Have you noticed you simply can’t believe a word you hear, see or read nowadays?

No, not a single thing.  From fake news to the erratic, varying, misleading and contradictory statements emanating from across the Atlantic to……well, to the Madill golf blog.  Yep.  Mea culpa.

Last week I waxed lyrical (well, I hope it was lyrical) about my lovely time at Kooyonga golf club in Australia way back in the seventies when I was on the GB team selected to play in the Commonwealth tournament.  It was a fabulous trip (true);  I met and made lifelong friends (also true);  the venue was superb (again true) and the tournament was played at Kooyonga golf club in Adelaide.  Alas, that last fact is, well, not a fact at all.

My very own personal edition of BBC Verify, namely Gillian Stewart, who was on that team, texted when she’d read the piece.

“Blog fact check!  The Commonwealth tournament was played at Lake Karrinyup in Perth.  We then went on to Royal Adelaide where we played in the Australian Ladies’ Open.  You been on the gin?”

I don’t know if this is all made worse by the fact that I HADN’T been on the gin, or on anything at all, but I did feel slightly better when Gill’s next text read, “Well, it was 47 years ago.”

So, apologies all round – particularly to Kooyonga and Lake Karrinyup.  I got my two special Ks mixed up.  I actually played Kooyonga as a professional some years later and it just goes to prove that time frames can shrink to nothing and become blurred the further away you get from them.  Ah well.

I can’t leave the topic of Australia without lauding that country’s current leading female professional, Perth-born Hannah Green.  Hannah has just won the Australian WPGA Championship, her third victory in her last three outings.  She won in Singapore and then travelled home to Oz and tucked away two more wins – such an enormously difficult thing to do for any athlete competing on home turf.  The attendant pressures from carrying the hopes of a nation do not sit lightly but, with her husband who was caddying by her side, Green was immense, impressive, tough and gracious in victory.

“It feels really amazing,” the 29-year-old said. “Again, it hasn’t really sunk in, but it’s been a really crazy month. I guess it’s been four weeks since I won in Singapore. But it’s been really special to be able to do that in Australia.”

Green has made history by being the first Aussie, man or woman, ever to record three consecutive victories and, as always, she was quick to express gratitude to the great Karrie Webb (with her in the featured picture at the top).

Webb, as many of you will be aware, is the owner of seven majors, 41 titles on the LPGA tour as well as multiple other victories worldwide.  Even when she was at the height of her powers as a player Karrie was creating foundations and scholarships to support the legions of young Australian girls who were hoping to follow in her footsteps.  Hannah was the recipient of one of those scholarships more than a decade ago, receiving financial aid, travel expenses and coaching and mentoring from Webb.  She has never forgotten it.

Karrie, a sporting legend and now 51 years of age, is still very relevant in the modern game, her door always open to any young aspiring golfer seeking mentoring or help.  Talk about giving back.  Bravo the Aussies – and how marvellous to hear that she is once again to captain her country’s golf teams at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

From summer Down Under to the ravages of the weather in the northern hemisphere, I can report that I am now back in Blighty – and very happy to be so.  A nasty weather system and Storm Theresa rolled over the Canaries which meant that for the last three full days of our time in Tenerife we were pretty much confined to our AirBnb.  A state of National Emergency was declared with road closures, rock falls, torrential rain and lightning and it was stressful wondering if we’d actually make it to the airport at all.

Happily we did and my hubby took an inter-island hop over to Gran Canaria where he has met up with some pals for a week’s motorbiking.  So far they’ve just had one wet day and the worst is certainly over but I was a teensy-weensy bit alarmed when he forwarded a photo of how GC had suffered a couple of days before he got there.

This is on one of their biking routes and may give you an idea of what these islands have been through.

Thankfully we didn’t encounter anything like that on our way to the airport but we did see the civic maintenance crews out on the mountain roads clearing away the rock falls and landslips.

And I used to think five footers were scary!

Hannah Green (above with the Australian Open trophy) must be enjoying life at the moment.

The 29-year old Australian has risen to No 7 in the world rankings due, in no small part, to her stellar play over the last two to three weeks.  Now in her ninth year on the LPGA tour, Green recorded her seventh win on that circuit at the HSBC Women’s World Championship which was played three weeks ago at Sentosa golf club in Singapore.  Every win is special but this was made doubly so by the fact that she had her husband Jarryd Felton on the bag.

Jarryd obviously carried out exemplary caddy duties because the duo then travelled together down to Adelaide for Hannah’s next start in the Women’s Australian Open which has featured for many years on the Ladies’ European tour (LET) schedule.

It had seriously rankled with the sports-mad Aussie population that the last time a home player won their national Open was way back in 2014 when Karrie Webb topped the leaderboard.  This year’s edition was at the beautiful Kooyonga golf course and Hannah and Jarryd wowed the home supporters by carving out a one-stroke victory.  The huge media interest and subsequent column inches, photographs and videos about the wife-husband partnership will provide oodles of material for the family album.  A home player lifting his or her national open is second only to winning a major…………….perhaps.

And did I mention Hannah already has one of those – a major?  The 2019 Women’s PGA Championship.  I doubt it’ll be her last.

Ah, Kooyonga.  The Adelaide club holds a special place in my heart.  It was the venue for the 1979 Commonwealth Tournament and my first overseas outing for a British team.  We had a lovely week or so of preparation before the serious golf began – it gave us time to get over the huge journey and to adjust to the significant time difference.  We were assigned members of the home club as caddies, all good players, and we had the benefit of several practice rounds with them.  But, how times have changed!

Back then we, of course, carried yardage books – or rather, notebooks.  I don’t recall my book having too many yardages in it.  It tended to be filled with shorthand notes that would indicate to me, for example, that a good tee shot on the fifth might leave me level with the third banksia tree on the left.  From there, into a one-club wind, a five iron would reach the middle of the green.  Nary a number hit the page.

This may sound mad in this precise, laser-measured era but it worked well enough – up to a point.  My caddy was unable to be present for one of the final practice rounds so I played a few holes solo with much consulting of the notebook and assiduous learning of the borrows on the green taking place.  I was challenged, however, by the unfamiliar array of trees, undergrowth and flora – very foreign to a (not so) wee girl from Norn Iron.  Without my caddy by my side, just which of these exotic-looking things were banksia trees?  Were they those low ones over there or that run of taller ones at the back?  No idea whatsoever.  Cue much relief when my caddy returned and I was a big step closer to having numbers in my book.

I made many friends at Kooyonga, particularly Dulcie Doherty who was the hostess for the British team.  She looked after us so well – nothing was too much trouble and she and I kept in touch from then onwards.  We corresponded for many decades and I looked forward to receiving a lengthy missive each January, filled with news and observations about the grand slam tennis (one of Dulcie’s passions) which takes place at that time of year.  When she celebrated her 80th birthday Dulcie and her husband, Jack, hired a Harley for a day and I still have at home the photo of the two leather-clad octogenarians.

I’m still in Tenerife looking for the sun and obviously can’t access any photos from home so I emailed Gill Stewart to see if she could put her hand on her copy of that 1979 team.  Within a matter of minutes she came up trumps and sent me the photo below.

I believe a copy of this picture was still hanging in the locker room at Kooyonga as recently as five years or so ago, along, I’m sure, with photos of all the competing teams.

Our captain that year was the inimitable Carol Comboy of  Cheshire, which incidentally has just been awarded “County of the Year 2026” at the prestigious England Golf Awards ceremony in Manchester.  The county has been recognised for its  “outstanding commitment to supporting its 95 affiliated clubs and delivering impact at every level of the game”.  Congratulations are in order all round.  Carol, a trailblazer herself, would be so proud of you all.  Keep up the good work.

Finally, many thanks to all of you who took the time and trouble to send congratulations re my honorary membership of the PGA.  It is much appreciated.

I’m back in England next week so my search for the sun will continue there for a while.

You realise – with a lot of a gunk – that you’re getting on a bit when twenty-five years, a whole quarter of a century, seem like no time at all ago; or, completely the opposite, a lifetime ago.  To digress, as so often, I’ve used a semi-colon there and am feeling haunted, hunted, panicked and incredibly guilty…was it the right thing to do?  Probably not.  And Jeremy Chapman, whose funeral I attended earlier this week, would have been down on me like a ton of bricks.

Jeremy, of the Sporting Life and Racing Post, among other publications, was once described as the Tiger Woods of golf betting tipsters and was a man of many talents.  Correct grammar was one of his things; punctuation was not to be messed with.  Of course, I’m now a complete mess, with commas, semi-colons and colons scattered to the four winds.  As for apostrophes, well, I’ve accepted that they’re a lost cause, with apologies to Jeremy and the equally great Lynne Truss.  Sometimes life really is too short.

Not being a gambler, I didn’t follow Jeremy’s tips avidly and would donate a few pounds to his coffers every year at the Open.  The only time I ever won anything – a substantial (in my terms) 30 quid, I had to leave early and Jeremy, ever trusting, gave my winnings to Dai…I never did get them in my hot little hand.  My ever-lovin’ put them in what he called “central funds”.  I’m still cross!

As is often the case with funerals you learn lots of things you didn’t know about the person who’s died and wish they were still around so you could learn more.  Racing, golf, boxing, musical theatre, cabaret, page lay-outs, writing, you name it, Jeremy was a master of it.  Condolences to his wife Christa, who drove him everywhere (he never mastered driving) and all the family.

Now where was I?  Oh yes, time and the passing thereof.  It was 25 years ago this week that Annika Sorenstam, like Jeremy an avid cruncher of numbers, became the first woman golfer to record a score of 59, 13 under par, in a proper professional event, on a proper golf course.  It was at Moon Valley in Phoenix, Arizona, in the Standard Register PING, an event that the incomparable Laura Davies, won four times in a row.  Annika, known from then on as Ms 59, had a putt for a round of 58 but breaking 60 was a magical feat in itself.

I was there.  Really.  I was.  And it was one of the triumphs of my journalistic career:  it took a lot of pleading but despite the eight-hour time difference I managed to persuade the subs at The Times to give me top billing, above the men’s European Tour event.  It meant I was given something like 450 words as opposed to 250.  Some career, eh!!  Mind you, you wouldn’t even get the results in the paper now, let alone words from somebody who’d been sent there to report on the event (and others).

I only realised it was a special anniversary when I got an email from the ANNIKA Foundation billing a “More Than Golf” virtual series session with Annika and Charlotta, her sister, called Achieving Your “59”.  Oh, lovely, I’ll sign up to that, I thought, that’ll be very interesting and great to revisit the day itself.  The glitch came when I was told that to sign up required parental consent…Ah, a bit tricky that.

Turned out the event wasn’t for old dolls like me wanting to reminisce about a great day.  A closer inspection of the small print revealed that the session was intended for “female junior, collegiate and young professional golfers”.  Not for the likes of me then.  Fair enough.  The chances of me improving my golf by 30-odd strokes – and the rest – per round are non-existent.  Odds of several million to one wouldn’t give even the most clueless bookmaker or tipster a single sleepless second.

The Standard Register, the Turquoise Classic I think in a previous incarnation, was a great event for us European watchers.  There were big crowds; Laura ruled the roost for several years in the mid 1990s; then in 2000 Charlotta beat big sister Annika and Karrie Webb in a play-off for her only LPGA victory; in 2001, Annika had her 59 in the second round and went on to win.

Looking up the LPGA media guide, 2001 was the year Annika had eight wins, six seconds and twenty top-ten finishes “en route to her fourth career Rolex Player of the Year Award, Vare Trophy [stroke average] and money title.”  She was quite a player.

Sadly, not all numbers always add up.  The day after Jeremy’s funeral, I went to watch Spurs play Atletico (Atletic nowadays I think) Madrid in the Champions’ League and although we won 3-2, we lost 7-5 on aggregate.  It was a good match and for a while we had a sniff of a mega upset but we had too much to do after a dire first leg and who knows when we’ll be in the top comp again.

I’m featuring Gandys at the top because at long last, on the day of the match, I got to their wee outlet shop in Covent Garden (I also managed to nip in to the Apple store where I discovered that the only thing you can do with the flood of mail in Junk is delete it!).  Just as well I decided to go because I discovered that a sustainable business isn’t always sustainable.  Gandys are, apparently, on the way out, unable to make the bottom line add up.

The company, starting with flip flops, was founded by two brothers whose parents were swept away by the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 – the boys and two younger siblings survived – and they’ve done great things since, helping set up schools and orphanages in Sri Lanka and Nepal and elsewhere.  It’s worth looking them up and reading all about it.

In the meantime, there’s 60 per cent off sitewide on gandysinternational.com.

 

 

 

I see Lexi Thompson got married last week.

Veteran of seven Solheim Cup matches the tall, striking American won eleven times on her home tour including one major, the 2014 Kraft Nabisco.  Renowned for her prodigious length, I remember seeing her reach the heart of the first green at Colorado Golf Club in two blows.  It was in a practice round for the Solheim Cup, her first, and the hole measured just over 600 yards.  Granted we were at altitude and the hole was very slightly downhill, but even so….  It was quite something to witness.

Her difficulties with the putter were also something to witness and in 2024 she announced she was ceasing playing full time on tour.  Lexi, who has been a professional since she was fifteen, is now thirty-one years of age and the game has given her lots in terms of fame, money and success.  It has also extracted a heavy price at times, with several enforced sabbaticals to work on her mental health.  There have also been occasional swirling rumours of inconsistent ball marking on the greens which have, at times, put her firmly in an unwanted spotlight.

She played part-time last year winning a tidy $750,000 and full playing rights for this year, which means she can pick and choose exactly where she wants to play.  No surprise, however, that we haven’t seen her yet in 2026 – she’s had her wedding to Max Provost to organise.

I don’t think we’ve lost Lexi completely from the fairways just yet.  Remember, this is a Solheim Cup year and she admits it’s still hovering on her radar.  Captain Angela Stanford made her feelings on the matter clear.

“I think if Lexi plays to her abilities, I would be crazy to leave her home.”

It’ll be fun to see if Lexi can make it eight Solheims in a row.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world from the Florida wedding Jon Rahm was making headlines of his own, chartering a private plane to take himself and several LIV colleagues from their homes in Dubai to Hong Kong for their next event.  The most nerve-wracking part of the trip was the 240-mile road trip to Oman where airspace had opened up to allow some flights to take off, Dubai airport being closed because of the ongoing threat of missile strikes.

Thankfully. all went well and the group arrived safely in Hong Kong, though with less than 24 hours to go until their tee times.  Not that that seemed to make any difference to Rahm who scooped the top individual prize of a cool $4 million.  Amazingly, that was his first individual success in eighteen months.

“Very relieving,” said Rahm, a two-time major winner. “That’s the only way I can describe it. I’ve been very ecstatic for wins in the past. This one just feels like a big weight off my shoulder. That’s all I can say.”

Even the best can wonder if they’ll win again, apparently.

Spaniards have brought much to our sport over the decades – grit, determination, magical mercurial short game skills, fierce competitiveness…….and stubborness.  All these qualities were wrapped up in our universal favourite, Seve, and they are present in Jon Rahm also.  He is refusing to agree to terms offered by the DP World tour which would lead to his acceptance back into the fold and, more importantly, assure his elegibility for next year’s Ryder Cup in Ireland.  It’s a matter of principle as far as the Spaniard is concerned and we do seem to be at an impasse.

Those of you long in the tooth like me will remember Seve having an ongoing row with the European tour over appearance money which resulted in his exclusion from the 1981 Ryder Cup team.  So, we have previous and it looks like history will repeat itself.  Looking on the bright side, however, Seve went on to become our most famous, ardent and committed Ryder Cup player of all time, so perhaps we haven’t seen the last of Jon.

I’m still out in the Canaries searching for the sun and reluctantly wearing a fleece far more often than I had bargained for but it’s been fun to follow the Six Nations rugby with all its twists and turns.  I had an ecstatic but slightly disbelieving hubby last week when Scotland put 50 points on the board against the French but diplomatic relations will no doubt be strained come next Saturday when Ireland and Scotland clash.  Whoever wins that, we’ll be united in hoping England can find a bit of form against the French in Paris.  Both sides will be smarting from last weekend’s defeats so we may well witness a dead cat bounce from one side or the other.

Sandwiched in between these two matches will be the Wales/Italy encounter with the Italians searching for an unprecedented third win in the series.  Wales may be tail-end Charlies but my favourite moment, by a mile, of the whole championship has been prop Rhys Carre’s wonderful 25 metre solo try, which he later described modestly as “a fluke.”

Finally, a piece of personal good news.  I received a letter this past week from the PGA which began as follows:-

“I am delighted to write and advise you that the Association’s Executive Committee on Tuesday, 03 March 2026, unanimously approved a proposal offered by your Regional Committee to accord you the status of Honorary Member of The Professional Golfers’ Association.”

To say I am surprised and delighted is an understatement but I’m incredibly humbled and grateful to all those who played such a big part in my career.  There are so many to whom I owe a great deal.

Thank you all so much.