I tuned in to a WiJ (Women in Journalism) seminar on AI (Artificial Intelligence) the other night, managed to connect via Zoom but realised, yet again, that I’m now well-nigh unemployable unless all the satellites fail and pencil and paper rule again.

Remember when Prince Charles (now King) threw a bit of a wobbly when a pen leaked or wouldn’t write or whatever?  Well, something similar happened to me when I couldn’t find out how much Brian Harman, the new Open champion, had earned in pounds sterling, the currency of the realm in which he won his title.

The Open app, as far as I could tell before fury and meltdown took hold, didn’t even mention the prize money, though I’m sure Martin Lewis – no, wrong Martin, it’s Slumbers (above), the R and A’s chief exec, another financial whizz….I’m sure he mentioned during the week what the total prize money was, though I’ve now forgotten and my notes only tell me that he reckoned the money had probably risen three years earlier than anticipated because of LIV ‘n all.

He talked about the financial sustainability of professional golf – where will it all end essentially, what’s the limit?  – and the need to find a balance between prize money and money devoted to the grassroots of the game, the R and A’s raison d’être, funded by the Open.  Probably a good thing that Slumbers was a banker in his previous life and understands money, presumably.

I don’t suppose Harman much cared what currency he was paid in last Sunday.  His smile said it all:  the claret jug is priceless.

He should be made for life but is anything ever enough for competitive millionaires who long to be billionaires?  There’s always a bigger yacht to hanker after.  Another Ferrari (or is that old hat?).  More acreage.  Another tractor.

The dosh du jour, du monde sportif at least, is pouring out of the coffers of Saudi Arabia and the quizzers out there will know that the currency of Saudi is….the riyal.  It’s abbreviated to SAR or SR and is pegged to the US dollar at a constant rate of exchange, according to Wikipedia.  There are, you’ll be interested to learn, 100 halalas to the riyal.  This is the sort of stuff we undoubtedly need to know.

I was disappointed to hear, no, disgusted is a better word, that some spectators booed Harman and made it quite clear that they didn’t want him to win, telling him so in no uncertain terms.  They didn’t know their man because the abuse only fired him up and helped him to the title.  He managed to put his own dampener on the proceedings on a soggy day that was beyond dreich, keeping all would-be challengers at bay.

Justin Thomas, who missed the cut by miles, his game eluding him at the moment, was still glued to the last 36 holes, as a fan and student of the game.  He congratulated “Harm” and his caddy Scott Tway, brother of PGA  champ Bob, on a masterly display of concentration and control, in their own little bubble under the brolly.

Thinking about it, that was spot on.  It wasn’t a day for flamboyant charges, it was a day for grinding out the victory that some outstanding golf earlier in the week had set up.  Many years ago, on a filthy day, probably an Open, Dai, who did leave the press room on occasion, went out to see why Tom Watson was making the game look easy when everybody else was struggling and racking up big numbers.

Our correspondent came back in, soaked and disgruntled (Dai, disgruntled?  Surely not!).  “Boring as hell,” he said.  “Down the middle, on the green, two putts, sometimes one.  Nothing to it.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if the weather is the last thing he thinks of whenever he looks back in years to come.  At the Ryder Cup at the K Club we all spent the week in waterproofs.  They went on before we left the house and came off when we got home but it took the photos to remind me how foul the weather was.  All I remember is the emotion, the excitement, some glorious golf and, of course, Woosie’s mile-wide smile in the warm glow of victory.

Was it wet?  Was the wind a factor?  Oh yes, I suppose it was….

One thing’s for certain:  we’d better be nice to the Open champion in Rome.  He’ll be trying his considerable damnedest anyway but we don’t need to give him an extra edge…

Talking of the Ryder Cup reminds me that this tradition, or whatever it is, of the holders retaining a trophy in the event of a draw/tie/half is beyond nonsensical.  Where on earth does it come from?  Why is it still tolerated?  The defending champions should NOT be given a head start just because they won last time out.

The Ashes probably started it and it’s infected golf – Ryder Cup, Solheim, Curtis, Walker, Vagliano  Trophy, whatever.  It’s just plain wrong.  Bonkers.  Change it at once, please.

That’s the end of the men’s majors until April but the women are in action this week in the Amundi Evian Championship at Evian-les-Bains and The Senior Open is at Royal Porthcawl.  Also, it would be remiss of me not to mention the winners of the Brenda King Foursomes, at Royal St David’s, Harlech.  Many congrats to Whittington Heath’s very own Sue Spencer and  her partner Sally Sketcher, from Trentham.

And welcome home to Ozzy, the bull who was the star of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, now in residence at New Street station, properly awe-inspiring.

 

 

The regular reader (many thanks for your perseverance and support) will have realised by now that I’m a sad soul  – but I’m quite happy with that.  For instance, the other day at Hoylake, aka Royal Liverpool, I spent several happy minutes watching people trying to sink a putt (best of three) along a humpback length of matting.  If they sank one, they’d win a golf ball (a Titleist proV1 admittedly) and be entered in a draw to win a Scotty Cameron putter.  Men, women and children were lining up to have a go.  Some came close but no one holed out while I was watching.  We all had fun, though.

That was on Wednesday and the place was packed but it was a glorious afternoon, absolutely perfect for wandering around, checking out the new and already dreaded 17th in relatively benign, sunny conditions.  “It’s 130 yards and they’re scared of it,” Sir Nick Faldo said.  Mind you, even he, three times winner of the Open, admitted that he was glad he didn’t have to play it.

When I played the little fecker (the 15th in the normal scheme of things), it was blowing a hooley and I knew I hadn’t a hope in hell.  I hit quite a good shot, some sort of finagled rescue but it went over the back into a ghastly sandy wasteland and I thinned my next effort into one of the front bunkers.  The ball eventually re-emerged in my hot little hand.  Nul points.  Who knows what carnage it’ll cause this week.

 

The sainted Rory (don’t worry I know he’s only human and fortunately he still seems to be well aware of that too) was playing with Tyrrell Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland and they were followed by quite a horde.  One young man who’d manoeuvred himself into a good spot close to the action told his mates, “I’m going to shout out my undying love for him (Rory).”  They didn’t give him any stick or laugh,  just nodded.

On Sunday, Rory had pipped home hope Bob MacIntyre to the Genesis Scottish Open title in a thrilling finish at the Renaissance Club, near North Berwick.  The left-handed Scot from Oban had set the target thanks to a brilliant birdie at the difficult 18th but the Ulsterman grabbed the spoils with two cracking iron shots at the 17th and 18th and two birdie putts.  It was his first win in Scotland as a professional.  Hope it doesn’t scupper his chances of winning at Hoylake…

Here in Lichfield on Sunday night we celebrated Rory’s victory with a spectacular fireworks display.  Well, officially it was to mark the end of the Lichfield Festival, nearly a fortnight of performances of all sorts.  It’s a great opportunity to widen your musical horizons and on Sunday two of us took the chance to watch and listen to Hsuan Wu, a young percussionist from Taiwan.  She graduated with distinction from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and is already a seasoned collaborator, exploring not just music but dance and drama.  She wowed us and baffled us in equal measure.  Quite amazing.

It was a very busy sporting Sunday and I scuttled home from the concert to watch the Wimbledon final, keep an eye on the golf and cricket and the Tour de France, not an easy task, hence the g and t, in a Singapore sling glass from Raffles Hotel, unbroken after all these years.

This was the last week of term for our singing class and I, who can ill afford to do so, had missed several sessions because of my gallivanting,   Should I just knock it all on the head or take a deep breath and dive back in?  I dived back in.

It was great fun, even though we started with a piece I’d never done:  Thank You For Being A Friend.  Lovely song but blooming complicated and I didn’t make much of a fist of it.  What’s more, we finished with Abba’s Thank You For The Music, which is also too hard for me and makes me laugh when we get to this line:-

“I have a talent a wonderful thing ’cause everyone listens when I start to sing…”

All I have is visions of rooms clearing in seconds as people rush for the exits…

Years ago our school music teacher – yes, we had one – wrote on my report:  “Shows no aptitude for this subject.”

Nothing much has changed and I’m just grateful to Helen, the boss, a soprano with perfect pitch, who keeps us in order, more or less and Clare, the pianist, who is beyond talented.  How they can tolerate such a musical incompetent is beyond me but I’ll see you next term.

It was well received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sister was with us last weekend in Cheshire.  She was en route home from her epic public transport journey from Lichfield to Dornoch to Ireland, north and south, and was pausing with us before completing the circle.

We were stationed in front of the telly watching the lengthy play-off for the Made in Himmerland title in Denmark between Spaniard Nacho Elvira and home hero Rasmus Hojgaard.  We had no particular favourite for the trophy but acknowledged how fabulous it would be for Rasmus and the partisan galleries if the Dane could manage to pull it off.  Elvira had ascended the 18th tee in the final round with a one-shot lead but was relieved to hole a nasty little one for bogey to fall back into a play-off with Rasmus, who’d shot 64 and been finished for ages.

The 18th was a bit of a brute of a hole with a very testing tee shot, trouble lurking everywhere. The pair shared pars on five occasions before Elvira finally came unstuck on the sixth time of asking and the title was won by a Dane for the first time in its history.

Cue delirious, joyous celebrations reminiscent of Shane Lowry winning the Irish Open back in 2009 when still an amateur.  One difference – the sun was shining in Denmark.

The sun was also shining way back in 1988 when I played in Denmark for the first time at a lovely course called Rungsted.  I’ve a feeling it was the first time the Ladies’ European Tour had visited Denmark and our collective breath was taken away by 19-year old Belgian Florence Descampe, who was making her professional debut.  She swept all and sundry aside with power, grace and accuracy, leaving a trio of US Open champions (Laura Davies, Ali Nicholas and Lotte Neumann) in her wake.  I suspect she won before she realised just how difficult it was.

My parents had travelled to the tournament with Patricia, who was there in a working capacity, and all three were going to mosey along together the following week to the next tournament in Sweden.  That gave the four of us the opportunity to share an unforgettable experience on the Sunday evening the tournament ended.  The golf was played a few miles down the road from Elsinore castle, the ghostly setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dad’s favourite play, and amazingly that evening there was an open-air production of the classic set in the grounds of Elsinore castle.

We were treated to a wonderful performance by a very young Kenneth Branagh and it really was unforgettable to watch the opening scene unfold with the ghost of Hamlet’s father appearing on the ramparts of the actual Elsinore castle – just where the Bard had set the scene.  It was a special evening and we knew it at the time.  It’s still special 35 years later.

The lengthy play-off on the DP World Tour prompted another discussion.  What was the longest play-off I’d ever been involved in and what was the result?   Well, my first win on the US college circuit was at the Temple Junior College tournament in Texas a million years ago where I won on the eighth extra hole.

I was having trouble with my contact lenses that week and had to play in glasses, which I never, ever did.  Just before the play-off I dropped my glasses in the car park under the wheel of the university van just as our coach, Pat Park, was reversing into the parking space.  There was only time for a lightning, running repair before I’d to go to the tee.  This consisted of one third of one lens being bound with elastoplast to hold the frame together in one piece, obviously massively inhibiting my vision (left eye).  I managed to win on the eighth extra hole.  We didn’t keep playing the same hole over and over as the boys did last Sunday – we started at the 1st and just kept going.

In my weekly letter home – remember, no emails, no texts and no facetime in those days – I wrote on the back of the envelope “good news inside”.  Not long before her death Mum gave me a little bag and when I looked inside there were all those airmail letters I had written home from the States.  She and Dad had kept them all.  Granted there were a few shopping lists on the back of some of the envelopes and instructions to Dad to put the dinner in the oven at such and such a time.  I have the letters, and the bag, still.

So, now my eyes, along with the eyes of most of the golf world, are turning towards the Open and Royal Liverpool golf club aka Hoylake.  I’ve already spent a wonderful day in the company of local member and former Curtis Cup player Maureen Richmond (née Walker) going round the course.  Picking her brains was a joy and if I have a good week broadcasting it’ll be in no small measure thanks to her.

The course is in magnificent order and with frisky breezes forecast to test the players it would be prudent to clear the diaries of all engagements.  I promise it’ll be compulsive viewing.

I have a busy week ahead so will be unlikely to check in with you next Friday – Patricia can hold the fort.  After that I’ll certainly be back to tell you about the week and lots of behind-the-scenes stuff.

Enjoy the Open.

One of my nearly nieces (the nephew’s long-time partner but not yet married) made the mistake of asking me where I’d been on my travels, so I told her.  “Blimey,” she said, “you need a holiday to recover.  Time to relax.”

Suppose that’ll mean a few trips to the Horse and Jockey, whose hanging baskets are a blaze of colour (see above).

I was only away for two weeks but it seemed longer, perhaps because there was quite a lot of dotting about.  Train from Lichfield to Inverness; car to Dornoch for a few days there; bus to Inverness; coach to Glasgow; plane to Belfast International; car to Dublin; ferry to Holyhead; train to Chester; train from Whitchurch to Lichfield (via Wem and Crewe).

“That’s expensive,” the woman from the Woodland Trust (doing a promotional stint in Lichfield) said when I told her about the train to Inverness.  She has relatives in Perth and found the cost of taking her own family up to Scotland by train prohibitive.  A senior rail card helps a lot and I missed mine when I left it under the mattress at my friend’s in Dublin and had to do two journeys without it.

The dreaded online booking just requires you to indicate that you have a railcard but the inspector – they’re still using real people on the trains but who knows how long that will last, given the imminent disgraceful culling of  ticket offices – needs to see the card.  Of course, if you’re buying a new one, you’ll probably have to store it on your phone.  Heaven help me if I ever leave that under a mattress.

Even I, Luddite though I am, have got used, however reluctantly, to storing tickets on my phone –  footie, cricket, theatre, you name it.  I’ve still not quite cracked inputting my golf scores on my phone – the signal persists in cutting out at crucial moments, m’lord – so it’s just as well that I haven’t played many competitions recently.  My partner and I wimped out on Tuesday, very wisely, as it turned out – about half an hour after our tee time, the heavens opened and we’d have been washed away.  Thank goodness they have a couple of roofs at Wimbledon these days.  Some of the tennis has been spellbinding.

The Lichfield Festival is in its second week, so friends and I managed to squeeze in a couple of performances.  First up was Mick Doran, principal percussionist of the English National Opera orchestra, with his A-Z of Orchestral Triangle Playing.  It was a brilliant, classy performance, funny, informative and poignant and I’ll never underestimate the triangle again.  Look out for Mick at the Proms and elsewhere, though goodness knows where the ENO is going to end up.

The golf nerds out there will know that another of the world’s famous Mick Dorans is an outstanding caddy, who has won numerous tournaments, including Ryder Cups, working for Lee Westwood, Costantino Rocca, Justin Rose and Eddie Pepperell, to name just a few.  Look out for Mick at the Open at Hoylake.

Post triangle, we went to a concert featuring two musicians from Africa, one of whom, N’famady Kouyaté, from Guinea, is now based in Cardiff.  He plays the balafon, a traditional wooden xylophone and he didn’t have his band with him, just his phone to provide the accompaniment.  His balafon didn’t seem to cause him too much trouble, seemingly a relatively low maintenance instrument, fairly easily portable.

Gaspar Nali, from Malawi, had to do a bit more tweaking and wrestling and mopping of his brow.  He plays “a one-string home-made three-metre long Babatoni bass guitar with a stick and an empty beer bottle”.  He also plays a cow-skin kick drum and sings.  Quite amazing.  Not too many of us in the audience spoke Chichewa, so we hadn’t a clue what Gaspar was singing about because he didn’t give us a synopsis but it all sounded brilliant.  There was dancing by the end.

The Knife Angel is also in Lichfield this month, raising awareness of the horror of knife crime and the devastation it causes.  The huge, impressive statue, incorporating thousands of blades collected by police forces across the country, was created by sculptor Alfie Bradley at the British Ironwork Centre.  It’s an amazing place in Shropshire, on the A5, more or less opposite Oswestry Golf Club.  Read all about it – and more – at britishironworkcentre.co.uk.  Alfie also has his own website.

Better squeeze a bit of golf in, so many congratulations to Matteo Manassero on winning the Italian Challenge Open at Golf Nazionale in Viterbo.  It was the Italian’s second win on the Challenge Tour this season – his wife Francesca, a non-golfer, caddied for him both times – and marks a bit of a revival for the man who once took the European (now the DP World) Tour by storm.  Now 30, he had won his four main tour titles by the age of 20, the first in 2010 at the ago of 17 years and 188 days after an outstanding amateur career.  He’s still the youngest winner in tour history and has not lost hope of rejoining the top flight.

You can’t keep a good Italian down and it was great to see that Federica Dassu, who played on the tour with Mo and has been at the heart of Italian coaching for years, popped up at Woodhall Spa this week where the seniors, men and women, have been braving some wild weather.   Thanks to Sue Spencer for sending the pic of her and Feda (left).