Well, there are a couple of shocks in the blog this week.  First, it was started long before the wee small hours of this morning and second, it contains a sentence that I’d given up hope of writing again, ever.

And what might that be?

Dare I write it down?

After all these years?

Ah, what the hell, here goes…..

Women’s professional golf in Europe is on the up.  The LET (Ladies European Tour), that perennial miracle of a body limping along, barely breathing but stubbornly surviving – somehow – now has a strong foundation on which to build.

Unlike the we’re-better-on-our-own UK, the LET has embraced collaboration and it looks as though, as the song says, There’s Nowhere To Go But Up.  Barring Nigel Farage or Ann Widdecombe embarking on another wrecking mission…..(Sorry, no Brexit bitterness spilling over here!!! – ed, wearing black armband.)

Admittedly, there wasn’t that far left to fall but this is golf’s equivalent of the post WWII Marshall Plan – I exaggerate a little but contend the comparison is valid in that the Americans have ridden to the rescue armed with dosh and, most importantly, expertise and a spirit of solidarity and cooperation.

Mike Whan, the commissioner of the LPGA (Ladies Professional Golf Association), whose praises were sung in the blog last week, was at The Buckinghamshire last Friday to announce the LET’s schedule for 2020 and explain the new LPGA-LET joint venture, officially Ladies European Golf Venture Limited, in more detail.  He was understandably delighted to reveal that they’d added seven new events in 90 days of working together – a strike rate that any tour would envy – and that there would be 24 events, 15 of them in Europe, worth nearly 18 million Euro.

Rebuilding the tour with more events in Europe itself is one of the aims and the federations have been galvanised by the new set-up.  As Alexandra Armas, the LET’s new CEO, said, “The federations are very motivated to get involved again.  They want their players to be the best in the world, to be Olympic winners.”

Golf is in the Olympics again this year, in Tokyo, in August and the Japanese love their golf, revering their best players be they men or women.  It’s the perfect place for the game to establish itself as a proper Olympic sport, deserving of support in every country from the ground level up.  I wasn’t a fan of golf in the Olympics but I’ve changed my mind, simply because of the worldwide reach of the Games and the chance for golfers to mix with other world-class athletes, to move our game out of its own little bubble.  Thanks in no small part to Justin Rose and Inbee Park, the gold medallists in Rio, who really, really appreciated what they’d done and place their gold medals right up there with their major titles, golf’s traditional currency of excellence.  It’s time for golfers to stop being mealy-mouthed about the Olympics and dive right in there and, in time, sort out a format that engages everyone and raises the event out of the ordinary.

So, of course, the players need places to play and a strong European tour is in everyone’s best interests.  To begin with, the top five at the end of the season will go straight to the LPGA’s Q Series, the final qualifying for the main tour and it’s envisaged that, in due course, as standards improve, the top players in Europe will earn a full LPGA card.  The aim is to develop a tour that provides a path to the LPGA but is also strong enough to allow players who do not want to leave Europe to earn a decent living.

Whan, who seems to be a man doing a job he loves and is passionate about, said, “There’s zero downside and a lot of upside. We’re not doing this short term.  We hope it’s still going in another 70 years.  [The LPGA is 70 this year.]  If our name’s on this, we can’t [afford to] fail.  It’s a historic moment.”

There’s nothing like an inspiring pitch to raise the spirits but the great thing about this venture is that there’s substance too.  The LPGA bring organisation and numbers to the aid of the LET, who’ve been operating on a wing and a prayer and a skeleton staff for too long but, crucially, the board of the new entity includes a representative from the R&A and a representative from the (men’s) European Tour.  When Whan offered board seats to Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the R&A and to Keith Pelley, executive director of the European Tour, he asked them who they’d like to assign to the task.  They both answered, “That’ll be me.”

That alone was a boost beyond measure.  Slumbers wasn’t at the Buckinghamshire gig but he had a good excuse:  he was on safari with his wife, celebrating her 60th birthday.  Pelley was there, in England and paid tribute to Whan, “the global leader in women’s golf”, to Marta Figueras-Dotti, the LET chair, for her “persistence for bringing us together” and described the venture’s first board meeting as “incredibly impressive and sophisticated”.  He also spoke about his organisation’s commitment to inclusivity, recognising that his members’ interests are best served if golf as a whole is thriving.

Catriona Matthew, who led Europe to victory in the Solheim Cup at Gleneagles last year and will be in charge of the team defending the trophy at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, next year, had already committed to playing in Europe this season, winding down after a successful career that included many years on the LPGA tour.  She’s now on the board and joked, “I’ve come in when it’s all looking good.  Having the benefit of the LPGA expertise can be nothing but good….The golf world is small and everything is connected now.”

It’s also a crowded market or “a wall of congestion” as Jason Wessely, head of golf at Sky Sports, put it graphically and the women have to work out a way to batter through that – or go round it or over it; they have to work out how to stand out.  They have to be entertaining, personable and innovative.  The hard work starts now.

This week the European Tour event, featuring world No 1 Brooks Koepka, Open champion Shane Lowry and luminaries Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson among many others, is in Saudi Arabia, a controversial and uncomfortable choice of venue.  Should they be there, following the money regardless?  It’s a moot point.  But, having wondered whether it was better to engage with the South African regime during apartheid or go for the sporting boycott, the success of the boycott makes me think that playing in Saudi is not a great idea.

The women are due to go there in March and play for a substantial amount of prize money (though peanuts compared to the men’s purse) but Meghan MacLaren, a thoughtful, thinking golfer, whose blog meghanmaclaren is always worth reading, has decided not to go.

I think she’s right.  Saudi is no place for women.

 

 

 

 

Hello everybody.  Happy New Year.  We’re back for a run at 2020 and the aim is the same as it always was:  to amuse and entertain our friends and ourselves.  Golf may well be a silly old game but it’s a great silly old game, linking a lot of people all over the globe, people who think and care about lots of other things vastly more important but still love golf.

It has never gone unnoticed that golf is a four-letter word and I remain indebted to the inestimable Dave Oswald, a Chelsea-supporting Scot (no one’s perfect) who was for many years the art editor at Golf World in the UK, for my lack of ladylike language.  We used to share an office in those far-off, like-it-or-lump-it days when sensitive little souls had to toughen up and give as good as they got – verbally in this case; the guys at Golf World were, whatever their faults, proper human beings.  And, of course, I’d been well trained in the art of smart-aleck repartee at the bar of Royal Portrush Golf Club and on the fairways at Portstewart.  Even when they should be, the Irish are rarely at a loss for words.

I haven’t made any New Year resolutions this year, having had more than enough years of failing miserably and depressingly; I’ve decided to accept myself as the flawed person that I am.  Perhaps I’ll improve my golf and perhaps I won’t; my language is another matter……And in any case, six-letter words are often just as satisfying as four-letter ones.

What do you give the woman who has everything?  Chris Allsop’s son Mark gave his mother a dozen golf balls.  So? you say.   What’s so novel about that?  Well, he’d given it a lot of thought.  “Mum,” he said, “I know you want to hit the ball further and straighter and I’ve come up with the solution.   You’ll want to hit these balls as hard as you can, so they’re guaranteed to go further and they’ve got your name on them so you’ll keep them straight because you won’t want to lose them and have other people finding them.”

If you look closely, you’ll see that Chris is a woman after my own heart and is not a fan of our current prime minister Boris Johnson.  His image is on the ball and on the other side is a damning message that reads:  Property of Chris Allsop!  (I think there’s a middle initial in there but I’ve forgotten what it is and my courtesy ball is safely locked away in my locker.)  Look out for Allsop being all conquering in 2020.

I’ve already won a fiver this year, thanks to coming second in the 13-hole 3-ball Alliance on Tuesday.  It helps when you’re playing with Jayne Fletcher and Bev Chattaway, two of the best players in the club and feel obliged to make an effort to concentrate.  Three putts at the first two holes didn’t augur well but I holed a few decent putts later on and did my bit, thank goodness.  Jayne is a very good golfer but I think she’d agree that Bev is one of those multi-talented persons who seems to be good at everything effortlessly and accepts the twin impostors just the same (Kipling I believe).  It would be easy to dislike her but, then, it turns out that she’s lovely with it and you’ve had it:  you just have to like her.

I love playing with her because like Sue Spencer, another of our stand-out players, Bev has a lovely, smooth rhythm that is a joy to watch.  Just looking at her makes you better.  Some people you daren’t watch because their swing is too fast, too violent, too jerky, too quirky, whatever, to do you any good.  Unfortunately for Angela Bonallack, a sweet-swinging Englishwoman who played in numerous Curtis Cups, JoAnne Carner loved playing against her.  Carner, one of the legends of the game, tended to be a brutal fire-and-fall-back merchant who wellied the ball to great effect.  However, whenever she played Angela, she absorbed some of that smooth timing and was even more effective!

Bonallack and Carner were Curtis Cup opponents and this year the Curtis Cup is at Conwy in north Wales in the second week of June.  Get there if you can.  It’s a super golf course in a lovely part of the world and you’ll be watching players who’ll go on to be stars of the fairways.  Michelle Wie, for instance, played at Formby as a precocious teenager (is there any other kind?) and I saw her hit an iron shot there, low, into the wind, that made me realise what all the fuss was about.  It’s endlessly fascinating to see who goes on to make it as a professional and who follows a different course.  Wie, who has been blighted by injury, is now happily married and expecting her first child and still has golfing ambitions.  Go Michelle.

At the beginning of the year Sandy Lyle, one of Dai’s favourite golfers, who’d been on his radar for years as a Shropshire prodigy and Birmingham Post parishioner, was awarded the PGA Recognition Award for his outstanding contribution to golf.  Sandy, whose father Alex was a proud PGA professional, had a period as the best player in the world – acknowledged as such by no less an authority than Seve Ballesteros – and was the first Brit to win the Masters, in 1988.  Earlier, in 1985, he had been the first British winner of the Open since Tony Jacklin in 1969.  That was at Royal St George’s, where the Open is back again this July, for the first time since Darren Clarke won in 2011.

Finally, just in case you’re wondering, the wee picture at the top of the piece features one of my Christmas presents and should ensure, with a bit of luck, that I never have to search for my glasses again!

 

 

 

 

Well, you’ll probably all be breathing sighs of relief at the news that this is the last blog of the year – one less thing to read in the run-up to Christmas, the Heathland stableford, the general election, birthdays, Hogmanay, whatever.  All being well, Maureen and I will be back in January, refreshed, revitalised and raring to go.

Usually I don’t put up the decorations until my brother-in-law’s birthday on the 12th of December but I gave in early this year and the tree – small but real – is already up, assorted Santas are being scattered about the place, there’s a (fingers crossed) healthy-looking poinsettia in a new pot (T-K-Maxx’s best) and all the lights seem to be in better working order than my golf swing.

We had a 15-hole, 3-a-side Texas Scramble on Tuesday and it was a glorious day, sunny, almost warm, mulled wine with mince pies and stollen at the halfway house.  All three of us hit some decent shots and one of us, a new member, holed some cracking putts once she’d recovered from the shock of meeting her playing partners, two people that she’d never encountered before but is unlikely to forget in a hurry…..Of course, if we’re lucky, she’ll never recognise us.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve always been in favour of abolishing the dress code altogether – although maybe not in favour of playing in the altogether, certainly not at this stage of the proceedings and certainly not at this time of year in the UK.  It’s two-duvet weather in my book and thank goodness for inside loos, double glazing and central heating.  Most of us no longer wake up with icicles on the pillow and scraping ice off the inside of the windows is an indication that you need new windows.

We’ve come a long way in a few decades but golf still seems to have a problem with shorts, if not long socks, which seem to have gone the way of the tie and become a relative rarity.  Can you believe the brouhaha over the European Tour’s landmark (!!) decision to allow the players to wear shorts at Leopard Creek in South Africa last week, not just in practice but in competition.  Sportsmen wear shorts, shock, horror.  Blimey.

I no longer have Sky so I like to go up to the golf club after tai chi and watch people playing in sunshine:  the men are in Mauritius, Sydney (the Australian Open) and the Bahamas, to name just a few of the venues and the LET’s last event of the season is the Magical Kenya Ladies Open at the Baobab Course in Vipingo Ridge.  In “the old days”, players like Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and their contemporaries honed their professional skills in Africa – Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia – so there’s nothing much new under the sun, although the resort seems posher than the old-fashioned courses of yesteryear.  Pete Cowen’s only tournament win was the Zambian Open of 1976 and he’s now one of the world’s best coaches.

I won’t be having any lessons from Pete in the New Year – way beyond my skill and purse level – but I will be trying to improve my game (did I really write that?!!!) and paying closer attention to the rule book.  The scale of my ignorance was brought home to me the other week when four of us were playing in our 9-hole Friday roll-up.  One of us hit a very respectable shot to the 9th green (it was a waltz, so three out of four scores were to count*), we walked a few yards to the next ball and there came a plaintive cry, “This isn’t my ball……..you’ve played the wrong ball…..”

Ah.  The mistake was easily rectified but we had to work out what the penalty was.  “I’m pretty sure it used to be two strokes,” sez I, “but I’ll check the rule book.”

That’s when confusion reigned and hope sprang in our hearts that, in fact, there wasn’t a penalty at all (we were struggling to register any points).  In match play it would have been loss of hole and in stroke play disqualification – unless the error was recognised and rectified in time.  Well, it had been recognised and rectified, so were we in the clear?  Had the rule changed?  Seemed a bit generous but…….

Eventually, in the clubhouse, after much discussion and consultation, a clued-up soul pointed out the words “general penalty” in the rule book.  It was there, under 6.3c Wrong Ball, in bold red letters:  “Penalty for Playing Wrong Ball:  General Penalty.”  None of us is colour blind but we’d managed to ignore/overlook the red letters.  If we’d gone back to page 19, rule 1.3 Playing by the Rules, we’d have come across (not in red) General Penalty:  Loss of hole in match play and a two-stroke penalty in stroke play…….

So, there you are, a general penalty is pretty severe.  Maureen knows that only too well, having had one of her most humiliating moments on the golf course when playing with Fred Daly, Open champion in 1947 and Ireland’s only winner of the Claret Jug until Padraig Harrington opened the floodgates 60 years later.  Mo, aged about 15, had been having an uncomfortable day but at the 18th she hit a cracker onto the green, in front of a few of Fred’s cronies, who’d come out to cheer him in.

Sadly, it was all in vain.  Fred walked a few yards, looked, then turned and said the immortal words: “You’ve played the wrong ball, sweetie.”

[*A waltz is 1, 2, 3:  one score to count at the 1st, two at the 2nd, three at the 3rd; then 1 at the 4th and so on.]

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I gave up worrying about the LET (Ladies European Tour) a long time ago.  It has been around, in various guises, since 1979, sometimes bounding along, sometimes limping but it has always survived, clinging on to existence, limpet-like, sustained mostly, probably, by sheer bloody-mindedness and determination.  A bit like the suffragettes.

Golf, particularly professional golf, is not a necessity, it’s an indulgence.  Like all sports it has always relied on patronage, aka sponsorship and most sponsors aren’t sponsoring out of the goodness of their hearts but because they see a commercial opportunity; they can make money out of golf.  At the moment, they’re churning most of their money into men’s golf, with the women picking up what they can but all being well, that could be changing.

It’s a slow process but you never know, the men could be pricing themselves out of the market.  The money they’re making is ridiculous, embarrassing even and their standard of living would be more than comfortable even if their prize money slumped to half its current level.  Of course, some players might have to downsize to a mini-mansion or up their game but they’d still be able to make a more than decent living.

A few days ago, in an article in Golfweek, Stacy Lewis, a former world No 1, who’s had a good career, winning two major championships, wrote about the disparity between what the men and women earn.   She lives in Houston and was at home for the men’s Houston Open, watching all the courtesy cars whizzing around, huge crowds massing for an event that featured $7.5 million dollars in prize money, with a field that “didn’t have a single player inside the top 30 in the world competing”.

Lewis pointed out that the biggest prize in women’s golf is the $5.5 million on offer for the US Women’s Open.  She worked out that over a season the women play for roughly 17 per cent of what the men do.  In the proper workplace, according to the latest report from Payscale.com, women make on average 79 cents to every dollar earned by a man.  Whichever way you look at it there’s room for improvement.

In the WPGA handbook of 1981, Peter Alliss, the WPGA president, was bullish:  “There can no longer be any doubts. The WPGA tour is here to stay – and getting stronger all the time.  If in 1979 we suffered the usual teething troubles of a new venture, last year saw us go a very long way towards silencing those who had little faith in our ability to survive….”

Barry Edwards, the executive director, said it was all systems go for a booming 1981.  He wrote:  “Women’s professional golf was hiding under a bushel before the emergence of the WPGA in 1979.  It did exist in Europe but in such a small and insignificant form that most people simply ignored it.  The WPGA changed all that.  This is a booming sport and all those instrumental with its launching can feel justly proud……

“It may not be long before we receive more entries from the United States.  Indeed, the USLPGA are very interested in our growth and plans are well ahead for a Europe-USA biennial match being organised……”

It took until 1990 for the first Solheim Cup to hit the schedule and it’s now a serious sporting contest as this year’s match at Gleneagles proved, showing that women’s golf can draw the crowds and hit the headlines.

Handbooks are a bit passe (sorry, not sure how to do an acute accent, or any other sort of accent) in this digital, electronic age but they’re an interesting record of a tour’s progress.  In 1997, the Women Professional Golfers’ European Tour was billed as the American Express Tour; a year later we have the ELPGA, the European Ladies’ Professional Golf Association – “the launch of a new name and a new era for women’s professional golf in Europe”; the next year, 1998, it was the Ladies European Tour, apostrophe ditched and the emergence of “a new-look circuit”;  by 2000 it was the Evian Tour……..I may have given up paying close attention to the behind-the-scenes politicking about this time and at least there were plenty of good players around, including the incomparable Laura Davies, Liselotte Neumann and Alison Nicholas, who won the US Women’s Open in 1997…….

Now, at the end of 2019, with the LET in another limping-along period comes news of a merger with the LPGA, “a long-term partnership to significantly grow awareness, sponsor support and professional playing opportunities for women in Europe……..The combination of the LET’s European expertise and relationships in the region, with the LPGA’s global strength and worldwide exposure and their shared vision for the future of the women’s professional golf and growth of the game, provides the core ingredients to ignite a tour loaded with upside potential.”

Well, who knows what that’ll all mean in practice in years to come.  In the meantime, the LET Order of Merit will be called the Race to Costa del Sol from next year and the prize money of the Andalucia Costa del Sol Open de Espana Femenino will be doubled.  It’s a start and Marta Figueras-Dotti, chair of the LET Board, was optimistic.  The Spaniard had a distinguished playing career on both sides of the Atlantic before becoming a coach of some renown and is a passionate promoter of the game in general and the women’s game in particular.

“Two teams, joining for one common purpose, will create opportunities we simply could not have pursued on our own,” she said.  “At its foundation this joint venture is about creating opportunities for our members to pursue their passion and their careers as professional athletes.  In just the 60 days since we began working on this joint venture, we have already seen a dramatic impact on our LET Tour schedule – an impact that will be a positive result for virtually all of our LET members.”

Mike Whan, commissioner of the LPGA, said:  “We have experienced incredible growth in women’s golf in the US and this is an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate and expand the game in Europe as well.  I’m excited that this is something we will build together with the LET.”

Here’s to a prosperous future.