Fantastic Day

For those of you with a musical bent you will realise that I have reverted to type and used a song title to describe my experiences today!  Purely for music education purposes, this was a song released by Haircut One Hundred in 1982 and reached No 9 in the singles charts in that year.  These were actually the only two words that I felt appropriate to describing my day at the Earth Course in Dubai.

Today was Pro-Am day, a pre-tournament feature of most of today's major golf tournaments and one that I haven't been able to accurately determine if the Professionals like or dislike?  Certainly from the amateur's point of view it must be magical to step out on the course with one of your golfing heroes and hopefully impress them with your mastery and control of these things we call golf clubs.  Mind you with several very high handicappers playing today, I can't be sure that mastery is a word that would come into their vocabulary!

Having said all that, the majority of the Professionals I have come into contact with today have been impeccable in the way that they have dealt with their playing partners and the marshalls and in my eyes have been a true credit to their sport.  There was one funny or maybe not so funny incident today when one amateur team member arrived late (how could this happen when you are partnered with one of the world's top ten?) and asked if he could tee off and chase the rest of his team who by this time were putting out on their first hole!  Needless to see his request was politely refused and he played on 17 holes instead of the 18 he expected.

My own duties today involved motorised transport which meant myself and a fellow volunteer Adrian, ferrying every fourball between certain tees in our extended golf buggies.  It sounds boring perhaps but let me tell you that it is brilliant to have people like Rory McIllroy, Henrik Stenson, Justin Rose and Lee Westwood as a captive audience.  For all of those who know me as a shy, quiet and very retiring (or is that retired?) Yorkshireman, they were all clearly captivated by my company!  Seriously though they were a true delight, very giving of their time and more than happy to let us get photographs on the tee. My conversation varied from wine with Ernie Els - he suggested that we must visit his estate in South Africa when we go next year and sample what I understand are some brilliant and inexpensive reds. Then there was British Airways with Justin Rose who benefits from the former's sponsorship.  He had been a tad distracted until I told him of my BA pilot daughter and he then went on to talk about the work he is doing with BA and also his recent family move to the Bahamas. Oh and Lee Westwood and Billy Foster, Billy of course always ribbing me about Skipton Golf Club but Lee far more interested in South Africa, the pound to rand exchange rate and Ernie's vineyard.  Mind you, that possibly gained his attention because he is heading down there next week for the Nedbank Challenge.

The most striking thing today however was that to a man, they are all extremely tired and looking forward to breaks varying from 2 weeks to in one case 7 weeks.  That tiredness is felt to an even greater degree by their caddies who collectively have amassed multi millions of air miles.

Enough for today and as always I will let some of my photos do the talking.  I know you'll recognise me but just who are those superstars of our game that I am hanging out with?

A quiet day tomorrow so the next dispatch might be Thursday following Day 1 of the tournament.