B good competitive frame of mind, to stay focussed
throughout the round and to control my ball
flight.” Alas, he closed with a 74.
Goss also uncovered the fact that Joshua’s granny
was raised in Evanston, where Northwestern is located. As for the lad’s own golfing credentials, he won
last year’s Scottish Boys’ Stroke Play championship.
An American spectator pointed to the 18th green
at Castle Stuart after it had been vacated by Alex
Salmond, Luke Donald and a couple of Japanese
dignitaries. “Your First Minister,” came the visitor’s
damming observation, “is a spike-twister.”
As labels go, “spike-twister” is hardly the best
for a man looking for support as he strives to bring
independence to a land of golfing fanatics.
Probably because the pro-am day was a wet one,
Salmond was wearing old fashioned spiked shoes.
These worked in tandem with an idiosyncratic shuffling of feet at the address to cut up the turf.
On a more positive note, Pat Goss, coach to
Luke Donald and Chicago’s Northwestern University, said that he would have no problem in turning
Salmond into a better player. Though not too interested in the First Minister’s political stance, Goss
was more than a little concerned with his golfing
set-up. He noted how he addresses his shots with
his right shoulder higher than the left – and with
the ball too far back in his stance.
Starting with Louis Oosthuizen two weeks
ago, Pete Cowen has visited Lytham and St Annes
with each of his top students. He shepherded Lee
Westwood and Graeme McDowell around the links
in mid-week and Darren Clarke Sunday.
“They’re all playing great,” said Cowen, before
focusing on Clarke. “Darren is starting to realise
what he’s done wrong all year. He has been trying
to live up to his Champion Golfer of the Year tag
every week instead of just being Darren.
“Other champions, like Paul Lawrie and Oost-
huizen, told him that things didn’t work that way
but that didn’t make any difference. He’s just too
much of a perfectionist for his own good.”
In Cowen’s opinion, Clarke could win again. “He
can still play well enough, he’s still got the talent
and he’s still got the desire.”
Els would seem to have been entertaining
much the same thoughts. When asked to name a
dark horse for the title, the former Open and US
Open champion wasted no time in opting for the
defending champion.
Goss was doing some scouting on behalf of
Northwestern University – both in Sweden and in
Scotland – before he teamed up with Donald at
Castle Stuart.
While in Scotland, he signed up Joshua Jamie-son, a St Andrews’ player with a remarkable golfing
pedigree. Jamieson’s great, great, great, grandfather, William Ayton, was a founder of the St Andrews
Golf Club in 1843; David Ayton, one of William’s sons,
not only finished third in the Open but caddied on a
regular basis for the legendary Young Tom Morris.
Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves,
the best-selling tome on punctuation, is never
going to feel entirely comfortable at this particular
Open venue where she will serve in her usual role
as a feature writer. Her problem will lie with the
name of the place – Lytham and St Annes.
According to Dr Steven Reid, who has just
written the excellent and intricately researched
Bobby’s Open, the venue had a perfectly good apos-
www.globalgolfpost.com
JULY 16, 2012
trophe when it was founded in February 1886 as
Lytham and St Anne’s Golf Club.
“The apostrophe,” explains Reid, who doubles as
the R&A’s Chief Medical Officer, “persists through
the early years, so it would appear that the answer
is clear, that the apostrophe should be there.”
Apparently, there was a muddying of the wa-
ters in 1926 when the club was afforded its royal
status. In the relevant letter from Whitehall, one
W.G. Allen wrote to say that “His Majesty has been
graciously pleased to command that the Club shall
henceforth be known as the “Royal Lytham and St
Annes Golf Club.”
It seems that when Bobby Jones, in penning a
letter to the club in 1960, similarly referred to St
Annes rather than St Anne’s, that that settled the
issue. The apostrophe was no more.
cure currency services) with the idea of helping the
professionals to get more out of their prize-money.
Where banks can take up to 3 per-cent of a
player’s winnings in transferring it from Euros to
Sterling, Satworldwide will provide the same service as the banks but for a whole lot less.
Lewis Atkins, Ernie Els’ right-hand man in the UK,
has hit on the right business idea for the moment. At
a time when no-one trusts the banks, he has joined
forces with a company by name of Satworldwide (se-
One of the main topics of conversation going the
rounds early last week was whether or not Scot-
land’s Andy Murray would have done better to steer
clear of the tears after losing to Roger Federer.
Colin Montgomerie was among those who were
sympathetic, admitting that he had found himself in
much the same state when he came close in majors.
