Writing this blog every week requires rare commitment, dedication and professionalism, as Mo will tell you – and more often than not a dose of The Proclaimers at full blast.  In this corner those qualities are proving rarer than ever after a day at the races, supping champagne in the sun and losing money on Gold Cup day at Royal Ascot.  The glad rags were rooted out, the hats recovered from their boxes in the attic, the Prada sandals, a little careworn now but still my most impressive footwear, removed reverentially from their bag.

Those sandals have been a lifesaver ever since I bought them in a sale goodness knows how many years ago.  I was meeting Dai in London and was early for once, so filled in time by browsing in Selfridges, where I gravitated to the shoe department, thinking I’d be safe with my big, slightly misshapen feet.  I rarely ever look at anything Italian because it’s too depressing.  They don’t do big people.  However, by some miracle I found an exception to this rule and not only did the sandals fit, they were so comfortable that even I could walk in them.  I looked at the price tag and hesitated – but not for long.  After all, if questioned, I could honestly say I’d bought them in a sale and I’m pretty sure Dai wouldn’t have known his Prada from his Primark.

Those shoes repaid me countless times.  From the moment I bought them I packed them first in the bottom of my bag, alongside the waterproofs and the thermal underwear.  Every time I wore them, whatever else I had on, I felt a million dollars; whatever the do, however grand the company, I stood taller – unless I was sinking into a lawn or catching a heel in ill-designed decking.  Minor mishaps in a lifetime of service.  Mille grazie Milano.

I should add that my Ascot day took place in Staffordshire, with friends just up the road from home and it was brill.  We were regally fed and watered and repaired to the gorgeous garden between races and I think my losses amounted to a mere £3, despite my picks being unplaced in all but the first race.  That’s when I made the sensible decision to plump for the combo of Ryan Moore and Aidan O’Brien but even they’re not infallible and came in a valiant 3rd.  Carrying my money is not a recipe for success and I now only bet on a golfer if I want him to miss the cut – which in practice means I don’t bet at all on golf because even I’m not that mean-spirited.

There are two golfers I’d like to mention this week.  Not the now double US Open champ Brooks Koepka (still known as Bruce to my computer if left to its own devices); not the would-be US Open champ Phil Mickelson, who made one of the worst decisions of his golfing life at Shinnecock Hills (see Maureen’s post for more details); not Susan Sims, the in-form Scot who had a nett 66 to win WHGC’s Centenary Trophy by miles on Tuesday; not even Leona Maguire, who’s making an encouraging start to her professional career; nor Sara Byrne, of Douglas, who won the Irish Women’s Amateur Close title in brutal weather at Enniscrone, emulating her club mate Eavan Higgins, who won the title 25 years ago (seems like only yesterday to some of us Eavan!)

No, I’m giving pride of place to Tom Alford and Peter Thomson.  Tom, 17, a member at Branston Golf and Country Club (and Whittington Heath), won the Staffordshire Boys’ Championship at Barlaston last Sunday by 12 shots with rounds of 67 and 69.  He gets a mention because I was playing a club match against his mother Carol at the time (his sister Rachel Emma was also playing and the youthfulness of the Branston team made us Heathens feel pretty ancient but I digress).  The match, a scratch B affair, ended in an honourable draw 2 1/2 – 2 1/2 and we toasted Tom’s success in tea and G and T.

Peter, 88, who died at home in Melbourne earlier this week, was a lovely, generous, erudite man who gave Australians – and golfers – a good name.  He won the Open Championship five times – only Harry Vardon has won it more often – in 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958 and 1965.  No, I have not mis-typed, that’s three years in a row, four years out of five – and in 1957, at St Andrews, he was runner-up, three strokes behind Bobby Locke.  That was the year that Locke marked his ball on the last green and mistakenly put it back in the wrong place.

Peter Thomson won the claret jug for the first time at Royal Birkdale and that same year Doug Bachli, a fellow member of Victoria, one of Melbourne’s famed sandbelt courses, won the Amateur Championship.  Apparently no one thought to commemorate that outstanding achievement by taking a photograph of the two men together with their trophies!  They’re sometimes a laid-back lot these Aussies.

Ben Hogan won the Open at Carnoustie in 1953 – Thomson shared second place, four strokes behind, with Dai Rees, Antonio Cerda and Frank Stranahan, an amateur – but in the 1950s the Americans were mostly conspicuous by their absence and tended to downplay Thomson’s dominance.   They had to revise their opinion when he won at Birkdale again, in 1965, with Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tony Lema, the defending champion, in the field.

In The Guardian Pat Ward-Thomas wrote:  [Thomson]….achieved the supreme performance of his golfing lifetime……His total of 285 (74, 68, 72, 71) was two strokes ahead of [Brian] Huggett and [Christy] O’Connor who sustained a magnificent challenge to the very end, while all the great Americans, save Lema, were nowhere…….It was a surpassing triumph for one of the purest swings that golf has ever known, a technique that has few peers in British conditions, a remarkable golfing intelligence, an assurance and composure of manner that have become such a familiar part of the golfing scene in this land for a decade and more….”

The game was his life but there was a lot more to Peter than just golf and it’s worth reading the obits to get a sense of his influence, not just in Australia but all over Asia.

“I had a very joyful time,” he said, “playing a game that I loved for the sheer pleasure of it.  I don’t think I did a real day’s work in the whole of my life.”

That’s the beauty of doing something you love for a living.  It never feels like work.

Talking of joy and fun, if you’re in Lichfield this morning, come and sing with the Social Singers in the precinct from 1030-1200.  The programme includes classics like How Much Is That Doggie, Oklahoma and, heaven help me, Swing Low (in my defence, it didn’t start life as England’s rugby anthem).

The season’s now in full swing for just about every golfer, no matter the standard, age or gender.  My old colleague on tour, Laura Davies, has been busy making history in Denmark by becoming the first woman to play in a men’s European Seniors Tour event.  She finished 44th, beating Jose Maria Olazabal, Costantino Rocca, Gordon J Brand and Philip Walton, all of them former Ryder Cuppers.  Fierce competitors as they all are, that must have smarted.

The competition was no less fierce at The Spire Trophy, an annual event held at the incomparable Castle Stuart Golf Links which, for the uninitiated, is situated five miles from Inverness, overlooking the Moray Firth.  The match was the brainchild of Simon Chapman, a stalwart of Walton Heath Golf Club in Surrey and Stuart McColm, the general manager of Castle Stuart.  Simon captains the visitors’ team, the Sassenachs and I was thrilled to be invited to play for the home team this year.  Actually going to an airport with my golf clubs brought back memories of those faraway days of tournament golf.  I must have got a little over excited because on the Friday I took full advantage of the superb practice facilities with Gillian Stewart who is the resident imparter of golfing wisdom.  The shock of this unaccustomed practice was too much for my system with my back locking up completely so I was unable to play at all on the first day.

I did walk a few holes, however, and was delighted to catch up with former Scotland international Sally Watson, who after four years of professional golf has decided to return to her studies to pursue a Masters degree in Business Administration in Chicago.  She starts her internship in a few weeks but rusty as she may have been, she still swings it impressively.

 

The match was 20-a-side with fourballs on day one and foursomes on day two.  I did manage to play on the second day and was carried round for the most part by my very able partner Jack Bonner, from Myrtle Beach.  We were doing OK – 2 up with 3 to go – but were reeled in by the combined expertise of the London legal duo, Darren Almeida and Alastair Hodge, who won the 16th and 18th to halve the match.  Overall, the trophy slipped neatly from the home team’s (the holders) grasp to that of the Sassenachs and our team captain Grant Sword dutifully tried to paste on a bit of a smile as he handed over the magnificent trophy.

Next stop during the week was another of my favourite places, Royal Porthcawl, for a sporadic yet regular fourball match with three illustrious members.  Pam Chugg, former tournament professional and founder member of the Ladies’ European Tour as well as former chairman of the Ladies’ Golf Union, has very current skills, however, as regards playing the game.  She is partnered by our long-standing friend Tink Graham while my partner in crime is Emer Disley.  This means the match neatly falls into a Wales vs Ireland contest but it was a one-sided affair on this occasion as we were no match for the seven birdies our opponents had in the first 14 holes.  [Obscene:  ed]

Alongside this classy golf there was also the little matter this past week of the US Women’s Open.  The championship admirably splashed its way to an enthralling finish despite the atrocious conditions and serious amounts of rainfall.  Ariya Jutanugarn, winner of the Ricoh Women’s British Open at Woburn in 2016, looked home and dry (figuratively speaking) with a 7-shot lead with only 9 holes to play.  A triple at the 10th and a bogey, bogey finish, coupled with a closing 67 by South Korea’s Hyo Joo Kim, meant the new two hole play-off format would come into play for the first time.  It took until the fourth extra hole before Ariya prevailed, doubling her tally of majors.

Further serious stuff is on the horizon, with the men’s US Open, the second of their four majors, due to start next Thursday at Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, New York.  More than half the field has to qualify through sectional qualifiers and for former Masters champion Adam Scott, World Golf Championship winner Shane Lowry and former PGA champion Keegan Bradley the challenge of the 36-hole qualifier was not something any of them relished.  This trio was all successful but Bradley summed up the whole experience,  “It’s awful, really awful.  It’s humbling.  We get treated so well on Tour, and you can kind of forget what maybe minitour life was like or even Web.com.  This is a reminder of how hard you’ve got to work to be out there on the Tour.”  I shall look forward to seeing them all in action next week in person.

Finally, enormous luck to Elaine Farquharson-Black, who tweeted out the picture below, and her GB&I team who begin the defence of the Curtis Cup today at Quaker Ridge Golf Club against the United States.  More of the same from Dun Laoghaire two years ago please.

I think a lot about golf and, perhaps not surprisingly, I think a lot about women’s golf.  I was amazed to see that it’s been four years since the talented Irish Maguire twins first went to study at Duke University in the States and now here they are graduating.  While their last four years have been a very predictable diet of study and collegiate golf it will be interesting to see how things pan out now for them both.  Leona, who spent oodles of weeks in the last couple of years as the number one amateur in the world has the credentials and status to dive straight into professional golf on the Symetra Tour, the secondary tour to the LPGA in America.  It is confidently expected she will cruise straight onto said LPGA –  I hope she does, but it’s not a given.

Lisa’s golfing graph has enjoyed more ups and downs than her sister’s and they may well be nearing the first time in their lives that they will start spending significant time apart.  For close sisters that’s difficult; for close twins that could be very difficult.  There’s so much more to success in professional sport than mere talent and it is not easy coping with living out of a suitcase, endless travelling and, often, loneliness and isolation from the people you love.  Success demands that you develop these coping skills as well as knowing how much spin to put on your pitch shots.

I had the pleasure of spending time on tour with the talented Head twins, Sam and Jo, who were as difficult to tell apart as the Maguires.  I could tell the difference only by their eyes and being short-sighted it meant I couldn’t hail them from afar and call them by name.  Rather, I had to lumber over to them, get up close and inspect their eyes – rather unnerving for them, I think.  Only then could I be sure which one I was talking to.  They ultimately took different paths with their golf, Sam heading out east and becoming a member of the Japanese Tour after several years in Europe.  The separation from travelling on tour with her twin was hard – it was anything but a soft option – and I was full of admiration for her.  Jo went stateside and has only recently returned to England with husband Terry Mundy, (who caddied for Ian Poulter) and is totally involved with house restoration and her own Grand Design projects.

There have been a few trailblazing sister acts in the past.  Think Sweden, think Sorenstam, think Annika and Charlotta.  Annika, many people’s choice as the GOAT (greatest of all time) won 89 times around the world including 10 majors.  Her sister Charlotta recorded a couple of wins as a professional, including one in America.  One of their collective proudest moments, however, was when they were teammates on the 1998 European Solheim Cup side.

At the moment the best sisters in the golfing world are the Jutanugarns, from Thailand.  Both Moriya and Ariya are ranked inside the world’s top 10 and both have won in the last month, Moriya finally breaking through to join her younger sibling in the winner’s circle.  They are incredibly close and travel and stay together on tour, each citing the other as their greatest support.  When Moriya was closing in on her first victory Ariya was more nervous and emotional than at any time during her own wins which now tally eight, including a victory last week, and one major, the 2016 Ricoh Women’s British Open.

They are the second set of twins to play on the main tours of the world following the now 32-year olds Aree and Naree Wongluekiet, who have a Korean father and Thai mother.  The Wongluekiets started attracting serious media attention at the age of 13 when they became the youngest players to tee it up in a major, the 2000 Nabisco Championship at Mission Hills Country Club.  Big Sis Patricia was out in the States covering all the majors at that time and I well remember her efforts to get her head around the unfamiliar name. She still hasn’t forgiven their Dad who took it into his head to change their surname to plain ordinary Song, just as she had mastered the more exotic Wongluekiet!  Unfortunately, both twins had their playing careers cut short for health reasons but both still remain in the golf industry, one as an assistant collegiate coach in the US, the other in Thailand helping develop young players.

In the week that the Maguires leave their college golf behind them I bumped into two of Wales’ best female professional players, Amy Boulden from Maesdu and Chloe Williams from Wrexham.  They are certainly not twins – not even sisters – but, along with many others, they share an uphill battle in finding enough tournaments to play in to hone their games, never mind make a living.  Amy has her full European Tour card and was Rookie of the Year in 2014 but with a 2018 schedule totalling a paltry eight (yes, eight!) 72-hole tournaments and three 54-hole ones it is not hard to see that professional golf in Europe is not a viable option without some serious sponsorship or backing.  Consider that four of the aforementioned tournaments are in Australia and one in South Africa and you realise the cost of even making it to the 1st tee is quite considerable.

Chloe, however, despite not having a full card, fares slightly better in terms of the number of events she can play.  There are a dozen on the LETAS or secondary tour.  Playing in those is all about improving your game and your course craft because the purses are small.  It is supposed to be a stepping stone to the next level but at the moment it isn’t working like that at all.  You can gain a full card but what good does that do you?  You still can’t make a living.  Both Amy and Chloe nearly fell over when I told them that in the late 1980s we had a schedule of 27 tournaments and nearly all of them were in the UK, Ireland and continental Europe, not Oz and South Africa.

I have much admiration for today’s young female professional golfers in Europe.  The majority are dedicated, athletic, skilful, beautifully dressed and interact well with fans and media alike. They work hard on and off the course and I’m confident the product the Tour has to sell is top quality.  The problem is not the players; it is the governance of the Tour which has lurched from one poor decision to another over the past decades.  A tour that 30 years ago had a strong pulse and a good heart has been on life support for too long.

So, as we watch with interest as Leona Maguire steps onto the professional stage in America, let’s not forget those whose only option is Europe.  Leona has only to worry about the state of her own game, safe in the knowledge there are opportunities and tournaments aplenty for her if she proves good enough.  The Ladies’ European Tour players are depending more and more on the metaphorical cavalry riding over the hill to provide more playing opportunities and make significant advances in building a viable tour.  I played on tour from 1986 – 1998 at a time when the schedule was vibrant and I loved it.  I wasn’t as good as many of today’s players but I had opportunity.  And I had two other things on my side – impeccable timing and luck.  Today’s female European tour players need a large dose of both.

One of the good things about meeting and marrying Dai, who died ten years ago tomorrow (thank goodness he’s not around to thunder against a royal wedding usurping his anniversary), was getting to know and love his family and friends.  

We buried one of those friends on Wednesday.  Mark Wilson, one of the world’s great people and a world-class teller of tales – and did he have tales to tell – was 90, born in 1927, just a few weeks after Dad.  He hadn’t been too well for quite a while but his humour never failed him and when I emailed him late last year to congratulate him on winning PYP (pick your pro), one of the AGW’s most/least prestigious competitions, he responded immediately.  “It was a fiddle,” he said.  I think that’s because Mitchell Platts, a canny punter, filled in Mark’s card or, at the very least, marked it.  Anyway, Mark’s going well in this year’s version of the season-long comp (essentially, name the winner of every tournament but only use a player once and you earn the money that your player does) and if he’s in the prize money again, his winnings will go to charity.

Dai, who had a pedantic, puritanical, purist streak, couldn’t see the point of PYP and never entered.  Whenever, in the days before shot-by-shot websites and unbroken surveillance of the world’s fairways, he rang me and I’d ask, affecting nonchalance, how some relatively random player was doing, he’d be mystified by my interest but tell me; when he realised why I was asking, he’d never tell me….I’m currently third from last but have already won more than a million dollars – and it’s not even the end of May.  Jason Day is my pick for the Byron Nelson this week – and I haven’t even checked that he’s playing.  That’s part of the problem:  you’re picking so far ahead that you’re just glad if your man (or woman) is in the field.  It is daft but it’s good fun, a bit like golf.

In March (well, it could have been any month, reducing my home landfill is the work of a lifetime and the mountain has yet to become a molehill), I was rooting through some old papers and found this typewritten invitation, which I sent to Mark, who was horrified!

“I don’t remember ever being that mean,” he wrote.  “One drink only….did anyone turn up?…….just escaped from a dreadful week in hospital, starting with 12 hours on a trolley in odd corners of A & E and finished in a bed in a bitterly cold corridor (heating had broken down and engineers were working on it).  Poor NHS.  Literally poor……Thankfully, my hospital medical treatment was great and I am recovering well in a warm care home……”

However frail he was physically, Mark was mentally with it and that note baffled and bothered him.  “I keep reading this invitation which puts me to shame.  How could I be so mean?  Hopefully it was a joke….I’m guessing that it was about the time I took redundancy at the Daily Express and joined the [European] Tour.”  Anyway, after discussing the invitation with Joan, his wife, he set to on his iPad again:  “Hello Patricia:  Joan denies all knowledge of such meanness.  She says we have never known anyone content with just one drink or such a time limit!  Insists it must have been me with a sick joke, oh dear!  I would love to know the answer.  Could it have been my idea of celebrating becoming AGW chairman and ‘at home’ being the Press Room.  You really have started something with your rummaging……”

In the end we came to the obvious conclusion that it was a joke and Mark said, “Can you imagine me giving Dai a limit of one drink and making it last 45 minutes!  I must have had a good sense of humour (and a thick skin) in those days……”

One of the reasons I love the photo of Mark at the top of this piece, tapping away at his typewriter in a press tent that was posh in those days, rudimentary now, is because I’m old enough to have worked in similar tents.  It makes me think of a dimly lit, smelly old thing that had probably last seen service at the Yorkshire Agricultural Show in 1949 and had been unearthed, brushed down and pressed back into service as our press HQ at Ganton for the home internationals or an amateur championship of some sort.

Getting to know Joan and Mark – and a host of other men and women, too numerous to mention here, not least for fear of forgetting someone – has been one of the joys of my life.  It was a sad, emotional, uplifting day on Wednesday, with Mark’s grandchildren and daughters doing him and Joan proud with loving tributes at the service at Woking Crem.  Then, at the wake at Sunningdale Golf Club, Renton Laidlaw, who succeeded Mark at the (London) Evening Standard, paid tribute to his friend with a eulogy that more than matched the exquisite setting.

If you want to know what kind of man Mark Wilson was, Renton summed it up when he told us that when he came down from Scotland to take over from Mark, who was off to the Daily Express, Mark handed him his contacts book (a journalist’s most precious possession) and said, “Everybody you’ll need is in there.”

No wonder we all loved him.