My dearly departed colleague and mentor, Jock MacVicar, was a tremendous creature of habit.
Most Sundays, for instance, he would toddle off to his local driving range to hit 50 balls. “It’s just a bit of exercise,” he reasoned, but the true motivation behind his routine was the fact that the café at said facility produced terrific scones.
Auld Jock, of course, loved his grub. The rampant devouring of a quite delightful lemon meringue pie at the Sleive Donard Hotel in County Down during an Amateur Championship one year could’ve been accompanied by the triumphant finale of the William Tell Overture.
While a bucket of 50 balls would always be more than enough for Jock – the scone was probably calling after 22 dimpled orbs had been gently swept off the mat to be honest – I prefer to arm myself with a haul of 100.
The reason? Well, it’s purely down to simple mathematics. It adds up to the same number of separate, negative thoughts that course through my feeble mind during the swing.
I don’t know why I actually keep going back to the range. But, for whatever reason, I still do. As Churchill once observed, “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Perhaps he too was driven on by the prospect of a scone?
In this game, there’s always food for thought. With the wider world girding its various bits and pieces for the onset of another Donald Trump presidency, the world of golf was left mulling over the impact another Trump term will have on merger talks involving the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund that fuels the LIV gravy train.
Forget the trivialities of global conflict and issues surrounding national security, immigration, the climate or the cost of living. Just how will men’s professional golf benefit from Trump’s return? Who said the game in its upper echelons was out of touch with the real world, eh?
Rory McIlroy, as honest as ever, gave his opinions last week in Abu Dhabi as he mulled over the prospect of Trump accelerating the wearisome discussions of the 2023 Framework Agreement.
And don’t worry, I find that phrase boring too. In fact, I just let out a gaping yawn right there, halfway through typing the word ‘Framework’.
Anyway, the influence golf-loving Trump can exert over the US Department of Justice – it has threatened to block any merger on the basis that it would violate competition law – is being viewed as something of a breakthrough in the current impasse.
“Given the news with what’s happened in America, I think that (Trump’s win) clears the way a little bit,” suggested McIlroy about the route towards this tripartite coalition. He also flung in – with a smile we must add – the prospect of madcap MAGA flag-waver Elon Musk getting involved too. Crikey.
Trump trumpeted last week that he would take about “15 minutes” to get the golf deal done. Whether he does it before or after the 24 hours he said it would take him to sort out the war in Ukraine remains to be seen.
When that aformentioned Framework thingamajig was unveiled some 18 months ago, Trump roared that it was a “big, beautiful and glamourous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”
Meanwhile, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, hailed a potential union with the Saudis as a “momentous day.”
Up until that June 2023 announcement, which was so out of the blue even the blue itself was caught on the hop, Monahan was very much against the Saudi golf revolution and even used the victims of the 9/11 atrocity to effectively shame those American players who had defected to the breakaway series.
Monahan’s subsequent volte face was quite something as he backed out of his robust anti-LIV stance with about as much elegance as a man reversing his car into the entire peloton of the Tour de France.
It was just one of the many flabbergasting developments in an on running saga that has been defined by eye-popping sentiments, greed, entitlement and players demonstrating an over-inflated sense of their own worth.
McIlroy has hardly rolled out the welcome mat for Trump and the Northern Irishman has been a great statesman-like figure in the game’s civil war over the last couple of turbulent years.
In many quarters, though, his statements last week were viewed as just another example of the blinkered, privileged and selfish bubble that golfers at the highest level exist in these days. It doesn’t matter how we get what we want, as long as we get it. It seems Trump and golf will continue to get on like a White House on fire.
But let’s end this week’s meanderings on a cheery note. The astonishing Bernhard Langer racked up his 47th win on the over-50s circuit in the Charles Schwab Cup Championship at the age of 67. And all of this after a potentially career-ending Achilles tendon injury at the start of the season.
Langer has won at least one title on the golden oldies tour during each of the last 18 years. His competitive longevity must now be an eighth wonder of the world.
In these changing, uncertain times in the game of golf, it’s comforting that some things stay the same.
