Whenever people ask me what I’ve been up to over the last few days, I tend to panic and my mind goes blank.  What on earth have I been doing?  Nothing much really, the days just go and suddenly another week has passed and we’re hurtling through another month.  It’s amazing how a mad whirl of golf, bridge, singing, tai chi, WhatsApping (when global glitches allow), visits to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Bath, via assorted diversions, eats up the time.

Last week was quite hectic, with singing (or an approximation thereof from me) and tai chi on Wednesday; golf at Delamere on Thursday, a shotgun start in aid of Stick ‘n’ Step charity.  A lovely day on a lovely course, breezy and mostly bright, until the final downpour that had us dripping our way to the car.  The four of us had a nearest the pin and birdie 2 between us, enough for three balls each and assorted goodies but not enough points to challenge the top teams – the winners had well over 100 points.

On Saturday, with a full tank of petrol thanks to Morrisons and a tip-off from a friend (crisis, what crisis?), I set off for Maidenhead in the pouring rain, holed up in a faded but friendly Travelodge and on Sunday morning caught the Spurs supporters’ coach to Tottenham.  This season ticket business is a bit of a logistical challenge but we managed to beat Villa 2-1, so at least I’ve got the bragging rights for a wee while.  The programme commemorated the incomparable Jimmy Greaves, who died last month and it would have been quite something to see him in his prime.

Steve Perryman, who was at the start of his career when he played with Greavsie, was in awe of his talent and said:  “He was a professional goalscorer.  That was it, from start to finish – he knew how to score a goal.  He didn’t really want to run about but he ‘thought’ the game and he floated over the grass. Can you imagine how bad those pitches were?  He floated over them, he glided over them and when defenders like me were running through the ground, he was floating on top of it.  What a player.”

Running was not his thing, though.  “He definitely did not enjoy training,” Perryman said.  “Anything to do with running, he wasn’t involved….His game was built on that first two or three metres.  He was very single-minded – his job was to be on there and score a goal.  He lived for scoring goals….”

Whether or not his work rate would pass muster with today’s coaches, it’s hard to argue against the Greaves strike rate:  266 goals in 379 appearances for Spurs between 1961 and 1970 and 44 goals in 57 games for England.  He also scored 41 goals for Chelsea in the 1960/61 season, still a club record.  Phenomenal.

Ignoring all the Nike stuff in the Spurs shop (their sponsorship is saving me shedloads of money), I took a detour to look at an art exhibition called Balls.  Every work is based on the shape of a football and there’s a plea in capital letters:  PLEASE DO NOT KICK THE ART.

Where to next?  Ah yes, Bath for a lovely couple of days – although  I think I might let the train take the strain next time I go there:  it is not a car-friendly place.  Luckily enough, the weather was bright and breezy, with no rain, so I swirled round the city in an open-top bus, soaking up the architecture and the atmosphere.  Fantastic.

At this point, Mo might be saying that there’s not enough golf in this piece, so she’ll be glad to know that we passed very close to what is known as “the most dangerous place in Bath” with a warning to beware of “low-flying golf balls”.  It’s a wee golf course for beginners and just down the hill from the timeless elegance of the Royal Crescent is a playground for the pre-beginners.

On the real golf front, Jon Rahm, the world No 1, is back in Europe, in Madrid, attempting to win his national championship, the ACCIONA Open de Espana presented by Madrid for the third time in a row.  Only Seve has won the title three times but even he did not manage three in a row and Rahm is well aware that he has the chance to achieve something special.

“It would be very unique,” he said.  “It doesn’t matter what event it is, not many people have been able to win one three times in a row so I’m hoping I can get it done – it would truly be my honour.”

Finally, there’s a big boost for the women’s game with a new sponsor for the first major of the 2022 season.  The Chevron Championship will replace the ANA Inspiration for at least the next six years.  The prize money has been increased by a whopping 60 per cent, to $5 million and after 2022 the tournament will move from Rancho Mirage to a new home, yet to be decided but probably in the Houston area and a new, slightly later date.

It’ll be a bittersweet occasion, leaving Mission Hills Country Club behind but there’s no doubt that the tournament that once led the way when it came to prize money had been lagging behind its peers for far too long.  Chevron’s involvement is a giant leap for women’s golf – perhaps even for womankind in general.  Time will tell.

 

 

 

 

It’s more or less back to business as usual now, with players back to strokeplay – even though the Dunhill Links is not just some same old same old event, given the stellar cast of amateurs from sport, stage and screen, not forgetting assorted family and friends of varying degrees of skill and some of the best courses in the world.

Don’t laugh but many years ago, in the dim, distant days when I worked for The Times, I got an invitation to play (and write about the experience).  I said yes of course but my back, which was even dodgier then than it is now (thank you Clare in Bristol, Esther in California and the life-enhancing Gokhale Method), gave out and I had to withdraw long before I got anywhere near St Andrews and environs.  I was never invited again.

On reflection, years later, I wondered if it had been psychosomatic in some way, caused by nerves, fear, stage fright, panic, whatever.  The back was definitely bad – I could barely walk let alone swing – but I do remember worrying, not just about the golf but also about making my deadlines and writing readable stuff.  There was also the certain knowledge that I wouldn’t recognise a single, solitary mega famous pop or film star, renowned all over the globe except chez Davies.

I’m not sure if it was during the Tandy period, when the computer screens were so small that you could only see four or five lines at a time and connections were as dodgy as my back.  All that would have added to the anxiety, so perhaps I was just giving myself a bit of a pass, suffering from a physical ailment to relieve the pressure of being expected to perform.  It’s not uncommon, so who knows?

For whatever reason, Europe’s Ryder Cup team were not at their best at Whistling Straits (did I tell you that I’ve played there, without distinction, a story for another day?) but they poured their heart and soul in to the match and on this occasion came up well short, beaten by a better team over the three days.  Gutting but hardly the end of the world.

There’s a whole lot of guff spouted about strategy, pods, pairings, players too young, too old, to rest or not to rest, singles line-ups and so on.  We all do it, pontificating and speculating, mostly badly but apparently one punter won a million dollars for an $8 stake by getting all twelve singles results right!!!  How he must have cheered when Paul Casey’s putt at the last, to halve his match with Dustin Johnson, slipped agonisingly by – it looked in to me for most of the way; or when Harris English hoicked his approach to the 18th into a ditch/stream to lose to Lee Westwood; or when Matt Fitzpatrick gifted Daniel Berger the bottom match with a woeful duff at the same hole.  Two matches finished all square, so could have gone either way and must have shredded a few more nerves.

If I were captain (suspend disbelief for the moment) of the Ryder or Solheim Cup or the Curtis or Walker Cup or any team for that matter, I’d  want only two things:  all my players playing well on the days of the competition and putting the lights out.  See Leona Maguire for details.

Roll on Rome for the Ryder and Spain for the Solheim.  And, please, please NO booing of the Americans on the first tee.  They are our guests:  we welcome them, then we MANGLE them, smiling politely as we do so.

Being involved as I still am, always will be, in the never-ending search for the perfect bag, I was delighted to receive a press release from a company called Meg & Bee, after its founders Meg Tudball and Bee Paul. They, it turns out, make bags and their “Classic Kit Bag” was at the Ryder Cup, doing duty with the European wives and girlfriends as they tramped the fairways putting a brave face on a pretty dire situation.

That might just do me for my treks to watch the not-so-mighty Spurs – room for tissues (to mop up the tears), lippy, glasses, purse, hand gel, mobile, pencil, notebook (old habits die hard), car keys, all those awkward but necessary things that tend to make bulges in bags that are too small.

Of course the perfect bag doesn’t exist; it’s the search that’s the fun.

Not sure if there’s such a thing as a perfect jean but I just have to mention that the US Ryder Cup team had official jeans – no idea when they wore them and I think they retailed at about $500 but the great thing is that they had them and, even better, they were made in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Doesn’t ring any bells?  That just means that you’re not an Elvis fan.  I wasn’t particularly but my mate Kate is fanatical, so I absorbed plenty of Presley tidbits and I know for a fact that he was born in Tupelo, in a tiny shack that is now a museum.  I went there once – the US Women’s Open was not that far away – and bought Kate some souvenirs, served by two women sporting the most amazing, jaw-droppingly perfect beehives and well-nigh impenetrable southern drawls.  Perfect.

Finally, I couldn’t resist sharing this photo from Golf Ireland, of Tuam’s GolfSixes team.  They’ve got to the national finals at Portmarnock on October 24th, along with Co. Louth, Millicent, Kilkenny, Doneraile, Tipperary, Lurgan and PORTSTEWART (sorry for the bias, home club!).  Imagine the excitement.  Good luck to everybody.

 

 

 

It’s hard to miss a castle if you’re in north Wales, which is more or less the fault of Edward I (1239-1307), completing a scheme he inherited from his father Henry III and adding his own amendments and improvements, in an attempt to keep the Welsh in order.  I’m indebted to the website castlewales.com (which is indebted to any number of learned historians) for anything approaching a fact on this matter and I did a lot of looking up at the castle when we were playing Harlech the other day.

The golf club, several centuries younger than the castle, was established in 1894, in the reign of Queen Victoria and the first name on the honours board is James Braid, one of the great triumvirate (along with Vardon and Taylor), golfing royalty indeed.  He won a “Professional Tournament” in 1903, no names, no pack drill but undoubtedly there would have been money handed out at the end.  It was scary how many of the winners we knew between us – I even saw Cecil Leitch, winner of the Ladies’ British Amateur Championship in 1926, in the flesh when she presented the trophy to Cathy Panton at Silloth in 1976….

A round at Royal St David’s Golf Club, to give it its official title, is always a treat and it was a lot less windy and the rough was a lot less penal, in a relative sort of a way, than the last time I played there.  Steve, the pro, is from Newcastle, Co. Down; we were playing with Pam Valentine, a good friend who’s a member (such a good friend that we forgive her for supporting Liverpool); the weather was benign; the castle peacefully hosting visitors from England and elsewhere; and we could scarcely have had a more enjoyable day, slow pace of play notwithstanding.

It gave us time to chat and enjoy the views (though Snowdon itself was hidden by cloud) and Mo admitted that during her years on tour she’d been guilty of paying little or no attention to her surroundings.  That’s the trouble with professionals, they have to be obsessively single-minded (or feel they have to be) to be successful.  Still, I challenge anybody to fail to notice the beauty around them when they’re playing up in the mountains at Crans-sur-Sierre, in Switzerland.

Dai and I used to love going to Crans, where the golf course is right in the middle of everything, a bit like an Alpine St Andrews and there was always a special buzz when Seve Ballesteros and co were in town.  The course, a skier’s playground in the winter, has its quirks but it has been a fixture on the schedule since 1923 (starting as the Swiss Open) and the list of champions reads like a veritable who’s who of world and European golf:  Bobby Locke, Kel Nagle, Bob Charles, Dai Rees, Seve (several times), Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam, Jose Maria Olazabal, Colin Montgomerie, Lee Westwood, Ernie Els and Sergio Garcia, to mention just a few.

Now Rasmus Hojgaard, a 20-year old Dane with talent to burn, has added his name to the list, winning this year’s Omega European Masters with a final round of 63, seven under par.  It was his third win on tour and only Matteo Manassero and Seve managed to win that many at a younger age.  “I’m very proud,” Hojgaard said.  “With some of the players who have won it, it’s very special.  It’s an amazing place and I can’t wait to come back again.”

We’re now gearing up for a splurge of Solheim, defined as “any boisterous or extravagant display”, which should just about cover our behaviour as we spectate at home, showing appalling bias and a distinct lack of decorum as we cheer on Europe. The neighbours have been warned.

Let’s hope it’s a good omen that Europe’s Junior Solheim Cup team, captained by Annika Sorenstam, stunned the Americans with an amazing comeback, winning the singles 9-3 to snaffle the trophy for the first time since 2007 and for the first time ever on US soil.  Brilliant effort everybody.  Inspirational.

It’s a good thing that there’s no premier league football this weekend, so I won’t be torn between savouring the Solheim in comfort or schlepping down to north London to watch Spurs.  Last Sunday I headed off again, for the game against Watford, clutching my season ticket (it’s on the phone somewhere, along with proof of my COVID vaccinations and I live in fear and dread of losing them altogether, of them vanishing in to the ether or some sort of black hole of lost connections).

There was more method than madness in the planning this time:  drive to Milton Keynes station and get a coach to the ground, letting someone else take the strain.  Only problem was that no one at MK Central knew anything about my coach or the bus stop it was supposed to go from…Still, I’d given myself plenty of time for once, didn’t panic, bought a coffee and a croissant and after a reconnoitre or three settled on the only possible pick-up place.

By this time, two other pedestrians had turned up, one with some sort of massive kitbag that ruled him out of a supporter’s role, the other, oh happy day, with a clear plastic duffle bag with a cockerel on it….He turned out to be John from Derby and he was indeed waiting for the Spurs coach.  An old hand at this trekking-to-Tottenham lark, he was kindness itself, took me under his wing and made sure I didn’t get lost.

It turns out he has three season tickets:  one for Spurs, one for Derby and one for Burton!!!  Not altogether surprisingly his partner plays golf.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, we’ve had to wait for more than a year because of the pesky virus (nothing like a bit of understatement to start with) but at last the Curtis Cup returns to Wales.  The United States team have bounced in to Conwy keen to retain the trophy they won in crushing style at Quaker Ridge three yeas ago but the beauty of team matchplay is that nothing’s ever won on paper.  The game, remember, is played on grass.

Maureen and I got up at 0500 yesterday (well, she did, I was a little bit later being lighter on the ablutions) because we wanted to be there for the off at 0745.  It was the first day after all and we knew how important it was to a lot of our friends, how long-awaited and there is something special about the start of a big match, be it Curtis Cup, Walker Cup, Solheim, Ryder, whatever.

There isn’t a Welsh player on the GB and I team but as Gerald Micklem once said of a Walker Cup team, rebuking someone moaning about a lack of one nationality or another:  “There are no English, no Irish, no Welsh, no Scots…”  It’s like the Lions really:  one for all, all for one.  If you haven’t heard of Micklem – and the people who knew him well are now few and far between and pretty long in the tooth – look him up.  He may seem like ancient history but there’s far, far too much to Gerald, a real golfing visionary and benefactor, to squeeze into a few words.

For several hundred of us, maybe more, in a little corner of north Wales it was a lovely day, catching up with any number of old friends (well, I suppose, if truth be told, most of our friends are old now…), watching some very good young golfers battling their hearts out on a lovely golf course in benign conditions.  They’ve become part of something special and will probably only really appreciate just how special years from now.  There’s probably nothing better than attending a Curtis Cup as a “past player”.  Much more relaxing than being a current player!

There were enough spectators to justify the presence of numerous white-jacketed marshals, mustered from clubs from all over Wales and possibly beyond, to keep us in some sort of order.

Quite a few people who would never miss a Curtis Cup have had to stay away for a variety of reasons, not least the current restrictions, so Mo and I took as many snaps as we could, to give a flavour of the day.  Also, modern technology means that not only can you watch the action on Sky and the Golf Channel but on the R&A’s digital platforms, live streamed (I think that just means live, as it happens) through YouTube and Facebook as well as randa.org.

A picture is worth a thousand words, allegedly and if we were to recount all the tales told yesterday, this blog would never end!  It’s a miracle we got back home at all.

GB and I, confounding the odds and the perennial pessimists, had the best of the opening day, so their captain, ever affable, didn’t have the worry of scrabbling around to put a positive spin on things.  She just had to smile and look at the scoreboard, well aware that today is another day entirely.

Sarah Ingram, captain of the USA, had a less comfortable day – being 4 1/2  – 1 1/2 down is not the start you dream of – but she probably had no need of a team talk last night, the scoreboard said it all.

The choice of an action photo is completely random – Mo just happened to be there at the time, trusty phone in hand and we both liked the image and the colour.  No Irish bias here of course….

Finally, as a homage to the incomparable Mary McKenna, who is at home in Ireland, we include a water shot, of Conwy Marina.  No birds in flight in sight admittedly but our photography is a work in progress…Stationary boats are hard enough.

 

I noticed that the old codgers, sorry, seniors, sorry, sorry, legends (probably with a capital ‘L’) were playing in Ireland last week, in Donegal – if you’ve never been, don’t delay, GO – and Thomas Bjorn won the Irish Legends presented by the McGinley Foundation at Rosapenna Hotel & Golf Resort.  It was the Dane’s first win on the Legends Tour and he beat Phillip Price of Wales at the second hole of a play-off after a final round of 65, six under par.  They finished a whopping six shots ahead of Peter Baker, Peter Wilson and Mauricio Molina.

“It was nice,” Bjorn said.  “As a sportsman there’s no greater feeling than Sunday afternoon.  It doesn’t really matter where it is, I really got into it…I recognised myself and I haven’t seen that person for quite a while, which is nice.  It’s pretty special winning any golf tournament….I’m really glad I came.  It’s a wonderful part of Ireland and a wonderful part of the world.”

And I thought the trophy, which was what really caught my eye, was worth winning.  It was handmade in county Offaly, from old Irish native beech.  There’s no way that’ll be ending up in the back of a cupboard!