Reaching The Heights

Many, many years ago, probably decades, when the Dinah Shore was still at Mission Hills and a very big deal indeed, an American journalist did that oh-so-dangerous thing:  she made an assumption.  She took it for granted that a Scottish friend and I were professional golfers manquées, that we’d have given our eye teeth to be out there playing against Laura Davies and co instead of writing about them.

My mate was a much better golfer than I ever was but we looked at each other in horror, said, as one, “Absolutely not,”  and burst out laughing.  Our American was nonplussed, unable to understand that we had never harboured dreams of playing golf for a living; in fact, could think of few things worse.

Diversion alert:  every time I use a semi-colon – or a colon come to that – I think of the incomparable Lynne Truss, who would, I’m sure, despair at/of the randomness of my punctuation.  Panic has now set in – and overthinking – and my defence of any abuse of usage is that it’s an Irish construction, dating back to Swift and beyond.

Lynne, who is not to be confused with Liz, prime minister for a few days in 2022, is a stickler for correct grammar and one of her best known books is Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which sold millions.  She’s also written many other books, plays, reviews, articles, you name it, she’s penned it.  I was lucky enough to meet her when one of her jobs was writing about sport for The Times.    Those years inspired her book “Get Her Off the Pitch:  How Sport Took Over My Life”.  She’s a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and her website lynnetruss.com is well worth a visit.

Now, where was I?  Ah, yes, feeling mightily relieved that every time I missed a tiddler, my life and my livelihood were not ebbing away.  Growing up I was surrounded by people who were better at golf than I was, much better.  What’s more, most of them, even the most talented, worked harder.  They knew where the practice ground was and spent a lot of time there.

The other day Maureen was remembering my trips to Newcastle, Royal County Down, to have lessons with their legendary pro Ernie Jones.  Newcastle is not next door to Portstewart but Mum would drive me there and I’d spend the time trying as hard as I could to make Ernie laugh and avoid hitting balls.  What a plonker (me, not Ernie, you couldn’t have found a nicer, better-natured man).  Quite shameful now I look back on it.

At events like the Dinah, I’d look at the pros working on the putting green for hours on end – my back twinges just thinking about it – and wonder, “Should I be inside battering away on my typewriter (it was a very long time ago) practising my intros?”  In fairness, I did spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to start my pieces and if nothing suitably smart and arty-farty came to mind, I learned to keep it simple and straightforward.  The office did not want to know that at the last minute they had a space, however titchy, to fill because I couldn’t start a piece off with a Shakespearean flourish.

I can be fussy, fretting away at a phrase but forensic I’m not and the attention to detail of the top golfers – most of the successful sports people – is unreal.  Their devotion to their craft borders on the bonkers but that’s not the way they see it.  I don’t begrudge them their success but I don’t envy them either.  Some of them nowadays make an obscene amount of money, not just a very good living and that’s the luck of the draw.

If you’re good at darts or snooker, you can now do very well financially, if not as well as footballers and golfers.  If you’re tops at tennis, athletics, cycling, boxing, cricket, rugby, no doubt you can make a fortune with a good agent, a central contract, an honest accountant and a resilient body.  Rowers, kayakers, badminton and table tennis players, to name just a few, they have their circuits and their championships and put in the hard yards but how many of them make a decent living?  And roar in to their forties without creaking?

Golfers are luckier than most in that they can still be competing well beyond most of their sporting contemporaries.  Padraig Harrington, for example, is now 54 and this week he’s trying to win his third US Senior Open title, at Scioto, in Ohio, the course where Jack Nicklaus learned to play the game.  By his own admission the Dubliner has always  been a bit crackers and laughed when he was reminded that he’d once pronounced:  “You chase improvement and not perfection.”

“I think I should write that down,” he said.  “Look, obviously, I can’t say that I live up to that aspiration, unfortunately.  If I hit the very best shot on the range, say the purest 5-iron you could hit, I’d try and hit the next shot better.  That is the stupidity of me.

“In a game that’s all about consistency, I wouldn’t try and hit the next shot the same, I’d try and hit it better, which is kind of mad.”

And that’s why he’s had the success he has and most important of all, is still in love with the game, besotted really.

No football so far you’ll have noticed but I can’t resist this, the Norwegian row (as in rowing with oars), although you need a video to do it  justice.  It’s a joy.