a funny ole week.  It started late last Friday evening with a crashing of the blog website and two terrifying words flashing up intermittently on my screen – Fatal Error.  Thirty-three minutes later I managed to get things back online with the loss of only one plugin – a bit of a result in my book – and I was able to crawl into bed secure in the knowledge that our (sad) transatlantic friends who may want to log on during their Friday evening would still be able to do so.  Patricia, of course, was oblivious to the drama as Friday is the night she catches up on her sleep after sitting up till the wee hours on a Thursday night crafting her blog prose.

An uneventful enough weekend hadn’t prepared me for a decision that would have to be made on Monday.  My hubby and I regretfully concluded we needed to abort a planned five-day visit to Venice starting next Tuesday.  I was loath to jeopardise my four working trips this year to America for the three US majors and the Ryder Cup.  Mr Trump has already banned entry to the States for anyone who has recently visited China and if the situation in Italy continues to escalate, he may decide to add that country to his list and I didn’t want to run that risk.  And, anyway, it wouldn’t feel right to add to the woes of the Italians with unnecessary travel to a region already having to implement quarantine measures in certain areas.

So, the passport is packed away now until April arrives and Augusta is once again beckoning.  I still feel like Augusta kicks off the golfing year but I couldn’t be more wrong!  I was staggered to realise that the PGA Tour is approaching the mid-point of its season, having completed some 22 tournaments already and with a couple of dozen or so left to come.  The climax, the Tour Championship, is during the last week in August before the (US) football season starts.  Yikes, the year will be over before we know it.

I wonder how many of you are collectors?  I wouldn’t say I’m a collector per se but I do have quite a selection of golf books and memorabilia.  I also inherited my mother’s hobby of collecting books of matches from various golf tournaments and hotels we’d all stayed in during my amateur and professional days of playing and spectating.  This record of our travels resides in a large Portmeirion bowl and occasionally I pluck one out at random to see what memories an innocuous little book of matches may elicit.

This time I got my husband to close his eyes and try a lucky dip – and out came a slightly tattered blue book, still containing eight matches.  On it in white lettering was written 113th Open Golf Championship.  Then, when you lifted the flap, there was the date:  1984.

Ah, Seve. The first thing that comes to mind is his glorious final green celebration – the impossibly good-looking, charismatic Spaniard pumping his fist in delight with a smile from ear to ear.  It’s one of the iconic pictures in our sport and one of ace photographer Dave Cannon’s all-time favourite images.  But there are a couple of other little things that I also recall.  Moments after that picture was taken Seve left the 18th green and handed his ball to a young lad who was nearby.  This lad was the son of friends of Patricia’s and mine and 36 years later that boy still has that cherished golf ball, along with a letter from Seve attesting to its provenance.  Talk about winning the lottery!

That year was the first of five Opens I have attended at the Old Course and, if my memory serves me correctly, it was the final time there was a second cut, after 54 holes.

My next Open was the 2000 edition where Tiger was at his imperious best and in 2005 we saw Jack Nicklaus bring down the curtain on his career with a final hole birdie, much to the delight of the huge galleries who had come out to see this legend of the game for one final time.

In 2010 it was Louis Ooosthuizen’s turn, a bright red dot inked onto his pristine white glove as a constant reminder to him to focus purely on the shot at hand.  The significance of the walk up the final hole of the two South Africans, Louis and his caddy Zack Rasego, was not lost on a country that had come a long way in dealing with the poison of apartheid.  Great moments, historic moments.

Zach Johnson may have won in 2015 but the story for most of the week was all about one man, Jordan Spieth.  Spieth had won the Masters in April and the US Open in June of that year and he was having a jolly good tilt at making it three in a row.  He ultimately missed out on a play-off by a shot but another man was knocking on the door of history.  Paul Dunne, an Irish amateur, was joint leader of the Open Championship after 54 holes.  A week can be a long time….and this was a long week, an 8-day one in fact.  Bad weather meant the final round was played on the Monday and for Dunne it was one day too many.  He slipped down the leaderboard in the last round and finished in a tie for 30th.

The next time an Irishman would tee off in the final group on the final day of the Open would be 2019 at Royal Portrush!  I still shiver to think of it.

A treasure trove of memories and experiences lies in my Portmeirion bowl – and I doubt I’d recall them if I hadn’t still got those books of matches to look at and jog the old grey cells.  Mums know a thing or two, don’t they?

 

I was up at the golf club on Tuesday morning having a coffee after wimping out on the golf – 40 mile per hour gusts and fingertip-freezing temperatures, nuff said.  There were people who played but my partners and I are older and wiser than most….Well, more experienced certainly, so we did the clubs a favour, kept them under wraps and fell into chat inside.

“Any ideas for Maureen for this week’s blog?”

“It’s got to be a tip.  We need all the help we can get.  Can she tell us how to hit the ball….?”  And so on.

So, a tip it was from Mo and being a kind, generous sister, she did one for me, a serial fire-and-fall backer, for ever on the back foot.  Gulf in class or not, JoAnne Carner had – may still have – the same tendency but she still delivered enough speed and power to hit it miles.  Apologies, but this is my blog and if I want to mention me and one of golf’s greats in the same sentence, well we all know, recent hole-in-one notwithstanding, what a load of self-indulgent baloney that is!

As you can see, this swing is not all ease and grace, there’s no beautiful balance and I can only apologise to all those lovely teachers I’ve had over the years who’ve done their best to sort me out.  And to those of you who are thinking: “Why on earth is she still trying to play a game to which she is obviously unsuited?” the only answer is:  “Take a closer look at the picture.”

Any time you’re playing with family and friends in beautiful surroundings on a lovely day is special and if the technique doesn’t quite match up, well, that’s secondary.  Mo and I think this picture was taken at Rosses Point, which has a special place in our hearts and she keeps this photo in the kitchen, in the recipe book holder.  I asked her why on earth she’d kept it and she said, “Because it makes me smile.”

There’s a lot of talk about loneliness in this super-social-media-connected day and age, with people plugged into their phones and other assorted devices and forgetting to talk to each other.  Not at WHGC.  We do a lot of talking and laughing and sometimes we even listen to each other.  Golf clubs may get a bad rap in some quarters but the best ones are very social places.

I started thinking a bit more about listening after reading a piece in The Observer magazine, written by Kate Murphy, whose book is called “You’re Not Listening”.  She says:  “Listening is not about simply holding your peace while someone else holds forth.  Quite the opposite.  A lot of listening has to do with how you respond – the degree to which you elicit clear expression of another’s thoughts and, in the process, crystallise your own.  It starts with an openness and willingness to truly follow another person’s story without presumption or getting sidetracked by what’s going on in your own head.  This can be a problem for people whose galloping thoughts may race ahead of the speaker’s words, often in the wrong direction……..”

Mmmmm.

Conversations can be wide-ranging and thought processes are intriguing.  I moved from a frozen shoulder (the possibility of someone else’s) to driving Mum’s Renault 4 – we swapped cars because she had a frozen shoulder and couldn’t use the gear stick, which was up near the dashboard; to hurtling it round a corner as Dad and I rushed to Aldergrove airport en route to Nairn to watch Maureen in the final of the British Women’s Amateur….That led to mention of the travel agent who’d sorted out our tickets at the last minute and probably called in some favours to make sure that we made the flight to Glasgow.  His name was Storrie Pollock and my friends fell about laughing when they heard that, to my total mystification.

Turns out they’d misheard and thought his surname began with ‘B’ and (probably) ended in ‘s’.  After that was cleared up they queried his first name and I realised I’d no clue where that came from, never having wondered about it at all.

That got me wondering – and sidetracked again.  Before they were married Dad used to ring Mum at her office and say, “I wonder if I could speak to Peggy please.”   Whoever answered the phone would hand it over to Mum, saying, “It’s the genius and he’s wondering….”  Dad was doing well in his accountancy exams, so Mum’s colleagues were extracting the Michael, taking the mickey – or the p or whatever.

Paul Kimmage, a journalist who’s always wondering, has had a long chat with Rory McIlroy, currently the world No 1 and the result is a three-part series in the (Irish) Independent.  Rory is as candid as Kimmage, so it’s well worth reading.  At one point, having been talking about films, Kimmage says, “Your mind is interesting.”

Rory is not unique, he’s not the only golfer who thinks but he’s unusual because he’s not afraid to say what he thinks; or to admit that he’s reading things that might make him change what he thinks.  He’s a refreshingly ordinary superstar, if that’s possible.  And he probably listens.

Oh, and Storrie, it turns out, was short for Stormont.

 

 

 

Writing this week’s blog has taken me back many years to when I was a very bad, undistinguished student in Edinburgh and lived in a tenement flat, 92 steps up.  It was a perfectly nice flat but it was blooming freezing (I was going to be alliterative but checked the dictionary and decided against it) and I’m not sure how I managed to stay up through the night to write my essays without succumbing to hypothermia.  There was a resident mouse who kept me company but no radiators.  I suppose I was just younger and tougher in those days.

Anyway, it’s the cold that’s triggered the memories because the boiler’s conked out and as you can see above I’ve got the fingerless gloves on and the fisherman’s jersey, from Scarborough, knitted many years ago by Marion Brocklehurst, bought during a trip to Ganton. The fault message on the boiler means that it needs an expert to fix it, not me fiddling with a couple of buttons.  “Contact your approved competent person,” the book counselled.  He’s pitching up today, all being well.  In the meantime, while the car freezes over outside, I’m trying to practise mind over matter and am testing out a friend’s theory that cold showers are invigorating and not just for pupils at schools like Gordonstoun.  It’s certainly an energy- and water-saving device if my shower yesterday was anything to go by; doubt it lasted more than 10 seconds!

On the golf front, there’s lots going on, not least Graeme McDowell rediscovering his mojo with victory in Saudi Arabia to lots of cheering in this quarter (despite reservations about having a tournament there at all).  Almost as much as when Ireland beat Scotland in Dublin, thanks in no small part to the Scots’ unerring and enduring ability to shoot themselves in both feet at once.  Perhaps it’s just a gift; perhaps they don’t believe in psychologists, sports or otherwise, because they haven’t come close to working out what causes it, this enduring capacity to bugger things up, to ensure that defeat trumps victory almost every time.  Perhaps they’ll get it sorted for the Calcutta Cup  at Murrayfield tomorrow.

It might take a little longer to sort out the problem of how far the golf ball is going these days – not in my world, admittedly but in professional circles, rendering the game more smash and gouge than anything more thoughtful and skilful, as a general rule. The R&A and the USGA, the game’s governing bodies, have been giving this conundrum some thought – not before time some would say – and the Distance Insights Project is still a work in progress.  If you have a solution or a suggestion, don’t keep it to yourself, let the authorities know, so that they can include it in their deliberations.

McDowell is not one of the big bombers but he can still compete if the course and the conditions are right, though he’s rarely going to start any event as the favourite solely because of his lack of length.  Should that be right?

Down here, at the lower level of the game, as Maureen may have mentioned, I’ve just had my second hole-in-one in 55 years of trying – and I haven’t seen either of them because of the nature of the hole.  That makes the experience less exciting than it should be, especially when you’re playing your least favourite hole, one where you have to finagle because there’s nothing in your bag – of clubs or skill – that’ll fit the shot that’s required.  The 13th at WHGC is the shortest hole on the course, with bunkers front and side and it’s the bane of my life.

On Tuesday, in a needle match, I thought I’d hit something I’d got away with, not brilliant but not too bad but having trundled up to the green there was no sign of the ball.  It wasn’t in the bunker on the left, it wasn’t where I’d hoped it might be, on the front edge of the green, so I’m peering over the back when my opponent looks in the hole and says, “This is going to cost you a lot of money….”  What can you do but laugh – and buy a few drinks when you get back to the clubhouse.  And I lost the match.

Anyway, it got us telling tall but true tales about holes-in-one.  Playing in the West of England at Burnham and Berrow many years ago, a Midlands stalwart hit a lovely shot to a longish par 3 with an elevated green.  There was a woman on a bench behind the green but she sat there unmoved and on reaching the green the golfer was surprised to find that his ball was in the hole.  “I’ve been here for half an hour,” the spectator said, “and you’re the first person I’ve seen do that……”

Then there was the man, who wasn’t short of a bob or two, who had a hole-in-one during a big competition at The Berkshire and asked his playing partner to write down a 2, to save on the bar bill.  The marker refused and didn’t waste any time recounting the story…..

Finally, you’re never too young to become a golf obsessive and young Fred here, who’s not yet 4, is already a sad case.  He sits on his bed, pretending to drive and announces that he’s going to the airport for his holidays with his golf clubs in the boot and his iPad in case he wants to watch the golf when he’s away…..When he’s not driving the car, he’s hitting shots.