Do you ever have times when you can’t believe how lucky you are?  It doesn’t mean you don’t have bad times or sad times but I often have moments of standing back, in amazement, wondering how on earth I got to be wherever it was, with whomever.

Earlier this week was one of those times.  Maureen and I had been to a rare  occasion this season, my tottering Totspurs winning at home – by a single goal, so not conceding, keeping a clean sheet and sending us supporters home happy.  We were shaken, stirred and exhausted but not disappointed:  three points and zooming up the table, away from the relegation strugglers.

Long may it last but who knows?  We’re away at Ipswich this Saturday and they really are in a relegation battle, so need to win at least as badly as we do – and they beat us at our place…”It’s not very relaxing, is it?”  Mo said, “This watching Spurs.”  Linda, who sits next to me, laughed and said, “We don’t come here to relax!”

This latest journey to Spurs was another first, not least because our ultimate destination was Thorpeness for a golfing reunion par excellence.  First off, we drove to Chelmsford, where we booked in to the City Centre Premier Inn (£15 extra for early check-in), then crossed the road to board the Spurs coach.  “I think it’ll take about 40 minutes,” I said to Mo.  Not quite right.  Two hours later we pulled in to the coach park about ten minutes’ walk from the ground.  Never underestimate the delaying power of London traffic.

En route to Suffolk, we took a short detour to have a coffee and chat with Judy Williams, whose late husband Michael was the golf correspondent of The Daily Telegraph for many years.   There’s not much Judy doesn’t know about golf – or Ipswich Town FC; the family are lifelong supporters, so we’re not on the same side this weekend.  I’d rooted out some photos of long-ago AGW (Association of Golf Writers) get togethers at Penina in Portugal, with Henry Cotton and his formidable wife Toots presiding.  The snaps are mostly dark and grainy but they’re lovely reminders of the laughs we had.

We made it to the A12 without alarms and Mo navigated us expertly to Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast, just north of Aldeburgh, where we were reunited with some of the founders and early members of the LET, the second such reunion arranged by the redoubtable Chris Langford, director of golf at Thorpeness and organiser supreme.  There were lots of tall tales told, an inordinate amount of laughter and some very good golf swings on show.  Maureen and I cheered the golfers off on a bright, chilly morning, then wrapped up warm and trekked in to Aldeburgh for coffee and cake, cheeks stinging from the North Sea breezes.

 

I’ll have to bring my clubs next time because it’s a shame to come all this way and not play a course described by Peter Alliss as “a hidden gem in the Suffolk countryside”.  This year I hadn’t time for golf because I was on the hunt for blue mascara.  The reason was that Jane Chapman, now Denman, was on the guest list and the first time we met, many years ago (more than fifty!!), at an Aer Lingus event in Killarney, she was wearing blue mascara. I, a few months older but light years behind in every other respect, thought it the height of sophistication.  Sadly, it never worked on my darker lashes; perhaps it’s true that blondes have more fun….

Anyway, as it turned out there was a blue mascara in the pharmacy in Aldeburgh but it was too dark, more of a navy and it wasn’t until I got back to Lichfield that I found something that would do the job.  Hope it’ll keep until next year!

Talking of colour, the Ireland rugby team will be wearing white shirts not green against Wales in Cardiff this weekend.  It’s to make it easier for fans who are colour blind – officially known as CVD (colour vision deficiency ) – to tell the difference between the two sides.  People with the condition find red and green particularly difficult to tell apart, hence the change.  This may be tempting fate but fingers crossed that looking at the players scoring the tries will help distinguish the Irish from the Welsh…

I suppose that’s the sort of cockiness that leads to defeat but I’m hoping that the players will be too good, too professional and too organised to think that they just have to turn up to win.  Wales may not be at their best at the moment but favourites, however overwhelming, don’t always win.  Isn’t that why we love sport?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A frequent topic of conversation in our family, and one which has whiled away many an interesting hour, is which generation has lived through the most change in their lifetime?

I have tended to think my mother’s generation (top, born in 1920) could claim that title.  At the time of her birth there was very little in the way of vehicular transport with horses and carts still vying for position on the increasingly busy streets of towns and cities.  A few decades later she had witnessed man land on the moon and Concorde cross the Atlantic in around three hours.  She even owned a mobile phone, could text, skype and send an email through the TV console.  The internet had gained traction and was a marvel although tending to baffle her somewhat.

Her golfing life moved from wooden shafted clubs to metal-headed woods and drivers;  from hitting a collection of (oldish) balls on a practice ground under the watchful eye of the club professional to a video lesson indoors on a computerised screen with slow-motion action replay.

Her ninety-year span covered a myriad of inventions and changes to her lifestyle showing just how adaptable the human being is but since Mum’s death fifteen years ago the world has evolved even more and become almost unrecognisable.  You can now book a restaurant from your wristwatch, pay the bill with it too, if you’re so inclined, and track every step you take through every minute of every day.  You can chat and interact with your family on the other side of the world and even “share” a meal with them across the miles.

I wonder what she’d make of golf now which is striving to embrace so many differing formats.  I doubt she’d have time for the LIV golf tour – too showy, loud, greedy and classless for her tastes but I do think she’d have quite enjoyed Tiger and Rory’s TGL efforts, indoors, under lights and in a two-hour evening time slot.  The first she’d have dismissed as not being “proper” golf;  the second doesn’t pretend to be that and is a winter evening’s entertainment (although it’s not to my taste).

I wonder if – no, I’m sure she’d have been uncomfortable with the steady encroachment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into all walks of life.

Next month sees the publication of Ely Callaway’s (founder of Callaway Golf) autobiography “The Unconquerable Game”.  Ely’s son, Nicholas, has been the driving force behind this twenty plus year endeavour since Ely’s death in 2001.  He used Ely’s extensive notes, documents and recordings of the discussions the man himself had had with his four biographers to put together the book, but it is the audio version that is a publishing first in that it has a posthumous narrator.

Nicholas provided original voice recordings from his Dad and the alchemy of AI, plus two voice actors and many hours of work have now produced the senior Callaway’s voice, nuance and inflexion to a tee.  So, in the audio version of the book it is Ely who is recounting his story.  Spooky or what?

Just about the same time I was reading about Ely I came across some news from the world of motor racing.  (Who says I don’t have eclectic tastes?!)  Scott Mansell, a British former racing driver, and no relation whatsoever to Nigel, had a coaching session in a racing car.  So, what’s the big deal?  Well, his coach was AI, our new friend, aka Artificial Intelligence.  Scott described the experience as “scarily good” and proceeded to go into all sorts of technical reasons that resulted in improved lap times, first in a simulator and then on a proper track, with the driver’s performance being monitored in real time by AI.

The sentence that really piqued my interest was,  “This will change the future of learning skills.”  Scott goes on to suggest that in five to ten years time we’ll all be able to access world-class coaching (and he specifically mentioned golf tuition) at less than 1% of the current cost with a coach who never gets tired, who is always assessing our technique and who is available 24/7.

Will there be any job left on the planet that requires a human being, I wonder.  Are we potentially a mere decade away from golf coaches not being able to make a living, having being ousted by AI which will have hundreds of thousands of hours of swing patterns and solutions at the touch of a button.

Will AI learn to read their pupils as well as a human coach?  Will AI understand human nuances, motives, strengths, weaknesses, ability to manage pressure and all the subtleties that go into making a human tick?  Perhaps a human coach will be squeezed out of technical coaching completely and only be called in to deal with this “extra stuff”.  It’s scary but it does appear to be the way we are heading.

In my almost thirty years of coaching I worked with professionals and amateur international squads but at least 75% of my time was spent with the club golfer who was keen to improve and enjoy the game to its max.  I never lost sight of the fact that these folk were spending their hard-earned cash with me and it was important to me that their improvement went hand in hand with having great fun as they were learning.  Surely that only comes with human interaction?

Only time will tell, but perhaps (if I’m spared a little longer) I will switch to my own generation as the one that has witnessed the most change.  I’m interested to know if you faithful blog readers would be itching to have an AI lesson – please let me know.

One thing’s for certain – boy, am I glad I’m retired.

It’s hard to believe that the force of nature that is Liz Kahn, a pioneering suffragette if ever there was one, will be 90 on Monday.  Happy birthday Mrs K, have a great day and thank you for all those battles you fought and won on our behalf.  We youngsters owe you more than we can ever repay.  However hard we have had to fight our corner and justify our existence, we have you to thank for slashing a route through the jungle and making our working lives in golf much easier.

The indomitable Liz (her late husband David always called her Elizabeth – in my hearing anyway) was one of the first woman golf writers to concentrate mainly on the men’s professional game but she also aided and abetted Vivien Saunders, a fellow femme formidable and others in the setting up of the women’s professional tour on this side of the Atlantic.  The WPGA (Women’s Professional Golf Association), founded in 1979, is now the LET (Ladies European Tour), thriving beyond most expectations.

If you’d like to know more about all this, take a look at the LET website (ladieseuropeantour.com) or YouTube and have a look at the interviews with Liz and some of the founders and early members.  Find “Celebrating The Founders” and enjoy; there’s a lot of fantastic stuff in there.

In her interview, Liz recalls the days when you could wander up to a player, any player and ask for a chat/interview, what is now called a one-to-0ne and is held up as some sort of holy grail, a pearl beyond price.  Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson, Tony Jacklin, properly big names, some of the greats of the game, were more often than not happy to chat to golf writers, most of whom they knew pretty well.  Liz once asked Watson for an interview and was pleasantly surprised when he sought her out instead of waiting for the appointed time.  Happy days.

All that reminiscing reminded me of the time that I was at The Tradition in Arizona on the occasion of Nicklaus’s senior debut and Dai had primed Jack, a sucker for a practical joke, to wind me up.  The press conference, which included Trevino, who’d been cleaning up on the tour, was packed and when Jack singled me out – I think I was the lone woman – everybody thought he’d lost the plot.

By some miracle I’d won the Barbados Ladies’ Open Championship a few months before and was called out on that.  One of the seniors, I can’t remember which one, had questioned that Trevino was dominating the tour because he was only winning by one or two, so Lee said,  “I didn’t realise you had to win by more than one.  You don’t get paid any more.”   Then he asked me,  “How many did you win by?”

“I won by ten.”

Collapse of all parties.  “There,” Lee said, above the laughter.  “That’s dominating right there.”

I have the tape of the exchange, given to me by the Westers, who did the radio stuff.  It’s entitled “Trish, Jack and Lee at the Tradition 3/28/90” (bear in mind they were Americans) and just looking at it cracks me up.  What’s more, I now have something to play it on, having bought an old-fashioned tape machine from Richer Sounds in their recent sale.

The snapper apparently gave Dai a copy of this photograph on condition that he never published it because it was a bit risqué, all those years ago.  I came across it (and the tape) during my never-ending sorting and thought they worked well together and enough years had passed for the pic to be less than embarrassing.  We should be able to work out the year because of who’s in the picture and because Trevino didn’t win his singles – and had promised his team he’d do something to them all if he didn’t….Who said American Ryder Cup teams never bonded.?!!

I managed 13 holes on the golf course on Tuesday without too many ill effects but was glad to take my wonky left knee to the osteopath yesterday for a bit of a going over.  It is behaving much better and I was quite perky after my treatment and promised to be more diligent with the exercises prescribed by the sainted K, who keeps a lot of the golf club in working order.  She can’t do it all on her own.  It’s up to me to do my bit.

On my way home the traffic ground to a halt unexpectedly.  Blimey, not another set of temporary traffic lights; there are so many in Lichfield and environs at the moment that getting anywhere requires precise planning – or very early starts!  If it’s not HS2, it’s gas works or putting in pedestrian crossings so that punters can reach the Bowling Green (a big pub in the middle of an even bigger roundabout) without risking life and limb – and that’s before having a drink.  Friends once walked there but had to get a taxi home because they didn’t dare attempt to cross the road.  True story.  No exaggeration.

Where was I?  Oh yes, in a queue, police car on hand, for no apparent reason.  What was going on?  Then I had to laugh – and take a snap (I wasn’t moving).  A lone sheep had stopped play.  See if you can spot it.

I really must start this week’s missive with a big thank you to all of you who sent in such lovely comments about last week’s blog when I irrevocably drew the line under my playing days.  So many of you corresponded privately with me as well, detailing your own personal stories and I thank you for that.  I don’t take it lightly and feel privileged you shared them with me.

However, onwards we go and this week I’m tapping away on the keyboard out in Tenerife where hubby and I have two weeks to enjoy the sun, sea, lava and hiking.  And no, the borrowed collapsible Nordic walking poles didn’t quite make it – this learner couldn’t collapse them sufficiently to fit into the suitcase, so they are holidaying peacefully at home.

It’s been a good week for the Irish, hasn’t it?  It’s always satisfying to start off with a victory in the Six Nations rugby although it took a worryingly long time for the boys in green to stamp their authority on an aggressive English side that for the first time in history was featuring twins, Tom and Ben Curry.  This was of particular interest to me as they are the sons of the headmaster of the secondary school in Malpas, three miles from where we live, and I couldn’t help but want the boys to do well – just not TOO well.

My wish was granted and I was pleased also to have a happy husband as Scotland came out on the right side against Italy, who are no mugs and absolutely not to be taken for granted.

Who knows what this weekend will bring?  Scotland versus Ireland at Murrayfield will be tense for this household and assuredly we won’t both be rejoicing come the final whistle.

The pictures from Pebble Beach are always spectacular and it was a feast of watching for me as Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry finished first and second respectively in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.  Both had had holes-in-one on the Thursday, Rory at Spyglass and Shane at Pebble’s scenic 7th hole, and they contested down the stretch on Sunday till Rory’s eagle at the 14th pretty much sealed the deal for him.

A closing 66 gave the Co Down man a two-shot cushion over Lowry whose stout effort of a 68 secured him second place on his own.  He admitted to being proud of his resilience out there when he hadn’t his best golf for a stretch and he was determined not to hand the title to close friend Rory, but to make him work for it.

He also summed things up succinctly:  “When players like Rory McIlroy turn up with their ‘A’ game, they’re pretty much impossible to beat.  I thought he was great out there.”

So, that now leaves all Rory fans agonisingly analysing his every move in the (interminable) lead up to Augusta.  Has he won too early in the season?  Will he go off the boil?  We certainly can’t have him peaking too early.  How many tournaments will he schedule in over the next eight to ten weeks?

For the uninitiated  (or let’s be totally honest here, the more sensible among us who do not stress over these things) these frantic musings are because if Rory, no WHEN Rory, wins The Masters at Augusta he will become only the sixth player in the history of the game to have scooped all four major titles.  For a wee girl from Norn Ireland like me to see a wee boy from Norn Iron like him achieve that would be beyond huge.  I might even die happy.

Rory has been stuck on only needing The Masters title to win the Career Grand Slam since 2014 so the last decade’s lead in to Augusta has been a fraught time for his fans, if not for him.  He has tried every kind of preparation – from resting the week before to playing the week before;  from arriving at the venue early to doing his preparation weeks before and coming in late.  You name it, he’s tried it and so far nothing has resulted in him slipping on the coveted green jacket.

And why am I talking about this in early February, for goodness sake?  I suppose because I became irrevocably invested in him back in 2007 at Royal County Down when as a 17-year old he coughed up a big lead in one of his Walker Cup foursomes matches.  He struggled through the interview and then, with the cameras off, fell into my arms in tears.  And for the last 11 years this lad has stood at the precipice of true greatness in the game.

Just take that final step Rory……

Leona Maguire, Ireland’s trailblazing female touring professional has also had a nice little start to herself  in this 2025 season.  A ninth place finish in the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions in Orlando will provide a solid confidence boost after an iffy year, by her standards, last year.  She closed out her second round with five consecutive birdies and I listened to her post-round interview.

Boy, did she take me by surprise!  It was funny, informative, relaxed, confident, unguarded – a million miles from the shy, slightly suspicious individual of only a couple of seasons back.  She is, after all, now 30 years of age and has been a wonderful ambassador for the women’s game in Ireland.

Alongside Stephanie Meadow she has inspired a new flood of Irish players joining various tours in 2025.  Annabel Wilson, Sara Byrne and Anna Foster have already taken the leap and will be followed later in the year by Beth Coulter and Aine Donegan. With Olivia Mehaffey and Lauren Walsh already on tour the Emerald Isle is better represented than ever before.

And to think I was the first Irish player ever to join the ladies’ European Tour……..

I can hardly believe it.