3. Welcome to the club
The man who gave me my career, the 1990 Open Championship, Datsun Sunny debacles, and a depressingly enduring tale of greed in golf
Thirty five years ago this week, I was two months into my first job in journalism as Editorial Assistant on Golf Illustrated Weekly magazine. Nineteen years old and fresh out of school, I drove a dilapidated brown Datsun Sunny right across London each day to my dream job on the Isle of Dogs.
I wanted to write but had enough self awareness to appreciate my chances of being taken on by anyone as a film critic, political commentator or picture by-line columnist were slim to emaciated. Sport was all I knew enough about, particularly golf and football, so I sent hand-written letters to all the golf and football magazines, of which there were many more than there are now.
Golf Illustrated was first published in 1890 and became a powerhouse publication during the early years of the game when its popularity first soared. The title had been through lean times but it had endured and been recently relaunched as a weekly covering pro tournaments and news. John Barton was the magazine’s Deputy Editor at the time.
Prior to joining Golf Illustrated Weekly, JB, as he is known, had been a senior editor on Golf World, the bigger sister monthly magazine which was selling over 100,000 copies a month. Both titles were published by the New York Times Group and run out of a low, glass-fronted office in the giant building site that was London’s Docklands.
It was my extreme good fortune that the magazine, in its new weekly guise, was hiring, and more so that working there was someone willing to take a punt on a totally untried teenager. JB, the magazine’s creative spark, persuaded the late Neil Elsey, its editor, to give me the opportunity that gave me my career.
I started work on my 19th birthday. It was a Monday, so press day, which meant a 6am start. I wore a Pringle sweater, which I’d bought after being offered the job, and slacks, and drove across the sleeping city for an hour and a half in the pre-dawn darkness.
John, Neil and other members of the small editorial team showed great kindness to and patience with the eager, earnest, gauche, accident prone, lambswool-wearing youth in their midst, enabling me to get my first by-lines and learn lessons about writing and editing that I still draw on today.
I worked at the magazine for 10 months and got to write features and cover a few tournaments on the European Tour. The highlight was reporting on the 1990 Open Championship at St Andrews, which was won by Nick Faldo. It was the Englishman’s second major of the year, having already taken the Masters. I walked the entire third round inside the ropes with the leaders, Faldo and Greg Norman, then the world No.1. I watched Faldo fillet the Shark for the first but certainly not the last time.
That week I got my press armband signed by Arnold Palmer, who was making his first farewell to the Open, bet on Faldo and won £120 from Jeremy Chapman, the golf correspondent for Sporting Life, and put words to the moment the Pringle-clad killer from Welwyn Garden City confirmed his status as the best golfer on the planet.
It was the start of a new decade and the beginning of the last pre-Tiger era of dominance. It was also, without doubt, the best week of my 19-year-old life.
The game story I wrote from the press tent next to the first tee at the Old Course still ranks as one of the best pieces I’ve ever written. I’d only got to do it because JB had to been forced to miss the tournament and recommended I be given the chance.
It was JB, ultimately, who persuaded me to take up the place I’d won at Liverpool University rather than stay on the promise of getting to travel to more golf tournaments, including the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island. When I finally took his advice, he ensured I was commissioned for stories and invited back into work as a freelancer during the holidays.
Not long afterwards, John crossed the Atlantic to work for Golf Digest in New York. His writing graced the magazine for many years.
“Every one of the pieces he ever wrote was special,” wrote Jerry Tarde, the magazine’s legendary Editor-in-Chief, “from travelogues in North Korea, Moscow and Bhutan to an extraordinary profile of the cross-handed golfer Papwa Sewgolum in South Africa.”
‘My Last Round’, John Barton’s story for Golf Digest, is one of the most poignant, beautiful pieces of golf writing you’ll ever read. It describes his start in the game and his end after being told, not long after his 50th birthday, that he had Parkinson’s.
In early May last year, a package arrived at the house containing copies of Golf Illustrated Weekly from 1990, including a few I had written stories in. The package was sent by Paul Hebdon, who is a collector of golf books and magazines. I’d made contact with Paul after he’d posted pictures of these particular magazines on Instagram. I wanted to know whether he’d ever come across a copy of the issue on the 1990 Open.
By total coincidence, JB came to visit that very same day. He now practices as a psychotherapist, he paints striking portraits in thick impasto, and he continues to live with Parkinson’s.
John was holidaying in Devon with his partner for a few days and was determined to see RNGC and play the round that would secure his membership of the club and member’s badge.
I cut the greens and got the course ready as best I could. The winter had been dismal and the spring late in coming so RNGC was soft and a little scruffy for my liking. We played a few holes and JB explained how difficult it is with Parkinson’s to find the balance required to swing the club properly.
He was encouraged by hitting some nice shots. We laughed as we remembered those days in the Docklands. The Ryder Cup match against Golf World. The party in St Andrews to celebrate the magazine’s centenary, which degenerated into a late night game of trouserless football. The time the Datsun Sunny broke down in the Blackwall Tunnel and caused a huge traffic jam that was covered by Capital Radio’s Flying Eye. JB told me that he saw something in that scrawly, handwritten letter.
Later that evening, JB texted me: “What a great day I had today… I am a little high on my medication but just feel so moved and joyful about today and glad to have played a small part in your success.”
A great writer but an even better man, he set an example that I have always endeavoured to follow by whenever possible giving young writers opportunities. As I’ve said them all over the years: “Someone gave me a chance once.” That someone was John Barton.
Welcoming a new member to RNGC is always special. But when that new member is someone who made such a profound difference to my life, and at such an important moment, it’s very sweet indeed.
Footnote
One of the copies of the magazine Paul Hebdon sent me was published 35 years ago this week. Nick Faldo is on the cover, wearing attire from his signature range with Pringle. I’m fairly sure that I wore a dark blue version of this sweater on my first day at Golf Illustrated Weekly.
Inside is a news item on Christy O’Connor, the Irish golfer whose striped 2-iron across the water on the 18th at the Belfry in the previous year’s Ryder Cup not only helped Europe to retain the trophy, but became an instantly iconic moment in the story of what is now the biggest event in golf.
A few months after sending his ball into the yawn of the grandstands and then to within a few feet of the hole, O’Connor had sold the 2-iron for £50,000 and donated the money to a hospice in the west of Ireland.
He said he hoped that Ryder Cup players in the future would not compete for money. “Any golfer can appreciate the real pleasure of just playing in the match,” he reasoned.
This week, Rick Broadbent interviewed Luke Donald, Europe’s Ryder Cup captain, in The Times. Discussion inevitably turned to the matter of the US players being paid to play in this year’s Ryder Cup matches for the first time in history. The 12 members of Keegan Bradley’s team will each receive $500,000, including a $200,000 stipend they can use in any way they see fit.
I found this passage particularly telling:
Last year, Paul Hebdon also become a member of RNGC, the golf club in the orchard. He played in the third RNGC Invitational in June where the bar bill was not quite of Team Europe proportions but sizeable nonetheless. Paul arrived with his wife and son not knowing anyone and left with a bunch of new friends. He will be returning in 2025 and has not asked to be paid.
He is still looking for that copy of Golf Illustrated Weekly from July 1990.
That's fantastic, Dan. I began writing for them a few years after they had moved to Peterborough - Golf World, Today's Golfer, Fore - which were all owned by EMAP. I never knew John, but read his stuff a lot and heard so much about him over the years. I remember reading his 'My Last Round' piece with tears in my eyes. Very glad to see he's still able to swing it, if only occasionally.
I remember meeting you for lunch up at Docklands, having a couple of pints, going to the bookies and you then went back to work to write about golf. I thought it was the coolest job in the world.