At the end of another blisteringly hot and sticky day at Saujana Golf and Country Club, I’ve just been sitting down with Miguel Angel Jimenez, the fifty five year old Spaniard, who was dubbed by an American journalist as the Greatest Showman in Golf. Slightly hyperbolic perhaps but he is very good value. He’s the oldest winner on the European Tour and also has more wins over the age of forty than anyone else. Married to a charming Austrian lady they have homes in Vienna (Susan’s home), Malaga (from whence he comes) and the Dominican Republic, where he bases himself for his frequent highly successful assaults on the Champions Tour in America…..that’s the one for the Over 50s. He’s playing his 699th tournament on the European Tour this week and will play his 700th at The Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland in July, for which he qualifies as the reigning British Senior Open Champion. The record number of tournaments played is held by Sam Torrance at 706. Jimenez has it very carefully mapped out how he will pass that number next year. Once he has the record, he says he will happily retire to the Old Farts tour where he will no doubt continue to win millions of dollars more. Miguel plays for fun and it shows. He invariably has a large Havana on the go, and a bottle of Rioja won’t be far away. He says so many of the young professionals of today have got it all wrong. They’re playing, not for the love of the game, but to make money. As he says, if he didn’t play golf what would he do? He loves to drive his Ferrari (no doubt very fast), but having started life as a caddie in Spain, golf is the only thing he really knows. He is the living embodiment of someone who just loves what he does and is therefore highly successful at it, almost without trying.
The first time I met Miguel was at the, much lamented, Benson and Hedges International at St Mellion in Cornwall in the mid ’90s. His English then was almost incomprehensible (it’s not an easy listen now!) but he was doing well in the tournament and my BBC Radio producer had detailed me to get an interview with him after his round. Standing behind the 18th green watching him finish, I saw him dump his second shot into the water in front of the green. He went to the drop zone leaving himself a pitch of 60 or 70 yards over the water to a tight pin. He then proceeded to put three more balls in the water before eventually playing the perfect shot. After that I still had to interview him. He was full of humour and just said “it’s my frog shot!”. Being an incredible shotmaker and a highly talented, but stubborn player, he was determined to play the right shot.
I’m conscious that this is becoming a bit golf specific for a general audience. So let me regurgitate a couple of relevant quotes that I read recently. Amelia Earhart, the incredibly brave aviation pioneer who was the first woman (and second person) to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, said “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward”. How very true.
The other one I like (having recently watched Dirty Dancing again), which is also relevant to my earlier golfing comments, is from someone called Satchel Paige; “Work like you don’t need the money, Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching”. Good advice but quite hard to follow on all counts, I’d say.
2DtC
ADayInTheStrifeOf 