No matter how hard I try, does this blog get done and dusted before Thursday evening or, more usually, Friday morning early hours, the sort of time we used to stagger home in our younger days?  Does it buggery.

I’ve known for ages that the Spurs v Man Utd game was at the supremely inconvenient time of 2015 on a Thursday – it’s also Draw Night at the golf club, so I’m praying I don’t win; a sum that would pay for my season ticket, more or less.  Despite our (their) indefensible defensive debacle at Newcastle on Sunday, I drove to Milton Keynes, squeezed into the one remaining parking space (the place’ll be empty by the time I get back) and am writing this as our Arsenal-supporting driver (not a happy Gunner but a lot happier than the three Tottenham tragics who got on his minibus at MK) ploughs southwards through the rain.

We usually have a proper coach (unlike Spurs – cheap crack, come on Ryan) but there are only eleven of us (wonder if we could get a game?) on the list tonight.  Four got on at Bedford, two at Shefford and two at Hitchin.  Was it Robert Louis Stevenson who said, “Tis better to travel hopefully than arrive?”

Ah well, United aren’t really that much better than we are (famous last words) though they have won a trophy already this season, are in the FA Cup final and do have a man in charge now who seems to have a plan and has a suitably scary death stare.  Everything points to another close contest…*

If you’re not an eejit with a Grand Canyon-sized streak of optimism and resilience, don’t support a football team.

Talk of deadlines and death stares is probably not the most tasteful lead in to tributes to three friends who have died recently but two were journalists, members of the AGW and the third, an artist and Manchester United fan, also had a way with words; they were all well into their 80s, so not much would surprise or shock them.

I’ll start with Peter Haslam to whom I’ll be forever grateful for giving me my start at Golf World, as the editorial assistant.  There were only four of us in the editorial department – Peter, the editor, not long arrived from the Kidderminster Times; Neil Elsey, the deputy editor, who knew a lot more about golf and the magazine business than Peter did and was to die far too young; and Dave Oswald, the art editor, a talented, Chelsea-supporting Scot with whom I shared an office and from whom I learned language that still gets me into trouble 40-odd years later.  [NB  Francesca Elsey, please DO get in touch with Dave, who knew your Dad as well as anybody.]

The office was in Bermondsey, so I stayed in St Margaret’s (between Richmond and Twickenham) with my cousin and her husband, the visitor who arrived for two weeks and stayed two years!  Peter revelled in the job, relishing the golf, the players and particularly the travelling.  As I remember, he wasn’t an always-in-the-office editor, he ruled with a light touch.  Hawaii was one of his favourite trips and he made friends and contacts wherever he went.

Whatever the reason, Peter didn’t bat an eyelash let alone an eye when I, also very new, suggested that I should cover the World Amateur Team Championships in Pinehurst, North Carolina.  Maureen was on the GB and I Espirito Santo team, with Mary McKenna and Belle Robertson, though Mc had back trouble and had to be subbed by Jane Connachan.  Maire O’Donnell, of Murvagh, was the captain and I slept on the sofa bed in the team’s apartment.

I also stayed on for the Eisenhower Trophy, staying in Pine Needles Lodge and Country Club courtesy of Peggy Kirk Bell, a friend of her fellow legend Maureen Garrett, one of GB and I’s great cheerleaders.  I met Dai that second week, so Peter has a lot to answer for and I can’t thank him enough.

John Ingham was on Maureen’s and my list of people to chat to for the blog but sadly we never made it down to Wimbledon to be entertained and enthralled for hours by his tales, tall and otherwise.  I put him on a par with the likes of Mark Wilson, Michael Williams, Mike McDonnell, Peter Dobereiner and Renton Laidlaw, to name just a few, old-school newspapermen who brought golf to life and could spin a yarn with the best of them.

John was press officer all over Asia and Africa and had a wonderful story about employing a local witch doctor to make sure that the monsoon, or whatever, held off long enough for the tournament to go ahead as planned.  Sorry to be so vague on the details but it was a bit of a miracle and the event got acres of coverage back home.  It was hard to stop smiling when John was in full flow.

Last, but never least, the incomparable Harold Riley, a promising footballer in his youth in the days of the Busby Babes but a magician with pencil and paintbrush.  A real artist, protege of Lowry (who was also a son of Salford), youngest student at The Slade, painter of popes and presidents, chronicler of footballers and golfers, luckily for us.

Golf was one of Harold’s loves and he attended many an Open, Ryder Cup and AGW dinner; many a menu ended up covered with his sketches and treasured for ever.  He agreed to do the illustrations for Dai’s and my book Beyond The Fairways – “almost a classic” as one Dutch publisher described it, to my delight and Dai’s fury.

Sadly, our publisher, who shall remain nameless, cared more about the bottom line than posterity, panicked at the mounting cost, demanded a simpler layout, more words, cheaper paper and fewer illustrations, essentially throwing Harold’s work away.

It broke Dai’s heart – I don’t think he ever opened the book – and hardened Harold’s.  The publisher later suggested another project to him and got a very blunt, northern response from an affable, good-natured, urbane and courteous man with high standards.

One last Harold story.  When he was still a student at The Slade, he was asked to do the illustrations for a new edition of Gray’s Anatomy, requiring hundreds of meticulous medical drawings.  Having completed the work, he tentatively asked about the fee.  “Don’t worry, Mr Riley,” came the imperious reply.  “You’ll get a prominent mention in the foreword.”

Lesson learned.  Harold knew his worth and there would be no starving-artist-in-the-garret nonsense for him.

Thanks for all the happy times and priceless memories, Harold, John and Peter and love and condolences to your family and friends from Mo and me.

Finally, to end on a joyous, raucous note, congratulations to Wrexham on their promotion and return to the Football League.

*Spurs 2 Manchester United 2!

 

 

The other day, on the radio, somebody said that we’d never complete our ‘to do’ lists, that the day we breathe our last, there’ll still be something on the list.  As somebody constantly and vainly trying to get her affairs and house in order, I found that strangely comforting; phew; I can relax; it’ll never all get done.

I was rooting around in my book room, a mess of boxes and bits and pieces and a sofa bed that’s hidden from view under a pile of stuff, trying to find that Dinah Shore badge that I know is there somewhere.  Having given up the search, the wee pic at the top of the piece, the featured image (fingers crossed, technology permitting), shows you why said search was unsuccessful.

Dinah’s tournament, which has had a number of names, is now The Chevron Championship and has moved to the Woodlands in Texas after a lifetime at Mission Hills in California.  It is the first women’s major of the season and Stacy Lewis, the US Solheim Cup captain, a proud local, is thrilled to be playing so close to so many friends and family.  She also talked about the importance of not forgetting the event’s history, of acknowledging its importance and weaving the old into the new.

 

“Chevron put together a player advisory group,” Lewis said.  “They wanted to know what was important to us to make the championship special.  There’s obviously a lot of traditions with this event and what…were most important to us.  They asked current players, they asked retired players, they asked everybody.

“To me, Dinah is and was the most important thing.  You can take the leap in Poppies Pond and all that kind of stuff but to me, there’s a reason Dinah is the only non-playing person in our LPGA Hall of Fame.  There’s a reason for that.  Chevron crushed it.  You see it with the trophy.  Dinah’s Place on 18.  Everything is about Dinah this week.”

Look Dinah up, she was a singing superstar in her day, friend of Sinatra, Hope, Crosby, you name them.  It was an Englishman, David Foster, who worked for Colgate, who persuaded her to switch from tennis to golf and send the profile of the LPGA and women’s golf soaring.  Dinah grew to love golf and golfers and that’s how she ended up in the LPGA Hall of Fame, one of the pickiest in all of sports (as the Americans might say).

Now, am I going to switch from golf to football or something completely random?  Having recovered my Spring issue of Golf Quarterly (www.golfquarterly.co.uk) from under the usual pile of papers, I immediately thought of Rory when I read the Sporting Truths and I quote two.  First, Bernard Darwin, who knew a thing or two about the vagaries of the game:  “Golf being a cold, calculating game gives perhaps more scope for folly than any other.  We have all the time in the world to make up our minds as to what is the wise thing to do, and then we do the foolish one.”

Second, and irrefutable, Keith Miller, the flamboyant Australian cricketer who was one of Don Bradman’s Invincibles after surviving World War II as a pilot:  “Pressure is a Messerschmitt on your tail – playing cricket is not.”

So I suppose there’s no pressure at all watching Spurs, just a lot of agony at the moment, longing for moments of ecstasy.  Last weekend, against Bournemouth, our defending was dire and Denise, over from Ireland for the treat of seeing the THS (Tottenham Hotspur Stadium) for the first time, had to suffer the frustration of a 3-2 defeat.  It was our 10th league defeat of the season, so the fact that we still have even a sniff of a top four finish tells you what a weird old campaign it’s been.

The next day, at the Poundland Bescot Stadium, more than 5,000 of us watched Aston Villa play Chelsea in the semi-final of the Vitality Women’s FA Cup.  Chelsea, the Cup holders x 2 (they’re going for three in a row), had beaten Villa 3-nil in the league a couple of weeks before but they had a tougher time of it this time and just managed to sneak a 1-nil win thanks to a spring-heeled header from Sam Kerr, the Australian who’d help sink England at Wembley a few days earlier.

It was a dreaded BBU (brave but unavailing) by Villa and the players, who had given their all, were gutted, slumped on the pitch, despair and disappointment oozing from every pore.  Hard luck, well played doesn’t quite cover it.  Not much consolation that it was a cracking game.

Nearly forgot to tell you that my train down to London was delayed, just outside Rugby as it turned out, for so long that the full fare was refunded.  An Avanti train pulled up alongside to deliver a new driver – they wouldn’t tell us exactly what the problem was but I hope the original driver is OK – and I spent the time applying for my compensation.

It only takes a delay of 15 minutes (which seems a bit short) to allow you to apply for some money back.  I thought it would be about a tenner, so I donated my refund to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, London Northwestern’s chosen charity.  The next day I found out that it was my full fare!  Still, as an oldie with a senior railcard, it was only £25.70…

 

It’s been quite a week, a week packed with more activity, work, responsibility and travel than the whole of the last 18 months put together.  My fateful tangle with Covid back in November 2021 meant that my interaction with anything other than the medical world has been on very short ration (as my late Dad would have said).  This last week, however, has been glorious.

It all started with my stepson’s wedding to his long-term partner, a happy, joyous occasion in a sublime setting in Yorkshire, north of Sheffield.  A 48-hour bubble in a luxurious setting with two sets of family and friends with time to connect, reconnect and just be.  Arguably the happiest wedding I have ever attended and all orchestrated by the delightfully smitten bride and groom.  Alas, no posting of a happy snap of the couple here, as they requested no social media pics of the pair of them.

Brian and I left this cloistered world for a long, tiring trip to the States, destination Augusta, Georgia, for the eagerly awaited Masters tournament.  The stress levels rose immediately as our Manchester to Amsterdam flight was only landing at the time our Amsterdam to Atlanta one should have been taking off.  They held the plane for us (and the half dozen or so members of Abergele Golf Club we met en route) and we staggered aboard the plane with no little relief.  Would our luggage make it, we wondered?

Nine hours later we landed in Atlanta and found our way to an arrivals hall bursting at the seams with folk and the unappetising prospect of queuing for hours to clear customs and immigration.  We eventually weathered that particular storm and were rewarded with the welcome, and somewhat unexpected, sight of our suitcases awaiting us.  Phew!  Now,  just the little task of phoning the airport hotel we were staying in to get them to send their shuttle bus for us.

Phoning done, we went to the collection point and waited……and waited…….and waited.  Understandably wilting badly after the exertions of the wedding and having left our beds some 20 hours earlier we decided to join yet another queue, this time for a taxi.  A delightful French girl overheard our arrangements and asked to join us as she was staying in the same hotel.  She was on her way to spend some time surfing in Nicaragua, flying the next morning to Puerto Rico before catching a bus across the border.  Suddenly, a trip to the Masters felt, well, quite ordinary.

A car service picked us up the next morning and whipped us down to Augusta amid a flurry of rain storms and showers. Within minutes of arrival, it seemed, I was bundled up in my waterproofs and off out on the course with my friend and colleague Fred Albers, taking my first few tentative steps back into broadcasting for Sirius XM.  With the pandemic and then my illness, it had been almost four years.  Time to start scraping off the rust!

The difficulties of the rain delays and then working out of sodden broadcasting positions for hours on end while wearing six or seven layers of clothing all became worthwhile when we enjoyed a rain-free, 30-hole final day of sunshine on the Sunday.  The Sirius XM team did an incredible job, having been on site for ten days, covering the Augusta Women’s National Amateur and then the Drive, Chip and Putt before gearing up for the Masters tournament itself.  Ultimate pros who absorbed my rustiness without missing a beat.

I watched Rory when he had driven off the 18th tee on Friday.  The normal, trampoline bounce of his gait was gone and it was with a very measured tread that he made his way up the hill at the last and into his car for the journey home.  Disappointment oozing from every pore.

I watched Jon Rahm win his first ever DP World tour title back in 2017 at Portstewart where Patricia and I grew up and played our golf with family and friends.  It was beyond cool to see him add a second major to his tally and a first green jacket.  He would be leaving Augusta National Golf Club with a completely different raft of emotions from Rory.

Monday morning for us meant a lift back to the dreaded Atlanta airport with a colleague where we picked up a hire car and made a beeline for a secluded cabin near Blue Ridge in northern Georgia.  A few days much-needed recovery nestled in the Chattahoochee National Forest has been divine.  With a hot tub as well as a hammock on the verandah it’s been the perfect place to reflect on the Masters, the wedding and assorted topics.

You may even start hearing from me a little more often in this blog!

Mention bifurcation to a medic and they’ll launch into something about the aorta splitting in two – or some such; dividing into two branches is what it means and some golfers hate the very idea while others wonder what all the fuss is about.

The R&A and the USGA, the game’s governing bodies at the time of writing, announced earlier this month that they were proposing, in essence, to reduce how far balls used in elite competition could go.  Don’t worry fellow club golfers and tippy-tappers, it won’t affect us at all.  The idea is to stop the big guns hitting the ball so far that a lot of classic courses have lost their place in the scheme of things because the game has become mostly about bombing drives, towering wedges and putting.

Of course, lots of full and frank consultations await but the very suggestion has caused uproar because, surely, one of golf’s central tenets is that we play by the same rules as the pros and use the same equipment.  Hmmm.  To be frank, that’s a load of old guff.  Delve down a little bit and you’ll find that the clubs the pros play with are as similar to the clubs on offer to the general golfer as artisan sourdough is to sliced white bread.  As for the balls…

Any road up, as they say in these parts, this is one of those discussions that’ll run and run, with a lot of the pros resenting being “dictated” to by a bunch of amateurs i.e. people who are not professional golfers, however professional, experienced and thoughtful they may be in other matters golfing.  The manufacturers of golf balls will have their say, of course, as they should and there’ll be some cracking conversations at Augusta National next week when the great and the good of golf pitch up in Georgia for the Masters, the first major championship of the season.

No doubt they’ll be chatting already as the club hosts the Augusta National Women’s Amateur and the Drive, Chip and Putt finals.

For what it’s worth, Mo and I aren’t particularly fazed by the thought of bifurcation but we discussed the possibility of a championship played with the sort of clubs we started out with…When we look back at the tiny (wooden) heads on our drivers back in the day, we’re in awe that we managed to hit the ball at all, let alone put together a respectable score.  As for the shafts…

Mo and I also discussed LIV and we don’t object to professionals, especially those who are past their peak (or never had much of a peak), taking the money and running.  But, please, please, please, don’t expect to eat your new cake and then go back and gobble up the old cake as well after trashing the baker and all his recipes.

And I still don’t get the team thing.

Perhaps that’s not so surprising because we all know I’m a bit of an eejit who’s often slow on the uptake – or quick on the wrong take.  Any road up, as an adopted Brummie (more or less), I decided it was time I started supporting teams closer to home than my tottering Totspurs, so I’m adopting Aston Villa Women (sorry Blues) and have become a member at Warwickshire (cricket).

Earlier this week, in the interests of research (and recovering my engagement ring, which some kind soul had found in the car park at MAC, the Midland Arts Centre, home of the latest Grayson’s Art Club exhibition), I got the train from Lichfield City to University (two stops beyond Birmingham New Street) and set off for Edgbaston cricket ground, which is dead opposite MAC.

I say set off but on emerging from the station at University, I havered, not having a clue which way to go – campus or QE (the hospital); which way was the city centre?  Eventually I chose a bus (bus pass coming up trumps) and the driver, an eastern European accent I think – he certainly found mine a bit baffling! – told me I’d have to change.  He let me know where to get off and I walked the rest of the way without getting lost.

Edgbaston is the second-biggest cricket ground in the country but it is fiddly to get to.  I called in and said hello and was invited to nip in and watch us play Worcestershire in a friendly.  Fortunately, I had to pick up my ring from MAC and get home before Mo arrived at mine, so I was able to decline the offer to freeze in the empty stands.

Ring retrieved, coffee drunk, I plonked myself at the No 1 bus stop outside MAC and Edgbaston, having been told it would take me to Five Ways, where I could get the train home.  Well, even I recognised that it was a roundabout route, the driver was a bit vague about where the train station was (I called in at a Marriott and they gave me a map and sent me to an underpass where a young man pointed me in the right direction).  Later, another young man, a student from the Far East, put me out of my misery and led me to the station…

Not quite as convoluted as getting to N17 but not as straightforward as I’d hoped.

And at least I made it home just ahead of Mo.