Golf At Its Best

It’s hard to imagine just how many airports I’ve been through in my lifetime, jetting here, there and (not quite) everywhere without a thought to the carbon footprint or the toll on the body. Nowadays, if you said to me, “You’ll never see another terminal building, anywhere, ever again,” I think I’d be delighted and relieved and then gutted – but only briefly.

Gutted simply because there are a lot of places I haven’t been to and a lot of them are hard to get to without flying but airports these days are much more hard-edged, unforgiving places than they were when I was flying every week.

However, some things are irresistible and the Walker Cup at Lahinch in the west of Ireland, followed immediately by the Solheim Cup at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands fell full square into that category. Consecutive weekends of team match play against the mighty USA, what could be better? Golf at its most compelling. Events worth flying for.

I still don’t know quite how GB&I overhauled the Americans at Lahinch to pull off the unlikeliest of comebacks.  Europe’s Junior Solheimers, also well adrift going in to the final singles, gave their US opponents, seemingly home and hosed, the heebie-jeebies, before falling short and losing 13-11 in Holland. That’s the way it usually works – if you’ve given the opposition too big a lead going in to the final day, you rarely claw it back because everything, absolutely everything has to go your way. There is no margin for error.

I’d love Anna Nordqvist’s Europeans to give Angela Stanford’s Americans a pasting over the next three days – we’re always the underdogs and I, never the favourite whatever the game, am a great fan of the underdogs.  But, Donald notwithstanding, I still like the Americans and count many of them as my friends and this year, this week in particular, it’s hard to pull against them. In fact, it’s hard to think that the result of a golf match matters a toss.

Why?

Well, today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The attack on the Twin Towers.

Both Maureen and Dai were in America that day, Mo at Fox Chapel in Pennsylvania doing a recce for the Curtis Cup the following year and Dai in St Louis for a WGC (World Golf Championship) event – remember those? – that never took place. They were safe but they never forgot that day – and neither have I, desperately trying to establish that Mo and her mate Benetton weren’t sight-seeing in New York at the wrong time.

It wasn’t just an American tragedy – I always think of Cantor Fitzgerald, who lost hundreds of people that day. They sponsored a women’s tournament at Brocket Hall one year, hosted by Laura Davies, if memory serves me right. It was never going to last – the boss, presumably persuaded by the firm’s highest-ranking golf nut, knew nothing about the game; his heart wasn’t in it; think he was a theatre buff.

And he was right: there are much more important things than golf.

Finally, from the beyond serious to the utterly ridiculous but intensely irritating and a bit of a self-indulgent rant about my least favourite recorded message: “Your call is very important to us….”

Well, isn’t that good to know. Just imagine if they didn’t give a toss.

I started trying to contact the Spurs ticket office (by phone; wonder of wonders there is a number) before going to Lahinch for the Walker Cup. No luck. Then I tried giving it another go this week and after several days I’m still in the queue being told how important my call is to….whom? The ether presumably.

On Wednesday, just before heading off for the minibus to Stansted (not an airport to revive a love of air travel) and the Solheim Cup, I made one last concerted effort to get through. The phone was on speaker so I paid bills, washed dishes, finished packing, cleaned the loos, put the bin out, then after the guts of an hour in some sort of never-ending queue, I had a bright idea: I’ll try another tack.

So I rang off and tried again, selecting a different option from the list in the hope of persuading someone somewhere that I was going to be spending a lot of money….I think I selected Experiences – stadium tours, formula 1, something like that. Anyway, I was pottering by the kettle when something strange happened; I heard a noise; or was it just the audible equivalent of a mirage?

No, it turns out I’d connected to a Sue, who was, miracle of miracles, a real person. Trouble was, of course, that when Sue realised what I wanted, she wanted to get rid of me, to transfer me to the correct department.

“ Just a minute, Sue,” sez I. “I’ve been trying to get through for weeks (felt more like months as my life ebbed away), will you be passing me to a person or back to a queue?”

“The queue,” sez Sue.

(“Och no,” thought I.)

“Sue, are you in the same building as the season ticket people?”

“Yes but I’m not allowed/able/whatever to pass you over.”

And with that Sue had had enough and without another word returned me to my never-ending listening brief…

I’m just so glad my call is important – no, VERY important – to the oh-so-invisible ticketing team at Tottenham Hotspur Football club. There’s only one word for it….

BOLLOCKS.

COYS.