MANY MANY THANKS FOR ALL THE KIND WORDS LEFT BEHIND IN THE COMMENTS SECTION YESTERDAY.......AND I WAS VERY HUMBLED THAT SO MANY OF YOU USED YOUR OWN BLOGS TO WELCOME ME BACK. REALLY MEANS A LOT......
This week the most famous professional golf tournament in the world takes place and for four days my attention will be firmly focused on it at the expense of just about everything else.
The Open Championship was first played for back in 1860 on a course not all that far from where I have lived most of my life. This week's event takes place at Royal Lytham & St Anne's which is quite close to the town of Blackpool which is where my family holidayed quite a few times when I was very young.
The most famous golf course in the world is at St Andrews, which again is a town that mum and dad would take me and my two brothers for breaks in the summer.
I've loved golf as long as I can remember....it's up there with football and music as the three biggest passions in my life. I've played it for abut 35 years now - I've occasionally had a bit of success but more often than not the game has got the better of me.
I've a temperament that isn't always suited to the game and there have been times I have let myself down very badly while out on the course. One of those times was quite recently and even now I get very disappointed with myself just thinking about it. I'm just too bloody serious and competitive for my own good. You'd think that by this time and at my age I'd know better.
My all time golf hero was the late Seve Ballesteros. He was an idol before any pop/rock musician grabbed my attention, so much so that for my 18th birthday, when perhaps I should have asked for a state-of-the-art hi-fi or perhaps an electric guitar to further my interest in sound, I was a very happy boy/man to be given a very expensive set of golf clubs that were endorsed by Seve.
Golf and the sort of music that I love don't really sit all that well together. Most musicians who turn up in celebrity golf tournaments are the type I'd go a long way to avoid listening to. There are a handful of exceptions. And here they are:-
mp3 : Iggy Pop - Nightclubbing
mp3 : Lloyd Cole - Eat Your Greens
mp3 : R.E.M - Drive
Yup. R.E.M.
It's Mike Mills who is the band member who likes to chase the little white ball around the fairways and hazards. He was seemingly interviewed at length earlier this year on The Golf Channel and came across as someone who really knew his stuff. Wonder if he ever tried to get Stipey interested?
Incidentally....the most famous and unlikely rocker who golfs remains Alice Cooper.
According to a contribution he made to a 2003 book about golfing celebrities he initially took up the sport to avoid being an alcoholic:-
"When I stopped drinking 20 years ago I learned quickly that an alcoholic's worst enemy is time. When an alcoholic gets up in the morning you make a drink and that starts your day. So the deal was, now that I'm straight, I have to find something that takes up time. I decided golf would be a good four hours...."
TVV. Bringing you facts you wish you never knew.
3 comments:
Quote from Keef Richards about Stones pianist/road manager booking the band in hotels near golf courses: "We'd be playing in some town where there's all these chicks, and they want to get laid and we want to lay them. But Stu would have booked us into some hotel about ten miles out of town. You'd wake up in the morning and there's the links. We’re bored to death looking for some action and Stu's playing Gleneagles."
When I was a kid, there was a father and son twosome in front of me. The son sliced one and slammed his club to the ground. The father said, "son, you're not good enough to have an outburst like that." Sounds mean, but his point was that shot was not to make the cut at one of the majors. Whenever I'm about to make an ass of myself on the links, I think of that moment. Sports in general, and golf in particular, can be maddening, but it should always be fun. There is nothing better than walking 18 on a beautiful day. Good luck with your game, JC.
I met an American guy over here in Thailand about 12 years ago. He knew all the crowd from CBGBs and claimed that he used to play golf with Richard Hell! I'm pretty sure that Robert Forster from the Go-Betweens is also a golfer.
I started playing in 1983 when I was on the dole. I don't play as often as I'd like these days but I'll be watching The Open until the early hours for the next few nights.
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