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.

 

 

 

I had a great couple of days last week down in Somerset with my good friends the Farmers – my former long-suffering coach, Lawrence and his wife Sally. They relocated to cider country four years ago and although Lawrence is more or less retired now his passion for golf is undimmed and spending two whole days with him hitting shots, going out on the course and just generally talking golf is a joy for me.

My game gets scant attention these days but the first two swings Lawrence saw at Long Ashton Golf Club, where we met, were more than enough for him.  I now feel that a lens shutter has clicked back into place and there is some clarity appearing out of my fog of indecision.  I teach loads of people myself and have looked at several thousand golf swings but we can all benefit from another person’s eyes on us.  It’s just sometimes tricky finding the right person but when you do, be sure to hang on to them for as long as you can.

It was my first visit to lovely Long Ashton, a club forever connected in my mind to Kitrina Douglas who hailed from there as an amateur.  We were friends and competitors back in the day and Kitrina is one of those rare beings in life who strives to fulfill her potential in everything she does. She scaled the heights of amateur and professional golf in the 1980s and 1990s, winning several top tournaments and representing Europe in the first winning Solheim Cup team, at Dalmahoy.  With that achievement behind her she set her mind to more academic pursuits, completing her PhD in Psychology at the University of Bristol, specialising in exploring mental wellbeing and motivation among professional athletes. She has now written several books, is a sought-after lecturer and mentors athletes from all sorts of disciplines.  In reality, it seems to me she’s had about three pinnacle-busting careers.  In fact, just rereading that last paragraph makes me feel like a lie down.

A warm welcome was waiting for Lawrence and me the following day at Burnham and Berrow (pic at top of blog) where I last hit a ball in anger in the amateur Home Internationals many decades ago.  What a great track it is too!  Influences of Herbert Fowler and Harry Colt abound with subtle green complexes and clever bunkering – both sure to prove a challenge to the four teams contesting the Senior Women’s Home Internationals there later in the year.  Throw into the mix that a calm day is rarer than hen’s teeth and it’s no wonder so many skilled players emanate from these parts.

There were three young lads playing ahead of us – good-ish players by the look of them, but, my word, one of them was so slow we were almost losing the will to live.  Every single putt on every green was given the Aimpoint treatment (if you don’t know what that is –  don’t ask, it would take too long to explain, even if I did fully understand it).  And then, of course, after all the to-ing and fro-ing he’d miss the putt anyway.  I’m sure Kitrina could point him in the direction of several sporting studies that show the likelihood of success at a given motor skill decreases in direct proportion to the amount of time you exceed your optimum timing.  Like many others I think he’d be astonished at how short his optimum timings turned out to be.  Golf is a mix of feel and thinking – his modus operandi was all thinking and it was tough to play behind.  As the incomparable commentator Henry Longhurst used to say of slow players on the green, “You’ll either hole it or miss it.  Away and do one of them quickly.”

But even that annoyance was nowhere near enough to spoil a great day out on a superb links in great company.  It gave us time to smell the roses, which we did, and to appreciate these are very precious, special days.  It was all rounded off nicely back at the house with a glass of Rioja, watching the Players’ Championship on the box in the company of Jonny, the resident Dandie Dinmont.  What more could anyone ask for?