Well, what to say about golf when it’s weeks since you’ve even seen a golf course, let alone played on one?  One of the proprietors of this blog is quite keen, insistent almost, that it should mention golf, so I’m getting that out of the way early – just in case things get out of hand later.  And of course, since I’m writing this while waiting anxiously for updates of Spurs v Liverpool on the radio – oh….dear, Liverpool have scored a third;  oh, it’s gone to VAR (very annoying review); and, happy day, it’s been disallowed, lovely VAR (valuable additional review).  God, why on earth do I still bother with football?  Really, I’m not much of a supporter nowadays and I don’t really care – except that I do.  But why?  What a plonker!

Anyway, earlier this week I read a piece by James Dodson in Global Golf Post and it brought memories swirling back.  Tom Stewart, who wrote A Tribute To Golf and is himself a golfing legend, has decided to sell his gallery in Pinehurst, a treasure trove stuffed full of, well, stuff, most of it sublime.  We went there with a Stewart of our own, Inverness branch, so Tom, a charmer to the very soul of his being, went into overdrive and we swirled away with a purchase or two (I bought a Russian Santa who comes out every Christmas and has just been carefully packed away for another year), our heads full of stories and memories that have lasted a lifetime.

In the name of research I switched on the telly and looked at the featured groups in the first round of the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego.  How lovely to see sunshine and ocean, lots and lots of ocean.  Bliss.  One of the bonuses of no spectators is that you can actually see the golf course properly and the first hole I saw took my breath away – I think it was the 16th on the North Course.  Having led a bit of a sheltered life I’ve never been to Torrey Pines – I knew Tiger had won there umpty-ump times (a far cry from empty-ump, as my smart-aleck computer predicted annoyingly) – and had failed to appreciate just how spectacular it is.  That’s the trouble with watching events swarming with spectators, you see people rather than places.

And it was rather lovely watching the players in the featured groups because they were so diverse, none of your clones with identical swings and no personality – though, on reflection, how many of those do you see?  There was Phil, looking fitter at 50 plus than he’s looked for years; Bubba, who’s another lefty with a method all his own; Jordan Spieth, still struggling with the exalted expectations of a super-charged start to his career; Patrick Reed, a Masters champion with a troubled past but an apparently untroubled conscience; Xander Schauffele, with a name to invite Scrabble envy (pity it’s proper and ineligible) and a swing that’s beyond reproach and more than proper…..

Those of us who aren’t yet scrabbling to keep body and soul together have a lot of time to think in lockdown and I was thinking that watching a load of multi-millionaires playing for more millions in a rather beautiful vacuum was, while delightful to look at, really beyond irrelevant.   There are the lovely stories of players who’ve been struggling for years making that life-changing breakthrough and winning the right tournament at the right time but of course, a few years ago, when prize funds were good but not excessive, one win wouldn’t have made a career.  Slash the purses in half (or three quarters) and the golfers would still be golfing and making a good living but would the money be going to a better cause….?

It took a while, what with the pandemic, lockdowns, quarantines and so on but at last the Association of Golf Writers caught up with Shane Lowry, still the reigning Open champion, to present him with the AGW Trophy that he won in 2019, the year of his magnificent, memorable, majestic, indescribably brilliant victory at Royal Portrush, not that I’m biased or voted for him multiple times or anything like that….The AGW’s David Facey (his photo has not been used, partly to protect his integrity but mainly because we can’t afford his image rights…) handed over the silverware at the Omega Dubai Desert Classic this week.  Shane noticed that Rory has won it three times so far and Padraig twice, so he’s keen to win it again.  Being a member of a winning Ryder Cup team might work – but if Padraig’s the captain, he’ll get to lift the trophy…..

Oh……..dear…….Spurs lost 3-1 at (an empty) home to Liverpool, so we’ve only flattered to deceive yet again.  Lacklustre apparently….But, of course, I don’t really care any more…..I’m just STOMPING AROUND SHOUTING AND SULKING AND HAVING A TANTRUM for no reason at all…….

Oh well…..best to finish on a high note, so here’s another stunning McKenna special.  Take flight everybody.

Hello everybody.  Happy New Year.  Now’s the time when people make predictions about what’s going to happen in the next 12 months but I’ve never been any good at that – Predictive Patricia I am not, let alone Mystic Madill.  I’m not the 7th daughter of a 7th daughter or 7th son and have always struggled with planning ahead – no good at chess and the despair of my bridge partners, always taken by surprise by tax deadlines and insurance renewals.  Oops, tomorrow?  No?  Midnight tonight?  Are you sure?  You get the picture.

I have friends who are always looking ahead, checking the weather for tomorrow, next week, next month but I usually just get up in the morning, poke my nose out the door and estimate how many layers are required.  These days I’ve been getting well wrapped up in numerous layers, thermals, silk long johns, merino wool vests, woolly jumpers, whatever it takes.  Then I look out the window and inevitably I see, out walking his dog, some bloke in shorts!!  He might be wearing a jacket, even a hat and gloves but he’s still in his blooming shorts.  Brrrr.   Grrrr.

A friend who’s a fan of Wim Hof, the guy who goes up Everest in his shorts and flip-flops, has been trying to persuade me of the health benefits of cold showers – though she’s refused so far to install an ice bath in her garden (the pizza oven is still a work in progress) – and I’m resisting, at least while the heating and hot water are still working.  I’m still recovering from winters as a student in Edinburgh, in a lovely flat with not much heating and a bathroom so cold it was a wonder we ever washed at all.

Despite being a bit of a splurger with an eye for quality, I also have a thrifty, Scottish streak (a grandmother from Lossiemouth) and a surprising number of my purchases, often expensive, have stood the test of time and passed the cost-per-wear test with distinction – one of the few times when minus equals top marks.  I’ve forgotten how long ago it was that I bought my fisherman’s jersey, hand-knitted by Marion Brocklehurst and I remember havering for ages before taking the plunge and handing over a substantial sum of money.  Bear in mind that this was many years ago and I was about to spend nearly as much as I was earning for the week – it was a tournament at Ganton, perhaps an England women’s amateur championship or even the British won by Lillian Behan, a golfing meteorite from The Curragh.  She’s for ever on a club honours board that could hardly be more distinguished, featuring the great and the good of golf, boasting names like Joyce Wethered, Gerald Micklem, Max Faulkner, Frances Stephens, Michael Bonallack, Peter McEvoy, Nick Faldo and Jose Maria Olazabal, the Wolstenholmes Guy and Gary, Liz Chadwick, Bernard Gallacher, Joanne Morley, the list goes on and on.

My jersey sat unused through many long mild, wet winters and was often in the pile for the charity shop but I loved it too much to abandon it and this year it’s come into its own, keeping me warm and bringing back memories.  Thank you Marion.

I don’t know if Mike Whan does any knitting in his spare time – or even if he has any spare time – but if the outgoing LPGA commissioner’s body of work is as enduring as Marion’s, he’ll be a legend, enshrined in the Hall of Fame.  He’s announced that he’ll be stepping down later this year, having been in post for 11 years, much longer than any of his predecessors.  The thing was that, as Beth Ann Nichols, Golfweek’s outstanding correspondent, explained:  “He fell in love.  And he didn’t just fall in love with the tour and its people.  He fell in love with the mission.  And he got angry, too.

“The fast-talking middle-aged man with three boys, who’d never thought about or worried about the discrepancies that exist between the genders, had his eyes opened in a massive way when he took on the role of commissioner.  And he could’ve just used his dynamic personality and creativity to get the LPGA back on its feet again and then walked away.

“But he didn’t.  He couldn’t……..’It got in me,’ he said, ‘and I felt like I couldn’t leave.'”

Whan has done an amazing job as commissioner and is a difficult act to follow but we’ll know he’s been truly brilliant if the organisation takes this departure in its stride and proves that the foundations are solid.  One of the best, most impressive and in many ways most important things is how he’s ensured that the LPGA and women’s golf are right in the middle of all discussions about the game and its development.  He’s restored credibility and that’s invaluable.

Talking of moving on, Mary McKenna isn’t much of a golfer these days but she doesn’t have to be, having done pretty much everything that any woman could do in the game.  Her new area of expertise is photography and not being a person to do things by halves, she’s excelling at it.  Her birds are nothing short of sensational and here’s one of the latest.  I’ll be posting some of my favourites throughout the year.

 

Well, it’s golf’s big day next week – not the US presidential election on Tuesday, between two keen golfers, that’s bigger than big but the introduction of the new WHS on Monday.

The initials stand for World Handicap System and it’s taken years to thrash out and implement, the holy grail of a system that will be truly universal, ensuring that golfers will be competing on an equal footing wherever they’re playing, against whomsoever.  I think that’s a reasonably accurate summation but there are no guarantees when you’re relying on a woman (me) who never managed to come to grips with the buffer zone, which, even for members of Whittington Heath, has nothing to do with railway lines.

Handicaps are a very important part of golf because they ensure that good players have to play well, often enough, to beat not-so-good players and give the nsg’s a fighting chance of turning a match into a proper contest.  Not the most elegant summation perhaps, so I rooted out my copy of The Historical Dictionary of Golfing Terms by Peter Davies (no relation; according to the blurb he is (or was) “a classical scholar, linguist and lexicographer….A superb natural athlete and games enthusiast, his prowess as a golfer is in some dispute….”)

Anyway, the origin of the word was “doubtless borrowed from horse-racing” and as a noun it’s defined as “a compensation in strokes assigned to players on the basis of their past and current performance, designed to enable players of different abilities to compete together on approximately equal terms.”

As a definition that stands up pretty well, surely and one of the people we have to thank for the notion of a standard handicapping system is the redoubtable Issette Pearson, first honorary secretary of the LGU (Ladies’ Golf Union), founded in 1893 now defunct), a woman once described by a disgruntled/discombobulated journalist as “as despotic as the Czar/Tsar of Russia”.

I have, after some stumbles and a few swear words, managed to sign up to England Golf and all the joys of the new handicapping.  I have my new index – 10.4 I think, which seems ridiculously low  – but I got distracted, so didn’t carry on to multiply that number by WHGC’s slope (non-golfers don’t have to go there) rating off the red tees, divided by 113 to find my new handicap.  Since it’s of no real interest to anyone else, at this late hour I’m not going to bother attempting to remember my CDH (short not for congenital diaphragmatic hernia but for central database of handicaps) number and root out my new password – that’s an excitement for another day.

One friend, who works with numbers, cracked, “If I sit here long enough trying to work it out, I’ll be off 36!!”   In fact, she’s gone from 18 to 21 – apparently.  Another friend, who has, presumably, done her sums correctly or read the appropriate list with her glasses on, plays off 30 at the moment but her index number is 35, so from Monday on, for a while at least, she’ll be off 41 on her home course….Yikes.  Her nickname’s already Two Shots, she’ll be Three or Triple now, unbeatable and unbestable.

Mind you, in so-called friendly matches, handicaps are negotiable.  J.P. McManus, financier, racehorse owner, restorer of Adare Manor, is a handy golfer but not in the same league as Tiger Woods, yet the Irishman devised a system that enabled him to beat the great man when he was in his prime, if not in full-on major-winning mode.  If I remember rightly, it involved Tiger hitting two drives, then J.P. designating which one he should hit and so on and on.  If Tiger didn’t play well, he didn’t win.

At the moment we here in England are still able to play golf, no, let me re-phrase that, we’re still able to go to the golf course and play.  In Wales and the Republic of Ireland, golf is off limits again – for reasons that escape most of us – hence Mo’s stay-at-home tips.  We probably don’t quite appreciate how much we can do to improve without setting foot on the course or the driving range.  This is the perfect time to give it a go.

Someone asked Maureen for a list of books to read when we’re either banned from the golf course or deterred by the weather and I piled up a few of my favourites but in truth the list is nearly endless – anything by Henry Longhurst, Bernard Darwin, Peter Dobereiner, Dan Jenkins, Lawrence Donegan, Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott, Bob Rotella, Harvey Penick, Stephen Potter.  There’s instruction, whimsy, biographies/autobiographies, club histories, fiction, whatever, thousands of books to choose from.

In my collection I discovered a tatty paperback from 1969:  Play Better Golf with John Jacobs, based on the Yorkshire Television series and it’s full of sound advice.  He finishes by saying:  “Remember that golf is a game of how many, not how; that people may often be interested in what you scored, but rarely in how.

”Finally, I would ask you to do what sounds quite a simple thing but is, in fact, very difficult:  to try your utmost on every shot.  Golf can be the most frustrating and infuriating, as well as the most satisfying and elating, of games; but if it has one cliche that cannot be denied it is that the game is never over until the last putt has been holed.

”So, don’t give up – ever.  Think about what you are trying to do, which is to make a good impact.  Think about what will help you to make a good impact, which, to put it as simply as I can, is correct aim and stance followed by two turns, one to get your body out of the way while you aim the club, and one to get it out of the way while you swing the club through the ball.  Think out the shots before you play them, then think of one key factor to help you to swing as you have planned.

”There’s never been a greater game for triers.”

To end on an even more upbeat, happier note, many congratulations to Bethan and Tristan Jones, two of the LET’s stalwarts through thick and thin, who’ve just had their first baby.  I’m still beaming from ear to ear, so heaven only knows how they’re feeling.   Love and hugs (virtual, of course).

 

 

 

There’s only one place for me to start this week – with apologies to Laurie Canter, it’s not with his first round at the Italian Open – and that’s with Sue Spencer’s 69 on the new interim course at WHGC on Tuesday.  We’ve now moved into the new clubhouse – I had my first sausage and egg bap on Monday after an 0730 start, delicious – so our 1st hole is the old 5th, then we play what was the 4th as the 2nd, the old 2nd becomes the 3rd and on we go, one hole behind what we’re used to (the new markers are a bit simpler than the old stones, which were auctioned off).  Anyway, it means that the incomparable Spenny, who is getting better and better with age, set the new course record.  She even had a couple of bogeys, so, scarily, there’s plenty of room for improvement!

That translated into 40 points, so Sue won the comp too and we had a glass of prosecco to celebrate.  Jayne Fletcher, my partner, played really well for 39 points and came second, unhindered by my rather wimpish effort of 31 points.  In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that my game, while deserving of a four-letter description, is not really golf.  Jayne took a photo that illustrated that to perfection.

That was confirmed the next day when I went to a Taylormade fitting and had my swing speed measured, along with the distance the ball went and various other depressing figures.  Bryson DeChambeau should try playing this game with my numbers!  Mind you, I didn’t have to glug down  endless protein shakes or add 40 pounds, or whatever, to increase my yardages – I just had to use a more modern, up-to-date club.  My clubs, which were, in fact, Dai’s, as Maureen reminded me, so hardly designed for me, are 15 years old.  Technology has moved on a bit (mostly in a good way) and, of course, so have I (mostly in a bad way), so Mark, the fitter, had little difficulty in finding a club that improved my performance without any need for improvement from me.  Hooray.

Canter’s numbers were spot on at Chervo Golf Club, San Vigilio di Pozzolengo, Brescia (what a marvellous language Italian is, whether you speak it or not) yesterday.  The Englishman had a round of 60, 12 under par and was in severe danger of becoming only the second man to card a 59 on the European Tour – Oliver Fisher is still out on his own in that regard and since there was placing in Italy, Canter couldn’t even claim a course record.  Still, the man who lists Bath rugby and red wine as his interests, couldn’t stop smiling:  “It was just one of those days where you’ve just got to enjoy the ride.  It feels great.”

They’re not so happy in Ireland, where the government has put the country into lockdown and golf is now on the list of banned pastimes, despite being the poster sport for social distancing.  People are not happy and there have been plenty of sarcastic comparisons popping up on social media and a petition to change the decision.

To finish, here’s a joke for you, sent by a friend who thought it might be a little risqué but I think it’s OK, though it’s maybe not for the more squeamish.  Anyway, here goes (it is/was American but I’m sure you’ll understand the terminology).

A little old lady was walking down the street dragging two large plastic garbage bags behind her.  One of the bags was ripped and every once in a while a $20 bill fell out onto the sidewalk.   Noticing this, a policeman [who didn’t draw his gun; presumably the little old lady was white] stopped her and said:  “Ma’am, there are $20 bills falling out of that bag.”

”Oh, really?  Darn it!” said the little old lady.  “I’d better go back and see if I can find them.  Thanks for telling me officer.”

”Well, now, not so fast,” said the cop.  “Where did you get all that money?  You didn’t steal it, did you?”

”Oh, no, no,” said the old lady.  “You see my back yard is right next to a golf course.  A lot of golfers come and pee through a knot hole in my fence, right in my flower garden.  It used to really tick me off.  Kills the flowers, you know.

”Then I thought, ‘Why not make the best of it?’  So, now, I stand behind the fence by the knot hole, real quiet, with my hedge clippers.  Every time some guy sticks his thing through my fence, I surprise him, grab hold of it and say, ‘OK, buddy!  Give me $20 or off it comes!’”

”Well, that seems only fair,” said the cop, laughing.  “OK.  Good luck!

”Oh, by the way, what’s in the other bag?”

”Not everybody pays.”