I pitched up at Woburn on Wednesday evening for the 1st edition of the AIG Women’s British Open (and the 43rd staging of what is becoming a venerable, veritable, viable championship) and wondered if an old doll like me, now more or less out of the circus-like loop that is professional golf, would still know anybody at all.  And would you believe it!  The first person I saw was Jo Morley, the pride of Sale, a former Solheim Cup player who is still out here caddying such is her devotion to the game.  That made me feel better.

Woburn always makes me nostalgic, thinking of all the happy tournaments spent here with Dai in the days of Alex Hay; this is where most of us got our first sight of immense talents like Karrie Webb (the sublime swing caused immediate double takes) and Annika Sorenstam (with her Dad Tom on the bag); it’s where we yomped after Laura Davies in her pomp as she displayed her Tigeresque powers of recovery from the most unpromising positions:  how wide was the gap?  There wasn’t one…….or at least it was invisible to all but Laura.  Unfortunately, there weren’t too many gaps for DLD (she’s a Dame now you know) in the first round of her 39th consecutive Open appearance yesterday.

I wandered out to have a look at Maria Fassi, one of the new talents, who is from Mexico, so is not eligible to play in the Solheim Cup despite her US college credentials.   Thank goodness for that I thought, then relented and thought what a shame.  Fashionable and feisty, with a habit of giving her colourful skorts/skirts a Palmer-like hitch before belting the ball miles, Fassi looks like very good news indeed.

The golf at Woburn is the sort of game I was once used to watching day in, day out, so I used to know a bit about it but it’s not a game I ever played.  My current version of golf was on display (in public but not to too many people, thanks be) last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  The courses deserved better but it was a delight to play Moortown and Alwoodley, close together, virtually in the middle of Leeds, both designed by Alister MacKenzie of Augusta National fame, for the first time, on our lady captain’s stayaway and Wrexham, for the umpteenth time, as a guest on lady captain’s day.

Moortown hosted the Ryder Cup in 1929 and Samuel Ryder presented George Duncan, the home captain, with the trophy.  It’s unlikely they ever encountered anything quite like Whittington Heath’s Trolley Dollies, who brought the clubhouse down with their immaculately timed appearance and blew away any opposition in the best-turned-out team stakes.

There was another familiar face on the wall at Moortown, looking impossibly young after winning the British Women’s Amateur Strokeplay title in 1983.  Four years later she won the Women’s British Open (sponsored by Weetabix) at St Mellion and ten years after that the US Women’s Open at Pumpkin Ridge in Oregon with one of the finest performances by any European golfer anywhere, ever.  Still.  It was that good.

At Alwoodley, just down the road, which reminded me a bit of Formby with its heather and bunkers and looked sublime in the sunshine (the golf, sadly, was neither sublime nor shining), the honours board provided another chance to remember all our yesterdays and the exploits of old friends and acquaintances.

Honours boards, distinguished or otherwise, are at the heart of a club, documenting its history and should be cherished and celebrated.  If I get a chance to get into the clubhouse, I love looking at them, wherever I go.

At Wrexham on Tuesday, we were lucky because the weather held off bar a bit of a plump as we were playing the 9th.  That meant I had time to indulge in a double Pimms (small measures…) to convince myself that it was summer and that my partner and I could claw back the 3-hole deficit against Delamere Forest, represented by Mo and Ruth.  Since Lesley and I were representing the Rest of the World, we really couldn’t go down to a club pair, however distinguished and, in the end, the match was an honourable half – or tie, as modern parlance would have it.

We all hit quite a few good shots but the jaw-dropping effort of the day was Ruth’s putt on the 3rd, which was so long it was almost extra-terrestrial.  “Oh, no!” I said unsportingly (but honestly) as it approached the hole dead on line at a perfect speed.  And, oh yes, in it went.  Dead solid perfect.  Brilliant.

 

 

 

 

 

It was, as they say over here in Ireland, a gas.

More than 200 of us gathered at Grange Golf Club in Dublin yesterday to play in the inaugural Therese O’Reilly Fourball Trophy and commemorate a woman who died, far too young, nearly 11 years ago.  She was a force of nature, at the centre of every gale of laughter, kind, compassionate, shrewd and a heck of a golfer who gave the ball a lash.

Nee Moran, a member of a formidable sporting clan, Therese had only herself to blame for the nickname ‘Tiny’.  She decided, in her wisdom, that Mary Gorry, a small but formidable fellow member of Grange who represented Leinster and Ireland with great distinction, should be known as ‘Midget’.  The thinking was straightforward:  MG equals MG Midget equals Midget or Midge.

If that’s the case, Mary responded, looking up at her tall and formidable friend, you can be Tiny.  And that was that.

If you’re expecting a coherent account of yesterday’s proceedings, this is the wrong place to look.  This half of the blog, having found its driving licence (but not its passport), is now on Irish time and that means sitting down to write at about two in the morning, having fitted in copious chatting and socialising and catching up with people not seen for far too long.

There was a bit of golf too, partnering the FBG, aka Mary Culliton, nee Governey, a wonderful hostess when Whittington Heath visited The Heath on my ladies’ captain’s stayaway a few years ago.  The Fine Big Girl, thus christened by an admirer in those far-off days before the phrase “politically correct” was invented, hit some fine shots at the end, so we won the money – all of two Euros – from Rita McGoldrick (nee Walsh) and Mairead Browne (nee Mullins).

We were never in danger of winning the trophy and found Grange’s undulating greens a bit beyond our current skill levels.  No wonder Paul McGinley (ne McGinley), one of the club’s many distinguished members, had no trouble holing that putt at The Belfry to win the Ryder Cup.  The greens there were wee buns to a man brought up holing out at Grange.

The FBG and I hit two good shots down the 18th, short of the evil, devilish ditch that protects the green, not a piece of land that looked in need of such extra protection.  Rita and Mairead hit their second shots into the ditch and I then shanked my third, from pretty well position A, into a wall and the ball ricocheted back into position Z+++ ad infinitum.  Seve at his peak would have been tested to the limits of his skill and imagination to hit the green and I gave up the unequal task and played out sideways.  Suffice to say that it was left to my partner to save the day.

Pontificating later, I gave my considered opinion that it would only rarely be worth going for the 18th green with your second shot, the lay-up being the wise, percentage option.  A friend looked puzzled and double-checked that she was thinking of the right hole, the last, right?  Right.  “I hit a drive and an 8-iron,” she said.  “No bother at all.”

Ah.  Well, in my heart I’ve known the truth for a while.  I play a form of the game with which even seniors are not familiar.

My thanks to the indefatigable Sheena McElroy (nee O’Brien-Kenney), who was one of the many people who put a huge amount of time and effort into organising the day, for lending me clubs vastly superior to my own.  And to Mary McKenna, great golfer turned fantastic photographer, for a driver that worked surprisingly well most of the time.  And to everyone for the fun, the laughter and the love.

Finally, congratulations to Ireland, Scotland and England for making it into the top eight at the Women’s European Team Championship in Italy this week and to Shanshan Feng, one of my favourite golfers, for winning the Thornberry Creek LPGA Classic in Wisconsin last Sunday in dramatic style.

I’m a sucker for a feel-good story and if it involves sport, or better still, golf, I can find my emotions running high and the tears flowing very, very easily indeed.  So, this has been a bumper week from that point of view, with heart-wrenching tales everywhere you look.

Let’s start with Nate Lashley.  That’s him in the picture above.  Ever heard of him?  No, neither had I until five or six days ago when he went into the final round of the PGA Tour’s intriguingly named Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit leading by a substantial margin.  He opened on Thursday with a 9 under par 63, never relinquished the lead and eventually won on Sunday by six strokes.  Apart from winning a tidy cheque for $1,314,000, he has assured his status on the PGA Tour until the end of the 2020/2021 season and has invitations into the next three majors, starting with the Open at Portrush in two weeks time.

Those are the bare bones of his story but add the following into the mix and you’ll realise this is the stuff of movieland.

In 2004 Nate was playing collegiate golf for the University of Arizona and his parents and girlfriend flew up to watch him compete in an important college fixture.  Afterwards, as they were flying home, their plane got into difficulty and crashed, tragically killing all three of them.  Nate did his best to soldier on with his dreams of making it in golf, turning pro in 2005 and bouncing around unsuccessfully on various mini-tours until finally quitting to sell real estate in 2012.

His ambition wouldn’t die, however, and he came back to the game, finally making some headway in 2015 with five top 10 placings on the PGA Tour Latino/America.  The year 2016 saw more improvement with three wins on that tour, making him exempt onto what was then the Web.com Tour, one level down from the PGA Tour.  Competing at this higher level brought out more of the best of Nate and he finished 11th in the overall standings which meant that in 2018, at the age of 35, he would be a PGA Tour rookie.

The fairytale wasn’t yet complete, however, and, hampered by a knee injury, 2018 wasn’t a great success and he failed to gain full status for this 2019 season.  Cue scraping around for starts on the main tour and lots of attempts at Monday qualifying, the most brutal examination of them all, where over a hundred players may tee it up for three or four spots each week.  Less than two weeks ago Nate didn’t quite get through the Monday test prior to the tournament in Detroit but he did secure third reserve spot.  Luckily for him three players withdrew and he led from start to finish.

He admitted that coming down the last hole he was thinking of his parents and girlfriend and understandably was feeling overwhelmed. “I’m just really emotional right now,” he said and then added, “I’m just happy I got into the tournament.  To win on the PGA tour is a dream.”

And so, next stop for Nate Lashley is Royal Portrush – quite an adventure for a man who hasn’t even been to Europe before, never mind played golf in the Emerald Isle.

Pass the hankies, please.

Next up on this double bill of stories that pull at my heartstrings is that of 25-year old South African Christiaan Bezuidenhout, who won the Estrella Damm N A Andalucia Masters, the European tour event hosted last week by Sergio, at the wonderful Valderrama golf course.  Like our friend Nate, this was also Christiaan’s first win on a big tour and he, too, won by six shots.

Bezuidenhout has had to battle adversity his whole life because as an inquisitive two-year old he swallowed the contents of a coke can he found on the street – although the contents were not coke, but rat poison.  Despite being rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped the toddler suffered nerve damage and developed a debilitating stutter, resulting in long-lasting anxiety issues.

He became introverted and depressed, shunning people in case he had to speak to them.  At 14 he began working with a psychologist who recommended he take beta blockers to manage his anxiety levels.  All this time he persevered with his golf and fulfilled a lifelong ambition when selected to play for South Africa in the Eisenhower Trophy at the 2014 World Amateur Team Championships (WATC).  Fate was to intervene in a cruel way, however, and a few weeks before the WATC he was randomly selected for a drug test when competing in the Amateur Championship at Royal Portrush.  He openly declared on the top of the form that he was using beta blockers but the results flagging up the beta-blocker use, suggesting it was to enhance performance, reached the South African Golf Union two days before the team was due to fly out for the Eisenhower Trophy.

Christiaan was stripped of his place on the team and banned from taking part in any golf tournaments for a period of two years.  It was a tough time.

“A lot of nasty things were said and I was known as the guy banned from golf for a drug-related incident,” he said.  “I was aware of how labels like that are hard to shake off and I reached a very low point in my life, I was banned from playing the only thing in the world I loved, the game of golf. I was inconsolable.”

He never gave up, though.

“After what seemed like the darkest period of my life I had a hearing and they reduced my sentence from two years to nine months after confirming that I had not used the drug for any performance-enhancing benefits. They were the longest nine months of my life.”

Returning to competition, he won his first event by seven shots, using the whole awful experience as extra motivation to do well.  In 2017 he was Rookie of the Year on the Sunshine Tour and secured his European Tour card for 2018 where he had some solid performances and retained his playing privileges for 2019.

Now he, too, is heading to Portrush for the Open.  Perhaps he’ll meet up with Nate – two remarkable men who have overcome so much.

There is one thing Christiaan said about those dark days that sticks in my mind:  “The fact I was cleared of using any form of drug to better my performance was the most important thing.

“My father, who introduced me to the sport, brought me up to play golf like a gentleman, with honesty and integrity so to have that questioned was very hard to cope with.  I felt I had let my family down which above all else was the hardest issue to cope with.”

More hankies, please.

 

I was delighted last weekend to see Hannah Green, a 22-year old from Perth, become the third Australian woman, after Jan Stephenson and Karrie Webb, to win a major.  She got up and down from a bunker at the last at Hazeltine to squeeze home by one shot, ahead of the multi-talented Sung Hyun Park, and lift the trophy at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.

This was her first professional victory on the big stage and heartwarming as it always is to see someone at the start of their career, it can be heartbreaking to witness what seems to be the end of another player’s career – particularly when it is not a departure or timing of said player’s choosing.  I am referring, of course, to Michelle Wie, who missed the cut in the Women’s PGA with scores of 84, 82 after yet another attempted comeback from injury.  We have got so used to Michelle’s litany of injuries over the years that it is easy to think that, yet again, she simply tried to come back too early.  This time, however, her post-round interview contained the emotional admission, “I’m not entirely sure how much more I have left in me.”  I found that chilling from a player who has always been refreshingly honest and lacking in excuses throughout her not inconsiderable time in the spotlight.

Let’s just have a quick recap of the golfing career of one of the most watchable players of the modern era.  By the time I first set eyes on the six feet, 14-year old from Hawaii in the 2004 Curtis Cup at Formby she was already famous.  She had Monday-qualified for an LPGA event at the age of 12 and had won the USGA Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship at the age of 13.  At 14 she had played on the PGA Tour in the Sony Open in Hawaii, missing the cut by one shot.  I’d never seen her like.  The sound of the ball fizzing off the clubface was something I hadn’t hitherto heard in the women’s game and I remember Tom Lehman saying she had the finest swing he’d ever seen.  Ernie Els played a practice round that week with her in Hawaii, helped her with her putting and christened her “The Big Weasy”, a derivation of his own nickname of “The Big Easy.”  She seemed to have it all.

On her 16th birthday she turned professional, by which time she had already played in 22 women’s professional events, gathering up a handful of top ten finishes in majors.  She signed sponsorship deals with Nike and Sony, reportedly worth in excess of $10 million per year.  What could possibly go wrong?

For the next six and a half years Michelle was a part-time professional golfer, part-time student.  The minimum age requirement for LPGA membership at that time was 18 and she and her family decided against petitioning for a special exemption, so for her first three years as a pro golfer she was not a member of any tour, simply playing on invitations and sponsor’s exemptions.  At the end of 2008 Michelle went to the LPGA qualifying school and won her playing rights for the 2009 season.  She was packing a lot into her life as she was also playing some events on the PGA Tour, again by invitation, and there was also the little matter of enrolling at Stanford University.

Against this backdrop was an almost endless stream of criticism of Michelle and, in particular, her parents.  They were too controlling; they were making these ridiculous decisions allowing and encouraging her to play in men’s events and suffer repeated, high-profile failures; they interfered with her coaches; they made it impossible for any professional caddy to do his job properly.  No one had been down this particular road at such a young age and every man, woman and dog had an opinion and didn’t hesitate to offer their advice.  The criticisms were endless and as a young player she was repeatedly questioned and asked to validate any and every decision. She handled it all with class, dignity and a maturity beyond her years.

In the spring of 2012 Michelle graduated from Stanford with a degree in communications and has devoted herself entirely to golf since then.  But the cracks had already appeared as regards her injuries.  It started in 2007 when she fell when out jogging and broke her left wrist.  Since then she has battled with pain and injury in her hip, knee, finger and currently it is her right wrist that is the problem, requiring surgery last year which has led to an intermittent and interrupted schedule this year.  She has arthritis in both wrists.  Add to that respiratory infections, appendicitis and a raft of food allergies and you begin to marvel that she HAS actually recorded five wins on the LPGA tour, including that most precious major, the 2014 US Open, not forgetting five Solheim Cup appearances.  She has spent an inordinate amount of time in the last dozen years rehabbing and grinding on a daily basis to get back out on tour – where she loves to be.  And last week, finally, her composure slipped, revealing to us her anguish that this may indeed be the curtain call to a career that had promised so much, but ultimately hasn’t delivered on the scale we all felt was possible.

Michelle will be 30 in October.  She is a mere five months younger than Rory McIlroy, another child prodigy who also grew up in a bit of a goldfish bowl.  They are both famous, both have tasted major victory, both have made millions, never needing to work again, and they both love the game of golf.  Yet how different their future landscapes look.  Was she badly advised or is it largely the luck of the draw as to what life hands you?  Michelle’s attitude and work ethic have been faultless and she has proved an inspiration to many.  If this does, indeed, signal the end of her career, it will be devastating for her because golf is what she loves passionately.  She will be fine, of course.  She is talented, clever, resourceful, wealthy……and engaged.   And all too accustomed to overcoming setbacks.

It is a lesson to us all, however, to seize the day and make the most of every opportunity we have.  You never know what’s round the corner.