Golf: Seaside Putting and Links Legends

Golf and I enjoy a somewhat ambivalent relationship. The traditional misogynistic  Pringle sweater/nineteenth hole snifters/middle-class businessman image rests uneasily with me. However, place me within walking distance of a putting green or mini-golf course and even now I revert to being an eight year-old pestering Dad for a game.

From the day I was given a plastic set of two clubs and ball, I was smitten. No family holiday in England was complete without an eighteen-hole workout. They were competitive, too. Scorecards were meticulously and accurately maintained, and usually retained as souvenirs of the fortnight as lovingly as any postcard or shells collected from the beach.

There were favourites. In 1970 Newquay boasted two excellent adjacent mini-golf courses and I still recall the thrill of a hole-in-one at Minehead. A nine-hole pitch’n’putt greensward atop the Cornish cliffs at Porth showed I could wield a seven-iron without embarrassment but I never forgave the owners of a chalk-grass putting links on the Isle of Wight where one hole was as lethal as anything prepared at Augusta! Miss the cup on the up-slope and the ball would inevitably roll back to your feet. We stopped counting strokes at ten…

Some venues drew me back many a-time. When visiting Nanna and Grandad at Clacton, Dad and I, often with Catherine and others in tow, would enthusiastically walk to the nearby ‘Rec’ for a round before the man in the hut could close for the day. We were also fortunate to live near a park featuring a nine-hole pitch ‘n’ putt which offered enough variety, vegetation and even genuine sand-filled bunkers to challenge anyone. Dad and I enjoyed many tight contests there on a summer afternoon, and later there were some keen competitions involving Billericay Rotaract members. Such courses were great levellers. Friends who could swing an iron like a pro were often disadvantaged by their tendency to over-hit. With luck I could ‘top’ a ball to the green and still record a three.

Hacking around Lake Meadows is all very well but it’s not proper golf. I often wondered what it would be like to play on a full-size course, somewhere to encourage me away from my natural conservatism and have the confidence to give the ball a good whack with a driver of long iron. I’m still waiting! The closest I have come to the clubhouse experience is an overnight stay at the prestigious Chepstow St Pierre hotel and post-funeral wake at the palatial Buckinghamshire club amidst the primped parklands of Denham.

For all the close encounters with the genuine golfing set and serried ranks of electric buggies, full ascent into the rarified atmosphere has passed me by. Instead I have focussed on watching the world’s best plying their trade on the telly, admiring their ability to power the little ball three hundred yards with fade from the tee, place an approach shot with back-spin inches from the flag or judge a forty-foot putt’s route across a minefield of undulations and gradients to perfection.

The earliest memory I have of a golf professional actually owes less to television and more to school. At the age of five I was in the same primary class as Bobby Platts, the son of the local Thorndon Park professional Lionel, who that same year led the Open after the 1^st round and played in the 1965 Ryder Cup. I don’t know whether Bobby followed his dad into the sport but he did follow him up to Yorkshire where Lionel became the pro at Pannal. For years I would comb the results pages of the Daily Express for a mention of L. Platts (Pannal), especially in the Open qualifying competition or the tournament proper.

Like Wimbledon and Test cricket, the four days of The Open in July formed part of the British summer’s holy trinity of sporting events. Interest in the US Masters and Ryder Cup would come later but, with a passing nod to the usually rain-sodden Wentworth Matchplay in autumn, my interest in golf was largely concentrated onto the historic annual festival of links golf. I would also often watch the BBC’s Pro-Celebrity hit-and-giggle Friday night programmes, in which Tarby, Brucie, ‘Enry and Wogan-y would swap putts and laughs with Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino, but that doesn’t really count.

As for The Open, I would watch it live when I got home from school on the Thursday and Friday, with little homework to distract me given the impending summer break, but the highlight was the final round on the Saturday, later Sunday afternoon. The leader’s procession to the eighteenth green is still one of TV’s great moments of theatre: the adulation, exuberant crowds sprinting to the stewards’ rope for best view of the concluding putts, the competitors’ understated waves and humble smiles, gestures which communicated their thoughts: mustn’t get too excited, I could yet blow it with a three-putt! I always found this an emotional moment, whoever was playing.

In the early Seventies, Brits such as Brian Huggett, Neil Coles, Brian Barnes, Christy o’Connor (Junior and Senior) and even Peter Alliss, before he focussed on being the much-loved purring voice of golf, would always be in the mix. However, the big names tended to be Americans such as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper, supplemented by other exotic foreigners like Peter Thomson or Gary Player. I vaguely recall our own Tony Jacklin triumphant in 1969 but he wasn’t exactly a charismatic sporting icon to an eight year-old boy.

Super-Mex’ Lee Trevino, on the other hand was an entertainer on and off the course. His was a wise-cracking personality, heart worn precariously on his sleeve, but he was also a cracking player on the global circuit, winning the Open in ‘71 and ‘72. A year later I was smitten by the railway-fringed fairways of Troon (won by Tom Weiskopf) then in ’75 the admirably cool-headed Tom Watson first held the claret jug. Annoyingly, he did so only after an 18-hole play-off against Jack Newton on the Monday afternoon, thus depriving me of a chance to see the action as it happened.

The Yanks continued to hold sway for the next few years but I was enthralled by the brutal but brilliant two-man show in 1977 when Watson and Nicklaus went head to head on a rare sunny Sunday afternoon at Turnberry. The ‘Golden Bear’ shot a bogey-free 66, finished ten ahead of third-placed Hubert Green and still lost by a stroke! The following summer, a repeat looked on the cards after 54 holes but this time Watson faded and the perennial challenger Jack edged a handful of other Americans to win his fifteenth ’major’. The leaderboard also featured a couple of Brits: our then number one Peter Oosterhuis and a twenty year-old Nick Faldo.

But the tide it was a-changing. When an unknown nineteen year-old finished second behind Johnny Miller in ’76, I duly took note. However, what do Spaniards know about golf? By the time we reached 1979, the old monopoly of the Yanks, throwing a few crumbs the way of Britain and the Commonwealth, was starting to creak. In 1979, the cracks were ripped apart. The sport hailed a new star and the golfing world expanded its borders to include continental Europe for the first time.