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The 48-year-old Richard Bland has just become the oldest first-time winner in the history of the European Tour. At what was the 478th time of asking, the Englishman captured the recent Betfred British Masters at the Belfry and, entirely understandably, was pride personified as he raised the trophy aloft.
The post-victory feeling was altogether different. Because of the tone of all the e-mails that came his way, there was an overwhelming sense of humility. Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters champion, was among the first to set the mood. “Today I saw something that simply inspired me and reminded me that golf is the greatest game,” Couples wrote.
Luke Donald, Lee Westwood and Thomas Bjørn mirrored that message, while out-and-out strangers marvelled at how he had lifted their golfing spirits. “I’ve had messages from everywhere,” Bland confirmed. “So often, golf is all about you but, if I’m helping people to live their golfing dreams, suddenly there’s this different emotion in the mix.”
With his phone ringing all day and every day, our winner was soon craving a touch of normality though, if he’s anything like Andrew Murray, the BBC 5 Live radio commentator who won his only tournament at the age of 33, there will come a time when he wants to talk more and more about his Belfry success.
Since Murray, who captured the 1989 European Open at Walton Heath in what was his 331st start, was suffering from the early stages of Ankylosing spondylitis in his week of weeks, he was no different from Bland in being hailed as an inspiration. Bundles of hand-written letters arrived through his door, while perhaps the most memorable moment of the lot came when he turned up for the following week’s Trophée Lancôme in France.
Double major winner Sandy Lyle was coming out of the locker-room as Murray was about to enter. “After you, champ,” said Lyle, holding the door open with one hand and giving him a slap on the back with the other while adding, “What a win.”
I asked Bland how, when anyone wanted to know more about him ahead of his win, he would sum up his career. “I would tell people how I was heading for 500 European Tour events and I’d tell them that I’d played in three majors and a WGC event,” he began. “Then I’d probably mention the time I lost in a play-off at the Irish Open (2002). Now, of course, I can forget all that and say, ‘I won the British Masters.’ ... It’s such a big thing.”
Everyone who signs up to play golf for a living wants at some stage to be a Bland, a Murray or, indeed, a Carl Mason, in being able to say they won this or that. In Mason’s case, he won at his 455th attempt (the 1994 Turespaña Masters Open de Andalucía) at age 41 and won again (the Scottish Open) that same summer before getting off to a rather faster start on the European Senior Tour: He captured four of his first 11 events on the 50-and-older circuit on his way to accumulating a record 25 victories to date.
Yet the truth is that it is entirely possible for a player to put together an impressive CV without ever getting across the winning line. You wouldn’t, for example, exactly classify Briny Baird and Charlie Wi as two of life’s failures when, respectively, they have bagged $13,251,178 and $10,079,659 in PGA Tour prize money.
“Now ... I can say, ‘I won the British Masters.’ ... It’s such a big thing. ”
Richard Bland
Baird, now 49, has six second-place finishes on the PGA Tour. However, he is arguably better known for the day in 2009 when he hit a 230-yard shot from the top of the Omni San Diego Hotel to a bulls-eye in the centre of Petco Park, a baseball stadium. He won a free chicken wrap for himself and his fellow competitors at P. F. Chang’s China Bistro.
Meanwhile, Wi, also 49, still would have had a grand tale to tell had he retired at age 13. That is how old he was when he defeated the then 9-year-old Tiger Woods in a California state age-group event. Wi, when asked about it, has always described the feat as “irrelevant.” But when pressed, he does not mind regaling people with a few details, simply because that is what they want. To give just one little insight, Wi, who won by four shots, had to stop and comfort his little playing companion at a long par-3 where he had narrowly failed to hole out with his 70-yard approach shot.
Fast forward to 2012 when Wi was four shots ahead of Tiger going into the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. When quizzed about whether Tiger would be feeling under any pressure, a bemused Wi dismissed the very idea of it. “The pressure’s all on me,” he said. “Tiger’s won 70-something times and I’m trying to get my first." His assessment of the situation was all the more poignant for being so simple. Come Sunday, Phil Mickelson had a closing 64 to beat Wi by two with Tiger finishing in an improbable share of 15th place.
Bland, incidentally, is now on his way to Denmark for this week’s Made in HimmerLand event where, like Murray at the Lancôme, he can expect a hero’s welcome from fellow players. Far from getting too caught up in the idea, he suggested that he would need clear his head of extraneous matters well before his Thursday starting time.
“When you get down to it,” he said, “the others are there to beat you and you’re there to beat them.”
Top: Richard Bland celebrates his victory at the Betfred British Masters.
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