90 day trial for anyone who wants it
Itâs practically free anyway tbh
Unbelievable timing.
Good interview with Laois legend Pat Critchley in the Times today
Didnât know he was in a band managed by Cheddar Plunkett
Who?
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Comfort reading in uncertain times -
Enda is some loose cannon. Or at least was.
Staunch Tipp man, had plenty to say but I always enjoyed his company.
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I used bump into now and again through mutual friends and would enjoy the few pints with. Not met him for a long time.
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Enda is the soundest skin you could ever meet⌠As good a pints companion as ever stood in shoe leather.
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A genuine attribute to the Boro, when he finally leaves go 
He already is, in camogie.
A nice little read.
And the highlights. Enjoy
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Ronay really is a top notch journalist.
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to be honest I have hardly ever heard of him but anyone with a basic knowledge of the game will know that England werenât much good in 1986 and werenât robbed in fact very similar to the Thierry Henry game in Stade de France .
They were very unlucky in 1990 to be honest . Both we very average World Cups
Sound. I remember the game well and enjoyed the highlights there.
The Bomber, the Babe and the hunt for a piece of history
The task was simple, if not vague: Select an item of golf memorabilia and tell its story. Easy enough. The sport dates to 15th century Scotland. Ample options.
Ultimately, the choice came down to this: the desire to select an overlooked piece of history to tell a larger tale. Which brought us to Jan. 7, 1952. That was when, on a rainy day in Chula Vista, on the grounds of San Diego Country Club, former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis stepped onto the first tee, drew back his driver and struck the shot that broke a long-held, well-hardened color barrier in a sport long defined by race and privilege. Louis is an icon in American sports for a host of reasons. The chapters including his contributions to golf, though, are often glossed over.
This task offered an opportunity to retell that history. So, we wondered, where are the clubs Joe Louis used in the 1952 San Diego Open as the first black player to participate in a PGA of America-sanctioned tournament? Surely theyâre in a place of great prominence. Surely theyâre waiting to tell their tale.
Well, about that. History has a funny way of starting one place and taking you somewhere else. Somewhere you didnât expect to go. Perhaps to a different doorstep in time where you find Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an American original and one of the greatest female athletes the world has ever known. And you find a friendship, one so gratifying in its significance that you have to keep going.
And, eventually, to a warehouse in Tampa, Fla., where history stands still.
Memorabilia tied to Joe Louisâ love of golf is hard to come by. Joe Louis Barrow Jr., the champâs 72-year-old son, tells a short and disappointing story. He once had a collection of his fatherâs golf items, but gave most of it to his stepmother. She ultimately sold all the pieces. Barrow calls it âa sad part of my life.â Most of that history is now unaccounted for, spread among private collectors. âI donât know what they have or even whatâs out there,â Barrow says.
That is, except for one known complete set of clubs that indeed once belonged to Joe Louis. Itâs tucked away at the USGA Golf Museum in Liberty Corner, N.J. The bag is big and heavy. Black leather lined with gold accents. It reads JOE LOUIS in script, and THE CHAMP underneath. He used the set later in life, when he lived out his days in Las Vegas working as a greeter at Caesars Palace. The woods and irons are MacGregor DX1s dating to the mid-1960s. Theyâre normal clubs except for one thing: ultra-thick grips to accommodate Louisâ enormous, battered mitts. âWhen I was a youngster my hands could barely fit around âem,â Barrow says.
The bag and those MacGregors are where they belong in safe-keeping. Louisâ impact on golf is profound. He was a compulsive player (and gambler) known to walk upwards of 45 to 54 holes a day. Regularly a single-digit handicap, playing as low as a 2, he was good â legitimately good. Solid from tee-to-green and a terrific putter. Four years after he took up the game, he played in the 1940 Eastern Golf Association Championship in Washington, D.C. More than 2,000 people showed up to see him.
Joe Louisâ golf clubs and bag. (Courtesy of USGA Golf Museum)
As Louisâ love of the game grew, so did his frustration over the abysmal treatment of the best black golfers of the day. From early pioneers like John Shippen, Robert âPatâ Ball and Howard Wheeler, to later greats Teddy Rhodes, Bill Spiller and Charlie Sifford, among others, he saw generations of players miss an opportunity he was afforded. Louis made his name in the 1930s fighting every available opponent, black or white. His Yankee Stadium knockout of Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera vaulted him to fame. His bouts with German Max Schmeling turned him into something else â a luminary, a larger-than-life star for whom his home city of Detroit would name its sports arena.
Louis fell for golf early in his professional boxing career. According to Barrow, Ed Sullivan, then a columnist for the New York Daily News, gave him an instructional book and a set of clubs. Louis grew so enamored that in the weeks before his 1936 title bout with Schmeling, he split time between training and golf. His win was a foregone conclusion. (The Miami Herald wrote: âSchmeling has less chance of beating Joe Louis than Landon has of defeating Roosevelt for the presidency.â) After Schmeling registered a stunning 12th-round knockout, some members of Louisâ camp blamed the incessant golf. In 1941, Louis began sponsoring the Joe Louis Invitational in Detroit, personally putting up the $1,000 purse. He paid entry fees and covered transportation costs for the black professionals who needed it. He would hire Rhodes â a four-time winner of the Joe Louis Invitational â as his personal teacher and pay him handsomely. (Years later, Rhodes would tutor a young up-and-comer named Lee Elder, who would become the first black player to compete in the Masters and the Ryder Cup. He won four PGA Tour events.)
After retiring in 1951 with a 66-3 record, including a record 12-year reign as heavyweight champ (1937-49), Louis was two things â insanely famous and obsessed with golf.
And that brings us to 1952.
Louis, an amateur, was invited by sponsors to play in the San Diego Open (now the Farmers Insurance Open played at Torrey Pines). He was joined there by Bill Spiller, a black Los Angeles-based professional who thought he had qualified to play. The PGA of America was having none of this. Horton Smith, the organizationâs president, barred both from playing. He picked the wrong fight.
From the Associated Press: âThe usually mild-speaking Louis denounced the rule as un-American and declared that PGA President Horton Smith was âanother Hitlerâ in enforcing it.â Louis went on to say he had been told the San Diego organizing committee expected to clear a $2,000 profit on the tournament. He offered to double the sum if the event was canceled.
Needing to save face, the PGA scrambled and threw a decision together allowing Louis to play. Spiller was refused because he wasnât a member of the PGA, nor a PGA-accredited player. Louis spit back: âIf Spiller is not approved, itâs strictly because heâs colored.â
It had been a long road for Spiller and other black professionals. In 1948, he was part of a group that filed a $300,000 suit against the PGA for denying them employment in their chosen profession. It was withdrawn when PGA officials agreed to change the rules to allow for more opportunities for minorities to compete. That, of course, never happened, and four more years of frustration passed.
Spiller was upset Louis accepted the PGAâs rule exception and chose to play in San Diego. Louis countered that one step forward was better than another step back. On the opening morning of tournament play, Spiller stood on the first tee in protest. Louis spoke to him one-on-one, ultimately quelling the situation. With that, Louis teed off and made history. He was paired on that Monday morning with Smith, who was a PGA player in addition to being the president, and Leland âDukeâ Gibson, a member of the PGAâs tournament committee.
The dayâs largest gallery followed the group. Black employees from the club crowded near a window by the 10th tee to catch a glimpse. As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, when Smith double-bogeyed the second hole, he turned to Louis and said, âTaking six on that easy hole is just like a punch on the chin.â
âOnly difference,â Louis replied, âis that in boxing you recover from a punch; in golf, itâs on the card to stay.â
Louis shakes hands with Horton Smith on the first tee of San Diego Country Club. (AP Archives)
Louis shot a 76 in the opening round. He followed the next day with an 82. He missed the cut, but made a statement. In the larger fight for equality in the sport, he left San Diego saying, âThis is only the first round.â
The following week, at the Phoenix Open, with a new precedent set â permitting non-Caucasians to qualify for tournaments co-sponsored by the PGA, as long as the local sponsor and host club approved â Spiller, Rhodes and Charlie Sifford became the first black professional golfers to play in a PGA event. Louis attended as a spectator.
The golf bag and clubs that were donated to the USGA museum are there to commemorate Louisâ place in the game. There is, though, something curious about them.
When donated in 2011, the clubs were accompanied with a handwritten note explaining the gift. They came not from Joe Louis Barrow Jr. or the Louis estate, but instead from the The Babe & George Zaharias Golf Foundation.
One door leading to another door.
You want to close your eyes hard enough to see them there together. The Brown Bomber and the Babe. The one, standing 6 feet, 2 inches, just a few pounds over his fighting weight of 214 pounds, but still fit and firm. An ex-boxer in autumn, all of those past punishments layered on the face like clay pressed upon clay. The other, all 5 feet, 7 inches, and 115 pounds of her. Perhaps the greatest all-around American athlete of the 20th century, she measures up. They shake hands and make a wager. Joeâs hand engulfs hers, but as Grantland Rice wrote of Babe, she has âstrong hands, strong wrists and forearms of steel.â
You will not find a list of the greatest American athletes of the 20th century that does not include both Joe Louis and Babe Didrikson Zaharias. The two reside in the rarest of air. Jim Thorpe. Michael Jordan. Jesse Owens. Babe Ruth. Muhammad Ali. So on. The greatest of the greats. Right there among them are Joe and Babe.
This is where that door leads.
As it turns out, in a slice of history, Louis and Zaharias were not only American icons and barrier breakers (both have been featured on U.S. postage stamps), but also friends. A black man who fought to be seen. A white woman who ran to be recognized. Together, they were contemporaries. The same way Joe shattered racial divisions and dismantled the notion of Aryan supremacy by beating Schmeling in 1938, Babe changed the notion of female athleticism in the United States and took on all challengers â male, female and stereotype.
Didrikson, born Mildred Ella Didrikson and later married to pro wrestler George Zaharias, won medals at the 1932 Olympics in the javelin, high jump and 80-meter hurdles, starred for a barnstorming AAU basketball team and proved to be innately excellent at pretty much any sport she tried: baseball, softball, tennis, bowling âŚ
And golf.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias swinging a Wilson driver, circa 1950. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)
As it often goes with Babe, this is where myth mixes with legend. During the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, she was invited by Grantland Rice and three other sportswriters to play golf at Brentwood Country Club. As a writer, Rice was both brilliant in his composition and grandiose in his chronicling â the type who might juxtapose a college backfield with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He billed the day as a relatively foreign task for Babe, saying it was only the 11th round of golf she had ever played (though itâs unclear if he knew that was likely bunk). Babe played along. She showed up early to get some tips from the Brentwood head pro before the round as the sportswriters watched in disbelief. In reality, Didrikson learned to play golf as a teenager and had played plenty of rounds in her life.
Nonetheless, after Babe posted a 52 on the front, smashing drives of more than 250 yards but struggling on Brentwoodâs greens, she zipped through the back in 43 strokes and finished with a 95. Rice called the round âbeyond all understandingâ and wrote: âYou finally understand that you are looking at the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination the world of sport has ever known.â
Rice went on to suggest the Babe could immediately compete with the best womenâs golfers of the day, if she chose to, and said she âhas the indefinable quality of genius that canât be explained.â In this regard, he was spot on. Over the next 20 years, Babe Didrikson Zaharias won 51 professional tournaments, including 17 straight at one point, and captured 10 majors, including three U.S. Womenâs Open championships.
Amid it all, though, even with the likes of Rice trumpeting her greatness, Babe withstood brutal levels of sexism and personal prodding. Reporters regularly asked about her sexuality and treated her as some sort of physical oddity. New York Daily News sportswriter Paul Gallico was especially cruel. He described her as having âwholly masculine pugnacityâ and pointed to her as an example âas to whether this or that woman athlete should be addressed as Miss, Mrs., Mr. or It.â (It probably wasnât a coincidence that years beforehand Gallico was one of the sportswriters who played at Brentwood Country Club that day in 1932. The Babe beat him both on the scorecard and in a footrace down the 17th hole.) Another sportswriter, Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram, once claimed that an average high school male athlete could match Didriksonâs Olympic feats and wrote: âIt would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.â She endured constant questions about her sexuality until marrying George in 1938.
Fellow athletes, though, for the most part, saw Babe for what she was â a generational talent. She was friendly with Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Jim Thorpe. All the great ghosts of the era.
And then there was Joe Louis. In his peak days as heavyweight champ, when he was still new to the game, heâd run into Babe at Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles. She gave him tips, tweaked his swing. Babe knew what she was talking about. She practiced by hitting 1,500 balls a day and mirrored her swing after Gene Sarazenâs.
In her 1955 autobiography, âThis Life Iâve Led,â Babe wrote of Joe: âHe was a fine gentleman and a good sport, the kind of fellow you enjoy playing golf with. He was a pretty fair golfer, too. He was capable of shooting in the middle 70s, and maybe better than that sometimes, if he had his game going good.â
Years later, when Babe and George bought a course in Tampa and settled down there, Joe visited often, playing 18 with the Babe and then heading to the famous Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City for dinner. They were a bit of an odd couple, Joeâs public persona as a quiet man and Babeâs reputation as the foul-mouthed hell-raiser. Both were likely products of a vox populi concocted by those muckrackers. In one way or another, Joe and Babe found they werenât all that different.
âHe enjoyed the game of golf and he enjoyed playing with people,â Barrow said of his father. âHe liked people. It doesnât surprise me that he and Babe struck up a relationship.â
As for Joeâs feelings about female athletes, Barrow added: âWe never talked about that, but I can only imagine his feeling was that equal was equal. Women can do what they do, men can do what they can do, and they can all excel, and they can all be champions. He knew women were capable, period.â
Indeed, Joe Louis not only played golf with Babe Zaharias, but also Althea Gibson and Ann Gregory.
The Babe died of cancer in 1956 at age 45. She was buried in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. There, more than a decade later, a group of townsmen wanted to preserve her legacy, but needed to raise funds. They created the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Invitational Golf Tournament in the early 1970s to generate donations and, year after year, an aging Joe Louis would climb off a plane and drive to the far-flung town in southeast Texas.
âI mean, Joe Louis ⌠visiting Beaumont, Texas?â says W.L. Pate Jr., who first met Joe during those fundraisers and is now both the townâs 71-year-old mayor and overseer of the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Museum & Visitor Center. âOh, it was a huge deal, every time.â
So much so that visitors to the town might be confused to find a bust of Joe Louis in front of the Beaumont Civic Center.
The bust of Joe Louis in Beaumont, Texas. (Courtesy of W.L. Pate Jr.)
George Zaharias suffered a stroke in 1974 and lived out his final days in Tampa. In 1976, shortly before his death, Joe surprised George at his bedside. The two had been friends and business partners years earlier and Joe knew George most likely was craving some real food. He snuck him some barbecue.
Having brought his golf clubs with him, Joe left them behind as a reminder to ânever give up and go to the Lord in prayer every day.â
George Zaharias died that same year at age 76.
Joe Louis died five years later, in 1981, at 66.
We know what Joe said to George that final day because the details are included in a letter that accompanied the donation of Louisâ golf clubs to the USGA Golf Museum in 2011.
The note is signed by Hal Shaw, the founder and president of The Babe and George Zaharias Golf Foundation in Tampa. Reached by phone recently, Shaw, now 85, confirmed that, yes, he wrote that letter to the USGA and was âbeyond thrilledâ to make the donation.
Then Shaw asked why one would bother inquiring about such a thing. I told him this all began with a hunt for Joe Louisâ clubs from the 1952 San Diego Open, but had somehow turned into this unlikely story about Joe Louis and Babe Didrikson being friends.
âOh, OK, well, these things youâre talking about,â Shaw said. âI have another set of Joe Louis golf clubs in storage here in Tampa with his name on the clubs.â
âWait,â I replied, âwhatâd you say?â
Separately, Joe and the Babe played with some of the most famous faces of their generation, the likes of Duke Ellington, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart. The difference was that Joe would often lose fistfuls of money, while the Babe cleaned her guests out. She wouldnât only bet money, but also equipment. She didnât only want to win, but also wanted to send you home empty-handed.
That, in part, is why one corner of a warehouse in Tampa is filled with everything from belt buckles she won off of opponents to, Shaw estimates, âprobably over a thousand clubsâ from a variety of golfers and celebrities. This is Babeâs bounty.
According to Shaw, the collection amounts to the remaining estate of The Babe & George Zaharias Golf Foundation, a charitable organization for children with mental and physical challenges. Some items are donated to institutions such as the USGA Golf Museum. Others are sold off to fund the foundation. Some still sit in the shadows.
Like this set of Joe Louisâ golf clubs.
Are these Joe Louisâ golf clubs from 1952? (Courtesy of Hal Shaw)
The Wilson Head Speed Fore Weight 4300 woods and Top Notch Goose-Neck Reg. No. 4102 irons date to 1948 â the same year Wilson Sporting Goods put up the financial backing for the Babe and Patty Berg to form the Womenâs PGA, predecessor to todayâs LPGA.
Looking at a variety of pictures from the day Louis broke the color barrier, the woods match the woods, the irons match the irons and the putter matches the putter.
Additionally, we know Louis used these very clubs in December 1951. He was in Japan at the time, traveling around the country conducting boxing exhibitions. He stopped in Tokyo on Dec. 10 and joined Lloyd Mangrum and Jack Burke, two members of the U.S. Ryder Cup team, for a match against three Japanese pros. (Per a Reuters report, the Americans lost the match, 64-66.) Louis returned to the U.S. with head covers from the host course, Koganei Golf Club.
Those same head covers are on this set of clubs.
Less than one month after that trip to Japan, on Jan. 7, 1952, Louis played in the San Diego Open.
âIncredible,â Shaw said.
Without a doubt, Louis played multiple sets of clubs over his decades in the game. He played MacGregors. He played Wilsons. He had a few sets from the now-defunct Burke Golf Company.
This set here, though, happens to line up with a moment in time when history was made. Relayed some of this information, Joe Louis Barrow Jr. could only pause and say, âHey, you never know.â
Maybe this is the set of clubs Joe Louis used when he walked upon a soggy San Diego Country Club that day in 1952, the day he played one of the most impactful rounds in golf history, one that came nine years before the PGA of America officially dropped its Caucasian-only clause. And maybe Joe lost those very clubs to one of the very few athletes he could truly call his equal â his friend, Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Maybe this is all too good to be true.
Or maybe history just wanted us to know the story of the Bomber and the Babe
Have you given up on the Clare Champion.
Ronay has done England v Argentina in 98 here. Heâs thrown a load of joyce wank in but itâs amazing to just remember how incredible the game was. We watched it in the James Joyce bar in Prague surrounded by English. It was a cracking atmosphere, good banter which never really threatened to go sour. Owenâs goal. Zanettiâs from the free. Beckham getting a red and the indescribable joy of England having a goal ruled out. And then the tension of the peno shoot out. I still remember our table erupting in cheers when we saw Batty walking up to take the peno and the reaction of the English lads around us. We knew. They knew. Batty missed.
And the highlights
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If anyone can put up the Kimmage article from the Sindo today it would be appreciated
Cc @Fagan_ODowd