I had a great time this weekend just past:  a family wedding on the Saturday – Mark, one of the great-nephews (Dai’s side), married Amy in Leamington Spa – then it was off to Wrexham on the Sunday for a lunch to celebrate Pam Valentine’s 70th birthday.  They were both joyous occasions and well worth the detour.

And, of course, there were detours.  Trying to find the Holiday Inn Express Warwick in the dark last Friday (not really that difficult, it’s hard by the M40) proved beyond me and my Waze app.  Trouble was I couldn’t get the thing to speak to me and it’s well-nigh impossible to follow the route highlighted on the phone when you’re devoting most of your attention to the road.  I ended up going through the middle of Warwick, which was packed with hundreds of revellers, mostly female, either hen partying en masse or reclaiming the night or some such.

In the end, the problem was solved the old-fashioned way:  by ringing the hotel and getting directions from a knowledgeable local.  Phew.  Time for a hug with the groom and half a Guinness with his dad.  I cadged a lift to the ceremony with the groom’s mum and her mum and even though we went to the wrong church first of all, we made the right church on time – just!  Good thing Leamington’s roadworks aren’t as all-encompassing as Lichfield’s – we’d have had no chance.

Then, at the start of Masters week came some sad, sad news:  Peter McEvoy had died at the age of 72.  He was an extraordinarily good golfer, one of the best amateurs ever to represent Britain and Ireland, capped goodness knows how many times for England (despite his Scottish heritage) and winner of the highest honours:  the Amateur Championship in 1977 and 1978, leading amateur in the Open twice, the first British amateur to make the cut at the Masters, member of numerous Walker Cup teams and non-playing captain of two winning teams, at home at Nairn in 1999 and then in 2001 away at Ocean Forest on Sea Island in Georgia.  His list of achievements runs much longer but those are the highlights.

More importantly, he was Dai’s and my best man and gave the eulogy at Dai’s funeral.  Peter, who played for Copt Heath and Warwickshire, was one of Dai’s Birmingham Post parishioners and they became good friends.  There’s nothing better than having a star to write about (and the Post had a few, not least Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam) but a star with opinions that they’re happy to share, well, that is beyond price.

McE, who qualified as a solicitor, had more than his fair share of opinions, often backed up with impressive statistics, many of which he’d made up off the top of his head.  Dai and he enjoyed many a full and frank discussion (translation:  argument), as Peter explained in the piece he wrote for The Guardian’s special, unpublished front page produced to mark Dai’s retirement as golf correspondent.  It’s a great, entertaining read.

In his book For Love or Money, written with Mark Reason and published in 2006, Peter talks about his love of the game but admits that if he’d had his success twenty or so years later he would almost certainly have turned professional.  “Agents would have been splashing so much cash in my face that it would have been almost impossible to say no.  I was 25, not much more than a year older than Luke Donald when he turned pro.

“Nowadays I could expect a plump signing-on fee, various clothing and equipment contracts and exemptions to a number of tournaments.  I could have expected to pick up something in the region of half a million pounds…But the only thing that you were guaranteed in the Seventies was a dodgy haircut.”

The book’s a cracking read, funny, insightful and a wonderful look at golf at the highest level.  Re-reading it is a joy and I’m just sorry I can’t tell Peter that.  Maureen and I send our love and condolences to Helen, Peter’s wife and all their family and friends.

To finish, I just can’t resist using this joke from The Essential Dave Allen, edited by Graham McCann.  It’s called Heaven and Hell and it’s easy for those of us old enough and lucky enough to have seen a lot of the inimitable Irish comedian to hear him weaving his magic with this gem.

“Many people think that Heaven and Hell are on different levels.  They’re not.  They are side by side, separated by a fence.  A wooden fence.  One day, God was walking around the area and he started to inspect the fence.  It was falling down.  All bits and pieces had fallen off it.  So he calls out to the Devil over the fence:  ‘Excuse me.  Mr Mephistopheles?  Hey, NICK!’

The Devil yells:  ‘Whaddyerwant?’

God says:  ‘The fence.  Look at it.  It’s falling down, it needs repairing.  And the posts are on your side.  This fence is your responsibility.  When are you going to fix it?’

The Devil says:  ‘Ah, screw you!’

God says:  ‘Now, listen:  if you do not do something about this fence very soon, you are going to hear from my solicitor!’

The Devil says:  ‘Where are YOU going to find a solicitor?'”

Well, we know where:  on the golf course.  And God would have the Devil’s own job getting them off it.

RIP dearest P McE.

Do you ever have times when you can’t believe how lucky you are?  It doesn’t mean you don’t have bad times or sad times but I often have moments of standing back, in amazement, wondering how on earth I got to be wherever it was, with whomever.

Earlier this week was one of those times.  Maureen and I had been to a rare  occasion this season, my tottering Totspurs winning at home – by a single goal, so not conceding, keeping a clean sheet and sending us supporters home happy.  We were shaken, stirred and exhausted but not disappointed:  three points and zooming up the table, away from the relegation strugglers.

Long may it last but who knows?  We’re away at Ipswich this Saturday and they really are in a relegation battle, so need to win at least as badly as we do – and they beat us at our place…”It’s not very relaxing, is it?”  Mo said, “This watching Spurs.”  Linda, who sits next to me, laughed and said, “We don’t come here to relax!”

This latest journey to Spurs was another first, not least because our ultimate destination was Thorpeness for a golfing reunion par excellence.  First off, we drove to Chelmsford, where we booked in to the City Centre Premier Inn (£15 extra for early check-in), then crossed the road to board the Spurs coach.  “I think it’ll take about 40 minutes,” I said to Mo.  Not quite right.  Two hours later we pulled in to the coach park about ten minutes’ walk from the ground.  Never underestimate the delaying power of London traffic.

En route to Suffolk, we took a short detour to have a coffee and chat with Judy Williams, whose late husband Michael was the golf correspondent of The Daily Telegraph for many years.   There’s not much Judy doesn’t know about golf – or Ipswich Town FC; the family are lifelong supporters, so we’re not on the same side this weekend.  I’d rooted out some photos of long-ago AGW (Association of Golf Writers) get togethers at Penina in Portugal, with Henry Cotton and his formidable wife Toots presiding.  The snaps are mostly dark and grainy but they’re lovely reminders of the laughs we had.

We made it to the A12 without alarms and Mo navigated us expertly to Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast, just north of Aldeburgh, where we were reunited with some of the founders and early members of the LET, the second such reunion arranged by the redoubtable Chris Langford, director of golf at Thorpeness and organiser supreme.  There were lots of tall tales told, an inordinate amount of laughter and some very good golf swings on show.  Maureen and I cheered the golfers off on a bright, chilly morning, then wrapped up warm and trekked in to Aldeburgh for coffee and cake, cheeks stinging from the North Sea breezes.

 

I’ll have to bring my clubs next time because it’s a shame to come all this way and not play a course described by Peter Alliss as “a hidden gem in the Suffolk countryside”.  This year I hadn’t time for golf because I was on the hunt for blue mascara.  The reason was that Jane Chapman, now Denman, was on the guest list and the first time we met, many years ago (more than fifty!!), at an Aer Lingus event in Killarney, she was wearing blue mascara. I, a few months older but light years behind in every other respect, thought it the height of sophistication.  Sadly, it never worked on my darker lashes; perhaps it’s true that blondes have more fun….

Anyway, as it turned out there was a blue mascara in the pharmacy in Aldeburgh but it was too dark, more of a navy and it wasn’t until I got back to Lichfield that I found something that would do the job.  Hope it’ll keep until next year!

Talking of colour, the Ireland rugby team will be wearing white shirts not green against Wales in Cardiff this weekend.  It’s to make it easier for fans who are colour blind – officially known as CVD (colour vision deficiency ) – to tell the difference between the two sides.  People with the condition find red and green particularly difficult to tell apart, hence the change.  This may be tempting fate but fingers crossed that looking at the players scoring the tries will help distinguish the Irish from the Welsh…

I suppose that’s the sort of cockiness that leads to defeat but I’m hoping that the players will be too good, too professional and too organised to think that they just have to turn up to win.  Wales may not be at their best at the moment but favourites, however overwhelming, don’t always win.  Isn’t that why we love sport?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to believe that the force of nature that is Liz Kahn, a pioneering suffragette if ever there was one, will be 90 on Monday.  Happy birthday Mrs K, have a great day and thank you for all those battles you fought and won on our behalf.  We youngsters owe you more than we can ever repay.  However hard we have had to fight our corner and justify our existence, we have you to thank for slashing a route through the jungle and making our working lives in golf much easier.

The indomitable Liz (her late husband David always called her Elizabeth – in my hearing anyway) was one of the first woman golf writers to concentrate mainly on the men’s professional game but she also aided and abetted Vivien Saunders, a fellow femme formidable and others in the setting up of the women’s professional tour on this side of the Atlantic.  The WPGA (Women’s Professional Golf Association), founded in 1979, is now the LET (Ladies European Tour), thriving beyond most expectations.

If you’d like to know more about all this, take a look at the LET website (ladieseuropeantour.com) or YouTube and have a look at the interviews with Liz and some of the founders and early members.  Find “Celebrating The Founders” and enjoy; there’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there.

In her interview, Liz recalls the days when you could wander up to a player, any player and ask for a chat/interview, what is now called a one-to-0ne and is held up as some sort of holy grail, a pearl beyond price.  Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson, Tony Jacklin, properly big names, some of the greats of the game, were more often than not happy to chat to golf writers, most of whom they knew pretty well.  Liz once asked Watson for an interview and was pleasantly surprised when he sought her out instead of waiting for the appointed time.  Happy days.

All that reminiscing reminded me of the time that I was at The Tradition in Arizona on the occasion of Nicklaus’s senior debut and Dai had primed Jack, a sucker for a practical joke, to wind me up.  The press conference, which included Trevino, who’d been cleaning up on the tour, was packed and when Jack singled me out – I think I was the lone woman – everybody thought he’d lost the plot.

By some miracle I’d won the Barbados Ladies’ Open Championship a few months before and was called out on that.  One of the seniors, I can’t remember which one, had questioned that Trevino was dominating the tour because he was only winning by one or two, so Lee said,  “I didn’t realise you had to win by more than one.  You don’t get paid any more.”   Then he asked me,  “How many did you win by?”

“I won by ten.”

Collapse of all parties.  “There,” Lee said, above the laughter.  “That’s dominating right there.”

I have the tape of the exchange, given to me by the Westers, who did the radio stuff.  It’s entitled “Trish, Jack and Lee at the Tradition 3/28/90” (bear in mind they were Americans) and just looking at it cracks me up.  What’s more, I now have something to play it on, having bought an old-fashioned tape machine from Richer Sounds in their recent sale.

The snapper apparently gave Dai a copy of this photograph on condition that he never published it because it was a bit risqué, all those years ago.  I came across it (and the tape) during my never-ending sorting and thought they worked well together and enough years had passed for the pic to be less than embarrassing.  We should be able to work out the year because of who’s in the picture and because Trevino didn’t win his singles – and had promised his team he’d do something to them all if he didn’t….Who said American Ryder Cup teams never bonded.?!!

I managed 13 holes on the golf course on Tuesday without too many ill effects but was glad to take my wonky left knee to the osteopath yesterday for a bit of a going over.  It is behaving much better and I was quite perky after my treatment and promised to be more diligent with the exercises prescribed by the sainted K, who keeps a lot of the golf club in working order.  She can’t do it all on her own.  It’s up to me to do my bit.

On my way home the traffic ground to a halt unexpectedly.  Blimey, not another set of temporary traffic lights; there are so many in Lichfield and environs at the moment that getting anywhere requires precise planning – or very early starts!  If it’s not HS2, it’s gas works or putting in pedestrian crossings so that punters can reach the Bowling Green (a big pub in the middle of an even bigger roundabout) without risking life and limb – and that’s before having a drink.  Friends once walked there but had to get a taxi home because they didn’t dare attempt to cross the road.  True story.  No exaggeration.

Where was I?  Oh yes, in a queue, police car on hand, for no apparent reason.  What was going on?  Then I had to laugh – and take a snap (I wasn’t moving).  A lone sheep had stopped play.  See if you can spot it.

Hey ho, here we go again!

A few phone calls to establish that the two Madills were still in the land of the living and a couple of cheeky WhatsApps enquiring were we on a permanent holiday have encouraged Patricia and me to start tapping on our keyboards once more for our faithful blog followers.

We launched the blog back in May 2016 and the big sis suggested we try to keep it going until the Open was played at Royal Portrush, one of the clubs we joined as children and where we had hours of fun in Golf Foundation lessons.  That Open, unbelievably, was back in 2019 and this July will see Portrush’s second Open since winning its way back onto the Championship rota.  That all, rather frighteningly, means we are honing in on our ninth anniversary.  Ninth……..!  EEK!  Who’d have believed it …… and just where has the time gone?  This is turning into a seriously swift decade.

Not so swift, of course, is the pace of play on the golf course.  Quick out of the blocks as he was last week in Dubai with the standard of his play, nevertheless Tyrrell Hatton (top), in the final match, had at least a ten-minute wait on the 71st AND 72nd tees.  So, same old, same old……

The new year has commenced with the same lamentable pace of play issues as before with absolutely no serious attempt being made to address the number one drawback to the watchability of the game.  Evidence, if ever it were needed, that the golf fan is of no importance whatsoever to the professional tours.

I was pleased, however, to see Tyrrell win the Dubai Desert Classic with its instantly recognisable trophy.  I like Tyrrell;  I like his game and I hope he’s on the European Ryder Cup team this September.  I’m also slightly surprised at how his bad behaviour doesn’t seem to bother me despite it being the sort of thing my parents would have killed me for when I was growing up.

The Hatton frustration led to his smashing a tee marker and receiving a fine.  Perhaps it’s witnessing the truth of what the game means to a player and how it gets under his skin that is appealing.  Whatever it is, it is baffling to me that I don’t bristle at it.  However, I do get a little tired of the commentators’ po-faced apologies for his bad language.  Perhaps they should just have a permanent caption on the screen to mute the volume when Tyrrell appears and that way those with delicate ears could be nicely protected without the need for the aforementioned apologies.

Come to think of it, perhaps September’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black should be a silent broadcast.  The home fans from New York are renowned for their fruity language and eagerness to give their opinions on all and sundry.  Muting them would certainly make for a different kind of viewing.

The holiday season has not passed without its customary splits in the golfing world.  Brooks Koepka has severed relations (again!) with long-time coach Claude Harmon III (Butch’s son) as he searches to recapture the form that saw him win four majors in a two-year spell from 2017 to 2019 and then again a fifth title in 2023.  Pete Cowen and Jeff Pierce have been overseeing the American’s short game and putting for a while but will take over full-swing duties for the 2025 campaign.  Sometimes a player just needs to hear a different voice – even if it is largely delivering the same message.

Another split is that between genial Irishman Shane Lowry, and long-term manager Conor Ridge, founder of Horizon Sports, who has looked after the former Open Champion since he won the 2009 Irish Open as an amateur.  Shane is setting up his own management company and Conor is making a move out of management to concentrate on his other business interests.  All seems fairly affable still between the two.

I often thought that Conor Ridge was a great name for a golfer/manager as it would be an equally good name for a golf course.  It puts me in mind of the oft-told story from the mid to late nineties when a certain Scottish professional was asked,

“Do you know Tiger Woods?”

“No, I haven’t played there yet,” came the innocent answer.  It really doesn’t take a lot to amuse me.

For me the most worrying change of direction, however, concerns the young Irishman Tom McKibbin, who, it is rumoured, is about to jump ship to the LIV Golf Tour.  Perhaps by the time you read this he will have announced his decision.  His mentor Rory McIlroy has counselled him that he’d be giving up a lot for not very much and that it is a decision he wouldn’t make if he were in McKibbin’s shoes.

The money on the table is rumoured to be £4 million pounds – a nice sum indeed but how does it stack up against the ability to play in both Europe and America and have a clear run at qualifying and playing in all four majors, not to mention the Ryder Cup?  The answer is it doesn’t, so that leaves me with two questions to ponder:  Just what are his advisers thinking?  And are those of us of a certain age just completely missing the point as to what floats the boat of a supremely talented 22-year old?

Perhaps this generation of golfers, born this century, have no real understanding of, feeling for or interest in the tenets and history of the game that we hold dear and perhaps money is all that really does matter to them.  And……..perhaps the harsh truth is that it’s high time for us to accept the world is different nowadays and that we must move on and not allow ourselves to get stuck in the past.

It’ll be a sad day for us all if that is, indeed, the case.