We’ve all had these conversations. Someone might say that so-and-so, who won a few tournaments in his day, is not well. The recipient of this piece of information probably will ask for details, only to learn that the person in question is “rumoured” to have dementia. No one wants to hear that word and, when it does get a mention, the inclination is for people to switch subjects in a hurry.
The extent to which this applies hit me when my husband, Norman, who used to play rugby for Scotland, was suffering from the condition for about eight years ahead of his death in 2014. It is impossible to give an accurate starting date, because then, if not now, an official diagnosis was seldom given until the illness was well into its inward half. For a long time, even family members would advance their own milder excuses for the latest bout of eccentricity.
Recently, I saw an entry on social media telling how older Japanese adult males were 37 percent less likely to get dementia if they played golf. It was clearly excellent news, though it did set me thinking that Norman, once the owner of an 8 handicap, had been unlucky in that he practised for hours at a time throughout his 60s. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I accepted that there was an ever more eccentric twist to those practice sessions and his preference for playing alone.
Proud though he was of having played rugby for his country before he became the golf and rugby correspondent for The Scotsman, he was unnecessarily self-conscious of a golf swing which featured a pause at the top. Eventually, he started leaving those trips to the range until it was too dark for the rest of the golfing fraternity to be out and, in time, he stopped practising altogether. Thereafter, he spent too much of his retirement sitting in front of the TV.
In recent months, head injuries in rugby and football have been linked to dementia, and it was because the condition has become ever more of a hot topic that I decided to go ahead with my book, “Tapping Feet: A Double-take on Care Homes and Dementia.”
I had started to write notes on Norman’s dementia journey simply because I was in the habit of putting pen to paper on anything which occupied my mind. Where Norman’s condition was concerned, I found it vaguely therapeutic – and even more so after he had gone missing in the middle of the night at a time when the family thought he was safely in his bed. Had he found the car keys, the situation might have been dramatically worse. As it was, it amounted to “the crisis,” as a medical man defined it, which would tell the family that he needed to be in a care home.
Like many another among the uninitiated, I had assumed that nothing happened in care homes. The truth was different.
The home – Farrow Hall as I labelled it in a book in which I changed the names of all the characters and places – was occupied by a range of very different residents. Many were charming, some engagingly muddled, and various others best described as disarming troublemakers.
The staff, for their part, could not have been more skilful in their handling of everyone, with the head nurse – I called him Alphonso – hitting it off with my husband on their first encounter. When Norman arrived at the nurses’ station and asked for “a platter,” Alphonso pulled a notebook from his pocket and made a list which started with pate and tomatoes before ending with a bicycle. Upon shutting his book, Alphonso said he would be back in a few minutes.
When he returned bearing a cup of tea, Norman said it was precisely what he had wanted.
The owner of the home took delivery of a grand piano not long after Norman’s arrival and, since I had always been able to play the piano to an OK standard by ear, I would reel off tunes from the musicals. That the residents would come to life like characters in a musical box and start tapping their feet explains how I arrived at the book’s title.
The music, coupled with Norman’s nonstop insistence that every resident, regardless of whether he or she was wheelchair-bound or a centenarian, would soon be back playing first-division rugby/football/golf or tennis, prompted many of the stories based around care-home life. (All of the stories are based on truth, some more loosely so than others.)
For a golfing tale, there is the story of the somewhat shaky gentleman whose daughter had placed him in the home while she was working in China for a couple of months.
On the grounds that the home boasted an AstroTurf putting green, the daughter had explained to her father that the establishment would be just like his golf club. (At that stage, the club in question was one of several which was still male-only.)
When, on his first day, the father found two women in the lounge, he summoned Alphonso and called for them to be evicted. Norman, to my glee, had sided with the women, describing them as “members.”
My aim throughout was to speak out about dementia rather than keep the condition locked inside the care-home environment.
In golf, you wonder whether we talk about it enough. Whatever the Japanese are saying about people being less likely to be afflicted by dementia if they play the game, problems to do with mental health are seldom far away. As Dr Andrew Murray, the DP World Tour’s chief medical officer, said not so long ago, people seem to assume that the tour doctors are dealing with a nonstop stream of back and wrist injuries “when 10 to 15 percent of our work is related to well-being. The health benefits of playing golf are amazing, but life as a touring pro is stressful when you’re away from friends and family for 30 weeks a year.”
Ask Englishman Andrew Johnston, whose nickname “Beef” resulted in a level of raucous admiration he could have done without; and ask Wales’ Becky Brewerton, a Solheim Cup player whose every hole of golf at one point conjured up a riot of darkly negative thoughts; and ask the American Christina Kim, a three-time winner on the LPGA Tour whose golfing life became a tearful tangle of depression and anxiety in 2011. All had the courage to speak out, and were all the better for it.
In 2019, the R&A, to its credit, followed Carnoustie Golf Links in starting a golf memories project which involves people meeting on a regular basis in the World Golf Museum in St Andrews to lead through pictures of old champions and talk about their own golf highlights. The Pete Dye Chapter of the American Golf Memories Project at TPC Sawgrass, inspired by Carnoustie’s example, has its own get-togethers which alleviate loneliness and prompt conversations.
Before you ask – doubtfully, I suspect – whether my husband would have approved of me writing “Tapping Feet,” I’m going to refer you to Andy Irvine, a Scotland and British Lions rugby star who used to see Norman as something of a mentor in his playing days. After giving the book a read, he came back with the line, “I’m sure that Norman would have heartily approved.”
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Sunset on the golf course.
Martina Birnbaum, getty images
Photo illustration by barbara Ivins-georgoudiou, ggp