It occurred to me the other day that we, as a nation of watchers of others, have become so accustomed to seeing tremendous skills on display that we can often take for granted their amazing expertise.  This year, in the golfing world, there have been two outstanding proponents in the men’s and women’s games and they have been voted by their peers as simply the best for 2020.  Take a bow, Rory McIlroy and Jin Young Ko.

Let’s deal with Ko first.  In only her second year on the LPGA she won four times, including two major championships, and it was her insatiable work ethic which helped her to add three second-place finishes and a further five top tens.  In the midst of compiling these impressive statistics she set the longest bogey-free stretch in the history of the game – a total of 114 holes.  The previous record was 110 holes, set in 2000 by Tiger Woods.  Ko’s greatest strength is that she simply has no weaknesses and she is rightly No 1 in the world.

McIlroy also won on four occasions in 2019.  Alas, there were no majors but he is revelling in what he describes as “the most consistent year of my career”.  From 24 starts he recorded 19 top ten finishes and his improvements are all measureable.  He’s become a bit of a stats junkie and the marginal gains so beloved by professional sportsmen and women are showing up in multiple categories, particularly in his putting – and that is what he feels is at the root of his success.  He described it succinctly as his “best putting year ever this year”.

Chasing hard on the tails of these two players are a host of others, all hard working and highly skilled and we who watch (as opposed to do) have the delicious prospect of an intriguing and compelling 2020.

I was doing some other watching, new watching for me, at the weekend.  We have a highly successful, small, independent, family glass-blowing business a hundred yards down the road, just over the border in Wales.  E+M Glass were holding an open day with mulled wine, live music, stalls and glass-blowing demonstrations – a perfect opportunity to do some early Christmas shopping and get a close up view of an amazing skill.  Apparently, it takes about seven years to learn about being a glass-blower and then, as with most things, you simply keep on and on learning.  Charlie, the son of Ed and Margy, the E+M in the company name, was doing the demo and in no time at all he had whipped up a beautifully elegant wine glass.

It put me in mind of the old challenges on The Generation Game and I reckoned that it would take many years to perfect Charlie’s skills.  But then you look at something like Strictly Come Dancing, of which I am an unashamed fan, and it seems that each year there are one or two novices who by week 10 or 11 are described as being indistinguishable from the experts, the professional dancers.  Could you ever, ever imagine that happening in golf (or glass-blowing) in that amount of time?  It just wouldn’t happen in a million years, so does that make our sport just miles more difficult than dancing?  Are our skills just so much more demanding to acquire?  Whatever you think, I don’t think Strictly Come Golfing has a future.

And finally, Christmas has well and truly arrived in the shape of my new kit and caboodle from Ping.  I feel as excited as I did as a youngster when I was building up my first set of Jean Donalds with one club for birthday and one for Christmas.  A niggly back means I must hold off for a few days before taking to the range or the course, so I must hold my enthusiasm in check just for a little while.

So, all that remains is to thank all of our faithful readers who follow the various ramblings of the Madill sisters. Another year has whizzed by and we are taking our annual Christmas break until the middle of next month.

Seasons greetings to everyone, swing it smoothly and hope to see you in 2020!

I turned pro many moons age – in 1986, to be precise, and for almost all of my tournament playing days I was a Ping player.  Back then, Ping were already huge supporters of the women’s game. They were one of the very few companies who not only provided their players with equipment but they were first to instigate a bonus pool which was shared out according to results.  As women professional golfers we were taken seriously and so many of us have so much to thank Karsten Solheim, the founder of the company, for.  Karsten was a trailblazer in multiple ways and had a proven track record in the women’s game long before the advent of the now world-famous biennial contest between Europe and the United States which is played for the Solheim Cup, a tribute to him and his wife Louise.

So, at one time in my life the road to Gainsborough and the headquarters of Ping was one that was well travelled by me.  Patricia and I took that self-same road last Wednesday for me to go and have a club fitting.  I had decided it was time to invest in some new clubs and when a couple of my colleagues (Ken Brown being one) suggested I look no further than Ping it was Gainsborough I was pulling up on GoogleMaps.  I realised with a jolt that it was probably the thick end of 20 years since I’d last been there and I was curious to see their latest clubs and club-fitting gizmos.

We presented ourselves at the appointed hour at Ping’s European Fitting Centre at Thonock Park where everything is state of the art.  Awaiting us was Adam Wainwright, a plus 3 Linclonshire county player and expert club fitter. I put myself in his hands as Patricia roamed around snapping pictures and keeping us supplied with hot drinks on a dank, dismal November afternoon.  Adam’s patience was second-to-none, only surpassed by his knowledge and ability to explain his thinking as he guided me through rigorous testing of various combinations of heads and shafts.

I realise that many of you reading this may well be of the mind that you’re “not good enough” to go and have a club fitting.  Banish all those thoughts at once!  There was a time I would have thought that a couple of good lessons would help a player much more than any club fitting, but no longer!  If anything, the lesson and the fitting are natural bedfellows and your golf is bound to improve with clubs that not only fit you but are fit for purpose.

Ever since I can remember Ping have always presented the winner of any professional tournament using one of their putters with a gold-plated replica of said putter.  This is a tradition still carried on today and the company keeps their own gold-plated copy of the winning model in their vaults.  Must be getting pretty crowded in there now!

I wasn’t the only one taking a trip down memory lane on Wednesday.  It was also quite a considerable time since Patricia had visited Gainsborough, having been in the past a much more frequent guest at the US HQ out in Phoenix, Arizona, along with Dai, her late husband.  With Patricia writing for The Times and Dai being the golf correspondent for The Guardian their globe trotting days frequently took them Stateside and they always did enjoy a close friendship with the Solheim family and Bob Cantin, for many years Ping’s head of communications (or some such all-encompassing title; Patricia, typically, has forgotten his official title).  They hosted the Solheims frequently as their guests at the AGW (Association of Golf Writers) dinner during the Open each year and played in numerous Ping Pro-Ams round the lovely Moon Valley golf course, scene of Annika Sorenstam’s 59, which Patricia was there to report on.  Relationships in golf tend to be deep and enduring,

So, the result of our trip is now that a set is on order – driver through to four wedges.  Hmmm, may have to revisit and look at the putters next time!  And it’s definitely high time to get Patricia fitted properly and prise her away from Dai’s cast-offs that she’s currently got in her bag.  That may well be a jaunt for the New Year!  So, if any of you are considering investing in your golf games for 2020 I thoroughly recommend you start with a club-fitting session.  It makes perfect sense.

“Yeah!  Let’s all hear it for Brendon Todd!

“Who?”

Come on, you’re not paying attention.  I know your thoughts have turned to Christmas but do keep up.  Brendon Todd has won his last two starts on the PGA Tour and when he tees it up at this week’s RSM Classic he has a chance to be the first player to win three straight events on Tour since Tiger did it in 2006.  So, it’s obviously not something that happens every day of the week – but that’s not the reason I’ve become a member of the Todd fan club.

Not that long ago Brendon Todd was going to hang up the clubs for good.  He had the full swing yips with his driver and just found it well-nigh impossible to draw the club back.  He missed 37 out of 41 cuts and decided to pursue another career and top of the list was buying into a pizza franchise.  As recently as the US Open this June he was ranked somewhere around 1000th in the world.  When he won in Bermuda a couple of weeks ago he moved from the 500s to 185th and then his win in Mexico last Monday morning catapulted him up to 83rd.  He’s living the dream now but he inhabited the nightmare of the yips for a long, long time and that can be a very dark place indeed.

I speak from personal experience.  I had always considered myself a pretty decent putter and had had good spells, bad spells and brilliant spells on the greens.  Then, one year, playing in a Ladies’ European Tour event at The Oxfordshire I stood over a 15-footer for birdie on the 8th green.  Without any warning or any conscious thought I found I had suddenly “yipped” the putt and had no recollection of any part of the stroke.  Despite never having done it before I instantly recognised it for what it was – that dreaded, uninvited inability to perform a fine motor skill with which you are so familiar that it is almost part of you.  The resulting three-footer had no chance and I realised that that dropped shot meant I needed to par the 9th (my last hole) in order to make the cut.  I chipped up to 14 inches from the hole leaving myself a straight uphill putt to secure my place for the weekend.  As I approached the ball I knew with total certainty that this was, at that moment, an utterly impossible task for me.  I simply couldn’t figure out any way that I could complete the task……..and I was correct.  My overriding feeling was one of relief that I was able to get the ball so close to the edge of the hole I could tip my next one in.  Welcome to yip city.

A number of weeks ago I came across a few lines I had written around that time to Patricia trying to explain what I was going through as I  battled to overcome the “flinches” as Tom Watson called them.  The whole of your game becomes infected as is obvious in this note I sent from The Thailand Open in 1997.

“I shot 80 yesterday – hit 14 fairways out of 14, missed the green 5 times from under 80 yards and missed 8 putts of 4 feet and under.  I played that golf course from the perfect position on every hole every time.  I was like two different players.” Sounds as if Brendon Todd could have done with my driving and I could have done with his expertise the nearer the hole we got!

Of course, it IS possible to overcome the putting yips – Bernhard Langer has, several times;  so has Tom Watson;  Tiger had a definite spell of the chipping yips of which there is now no trace and Todd has seemingly banished the driving yips.  There are many, though, who do not come out the other side.

It’s not only golfers affected, though.  Concert pianists, snooker players, violinists, tennis players – people from all sorts of walks of life have suffered.  The common denominator seems to be a fine motor skill that has been rehearsed ad infinitum and then, one day, the mind suddenly says, “Enough!  I can’t do this any more.”

There is no one magic cure.  It requires an inordinate amount of hard work, suffering setbacks, experimentation and sheer bloody-mindedness just to survive.  Oh, and, of course, a decent stash of funding to buy you time to find your way out of the maze.

So, sign me up to Brendon Todd’s fan club.  This is a fairytale story masking goodness knows what heartache – and there’s a chance an even more fabulous chapter may be written this weekend.

 

Sometimes, days, weeks, even years don’t go quite as you’d like – the yolks break, the beyond-mid-life crisis Doc Martens don’t fit, your golf swing dissolves, sponsors shun you – but the key is to shrug, regroup and plod on, muttering ‘nil desperandum’ with as much conviction as you can muster.  Mo’s piece about Brendon Todd is a case study par excellence in perseverance.

And however knotty the problems any of us may have to confront, at least we don’t have Prince Andrew as our patron (Royal Portrush to name but one club) or on our list of past captains (the Royal and Ancient).

Sometimes, though, everything goes right at the right time and Benjamin Poke, of Denmark, sailed through the gruelling, nerve-shredding European Tour Qualifying School Final Stage at Lumine Golf Club in Tarragona, Spain, with six rounds in the 60s.  He won by six shots from Gregory Havret, a Frenchman who has won three times on the European Tour and in 2010 finished second to Graeme McDowell in the US Open at Pebble Beach but was playing on the Challenge Tour this last season.

“Our wives so much of the time, are the most important people around us and that’s certainly the case for me,” Havret, who’s now 43, said. “She wants me to go out there and live my passion as best I can and she has always supported me with that, so this achievement is for her.”

Poke’s compatriot Rasmus Hojgaard, just 18 years, also got his card but was sad that his twin brother Nicolai didn’t make it through and probably the most relieved man was Rikard Carlsberg, a Swede who has been laid low by illness and depression in the past.  He holed a 50-foot putt on the last hole to snatch the last card and was ecstatic.

“I knew I needed to hole it,” he said, “and the euphoria I felt was just happiness.  I don’t think anyone really likes this week.  It’s horrible.  It’s pressure all week and you’re walking with tension and you don’t have much room for error….”

I covered just the one final Q-school, at a damp, windswept, closed-up, end-of-season Montpellier, shorn of its summer bounce and bonhomie and found it a very depressing week, despite the marvellous stories – mothers re-mortgaging their home to help their golf-mad sons chase their dreams, a never-ending stream of tales of sacrifice and ingenuity.  I saw friends lose their card and watch their life drain away (they all survived and, usually, thrived once they’d got over the shock) and to extract any words at all from Retief Goosen, the winner, a painfully shy Afrikaner, was a task to test the patience of Job.  At least he trained on well, on the playing side, and won two US Opens.

Poke, who’s 27, is well aware of the vagaries of the game he plays for a living and had a suitably sensible and mature reaction to his victory:  “I’m planning to celebrate this moment for a while.  You work so hard and then there are times when you are struggling and it’s not easy but you’ve got to get up and carry on and celebrate the good times when they happen.”

These are pretty good times for the LPGA Tour and Mike Whan, who’s been commissioner since 2010, has had his contract extended and shows no sign of running out of steam.  He has already been in the job longer than any of his predecessors but far from being ground down by the demands of promoting a bunch of women in a male-dominated sporting universe, he is relishing the challenge.

On the eve of the end-of-season CME Group Tour Championship at Tiburon Golf Club in Naples, Florida, where the first prize is $1.5 million, the biggest ever in women’s golf, Whan issued a rousing rallying call on the LPGA website.    In a letter that started, “Dear Teammates”, he listed the growth in the last ten years  – in prize money, tournaments, television coverage, teachers, juniors – and stressed that he had no intention of slowing down or resting on his laurels.  In fact, he has grand designs.

“Imagine a future where half the people who play golf are women.  How can we be satisfied with anything less?  I know we won’t change the demographics overnight but if we continue to focus on the ‘future of the game’ (those under 18), we will change how golf looks in 2035!  We’ve already gone form 20 per cent of youth golfers being female to 36 per cent in ten years.  I think 50-50 participation is not only achievable but inevitable in junior golf…..

Whan laid down a challenge to his members:  “Women represent the largest untapped potential for our game to double in size….We need to take our leadership role seriously…….It’s not OK to simply play golf or be an LPGA member.  Both individually and as a group, we must be relentless in finding ways to make this game better and more inviting to half the world’s population.”

And he challenged companies to pay more than lip service to equality:  “If a company’s stated values are to provide equal opportunities for women to advance and succeed, why wouldn’t their marketing/sponsorship dollars reflect that?  How is it that nearly every company claims equal opportunity is a cornerstone of their business but 95 per cent of all corporate sports sponsorship dollars are spent on male sports?  There is no doubt we’re at a tipping point and more executives, shareholders and investors are questioning whether their corporate values are reflected in every aspect of their company, including marketing and sponsorship decisions.

“Increased corporate support translates into more opportunities for women in golf and more opportunities for female athletes to be seen as role models of confidence, ability and accomplishment……

“One of the things I’ve learned from the past ten years is I like being the underdog.  I like it when others bet against us.  I like the fact that some people think we’re satisfied with our progress….when the truth is, we’re just getting started.”

Nothing wan about Mr Whan.