The sister and I are in Open mode, quite a few miles from Troon but glued to the action nonetheless and trying not to be completely glued to the couch. Flicking through the Open app (I think), there was something about trying to get to 8862 steps a day for the duration of the championship. No idea how they came up with that number or how it was to be measured and since it was already well into the first day I decided not to pursue it further.
Anyway, once you start measuring or weighing or counting it’s all too easy to become obsessed and I like to leave that sort of thing to the real athletes. How any of them remain remotely sane (whatever that is) is a bit of a miracle.
Open days are long and tiring for everybody involved be it players, caddies, caterers, broadcasters, greenkeepers, spectators, officials, marshals, car park attendants, journalists, teaching pros, security bods, first-tee announcers, litter pickers, whoever. And, of course, it’s 99.9 per cent certain that somebody in the last or last-but-one group will be threatening the leaderboard and keeping the press glued to their seats for fear of missing a late, usually entirely unexpected leader.
Yesterday Dan Brown, a largely unheralded (just as tradition requires) Englishman was fulfilling that role. However, being far from the action and retired from proper deadlines, Mo went to bed and Brian and I watched the Tour de France highlights. Having watched Shane, one of my picks, birdie the last, I was content to leave Dan (a highly successful novelist in his spare time, surely?) to his own late-evening devices.
Who knows who’ll be holding up the Claret Jug at the end but enough of my men in the draw with Maureen and Brian started well, though not all: Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland, Cam Smith, Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Fitzpatrick and Shane Lowry. A good start overall but a good start is just that: a good start. Smith’s 80, nine over par, was the real surprise.
Spending hours engrossed in the Open is all very well but last Sunday I stayed up until the early hours watching Harry Hall, an Englishman from Cornwall, win the Isco Championship at Keen Trace Golf Club in Kentucky. It was his first win on the US PGA Tour and it took him a while – there was a five-man play-off – before he chipped in for a birdie two at the third extra hole for the most spectacular of victories.
Harry Hall, in the gloom, celebrating his win. [pgatour.com]
Hall went to college at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and he wears a white cap, apparently in tribute to Jim Barnes, a fellow Cornishman, who moved to the United States and won the PGA Championship in 1916 and 1919, the US Open in 1921 and the Open in 1925 (at Prestwick). Not a bad role model. Barnes, like Hall, was 6 foot 4, still tall for a golfer but not as unusual now as it was back in the day.
Prior to the golf it had been mostly tennis, with Wimbledon taking centre stage. There were some stunning matches and I was engrossed, marvelling at the skills of people I’d never heard of. Having gone hoarse roaring as Ireland beat the Boks in Durban with a drop goal in the last seconds, to win by 25-24 (Ciaran Frawley was the man who kicked the points), I switched sports for the umpteenth time.
Before I knew it it was after 10 o’clock at night and it was 4-all in the second set and 30-all, with four women I didn’t know slugging it out on the centre court, in front of a very respectable crowd. The tennis was ridiculously good and I was screeching like a banshee; what on earth is going on? I have nothing to do with these people! But they were out there, playing their hearts out and I couldn’t help but get involved.
There’s no way I could sit decorously in a box if somebody of mine was out there playing; I’d have to be outside, pacing, pacing, pacing, with anxious glances at the score. How Tim Henman’s parents spent years sitting impassively as their boy slogged away, playing his best and just not quite winning the big one…It was a mystery and an exercise in self-control above and beyond.
You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned the football – Viva España, hard luck England – not least because I have friends who love sport but have no interest whatsoever in the game and were creative enough to avoid every single kick. Amazing. Not surprisingly they’re baffled by my devotion to Spurs and think I’m cracked. They’re probably right.
I’m not sure this picture will work size wise but my mate who lives in Florida and is a real eco warrior, taking people on kayaking nature trips and educating us all, posted this picture on Facebook. It cracked me up because I love the fact that it was a “shoreline restoration project…in which we tore out a parking lot and restored it with native plants all the way down to the water…” The land of the car losing a parking lot to plants, imagine!
A bit of a moonscape at the moment but the plants will spread soon enough. And what a sunset. [Lisa Mickey]
And so did this, from the inimitable Dave Allen: If you want to examine what some people term ‘Irish illogicality’, perhaps the best place in the world to go to is the courts. I watched a man, charged with some menial offence and the judge said to him: “How do you plead – ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty’?”
And the man said: “Would you mind awfully if I listened to the evidence?”
Simply the best.
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