On a Thursday morning after tai chi I like to go up to the golf club for a coffee and a wee look at people playing golf in shirt sleeves in the sunshine.  No, we haven’t gone tropical at Whittington, like the rest of the country we’re all wrapped up against the increasing chill but on the telly the professionals are playing under blue skies in places like Hawaii, Florida and Abu Dhabi.  Bliss to watch for those of us who are testing out the latest Icebreaker merino magic.

Only not yesterday.  The box and the broadband weren’t connecting, a hangover from a series of power cuts on Wednesday, so I haven’t seen a single shot of, say, Shane Lowry’s sizzling 62 in the first round of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship presented by EGA.  He had a solid 70 in the second round, so let’s hope he can end up out in front after 72 holes, no easy task after such a scintillating start.  Not that there’s any Irish bias in this corner of the blogosphere, of course.  (Do spheres even have corners?)

Also in Abu Dhabi, last week, Charley Hull won the LET’s first event of the year, the Fatima Bint Mubarak Ladies Open at Saadyat Beach Golf Club.  Newly engaged, Hull, who’s still only 22, finished one shot ahead of Marianne Skarpnord, of Norway.  She received her trophy from that irrepressible octogenarian Gary Player, who designed the course.  Winning is a great way to start the season and I’m hoping the bold Charley will be in even better form by the time the Solheim Cup comes round in September.

The match is at Gleneagles and Europe always win in Scotland, don’t we?  First, at Dalmahoy in 1992, then at Loch Lomond in 2000.  No pressure then for Catriona Matthew, the European captain, who learned her golf at North Berwick.  Juli Inkster, the US captain, is plotting an unprecedented third consecutive victory in charge of the Americans.  It should be quite a contest.

Keep an eye on potential team members Caroline Hedwall, of Sweden, Anne Van Dam, of the Netherlands, Denmark’s Nicole Broch Larsen and England’s Jodi Ewart Shadoff, who shared third place in Abu Dhabi (alongside Luna Sobron of Spain).  They were on 3 under par, five shots behind Hull and won a grand total of $10,164.16 each.  Hull’s haul was $38,115.60.  The total purse was $300,000 – that’s US – between 56 players.  The LET’s next three tournaments are in Australia and the respective purses are $350,000, $150,000 and $150,000 – that’s Aussie dollars, so you can see that playing the tour is a long old haul, more risk than reward for most players.  You have to love it to persevere.

Over in Florida, the LPGA season is getting under way with the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions presented by Insurance Office of America – we women love a snappy title – and the purse is a little more nought-encrusted at $1,200,000.  There are also only 26 players competing, including three Europeans:  Georgia Hall,  who won the Ricoh Women’s British Open in such style last year and the Swedes Anna Nordqvist and Pernilla Lindberg.

Meanwhile, here in Staffordshire the digging goes on and the heavy plant is criss-crossing the fairways.  I’ve always loved that sign “Heavy Plant Crossing”, it always makes me laugh.  Imagine a giant cactus or an obese chrysanth or a terrifying triffid stomping along determinedly, making its way to the other side.  It’s good fun dodging the diggers – note to Health and Safety buffs, I’m exaggerating, we’re well cordoned off – and keeping track of their progress.  There’s rarely a dull moment.

For the financial record, my mates and I threw prudence aside and lobbed 100 pence each into the pot – a couple of noughts but not enough to cover the cost of a cuppa these days; we’re just going for the glory.

 

 

 

 

It’s a bit of a miracle that the Royal West Norfolk golf course at Brancaster is still in existence.  It’s squeezed onto a narrow stretch of land between the North Sea and marsh land that is a paradise for birds and boats and has been battered from both sides since the golf club was founded in 1891.  There’s no doubt that the founders would still feel at home because not all that much has changed all that much and the course is a wonderful throwback.

I’ve probably mentioned before that it was the course that Dai (my late husband, for new readers) chose every time anybody asked where he would play his last round of golf.  And, by sheer chance, it was where he played his last round, not, sadly, a very distinguished round but he was used to that.  It was the disappointments and the determination to do better that kept him coming back  – after retrieving the clubs from wherever they’d been hurled.

The golf writers are still making their annual pilgrimage to Brancaster every November, though we’re dwindling in numbers and could do with an injection of new blood.  It’s a long way from most places but it’s more than worth the detour and the Pat Ward-Thomas trophy really has to be played there – you may remember that Pat, one of The Guardian’s corps of irascible golf correspondents, was captain and is on the board above the fireplace alongside a variety of dukes, air vice-marshals and HRHs.

Last Saturday, we had a glorious, shirt-sleeve sort of a day, with a bright blue sky and a bit of a breeze – not too brisk – and my partner and I (it was foursomes, a format that can strain many a friendship and many a short fuse) started blob, blob, blob, blob…….His short fuse had been lit as early as his first shot but we settled down to play semi-respectably and even had an unlikely par 4 at Brancaster’s fearsome 9th, where the green is guarded by the marsh and a frightening array of vertical sleepers.  It was too long for us to reach in two – unlike our singleton playing partner who ended in the marsh only because he pushed his second shot slightly – but by some sort of miracle (a mishit rescue club hit high off the toe and also sort of semi-duffed) our third shot landed on the green and stayed there and my partner holed from about 30 feet.  One of those par things.  Easy.  High fives all round.  Dai, who was scattered there ten years ago (well, the bit of him that is not on Bryher or in the hollow to the left of the 5th at Whittington Heath or in the kitchen cupboard), would have appreciated our delight, despite the dodgy nature of the execution.

Over the years, every now and again, I’ve played half decently at Brancaster, so I’m no longer too upset when it exposes my lack of golfing skills.  It’s just a joy to play, even given the difficulties of the 8th and 9th and the challenge of clearing the cavernous chasm that is the monstrous bunker at the 15th, a formidable par 3.

However, none of those holes gets my vote as the most difficult in Norfolk – admittedly, there are plenty of courses in the county that I have yet to play and my choice takes into account my limitations, prejudices and many years of frustration and humiliation on said hole.  Top of my list is the 6th at West Runton, a testing 9-holer where we’ve been playing our annual match for 30 years.  Hence the medal in the picture at the top of the blog, presented to us golf writers by the opponents who’ve been beating us up for three decades now!  They’ve been generous and welcoming hosts and we’ve been the perfect guests, doing our best but losing so often that, really, I think it’s time they started sending us for lessons.  (Are you listening Mo!)

You’ve guessed it, we lost again but all the matches were close enough and, all being well, we’ll live to fight another year.  My partner and I (greensomes this time, different partner) even won the dreaded 6th, which is nearly at the top of Beacon Hill, at 103 metres the highest point in Norfolk apparently.  The views are spectacular and well worth the climb.  I’ll decline to say more…..

This is not the place to regale you with tales of the Staffordshire Union Of Golf Clubs’ annual county golf dinner – which, to the amusement (or horror) of many, was held in Warwickshire and included women for the first time.  It finished late last night, even by this blog’s standards and I’ll try and do it justice at a later date.  The guest entertainer, who entered the fray late, after the guest speaker who was conscious that he himself was starting late, did a brilliant job and had an excellent gag about Tiger Woods, which I’ll try and remember on request.

To finish on yet another losing note, my partner and I are already out of the (ladies’/women’s) winter foursomes at WHGC.  We were beaten, in near darkness, at the third extra hole.  It was so much fun but that’s us done.  Round robin anyone?

 

 

The dreaded laryngitis/lurgy type thing I’ve encountered this season lingers on and I’m now past the three-week mark.  I am much better but am certainly not helped by the fact that I’ve hit a very busy time of year and have been running around a bit like a headless chicken.  It was back to Ireland again this week, this time to the wee North and a day’s filming at the incomparable Royal Portrush Golf Club, host of the 2019 Open Championship, just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

The weather was glorious, with lots of sunshine but boy, was it cold.  I mean deep-down, right-into-your-bones sort of cold.  The programme, a documentary to be shown on BBC 2 Northern Ireland ahead of the Open next July, is fronted by the incomparable Gerry Kelly, one of Ireland’s most popular broadcasters and journalists and erstwhile prolific presenter on Ulster television.  Gerry delves into the beginnings of golf in Scotland and traces innumerable links to Irish golf in a “Who do you think you are?” type of way and apparently I was required for the final segment of playing a few holes and previewing next year’s return of the Open to the Portrush links.

Special thanks here to producer Graham Little who convinced me I was the right person for the gig.  If I hadn’t listened to him, I wouldn’t have had the chance to work with one of the best – so, thank you, Graham.  Normally I would have a nice pic to put in here but forgetting to take my phone on the course and the extreme cold put all such thoughts from my mind.  You’ll just have to hang on till the documentary comes out but don’t worry, I’ll remind you nearer the time!

Anyway, in the interests of pictorial content in the blog this is how I was spending my time in Belfast International airport on the way home……………

It’s been an interesting year, off the golf course as well as on it.  In May we started having some work done to the house which meant that the contents of four rooms were boxed up and put into storage.  These much-loved possessions were liberated ten days ago and it was with great excitement that I stood in the conservatory directing assorted boxes and furniture to the correct rooms.  Ten minutes into my traffic warden job I began to think to myself I had no idea we had accumulated so much, well, rubbish, frankly.  At this point Patricia appeared and succinctly asked, “Well, have you seen anything come down the drive yet that lifts your heart?”  I think by now you can probably guess the answer.  I decided on the spot that I would have a total cull of the garbage we had for some unknown reason refused to throw out – it was not going back into cupboards and drawers “to be dealt with later”.  It wasn’t going to make it into said cupboards and drawers again – particularly in the study.

One thing I’m quite proud of, and which gives me great pleasure, is my collection of golf books, some autobiographical, many instructional.  At Portrush Gerry had been telling me about some of the people he had met in the course of making the programme.  He encountered serious collectors and chroniclers of our sport, owners of prolific collections numbering thousands and thousands of individual pieces.  I was thinking of this as I was doing a bit of sorting the other day, (trying not to start leafing through and reading too much) and was struck by several of the authors’ names adorning my shelves – Seve Ballesteros, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Nick Faldo, Mike Hebron, Pia Nilsson, Sam Snead, Peter Alliss, Dai Rees, Peggy Kirk Bell, Kitrina Douglas, Annika Sorenstam, Ken Brown, John Jacobs, to name just a few.  I realised with a start that I HAD MET all these people, had had the pleasure of spending quite a lot of time with a number of them and was privileged to call many of them my friends.

And once again I found myself sending a heartfelt thank you to Mum and Dad, wherever they may be now, for introducing their two girls to this phenomenal game called golf.  I wonder could they ever have envisaged the wonderful world they were opening up for the two of us?

This is not the way to start a piece that you want people to keep on reading.  Intros are meant to engage the reader, draw them in, intrigue them or at least inform them, keep them wanting more, keen to read on.  If I tell you that this shows every sign of being about me, me, me (what do you mean, what’s different from every other week!), you can move on to something else with a clear conscience, no offence taken.

I was delighted to see that on Monday defending champion Sergio Garcia hung on to win the weather-disrupted Andalucia Valderrama Masters, hosted by the Sergio Garcia Foundation, at Real Club Valderrama.  The event was reduced to 54 holes – it does rain in Spain – but Sergio coped well and won by four shots from Shane Lowry (hooray), who finished with a 66.  I’m a Sergio fan still and am happy to take every opportunity to show him, beaming, clutching a trophy.  Shane, I hope, will be winning more trophies soon.

On Monday I was playing at Delamere Forest in Cheshire, which is always a treat to play, not, for once, with Maureen, who is a member there (hooray) but with the AGW (Association of Golf Writers), contesting the Michael Williams Hogget.  Michael, who died, far too early, on his home course of Chelmsford, was the golf correspondent of the Daily Telegraph for many years but I had to look up hogget in my trusty Chambers Dictionary and am now, I confess, none the wiser.  A hogget is, apparently, “a yearling sheep or colt”, so who knows what it has to do with Michael or golf.  I await the answer with some trepidation.

Rob Perkins, who’d travelled up from Somerset, claimed the title and pretty well wrapped up our Race To Wentworth  and the Etiqus Golfer Of The Year award with only the AGW Championship, at Hoylake, to come.  No longer required to be hot on detail, I believe he could have given Royal Liverpool a miss and gone home and still come out as No 1.

As it happened, Hoylake, the sainted home of Royal Liverpool, one of the oldest and most historic courses in all Britain (I quote from The Shell International Encyclopedia (sic) Of Golf, edited by Donald Steel and Peter Ryde, advisory editor Herbert Warren Wind – all three men are worth looking up).  In England, only Royal Blackheath and Royal North Devon (Westward Ho!) are older.  Bernard Darwin was a fan, though he conceded that it is not the most scenic of links:  “…this place of dull and rather mean appearance is one of the most interesting and most difficult courses in the world and pre-eminently one which is regarded with affection by all who know it well.”

I’ve always liked Hoylake – even when there were places where women could not tread in a clubhouse that is a treat in itself, full of photographs and portraits that could keep you engrossed for days.  On Tuesday, it was too tough for the likes of me, blowing a hooley that might have been stronger than the one at Royal St George’s when Darren Clarke won the Open Championship.  On the 1st tee I thought that amassing double figures in points for the 18 holes would be a good effort.  I’m not joking; it was that windy.  One thing that Hoylake lacks is one of those wind thingys (have forgotten its official name) that tells you just what you’re having to cope with – zephyr, storm, gale, hurricane, whatever.  The club history is called “Mighty Winds … Mighty Champions”.

We could just about stand up, so it probably didn’t quite reach gale force, though some of the gusts might have – my trolley blew over four times – and I clocked up nearly 19,000 steps (about 11 kilometres), tracking balls that were blown to blazes as they soared in the wrong direction; at Delamere it was 16,000.  I managed 11 points going out (hooray) and wondered why I couldn’t see properly before realising that salt blown in from the Dee Estuary was mucking up my glasses.  Regrouping and drawing on my formative years at Portstewart and Portrush , I amassed 17 points, little short of miraculous, on the back nine, including one blob, at the 15th.  It was into the teeth of the wind, I didn’t have a shot and knew I was toast when I put my second shot into a fairway bunker.  Don’t think I ever got out.  So now I know why Tiger went to such great lengths to stay out of the buggers when he won the Open so emotionally in 2006.  Anyone who thinks he found it easy-peasy didn’t see him fall into Steve Williams’s arms when the last putt went in.  Tiger, whose dad had died earlier that year, was a man who’d put every last ounce of skill, effort and emotion into every shot.  He’d given his all.  Easy it was not.

My three partners and I staggered in as darkness was falling and it turned out that my valiant total of 28 points had won by four points.  So I became the first person to win the AGW Championship and the coveted Fred Pignon Trophy four times!   Even more amazing, this victory came 27 years after my first triumph and 16 years after my third (hooray)!

I couldn’t help thinking about my first win, way back in 1991, at The Wisley.  Foolishly, because the club handbook recommended that only single figure players should attempt the course from the back tees, the men played off the tips – and the golf writers, for all their qualities, are not, in the main, even in their dreams, frustrated tour pros.  I, the only woman, played off the red tees, which we sometimes couldn’t find because they’d been plonked so far up the fairways.  My course, as it turned out, was 1,000 yards shorter than the men’s, which, even allowing for everything you could allow for, was pretty daft.

Anyway, I blobbed the 1st and the 18th and came in with 38 points just as husband Dai was being hailed as the champion.  He’d played out of his socks, spikes, everything and come in with 36 points, a magnificent effort deserving of the trophy and a first victory in the championship.  And I snatched it from him.  It would not be an understatement to say that my reception (not just from my ever-lovin’) was glacial – and this was long before we were taking global warming seriously.  It was COLD.

The following year, at Brocket Hall (some things stick in your mind), Liz Kahn and I were made to play off the same tees as the men, with a few extra shots thrown in as some sort of inadequate sop.  Our protests came to nothing, especially when Liz finished respectably in the middle of the pack and I won, again.  Oops – or do I mean hooray!

Sorry Dai, you probably did deserve to win at The Wisley and at least you once got your hands on the original Henry Cotton Salver, the solid silver one that is now at the bottom of the Thames – but that’s a story for another day.