Golf

1

Anyone a golfer out there???

2

You are an idiot

Please dont start such ambiguous threads. Whats next? The “Soccer” thread? or the “anyone like sport out there” thread? fook sake

Here call this number 4102316. I think you two should meet up.

Amateur

3

Hey ball ox, thats quite a harsh welcome to a new member.

New members, please note ball ox is likely to send you abusive private messages. We are monitoring his pms on an ongoing basis!

TW, I used to play golf casually but I was scheidt at it. Then I came home to Wexford one weekend to find that my Dad had given away my golf clubs to my uncle. Lovely. I havent missed it though I must admit.

4

Never really played it myself. I’ve given it a couple of attempts over the years but I’m pure useless at it.

5

Tried learning this summer and kinda enjoyed it but was all kinds of crap. Was naturally able to pick up a few sports as a young lad but hurling and golf are a couple of bogey ones for me.

It’s pure difficult to come back to too. Did exams in September so hadn’t played the few weeks before and after said exams. Went down the range then and was hitting the mat and slicing and topping etc. Very frustrating. Would prefer to get back into soccer or tennis to be honest.

6

[quote=Bandage ]
Hey ball ox, thats quite a harsh welcome to a new member.

New members, please note ball ox is likely to send you abusive private messages. We are monitoring his pms on an ongoing basis!

TW, I used to play golf casually but I was scheidt at it. Then I came home to Wexford one weekend to find that my Dad had given away my golf clubs to my uncle. Lovely. I havent missed it though I must admit.

Ya im from good aul wexford aswell! Hey ox ball go fuck urself ya prick

7

Yeah its a tough aul sport alright,what handicap were you off? The ryder cup was class

8

[quote=tiger woods ]

thought i could smell another bogger

9

Ryder Cup rock Clarke resists sorrow and the pity

Donald McRae
November 28, 2006 10:20 AM

Darren Clarke rocks back in his chair and nods gently at the strangely comforting thought that we are rattling through the last days now. Another year is hurtling towards its end with the inevitable rush of school concerts and Christmas parties, award ceremonies and annual retrospectives. And even though the gleaming spikes in his hair are so proudly tended that they catch the light while he talks, Clarke shoots out the knowing look of an almost middle-aged family man.

“There’s no stopping it,” he says with a faint grin. “Anyway, it’ll be a bit different this time, what with me being a more hands-on father now.”

This has been a year like no other for Clarke, a brute of a time which he had long known was coming. That pitiless knowledge, of his wife Heather’s eventual death from cancer, had given him months and even years to prepare himself. But there is a terrible difference between imagining and actually witnessing the loss of the person you love most.

Heather Clarke died at 2.15am on Sunday August 13 at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. She was 39 years old. Her death came the day before her husband turned 38.

Fifteen weeks later Clarke admits that “I have no desire to play golf right now. I need to be away from the game for a while because, mentally, I can’t focus on golf. I just want to make sure my boys are OK this Christmas; that seems much more important than golf.” With two sons, Tyrone and Conor, aged eight and six, Clarke has withdrawn from his last three events of the year. “I need to go to the boys’ school plays and all that stuff. It’s their first Christmas without their mum and I need them to have as good a time as possible under the circumstances.”

Those circumstances were particularly raw in September when, six weeks after Heather’s death, Clarke played such an emotionally charged role in Europe’s Ryder Cup victory. The golf produced by him, as he won his three matches, was as exemplary as it was inspirational. Yet a dramatic sporting story was engulfed by an outpouring of public feeling for Clarke.

“I’m this Northern Irishman from County Tyrone,” he says ruefully, “and the way we deal with things is to get a bit drunk and not really express any proper emotion. It’s meant to stay inside and be dealt with in private. Hugging and crying is just not our way. But on the Sunday, on the 16th hole at the K Club, I couldn’t help myself.”

After Clarke’s singles victory over Zach Johnson his tears of suffering and relief, courage and helplessness seemed to define the human condition as much as it did a sporting occasion. Whether or not it is right to foist our more sentimental perceptions on to an individual golfer, it is clear how heavily such public empathy now weighs on Clarke.

“It’s been very difficult to bare my soul. I think grieving is a very private thing and unfortunately I’ve had to do a lot of it in public. It came to a head against Zach. I had a horrible little putt about 2 feet downhill to win but, when he saw my emotions churning up, he just gave it to me. It was a huge gesture.”

Clarke prefers to focus on such small acts of personal kindness rather than the unsettling mass sympathy that is symbolised by him being a favourite to win BBC Sports Personality of the Year. “It would be great if I’d just won a major and was given Sports Personality of the Year. But what’s happening doesn’t sit comfortably with me. A lot of people believe I deserve it for what I’ve been through but a big part of me feels very different. I don’t want to throw people’s votes back in their faces but the larger part of me thinks I shouldn’t even be in contention.”

The process of publicising a new book might add to his difficulties but Clarke can at least wield a certain control over such proceedings. He remembers being interviewed on the eve of the Ryder Cup by Sky’s Tim Barter and, while in charge of his own emotions, “when I looked across Barty had tears in his eyes. So I stopped the interview and said, ‘Barty, it’s supposed to be me that’s crying, not you.’”

Such a reaction, ironically, will deepen public affection for Clarke. Yet at the opening hole of his first Ryder Cup match on the Friday morning he felt so overwhelmed that “I was worried about even making contact with the ball”. Yet Clarke finally stepped up and “absolutely nutted it”. The ball flew straight and true 340 yards down the middle of the fairway - to the joy of the gallery and the bewilderment of his caddie, Billy Foster, and playing partner, Lee Westwood, who knew how torn up he was on the inside.

“I’ll never be more challenged than I was then. No matter what I eventually do, even if I walk to the last hole of a major with a one-shot lead, nothing will come close to that intensity. After Heather’s death I can’t think of anything more difficult to face. So, if I ever find myself in that position at a major, I’ll remember how I was tested at the utmost level and still managed to perform.”

There was such conviction in Clarke as he faced a 15ft putt at that 1st hole that “I thought there’s no point even reading this one. All I’ve got to do is hit it. It’s going in. It’s hard to explain because, if you’d told me on the night that Heather passed away that the following month I would play the first Ryder Cup hole like this, I would’ve said ‘don’t be ridiculous’. But it was like Heather was watching me. I could have stepped up to that putt with a driver in my left hand and it would’ve gone in.”

Life is now a less certain daily struggle and Clarke reveals the ache that can surface during otherwise mundane moments. At the Ryder Cup a bleak signifier of Heather’s absence could be seen in an empty row of hangers, meant for her clothes, dangling from a metal rail. Such ordinary reminders are still more striking at home, even if Clarke uses humour to deflect the pain. “I can’t help thinking of her every time I switch on a computer because there is not one machine in our house which does not bring up Net-A-Porter [the expensive designer fashion website]. That was where she spent most of my money! No matter how ill she got it didn’t stop Heather shopping.”

In a similar vein Clarke marvels at his failure to get “properly drunk” at the K Club, even though he consumed “at least 24 pints of Guinness that Sunday night”. He also talks about the new year and the old yearning for it to mark a fresh start. It seems a chance to begin again, even though the slate can never just be wiped clear with a simple click of a calendar year. And grief, of all the human stains, is the slowest to fade - which means we keep coming back to Heather’s death.

“The boys had a little goodbye with their mum,” Clarke says, “but it was very difficult because they’d become so used to her going in and out of hospital. They had seen her in intensive care last year when she was in a bad way with tubes coming out of her but she came home from that - just as she did when the previous chemo drugs had had an adverse effect on her. So, this time, when I had to tell them their mum wasn’t ever going to get out of hospital, it was a very hard thing for me to do - and for them to hear.”

Clarke pauses and looks down. His eyes are clear, however, when he lifts his head. “I like to think my kids are as normal as they could be and they still talk about their mum on a regular basis. And while I really don’t know how long it will take us to get through this, at the minute we’re all doing OK. I’m going to get back playing golf in January and we’ll have to find a new routine together then. It will be another challenge but, like now, we’ll just deal with things as best we can.”

10

Darren Clarke is a all round Legend,Fair play to him for playing in the ryder cup so soon after losing his wife.I was up at the practise days and he stopped at every hole for about 15 minutes signing autographs as was the rest of the team,Pity the Americans couldnt do the same.