The current rivalry between Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood appears to be heating up, as we saw at the Arizona WGC Match Play semi final back in February. It got me thinking about great sporting rivalries, of which there have been many examples over the years: McEnroe vs Borg; Fischer vs Spassky; Ali vs Frazier; Senna vs Prost: Celtic vs Rangers to name a few.

 

Another year over then, and we have all survived the festive season. For some, the hardest part of Christmas is behind us, thankfully.

 

I was saddened to learn two weeks ago that Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight boxing champion, had died of liver cancer. It was an ignominious end for a man who fought all his life, but who couldn’t beat the disease which took him from us.

On the sage advice of someone I respect, and who is infinitely better placed to judge all things golf more intelligently than myself, I recently read a copy of Mark Frost’s excellent book, The Greatest Game Ever Played, which is also a Disney movie.

Sportsmanship and gamesmanship take many forms. We all remember Diego Maradonna’s "hand of God" in the 1986 football World Cup. Tennis players have been guilty too, employing delaying or distracting tactics to put their opponents off. Rugby players inhabit the dark world of the scrum, where sly violence is unseen by the referee. There are very few disciplines in fact where it doesn’t happen.

Tim Pettifer can only describe his last trip away as...supernatural.

“It’s a dream come true,” Craig Hinton says of Open qualification.
In the first of our blogs by the Oxfordshire’s Craig Hinton, he describes how he broke into golf and what it feels like to have qualified for The Open Championship.

Robert Frost once famously said, in a line that I intend to make my own when the time is right, that a bank manager is someone who lends you an umbrella in fair weather, then asks for it back when it's raining.

At this time of year we Spring Forward; a quaint phrase that someone once coined referring to the advent of British Summertime. I would say that they dreamed it up, but they probably weren't in bed long enough.

Round about this time of year my wife and I leave behind the snow, ice, fog and incessant rain and head off to a historic European city for a long weekend, to be greeted by identical weather.

We have had a few unexpected expenses of late, so when the missus said “let’s go Dutch” I was overcome by her generosity, as the future bill was immediately halved in my consciousness.

However, what she meant in fact was that we should visit the lowlands of Holland, which is how we ended up in Amsterdam.