It was all too easy to get carried away on the media day ahead of the Trust Golf Women’s Scottish Open back in June. The Dumbarnie Links looked exquisite under the Scottish sun and Dr Prin Singhanart – the physicist and technology innovator who is sponsoring her first Scottish Open this week – was speaking of her plans “to make the impossible possible.”
Owner of 20 different companies in her native Thailand, Dr Prin has a vision of turning her tournament into a major, and of upping the prize money – it currently stands at $1.5 million — to a dramatic degree. “This is the home of golf and I would like to see the Women’s Scottish Open as a major with the same prize money or more than the other majors,” she said. “I don’t want it to just be another event.”
No less an eye-opener is her belief that she and her team of 9,000 technicians and assorted robots, will soon have the necessary data to cut the time it takes for a golfer to make the transition from beginner to card-carrying tour professional. Currently it averages out to seven years. She believes she can reduce it to two.
Even when it comes to a player with no talent – here she cited herself – she thinks she can make things happen a whole lot faster. And the reason she so wants to succeed on this front is because she has a son with whom she wants to be able to play golf for the rest of her life. “I wouldn’t be able to do this with tennis or football,” she said.
If there was a touch of skepticism making itself felt on the Dumbarnie terrace that day, I had this fleeting thought that Dr Prin’s wish “to make the impossible possible” was maybe not so crazy after all.
Going back to the 1970s, it took one man – David Foster, the chairman of Colgate-Palmolive and a man who was besotted with the best women golfers of the day – to work wonders for the status of the LPGA Tour. He did as much by introducing the most lavish of majors to the US schedule in 1972, the Colgate-Dinah Shore, and playing it in Palm Springs, California.
“I had never played in front of galleries that large,” said Jane Blalock, the first winner. “You talk about putting women’s golf on the map; that one event single-handedly changed the face of women’s golf and the way the public perceived it.
“It’s hard to describe how big that event was and how important it was.”
You doubt that too many people had much faith in what Foster had in mind at the start. But it worked, and how.
Dinah Shore apart, luminaries such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope turned out for the pro-ams and attended the tournament banquet while, on one night of the believe-it-or-not variety, Frank Sinatra serenaded the diners.
The course is 6,600 yards overall, with sea views from 14 of the 18 holes. The third, fifth, 17th and possibly the 11th will be drivable par-4s for the women, if the good weather stays in place.
Back in June at Dumbarnie Links, it was Paul Bush from Visit Scotland – that wing of the Scottish Government who do so much to make the most of Scotland’s golf heritage – who had the next say. He, certainly, was not about to dismiss Dr Prin’s ideas out of hand. He hoped that her “visionary approach” would help with the cause of gender balance, and that the Trust Golf Women’s Scottish Open would “create some great golfing heroes.”
On to David Scott, the course manager, who put words to the view, which stretches from an elevated first tee down a wide green fairway flanked by wispy golden rough and featuring two imaginative sets of unrelated bunkers. Not too far beyond, there is a stunning stretch of the Firth of Forth.
The course is 6,600 yards overall, with sea views from 14 of the 18 holes. The third, fifth, 17th and possibly the 11th will be drivable par-4s for the women, if the good weather stays in place.
The Links, a Clive Clark design which had the seal of approval from Sandy Lyle just a day or so ahead of the golf writers’ visit, stretch over 350 acres of land which was given over to cows and sheep until it was discovered by Malcolm Campbell, the former editor of Golf Monthly magazine. Campbell was walking along an old railway track down by the coast – this was back in the early 2000s – when he pictured golfers in the place of cattle and sheep. Campbell rang Clark, the Englishman who played in the 1973 Ryder Cup and is now a well-known course architect, and Clark liked the sound of what he was hearing.
Things took forever but, with the farmer who owned the land playing ball, Clark, Campbell and others eventually uncovered an appropriate number of backers and the links opened 19 months ago.
It is a pay-and-play venture and no sooner had it opened than there was a gentleman who, having played just the once, took out his cheque book and paid £11,500 for another 100 rounds.
Scott mentioned that the current price for a round in August is £258, though there are any number of situations when it can be cheaper. Essentially, they want people to be playing throughout the golf season.
The women of the LPGA and the LET will no doubt take Dr Prin’s wishes for the future of their tournament with the proverbial pinch of salt. Yet maybe they should go along with those dreams of hers. Thanks to that recent reminder from Phil Mickelson, we all know that it is rather more than once in the proverbial blue moon that the impossible becomes possible in golf.