What has Lydia Ko, who celebrated her 20th birthday on Monday, had nine of and yet Phil Mickelson, who is 46 has only had one and Tiger Woods, aged 41, has totalled three?

The answer is – caddies!

Amazingly, the super-talented and well-grounded Kiwi, who also happens to be world No 1, keeps firing her bagmen.  It certainly isn’t down to hotheadedness or impulsiveness, given that Lydia has displayed an amazing degree of emotional maturity from long before she won her first professional event at the tender age of 15.  She is not alone on the women’s tours of the world.  The employment security for caddies is not high – it is much safer, and more lucrative, on the men’s tours.  Of course, there have been some long-term female player/caddy associations – think Annika Sorenstam and Terry MacNamara;  think Karrie Webb and Mike Paterson – and there have been plenty of short explosive ones on the men’s tours.  There is no doubt, however, that the caddy roundabout spins a little faster on the women’s tours and the first list picked up on a weekly basis by the media is the caddy list to see who is working for whom.

Many of the successful caddies who were on the Ladies’ European Tour when I was a player are now extremely successful on the PGA Tour.  Mark Fulcher, who steered Alison Nicholas to her British Open title at St Mellion in 1987  and her US Women’s Open title ten years later, has been at Justin Rose’s side since The Players Championship in 2008.  He and Rose have currently annexed a US Open title, a gold medal and half a sleeve of a green jacket the other week.  Craig Connelly, aka Wee Mon, worked for former world No 1 Martin Kaymer, did a spell with Paul Casey and is now back with his German employer.

So why are there so many hirings and firings by the female bosses?  Caddies have the unenviable task nowadays of having to have at least a dozen strings to their bows and be all things to all people.  Of course, they must take care of the equipment and have basic addition and subtraction skills; be physically fit enough to lug a huge tour bag around five or six miles cross-country; be a psychologist; a cheerleader; the calm voice of reason; read the game (and their player) well; have a coach’s eye; and know when to be supportive and when to stand their ground.  There is no room for indecisiveness.  Oh, and a crystal ball doesn’t go amiss either!

A number of good female caddies are out on tour but the concensus of opinion amongst the caddies themselves is that it’s mostly down to the prevailing male/female dynamic that exists in any workplace.  If two blokes have a bit of a barney at work they can still go and have a pint together at the end of the day.  Two women who fall out at work would no more go for a drink with each other than fly to the moon.  Male colleagues may not particularly like each other, yet work well together.  Females don’t operate the same way – at least they don’t operate at their best.  Mostly it’s important they LIKE their work colleague or, in this case, caddy.

And when Lydia’s agent, Michael Yim, was asked what prompted the latest firing (at the time of writing), of Gary Matthews, he was quick to emphasise that Matthews’ work wasn’t faulted at all.  “He’s more of a quiet person, so I think that’s where she wanted more of a friend, someone she could talk to.”  Yim added, “It was just a personality difference.”

So, it appears that it’s very important for the women to like and feel comfortable with their caddies.  There is an indefinable extra layer of compatibility required alongside the purely strong working  business relationship that can suffice in isolation on the men’s tour.

News has come through that Ko has appointed Peter Godfrey as her new looper. Godfrey has just been named Caddy of the Year by his peers, principally for his outstanding results working with South Korea’s Ha Na Jang last year and for bringing home Ariya Jutanugarn at Woburn in the Ricoh Women’s British Open for her first major.

Good luck to them both as they embark on this new chapter together and, well, if Lydia, winner of two majors already and current world No 1, finally finds the perfect on-course partner – just look out everyone else!

A blog is a bit of a diary I suppose, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel guilty about going all me, me, me again, look where I’ve been playing this time.

 

It’s not as though there’s not lots going on:  Rory getting married – congrats to him and Erica; Padraig making up with Sergio; Justin teaming up with Henrik in the vaguely innovative Zurich Classic (foursomes and fourballs not just individual 72-hole strokeplay, hallelujah); Florentyna Parker beating Anna Nordqvist and Carlota Ciganda in a play-off in Spain; Rickie Fowler apparently on the verge of abandoning most-eligible-bachelorhood; Lexi in tears after the R&A and USGA amended the decisions on video evidence (though whether it would have saved her or not at the ANA is the subject of much discussion); Marta Figueras-Dotti addressing the great and the good of golf  in St Andrews; a Rosses Point man winning the West of Ireland for the first time in 67 years – congrats to Barry Anderson; the men of Whittington Heath winning the annual match against the women (sorry, ladies!) again…..Well done boys, well played gentlemen….

In that particular encounter, my partner and I, playing off 16 and 13 respectively, were beaten 4 and 3 by a late substitute, who’d already played 18 holes, playing off 16 and my dancing partner, a leftie playing off 17.  It was classic matchplay and an object lesson in the importance of bearing down from the off.  We let them off the hook at the 1st by three-putting but were two up after 3, then lost the 4th when they holed from 18 feet up the slope for a par 3 and we three-putted.  Three over par after 3, four over after 5, they were six over par gross when the match ended on the 15th, where we’d needed a birdie 2 to have any chance of keeping the match alive.  Hmmm.

All suggestions for tackling the knotty problem of handicapping in mixed matches gratefully received!  Also, are men just naturally more competitive than women?….Nah, I don’t think so, really.  Putting lesson please.

Anyway, having reluctantly accepted that you can try hard and be stubborn and uncompromising but still lose even when the skill levels are much of a muchness, I have to concede that I am not the stuff that British and Irish Lions are made of.  Too dozy, too flaky, too bad at maths always to count the score properly.  Not sure I can even claim it’s hormonal at my age; think the hormones have buggered off or gone to sleep or on strike or whatever it is they do.

I perked up the next day though, because I played at Hillside for the first time and it was just as wonderful as I’d been told.  It was a gloriously bright day, a tad chilly but with very little breeze and looking down the 1st fairway, it was just begging you to play golf.  Even non-golfers could see the attraction!

As members of the AGW (Association of Golf Writers) we had been granted courtesy of the course to play our President’s Putter comp but I bought a ball-retriever gizmo for £22 so that I could have my £4 retro two-wheeled trolley (three wheels are de rigueur these days surely?) for nothing.  Not every member of the AGW has a head for figures, which is why we usually play Stableford because our scores often don’t amount to much.  If we stuck to strokeplay, even a computer might crash and all too few rounds would be played to a finish.

There’s a railway running alongside the course, as railways should, with S & A (Southport and Ainsdale GC) on the other side of the track, to the left as you’re playing the 1st.  To the right, with the stands for the Open already going up, is Royal Birkdale, so you’d be hard pushed to find a better stretch of golfing territory anywhere.  Formby and Formby Ladies are a short hop away, so there’s proper golf everywhere you turn.

Mo’s bunker tip from last week came in very handy at Hillside, where I was in the sand so often that the old Lawrence of Arabia jokes started to pall a lot.  The only time I failed to get out first time was at the last, where I panicked and didn’t follow the instructions.  Still, I was pleased enough with my haul of 30 points, not least because it meant that I joined several others in second place, one behind the winner Dick Turner.  The PP is not the prettiest of trophies and one former winner, retrieving it from his garage where it had languished, unloved, for a year, was told by his wife, in no uncertain terms:  “NEVER BRING THAT THING BACK HERE AGAIN.”

He hasn’t.