Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in Global Golf Post’s international edition on Monday. It is reprised today for our GGP+ subscribers.
Monday 19th September, no ordinary day, was when the pomp and ceremony for which the United Kingdom is known was demonstrated to an extraordinary level. On that day the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II marked the conclusion of the most extraordinary period in recent British politics, which had included the appointment of Liz Truss, a new prime minister, 13 days earlier, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the much-loved and longest-serving monarch in our history, 48 hours later and the immediate succession of her oldest son, Charles, as King Charles III.
More than 100 kings, queens, presidents and prime ministers arrived for the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, including the king of Malaysia, whose full name reads Al-Sultan Abdullah Ri’ayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah Shah ibni Almarhum Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Al-Musta’in Billah. Imagine having to announce that on the first tee of a pro-am. Nearly 30 million in the U.K. watched the day’s proceedings, and more people watched it around the world than there were in the world when she began her reign in 1952.
I was not one of them. I had booked a golf lesson weeks earlier, and early that morning I jumped into my car and drove west, away from London, watching traffic that included 10 ambulances heading in to the capital.
Usually when I am driving to a golf lesson, I rehearse in my head the things I was taught at the last lesson. Stand nearer the ball. Move my hands forward at the address. Straighten my back. Don’t take the club inside the line on the way back. Most of all, shorten my swing and slow it down. Neil, my coach, often said to me: “There is never any likelihood that you will swing too short and too slow, is there?”
There was little golf being played in the United Kingdom last Monday as many golf clubs closed as a mark of respect. For the royal golf clubs, bearing the prefix “royal” meant they had to close. Other clubs did not. Some stayed open, and some recorded record green fee income.
This time though my mind was elsewhere, concentrating on what was going on in London and, perhaps even more so, the recent sad news that Eddie Butler, a journalist friend and colleague, had died while on a trek to Machu Picchu in Peru to raise money for a prostate cancer charity. The queen was 96 and in failing health. Eddie was 65 and considered to be fit and strong. I had written about him when he played rugby for Wales, and when he joined a rival newspaper later he sat alongside me in the press box at rugby matches. He morphed into television where his distinctive voice and crisp turn of phrase found a natural home and delighted many with his commentaries on those tribal rugby matches among the countries of these islands. He was a golfer, though I had never played with him, and a member of a club in south Wales part-founded by Charles Rolls of Rolls-Royce fame. He was a gentleman.
As I drove I listened on my car radio to the solemn events of state, learning that Windsor Castle is the largest inhabited castle in the world, covering 13 acres or 22 football pitches, and has been the home of the reigning monarch for 1,000 years; that the BBC, the host broadcaster, had 213 cameras in Westminster Abbey alone; that the Lord Chamberlain, a man named Lord Park, would break a white wand and put it on the queen’s coffin to mark the end of his service to the queen. I heard that the Earl Marshal, the man who held the responsibility of organising the royal funerals, coronations and state openings of parliament, was the 18th Duke of Norfolk, an ex-racing driver, who lives in Arundel Castle in Sussex, not Norfolk, and that some of the music was written by a 68-year-old lady titled the Master of the Queen’s Music (now the King’s Music), an appointment first made by King Charles I in the early years of the 17th century.
There was little golf being played in the United Kingdom last Monday as many golf clubs closed as a mark of respect. For the royal golf clubs, bearing the prefix “royal” meant they had to close. Other clubs did not. Some stayed open, and some recorded record green fee income.
And then on Tuesday evening, 24 hours after the funeral, I went to my son’s house. A former Royal Marine, he has military traditions in his heart. Briefly he had been an equerry to Prince Philip, who had been commander in chief of the Royal Marines. My son had been surprised on Sunday evening when I told him that I was going for a golf lesson on such a momentous day.
Now, two days later, he turned away from his computer, looking stern, and said: “I hope you did something appropriate to the queen on Monday.” “I did, I did,” I replied. “I watched a recording of almost the whole day’s proceedings when I got home that night.” This was greeted with silence, neither approving nor disagreeing, though his body language led me to believe it was more to the latter.
I thought about this exchange with him as I drove home along a winding road at the bottom of a verdant valley in Oxfordshire. I thought about the words of John Updike in his review in The New Yorker of Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom.” Updike said “there is much wit and good will in Golf in the Kingdom,” citing this particular passage: “We are spread wide as we play, then brought to a tiny place.”
Should I have canceled my golf lesson to pay more attention to this historic event? … Now I am not so sure.
“[This] beautifully describes both golf and life,” Updike wrote, continuing: “and why not make the world more of a golf course, where our acts would take validity from within, and we would replace our divots in apology for each blow, and joy would attach to the leisurely walking, the in-between times? There is a goodness in the experience of golf that may well be as Mr. Murphy would have it, a pitha, ‘a place where something breaks into our workaday world and bothers us forever more with the hints it gives.’ ”
I thought about what Matthew Parris, a columnist in The Times of London, had written on Wednesday, two days after the funeral, expressing a view that undoubtedly had some traction for others. “The gathering of so many of my fellow citizens to see the coffin and pay respects is a beautiful and moving thing and in no way would I diminish it,” Parris wrote. “But it was not the Queen, it was a coffin and she was not in it: she had gone.”
Should I have canceled my golf lesson to pay more attention to this historic event? At the time I thought I was right to drive to Newport for my lesson. I was looking forward to it. It had been booked weeks earlier. Now I am not so sure. On Tuesday evening I didn’t know whether I was right or wrong, and now, almost a week later, I still don’t know.