Fifty Not Out

Glory be!

This week we are celebrating the fiftieth playing of the Women’s British Open and the world’s best have gathered at glorious Royal Lytham & St Annes to battle it out for the final major title of the year.  I know there are some special celebrations planned and Jenny Lucas, formerly Lee Smith, the inaugural winner of the championship, will be in attendance.  She won as an amateur at Fulford back in 1976, in sun-baked, fast-running conditions which were a sore trial to most of us on those tree-lined fairways.

Yes indeed – I was there.  Actually, my memory is pretty good about golf dates and so on, but until I looked up the records on the aigwomensopen website I didn’t recall that I’d played in this inaugural championship.  I had remembered the tournament as being the British Amateur Strokeplay championship, which, alas, is now defunct.

Looking back it is understandable that my brains were a little scrambled as to the exact tournament I was teeing it up in.  It was a life-changing week for me as Canadian player, Pam Johns, recruited both me and my Welsh pal Lisa Isherwood for Lamar University in Texas.   The upshot was that in January 1977 we became the first women from GB&I (in fact, from Europe, I think) to sally forth to America on a golf scholarship.  It subsequently opened the floodgates across the Atlantic and I must admit to feeling a wee bit of pride in being the first to take those big steps.

I don’t, however, have a great deal of pride in recalling any of my performances in the Women’s Open.  I’m not sure that I made many weekends in the fifteen or so times I teed it up but boy, did we have fun.  There was that long stretch of years – seven in a row I believe – when we were hosted by Woburn and there were such enormous crowds streaming in to the venue that the traffic jams reached all the way back to the M1.  Heady stuff indeed.

Each year the pro-am dinner was held in the sumptuous surroundings of the Long Room at Woburn Abbey and we were all dressed to the nines.  There was one unforgettable moment when a visiting American pro didn’t want to sit with her pro-am team at the dinner and the tournament controller felt it necessary to step in.

When she was asked why she was averse to sitting with them, she declared in a voice that rang out down the room,  “I’ve spent more than five f…..g hours with them on the golf course and that’s more than enough for anyone!”

I looked across at her team of amateurs, at least two of whom were golf journos and who were sitting at my table.  They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said to the rest of us.  “Well, she has a point!”  They then poured another glass of wine each and proceeded to have a great evening with not a bit of offense taken.  It was hilarious because she voiced exactly what so many of us felt on occasions.

I was there when Laura Davies, Ali Nicholas, Corinne Dibnah, Karrie Webb, Helen Alfredsson and Lotta Neumann all won.  Aside from the two Aussies, Webb and Dibnah, the others went on to become stalwarts of many, many European Solheim Cup teams.  One victory I’d love to have witnessed in person was that of another Aussie, Karen Lunn, who had a runaway victory in 1993.  She was supreme.  I watched that one on telly having had had back surgery a few weeks earlier.

I’ll be watching this one on telly too – the old back is misbehaving yet again which makes the travel a tad tricky.  There is so much that is different about the championship now yet somehow there is so much the same.  The prize money is huge, of course, compared to our day and the players are serious athletes whereas we were just beginning to embrace the gym, thanks mostly to the arrival of one Mr Woods.  There are more international players in the field now and the players have their own support teams of physios, mental skills and performance coaches as well as putting, short game and long game coaches.  It’s quite a caravan.

When it comes down to it, however, it’s all still about getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of shots.  There are more players capable of winning now – the strength in depth is unreal, but I’d back any of the winners I’ve mentioned from my time to more than hold their own – and I haven’t even mentioned Annika Sorenstam, perhaps the greatest of them all.  These players had more shots, were multi-dimensional in their creativity and were able to adapt their strategies to changing conditions.  Those were the questions asked of us in the course set-ups we faced.

Nowadays, the questions asked of the players have determined how they’ve evolved.  Power, strength and the ability to hit the ball a long way are hugely rewarded and often it’s better to be miles down and in the rough rather than further back and on the fairway.  Wedges with 60 degrees of loft or more are common so the equipment is more helpful in manufacturing and finessing shots.  We used to do that with 52 degrees of loft.

It’ll be interesting to see how Lytham is set up.  What is this week’s examination paper going to demand of the contestants?  We’ve had a similar sizzler of a summer to 1976 and that first championship but there’ll be no trees to trouble the players.  (Dad would be delighted – he was brought up in the west of Ireland at Rosses Point and felt there was no place for trees on any golf course!)  The key will surely be the bunkers and the avoidance thereof, so strategy is going to play a huge part, potentially nullifying the bomb and gouge game.

It’ll be fascinating, it’ll be exciting and it’ll be life-changing for someone.  The last two Opens at Lytham have resulted in home winners in Catriona Matthew and Georgia Hall – a hat trick would be nice.

Play away please.