“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.

 

The cartoon above dates from 1928 and the caption has the caddie saying:  “‘Ave yer finished with the links for today, Sir?”  Sir is stomping off, clubs and caddie abandoned, radiating rage from every pore.

Every golfer, at whatever level, has to learn to cope with the frustrations of a game where the ball sits there waiting for you to hit it.  There’s no opponent trying to kick it or hit it out of your way; no one trying to send you flying with a big hit, sorry, tackle; it’s just you and a ball, sitting there waiting quietly for you to do your best/worst.  Easy-peasy.  No problem…..

As every golfer knows, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds and Eddie Pepperell, an affable Englishman who’s still just in the top 50 in the world as I write, had some sort of meltdown at the Turkish Airlines Open last week.  I don’t think he’s written one of his entertaining, thought-provoking blogs about the incident yet but he put four or five balls in the water, then walked off, saying he’d run out of balls.  His partners Martin Kaymer and George Coetzee were gobsmacked and Pepperell was DQd for not completing the hole and the round.

Yesterday, the R&A tweeted a picture of the finalists in the 2009 Boys Amateur, who now have seven professional wins between them.  Tom Lewis beat Pepperell 5 and 4 and the tweet asked:  “Who would win now?”   Pepperell, having recovered his humour and, with luck, his equilibrium, replied:  “Probably Tom as I still have no balls.”

Dai, my late husband, had his moments on the golf course but the most memorable were mostly of the volcanic variety.  Some of his former colleagues have some hair-raising tales, including behaviour the man himself would have excoriated as appalling:  stomping off the course without finishing out or shaking hands, heading straight for the car – not the bar – and roaring off.

On one memorable occasion, at Whittington, Dai’s temper didn’t make it as far as the 1st green.  Our 1st is a hole he used to call “the easiest par 5 in the country” and he invariably, inevitably, took at least six.  This time he hit two crackers just short of the green and, for reasons best known to himself, took out a horrible, deep-faced, heavy-headed wedge that he’d liberated, again for reasons best known to himself, from the dark recesses of a friend’s garage.

The ground was wet, Dai duffed the ball into the dip in front of the green, considered the situation briefly, then let out a roar as he raised the club above his head and speared it with all his might into the sodden turf.  As the head buried itself well en route down under, the shaft broke in half and the bit with the grip went spinning off towards the rough, with the bit in the ground vibrating wildly.  My beloved’s temper was not helped when he saw me in a stomach-clutching, shoulder-heaving heap on the ground.

It took him some time to extricate the buried bit because it was hard to get a grip of the shattered, spiky-edged half of shaft but he managed it and hurled the two pieces into the trees behind the green never to darken his golf bag again.

You may not have seen the comment from Des O’Reilly on Maureen’s post about our golf at Portrush and it bears repeating here.  Mention of Lilian Starrett (nee Malone) brought the memories flooding back.  “I remember my first introduction to Lilian at the Hermitage Scratch Cup (circa 1978),” Des said.  “As a starry-eyed new boyfriend, I was cadddying for Therese [Des’s late wife, the incomparable Tiny], who thought Lilian was ‘great craic’.

“She was warm and friendly until after a couple of poor shots on the 6th or 7th hole she turned to her clubs and caddy car and quietly but with intent beat the living daylights out of both with a 4-iron. This scared the living daylights out of me. I never uttered a word for the entire rest of the day!  In fact, it took a good few years before I felt at ease in the company of ‘the Starrett’!…..”

Not long after writing this, Des received a phone call from a woman puporting to be a solicitor ringing on behalf of said Starrett, mentioning defamation, libel and the like.  It was, of course, Lil, insisting that she was a reformed character and would be battering her new TaylorMades only on the practice ground.

Even the sainted Bob(by) Jones had to learn how to curb a fiery temper.  Famously, the man who received the freedom of the Burgh of St Andrews in 1958, picked up his ball and tore up his scorecard in the third round of his first (British) Open, at St Andrews, in 1921, describing it later as “the most inglorious failure of my golfing life”.  He did win the Open on the Old Course in 1927 and the Amateur there in 1930, the year of his Impregnable Quadrilateral that also included the Open, the US Amateur and the US Open.

Jones also had an inglorious moment at the US Open in 1920.  As a precocious 18-year old paired with the venerable Harry Vardon, aged 50, Jones made a mess of the 7th hole after thinning a straightforward pitch over the green into heavy rough.  Vardon wasn’t much of a chatter and the pair hadn’t exchanged a word until Jones, embarrassed and nervous, said, “Mr Vardon, have you ever seen a worse shot?”

“No.”

Neither of them won that championship – Ted Ray, an Englishman, was the champion – at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio and 101 years later, in 2021, when the club hosts the Solheim Cup, some of us hope that it’ll be another foreigner, a Scot, holding the trophy aloft.

To no one’s surprise, Catriona Matthew, who led Europe to victory at Gleneagles a few weeks ago, will be captain again at Inverness.  She was at home in North Berwick, cooking dinner, when the call came asking her to do the job again and she was delighted to accept.

“Being captain of the winning team was the highlight of my career,” she said.  “Capturing the Solheim Cup in Scotland, an hour’s drive from our home, with my close friend Suzann Pettersen making the clinching putt on the last hole in the last match on the course…..you can’t top that.”

It’ll be different away from home, with the crowd cheering the Americans on but Catriona relishes the challenge:  “I love Toledo and Inverness is such a Scottish name, I’m hoping that’s a good omen!  Winning the Solheim Cup in Scotland was a dream come true but backing that up with a win in America would be even better.”

 

 

 

This is the sport that keeps on giving………….and giving.  A couple of days ago Patricia and I rolled in to Portrush for a day’s golf with great pals, Kath Stewart-Moore and Lilian Starrett.  We were trying to work out when we had all first joined this great club and reckoned it was the late 1960s or at the very latest the early 1970s.  There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since those days and even the odd decade has passed with very little contact, but as we all ease into our retirements we have found it so easy to pick up where we left off.

In the old days we were no slouches.  Lilian was a wonderfully talented “feel” player who got down to scratch by the age of 20 and represented Ireland on several occasions.  She continued her upward trend by captaining her country on three occasions, the most memorable trip being to Moscow which afforded a peep into the privileged existence enjoyed by the high-ups in the Politburo.

At her best Kath got down to four and played for Ulster.  Like Lil she also captained Ireland in the shape of two girls’ International sides and she is arguably creeping up on her proudest moment in the game.  In January she will become the Lady President of Royal Portrush Golf Club, a just recognition of her immense contribution to the sport and the club.  Mind you, I was more than a little annoyed to hear she had demoted her victory over me in the 9-hole heats of the Collin Cup in 1982 to second place in her list of proud achievements.

Patricia’s lowest handicap was also four and her debut into girls’ International golf was seamless with a 100% win record at North Berwick way back in 1971.  However, when questioned as to her most memorable moment in the game she still resolutely cites witnessing Alison Nicholas’ victory in the 1997 US Open at Pumpkin Ridge.  Alison defeated the US favourite Nancy Lopez in a nail-biting finish and despite covering many of Tiger’s and Jack’s glorious victories for the Times nothing resonated with my sister quite like this.  Her own 3rd place finish in the Heath Scratch Cup, although cherished, didn’t quite cut the mustard.

So, it was in the company of these three titans of the game, with 164 years of golfing experience between them, that I teed off on Wednesday.  Fresh in my mind was the last time I was on that hole – namely on Sunday 21st July in the pouring rain, waiting for Shane Lowry to take history by the scruff of the neck and win the Open.  We were aghast at his untidy bogey 5 up that first hole but looked upon it more favourably when our best player managed a resounding seven!  I know it was an impossible pin, only ten yards on and front left, but, still – to win the hole with a seven!!!!

The course, obviously, has now been denuded of Open Championship furniture – the grandstands, the signage, the ropes, the camera towers and so on, have all gone.  But, to me, it was so much more like the Portrush I’ve known and loved for so long.  It was a perfect day, weatherwise, if a tad chilly at 4 degrees and, I have to say, the golf (apart from Kath’s) left a great deal to be desired.  However, as always, this has to be the best club in the world for the welcome afforded to golfers at the initial point of contact with the customers.  Gary McNeil, the professional, who so proudly played 36 holes as the marker in the Open at the weekend, runs a tight ship with his staff who are simply superb in the service industry.  It is a pleasure to enter the sanctuary of the pro’s shop.  Time stands still and conversations have time to be enjoyed.

It’s not simply time on the course that counts, obviously, but the time spent together – the “do you remember whens?”;  the piecing together of the collective memories of the same events, some of them widely differing;  the occasions one of us remembers something with total clarity as the other three look on blankly.  It’s all grist to the mill for folk with a united love of golf.

Even when I was younger I was always acutely aware of how fortunate I was to be involved in a sport that tends to be played in beautiful surroundings.  Thank God I wasn’t a swimmer whose playground would have been likely to be a 50 metre chlorinated, indoor pool!  (Do they still put chlorine in pools?  Probably not!)  Not many beautiful, uplifting vistas there, however, to take your mind off poor performance.

As I weaved my way round the links the other day I was able to recall so many of the deft skills Shane Lowry displayed on his way to his greatest golfing achievement.  It was quite something coming down the last in the gloaming to hark back to the tumultous scenes we had all witnessed there in July.  Then, I was totally caught up in the moment, lustily joining in with the thousands of voices serenading the winner with the Fields of Athenry, followed by Ole,Ole, Ole!

This time there was no singing, rather a weary relief that we could now make our way to the sanctuary of the bar, chew the fat, put the world to rights and gird our loins for our next day’s play.  More beautiful, and changing vistas, to enjoy;  more time with lifelong friends;  a bit of fresh air and exercise and the never-ending challenge of getting the ball into the hole as fast as possible.

How lucky we are.