The Loop
Muirfield members 'making pillocks of themselves...more entertaining' than British Open they've lost
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Stories of interest you might have missed…
Muirfield Golf Club, as we know, has been stricken from the British Open rota for its resistance to opening its membership to women. Marina Hyde of the Guardian in this column has some fun with the club and its biannual discussions on whether to relent on this issue.
“A personal highlights reel from last time around would include interventions from Peter Alliss, who appeared to regard the Muirfield facilities as so superlative that they were worth entering into a high-stakes bargain for,” she writes. “‘If someone wants to join,’ he mused, ‘well, you’d better get married to someone who’s a member.’ I don’t know about you, but I think if I were to enter into a marriage of state, I’d require in return something like dibs on the Habsburg empire, as opposed to the chance of a silent G&T in the 19th with a man who switches channel when Cialis adverts come on…
“Indeed, the good gentlemen of Muirfield should be under absolutely no illusion: watching their twice-yearly insistence on making pillocks of themselves is a hundred times more entertaining sport than anything that could be viewed on their course. If they feel they must persist in this particularly savage brand of self-satire, then it is not for us to impede their journey.”
Rod Pampling's wife, sports psychologist one and the same
Australian Rod Pampling unwittingly got more than a girl friend, and future wife, when he started dating Angela, a clinical psychologist.
“They met on a blind date in Ipswich, Australia, nearly 20 years ago,” the Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson writes. “She was working with mental health patients at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. Pampling had just returned from playing the mini-tours in America with limited success.
“They kept their careers separate from their courtship, though it was inevitable that husband and wife would make time for doctor and patient.
“It wasn't as simple as it might seem.
“‘She didn't want to, but I said, ‘I need help,’ Pampling said.”
Angela became his sports psychologist as well as his wife.