This week Annika Sorenstam, one of golf’s greats, is playing in the US Women’s Open at Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club (above) in North Carolina.  It’s the first time she has teed it up in this championship since she “stepped away from the game” in 2008 and it wasn’t something that was ever really on her radar until she was victorious in last year’s US Senior Women’s Open.  That gave her an automatic spot into this field and she decided to take it, principally to continue inspiring and encouraging the next generation of golfers.

At the age of 51  Sorenstam has nothing to prove to anyone.  Ten majors are scattered throughout her 72 LPGA victories and in the last fourteen years since she stopped playing seriously she has excelled in business and done what she wanted to most of all, that is, settle down and have a family.  And now she wants her children to see her play for real, not just on grainy old television broadcasts.

There’s another reason why playing at Pine Needles is irresistible to her.  Back in 1995 Annika broke through for her first win in America by landing the big one, the US Women’s Open.  In 1996 she came to Pine Needles to defend her title at the course owned and run by the renowned Peggy Kirk Bell and her family, with whom Annika was forging a strong bond.  The Swede was once again successful and admits that for a number of reasons, not least her relationship with Peggy, who was a veritable tour de force in the women’s game, Pine Needles is very special to her.  Hence the commitment to return and compete this week.

I never did get the opportunity to play golf with Annika.  She turned pro and played her first season on the Ladies’ European Tour in 1993, the year I was out with a bad back and subsequently had surgery.  In 1994 she was off to the LPGA and rocketing out of my orbit but I got to know her through Solheim Cups and later via various broadcasting duties of mine.

For all her success and seeming assuredness the very shy young girl still lurks within.  There are well documented stories of early Swedish training camps where Annika used to make sure she never won, always finishing second so she wouldn’t have to make a winner’s speech.  Pia Nilsson, the national coach, spotted this and wisely decreed the first two place finishers should both make speeches.  After that Annika decided she might as well try and win because it was likely she was going to have to speak anyway.

 

There are still traces of that shyness in her.  In early 2015 Annika was one of seven women invited to be an honorary member of the R&A.  This was groundbreaking stuff, bringing to an end 260 years of male-only membership.  However, it wasn’t until the Open in July that year that Annika was able to visit St Andrews for the first time as a member of the club.  When she arrived I happened to be on the eighteenth, having just completed a full recce of the course and its condition in preparation for the week’s broadcasting.  Obviously relieved to see a familiar face she hurried over to me and explained this was her first visit since becoming a member and what should she do about gaining access to the clubhouse?

I looked over to the front door of the club and saw an imposing, uniformed doorman on duty who was challenging all who approached.  Annika obviously didn’t wish to run the gauntlet of facing him on her own so I grabbed her arm, propelled her over and introduced her to this imposing gent, informing him she was a new member.  He morphed into full welcoming mode and she was ushered in, disappearing from my view as I returned to the course to finish my work.  At that moment it was rather useful that in a former life as a student at St Andrews I had actually worked as a waitress in the clubhouse, so I wasn’t quite as daunted as some!

I remember being surprised at the great Annika having this degree of insecurity that she wouldn’t march up to the door on her own.  On reflection, however, I found it illuminating that despite being a world-famous, one-name legend, there wasn’t an ounce of arrogance in her body.  She didn’t assume that she would be recognised or that she would gain entry without some kind of explanation.  I can’t imagine she would ever utter the “Don’t you know who I am?” phrase.

It was quite touching, in a humbling kind of way, to learn that underneath it all she is just like the rest of us.  Well, at least a little bit.

 

The countryside all around us is bursting with life and colour and, wonders will never cease, so is Shane Lowry.  Thanks to Ian Poulter for getting Shane out of his ubiquitous black trousers and black shirt and into something with a bit of life about it when they played together in the Zurich Classic of New Orleans.

Not saying I’m a great fan of the checked trousers, but really, anything is an improvement on black, black and more black.  Mind you, it must make packing easy.  I used to have a friend on tour, Helen Wadsworth, who wore nothing but black or white and it took her only seconds to pack her case for a tournament.

I’m not sure how much input the Curtis Cup team gets into their playing and dress uniforms but I’m sure it’s much more than in my day.  The Great Britain and Ireland team was announced at the start of the week and six of last year’s team are back to see if they can exact some revenge for the defeat at Conwy last year.  Emily Price of Ludlow and Amelia Williamson of Sheringham are the two new caps, rounding out a team comprising five English players, two Scots and one Irish.  Elaine Ratcliffe, the captain, has high hopes:-

“I am delighted to have six of the girls from last year back in the team for the 2022 match and I believe this gives us a strong base to build upon. The two new players to the team will strengthen that talent base and we very much look forward to an exciting match.”

This is Ratcliffe’s second go at captaining the team and it’s hard to think of anyone more qualified to lead the side.  An accomplished player in her own right – English Amateur Champion, Curtis Cup player and Rookie of the Year on the Ladies’ European Tour – she has mixed it with the best throughout her playing career.  After regaining her amateur status she combined her business degree with her extensive golfing background and, with family members, purchased and now runs Essendon Country Club in Hatfield.  She is passionate about introducing more people to the sport, particularly women and girls, and she will be a wonderful representative for us out in the States.

Regaining her amateur status was something Ratcliffe presumably did so she could play in club competitions again as she raised her family.  If she hadn’t we would not be able to have her as Curtis Cup captain as the rules state the captain must be an amateur golfer.  Time for a change, methinks.  We are missing out on so much wealth of knowledge and expertise because we are so keen to hang labels on folk.

“Amateur” and “professional” are two such labels.  We are just people and all play the same sport and with more players trying their hand on tour now and making a living within the industry, it seems crazy to cut ourselves off from such a deep pool of talent for future captains and administrators in the amateur game.  Ditch the labels and access the very best for the job in question.

Talking of talented administrators in the game, Ireland has been fortunate to have had more than its fair share of trailblazers in this department of the game over the years.  Spending thousands of hours over the years spotting and nurturing talent and voluntarily serving on a myriad of committees and panels is not for the faint-hearted and over the years Brigid McCaw of Royal County Down has tirelessly worked for the good of the game.  She has been active from club and district level all the way to the heady heights of international golf and the coveted distinction of qualifying as an R&A rules official.

So when an email thudded into the inbox this week from Brigid with a request for an outline of my career in amateur golf I knew it would entail a dusty visit up the ladder into the attic.  Her latest project is putting together a timeline of achievements of Ulster women golfers.  Now, I always thought you would only be able to forget what tournaments you’d won and teams you’d played on if you were super-duper successful and the sheer volume of triumphs meant you couldn’t recall everything.  Wrong!!

The passage of some forty years meant I’d forgotten most of my sparse highlights but leafing back through old scrapbooks with yellowing cuttings loosely cramming the pages brought the memories all roaring back.  Gosh, those were the days of extensive newspaper coverage and some wonderful writing by golf journalists who knew their stuff.

I had taken a scrap of paper with me up to the attic to jot down salient dates and before I knew where I was a couple of hours had passed and I had to scoop the now mostly detached cuttings back into the relevant scrapbooks, of which there were a couple of dozen.  As I descended the ladder back into 2022 and civilisation I decided the tidying of the attic was the next lockdown job – but I knew Brigid would be pleased with me for making the effort.

When I sat down to email her my findings, I realised that the scrap of paper with my carefully-made notes on it had been bundled back into one of the aforementioned scrapbooks, goodness knows where!

And no, Brigid, much as I love you, I’m not going back up that ladder until the next lockdown!

 

Well, there’s only way to start this week and that’s by congratulating Sarah Bennett on becoming the 82nd captain of The Professional Golfers’ Association.  The 53-year old from Essex, head professional at Three Rivers Golf and Country Club, succeeds Bernard Gallacher, three times Ryder Cup captain, among many other achievements.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that it took the PGA a while to embrace women as members but they always had their supporters – for instance former captain Peter Alliss was one of the early presidents of the women’s European Tour (whatever it was called way back when; it’s so long ago that my addled brain can’t recall and I haven’t got my reference books to hand, so much more reliable than Wikipedia for some of us oldies).  The PGA, under Colin Snape, also ran the women’s tour for a while but it didn’t last – tournament pros tend to have different needs from club pros, though the two are always intertwined.

So, Sarah is only the second woman to be captain of one of golf’s most venerable organisations and it’s particularly poignant that she is emulating the late, much-missed Beverly Lewis, another Essex girl, who was a close friend and mentor.

“If it wasn’t for Bev, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Sarah said.  “She was my role model and it means so much to me to be following in her footsteps.  She used to coach me in her garden when I was 15 and we used to discuss my swing in her kitchen – I really tested her knowledge!  She was always there for me as a friend and mentor, offering advice, support and encouragement during my career.”

Sarah, who grew up playing at Colchester GC, turned professional and spent a quarter of a century on tour before doing her PGA training and becoming a coach of note.  She is also, as the PGA said, “an indefatigable fundraiser for charity and the Golf Fore Recovery initiative for wounded and sick armed forces personnel and Canine Partners have benefitted hugely from her efforts.  More recently, she has been the driving force in raising  more than £40,000 for research into Thymic Carcinoma, an extremely rare form of cancer.”

Mo should really be writing this but she’s had a bit of a relapse and is beyond blogging at the moment, hors de combat for this week at least.  She and Sarah are good buddies and shared a particularly harrowing experience on a Curtis Cup recce at Fox Chapel GC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in September 2011:  9/11.

The destruction of the Twin Towers and its aftermath were beyond horrific but Sarah and Mo, who were staying with Peggy Runnette, the host club’s Curtis Cup chair and her husband Bob, had a drama of their own to contend with.  And for Sarah it was life changing.

Packing up to go home, she collapsed unconscious and was taken to hospital by paramedics who were convinced that she (and Mo) had been doing drugs.  The toxicology report proved otherwise and Sarah was suffering from, to quote Mo, “some sort of brain/inner ear/balance thing that resulted in her having to recalibrate parts of her brain and relearn balance – not very helpful if you’re a golfer…

“She’s gone on to achieve great things and I’m probably one of the few who knows the adversity she has had to overcome.  I’m very proud of her.”

It was a long, hard road back to fitness for Sarah but as she told Essex Life magazine earlier this year:  “I learned a lot about myself during my rehab, which has been instrumental in forging my pathway.  Coaching people through golf has been fantastic.  I love the daily challenge and variety and I am blessed to start the day doing something I love.”

James Braid, the PGA’s first captain, a Scot, might not have envisaged a woman in the role but Bev Lewis and Sarah Bennett are worthy successors and really, The Only Way Is Essex.

 

Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Co, used to play most years in the pro-am(s) at Mission Hills Golf and Country Club prior to the Dinah Shore – Colgate, Nabisco, ANA, whatever – and this week, now under the sponsorship of Chevron, the tournament, for so long the first major championship of the year, will be saying goodbye to its iconic home in Rancho Mirage in the desert in California.  It’s moving to Texas next year and a different date.

It started in 1972 as the Dinah Shore Colgate Winners Circle, with a then massive prize fund of $110,000 (the US Women’s Open was $40,000) but didn’t become an official major until 1982 even though it was always a mega event.  For years, with its status assured, subsequent sponsors got it on the cheap, with the prize money starting to lag well behind the other majors.  Now that there’s $5 million on offer, you could say that it’s come full circle.

Thanks for the memories, Dinah.

Dinah really could sing – she was a huge star, a mate of Sinatra, Hope, all the big names – but you’ll be glad to know that my concert debut last Saturday was a triumph!  The City of Lichfield Concert Band was terrific and so, apparently, were we, the Everybody Sings! choir, applauded and praised by band and audience alike.

Helen, our conductor, even asked me if I’d been miming, which I took as a huge compliment because it meant that my contribution, however flat, had not filtered through to her educated ear.  It reminded me of when Miss Glass, our geography teacher, asked me if I’d traced my outline of South America….

I had not.  And I did not mime.  Just ask the people next to me!

Many faithful readers of the blog are aware that for the last, ooh, almost 30 years there has been a little, almost annual, get-together of the not-so-great and the good at Muirfield, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (HCEG).  The occasion is the Madill Trophy which is contested keenly by the host team, a Secretary’s selection known as “the Lads” and the visitors, a team invited by me and known as “the Lasses”.  The winning name engraved on the trophy for the last couple of years has, however, been “Covid” but I’m happy to report that, despite exerting some last-minute influence on this year’s match, Covid was denied a hat trick of victories.

Stuart McEwen, the secretary of the club and leader of the Lads was, indeed, sidelined by Covid and I am not yet able to swing a club or travel too far (Long Covid) so we both had to appoint stand-in captains.  Andrew McInroy took over for Stuart and was the perfect person to give the teams a little overview of the whole event having been present at the very first meeting way back in 1993.  Apart from the Covid years I think we have been denied a couple of playings because of snow but mostly we have had days like last Sunday – a mite on the chilly side but with cloudless blue skies, a perfect course laid out for us and the skylarks singing fit to burst.

Nowadays we have eight-a-side with four foursomes morning and afternoon.  We play the match under Dallmeyer handicapping which means that handicaps are not taken into consideration and you start off playing a level match.  When a side reaches 3 up, however, they give a shot at each hole until the match gets back to 1 up.  This results in very keenly contested encounters and six of the eight matches finished on the last green and two on the 17th.  It’s a great format – if you haven’t tried it, give it a go.

Back in Cheshire I was receiving reports through the day and was gratified to hear we were leading by a point at the halfway stage.  It’s been a few years since we won the trophy and I was looking forward to becoming reacquainted with it.  However, a lengthy Sunday lunch and a few wee libations saw the hosts burst from the starting gates in the afternoon and record three wins, resulting in victory by a single point.

At least the lasses could lay claim to what Gill Stewart called the “shot du jour”.  At the 9th in her afternoon match in partnership with Pat Smillie.  Gill drove down the left hand side, in the rough and Pat advanced the ball further down the left, still in the rough.  Studying the lie for their third shot, Gill thought she could just get one of her rescue clubs on the back of the ball if she came in a little more steeply.  The pin was back right and the yardage was 209 to the flagstick.

“What yardage do you think Pat had left after my shot?” she asked me.

“Six inches,” I guessed.

“No,” said Gill.  “210 yards – I hit the ball BACKWARDS!  I’ve never done that in my life!”  She then had the ignominy of having to call to Pat, who was stationed up by the green and gesture for her to trek back down the hole to face their longer-than-expected fourth shot!  Ah, the joys of foursomes – there’s always something memorable to recount.

Jane Connachan, my stand-in captain did her best to rally her troops and led from the front with two victories but the lasses came up that one point shy.  We may be getting on a bit and have knee, back and assorted injury problems but the competitive juices are still flowing and I’ve heard whispers of instigating a practice match in the future before the “big” match!  Surely not!  We’d probably not be fit enough for the actual match then!  We shall see.  Perhaps we need an American Ryder Cup-style task force – or is that taking it just a tad too far?

The HCEG plays host to another massive fixture later in the year – the AIG Women’s Open, when honorary Scot, Swede Anna Nordqvist (she married a Scotsman last year), defends her major title.  In truth, although it may surprise you, there aren’t that many similarities between the two fixtures.  I imagine on championship Sunday there will be a few more spectators vying for a good vantage point than there were last Sunday…….

and I suspect the first tee may be a mite busier than this…….

Even so, these two wildly disparate events will share some common denominators, not least a first-class golf course – unfussy, untricked up and always in superb condition.  The major championship players will mirror us in not being able to avoid feeling special and privileged walking in the footsteps of those who have gone before us.  If you are of golf, and steeped in golf, you will assuredly feel the hand of the game’s history on your shoulder.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for the Lasses.  We have to up our games in every department on the golf course but most definitely we must learn to pace ourselves at lunchtime.  We have a year to practise.

Thanks to all those who provided the photos.