It may well be, as I near the age where "ripe" and "old" will become the required adjectives, that I am one of the dwindling band of people who played golf with the previous Irish winner of the Open championship, Fred Daly.
Fred won the Open at Hoylake the year before I was born.
In the early 1970s, after I left Queen's, I was attempting to earn a living from writing, editing and cartooning in Belfast. Starved of my cheap university golf (seven shillings and sixpence every Wednesday at Royal County Down), I joined the Belfast Journalists' Golf Society and, after a while, became the secretary/treasurer/organiser. Our president was Fred Daly.
He would play regularly with us after being driven to the course by his pal, Bob, so Fred could indulge in a little sweet sherry at the end of the round. He didn't drink. Just a little sweet sherry - which wasn't drinking, we were told, but for which he had, sadly, an increasingly great thirst.
When under the influence of a few sherries the conversation would inevitably turn to the miserable recompense he received for winning the Open - 150 of those old sterling pounds, to be precise. Today, because of sponsorship, advertising and the like, a victory like that guarantees a comfortable life thereafter. In those days that was far from the case, so Fred - and many other top players - never enjoyed the lifestyle which has become standard issue for today's champions.
He wasn't a large man. His most distinctive feature were his arms, which were about the size and girth of most people's legs. He had a habit of greeting his friends and acquaintances by gripping their upper arm and squeezing. You could tell if Fred was in the clubhouse by seeing the people leaving with lifeless arms hanging immobile at their sides.
He played with clubs longer than standard and had a flat, unusual but simple swing that was dependent on his arm strength. When I was leaving Belfast for Kildare in the mid-1970s he asked me to call in and see him.
He had a farewell present. It was one of his own drivers. He explained that he had ordered three from a club-maker, quite forgetting that he was giving up tournament golf, and it had lain unused in a cupboard for years. It was a lovely piece of persimmon. As it was longer than standard it might suit my 6'7" frame, he said. Well, it did in length, but the extra, extra, extra-stiff shaft proved to be a bit of a problem. It felt like swinging a railway sleeper. He would have needed to donate his arms as well.
He was kind. He heard I was off to England for a holiday to play a little golf. As I wasn't a member of a golf club in Northern Ireland, he gave me a letter, on his own notepaper, rather like a passport, saying that M. Turner, the bearer, was known to Fred Daly and would anyone reading the letter please look upon him favourably. Over the years it got me into many golf clubs to play, many of which forwent the usual green fee. Did it ever get better than that? At the monthly journalists' golf society outings we fell into the habit of playing together at the end of the field. His powers had, obviously, waned, his putting was somewhat jerky, but he was still a real joy to watch.
He was a shotmaker and could pretty well use any club for any shot. No pacing off distances and consulting the guidebook, just a quick look and hit and on we go. Three hours would be a long time for a round of golf in those days.
In the fantasy world in which I lived then, I thought he was happy to play with me each month because I was one of the lower handicaps in the society. It turned out the truth was somewhat more pedestrian.
"I really like playing golf with you, Martyn," he said one day. "You're the only person I know who is a worse putter than me."
But, even in his late sixties, he could work magic on the ball. I saw him bend a medium iron right to left around a tree and land the ball 10 feet from the hole. When I said it was a wonderful shot, he said he had not been quite sure which way to send it. "Go on, show me," I said and he bent one left to right around the tree, to land right beside the first ball.
We asked him once what it felt like to play in his prime. "Back then, if you had put an ordinary hall door 200 yards down the fairway, not only could I have driven the ball through it, it would never have occurred to me that I might miss." Perhaps we never saw how good he was, or gave him the recognition he deserved.(He also had that Northern, Presbyterian suspicion of fame.) He was 36 when he won the Open, and there had been no major tournaments played during the second World War, when he probably was in his prime.
He told a story, someone told a story, someone made up a story, whatever, that Fred was sitting in Balmoral golf club one day enjoying a few sweet sherries with a bunch of golfing pals. One of them was called to the phone and returned a while later with a very large smile on his face.
"What's up" they asked."That phone call", the man said, "was to tell me I've just been selected for the Walker Cup team".
"That's fantastic," said the crowd. "Where is it being played?"
"Hoylake," said the man. Then he paused and looked at Fred. "Did you ever play Hoylake, Fred?"
He became a patron of the Dublin Journalists' Golf Society as well and it was they who brought him back to Hoylake in the 1980s. The captain turned out, in his hunting-pink jacket, and the committee and posh gentlemen were as excited as children to meet a champion who won the Open on their course. Two Open champions we have now: one who will be rich and famous for the rest of his life, and one who worked in the pro's shop at Balmoral Golf Club outside Belfast; but both, to the true golf fan, touched by the gods.