Go With The Pro

Patricia and I sampled a smorgasbord of delight last week with a visit to Portrush that delivered on every level.  The ladies’ branch had invited the sister and me over to celebrate my award, made earlier in the year, of honorary membership of the PGA, aka the Professional Golfers’ Association.  To me, it was truly humbling that they should even think of doing such a thing.

It’s always a treat to return to Portrush – and I feel so lucky to be close to clocking up sixty years of having been a member there………….whereas it’s only been a mere forty years since I became a member of the PGA.

A little info about the PGA of Great Britain & Ireland.  It is the world’s oldest PGA dating back to its formation in Victorian times – in 1901, to be precise.  That means this year the association celebrates its 125^th anniversary and much of its early progress was driven by the efforts of the Great Triumvirate of J H Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid who were determined to raise the status of the (in those days) men who played the game for a living.  Records back then show that membership figures read:  59 professionals and 11 assistants.  Nowadays there are 8,500 men and women pros working across 80 countries and there’s an intake of 300 assistants each and every year.  Remarkable changes and remarkable growth.

I was so very fortunate that my first experience of golf professionals was with two fine gentlemen, one the pro at Portrush and one at Portstewart.  PG Stevenson or Stevie as he was universally known, was one of the relatively early members of the PGA when he took up his post at Portrush in 1922 and, as well as being in charge of all things golf, he oversaw the summer golf foundation coaching for many decades.

Johnny Hunter took up his position at Portstewart in 1948 so was well established there by the time I started to annoy him on the practice ground.  He and Stevie were both full of old world charm, had an infinite love for the game, were great teachers and good listeners.  How lucky I was that that was my first brush with the profession.

When I look back it was a remarkable stroke of luck and geography that Patricia and I started our golfing lives as junior members of two such wonderful golf clubs.  If that hadn’t happened I suspect it would have been unlikely that we would have made our careers within the game.

Mum and Dad were long time members of the Portstewart club and my sister and I both became members when I was eight or nine years of age. There wasn’t a big junior section at the time – a decent handful of boys for sure but Patricia and I were the only girls.  We were warmly welcomed in to all the ladies’ competitions when we had handicaps but girls our own age were rather thin on the ground.

Over at Portrush, however, there was a thriving junior golf schedule with Golf Foundation lessons and boys’, girls’ and mixed competitions virtually every week in the summer holidays.  There were a number of wonderful women members of Portrush who drove these initiatives and I often wonder did they ever really realise the influence they had on so many young lives.  Dorothy Glendinning, Zara Bolton, Nancy Kincaid, Henrietta Bell and Pauline Higgins are some of the names etched in my memory banks and to whom I owe so much.

It was Dorothy Glendinning who rang Dad up and asked him to “send the girls over”.  It was so exciting to make the big four-mile journey to Portrush and to be included in with all the other children.  The following week Dorothy rang up again with the same request – Dad would never have been so presumptuous as to expect that we would be included because we weren’t members of Portrush.  It mattered not a jot to these wonderful pioneering women if we were members or not – but it did to Dad, so very quickly, Patricia and I found ourselves members of two clubs.  About a fiver each.

We grew up thinking all golf courses were like those we played at Portstewart and Portrush.  Talk about being spoiled!

In the intervening years we have both done a fair bit of travelling – Patricia more than me with several annual forays to Oz and to Japan, not to mention to all over the States, whereas I mostly tended to be more European based.  We each have our own favourite places and courses but are in total agreement that any opportunity there is to return to that special stretch of coastline on the north of Ireland must not be missed.  We are never disappointed.

I was more than a little surprised to receive honorary membership of the PGA – it truly came at me out of left field but I am really chuffed to bits.  I was doubly chuffed, however, to return to Portrush to celebrate there with so many old friends.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.