My father-in-law wasn’t a golfer, but I’m going to tell you about him anyway.
He was a rugby player, an eighthman, good enough to play nine times for England. He played in Frik du Preez’s Test debut at Twickenham in 1961. The Boks won 5-3, but the old man had his revenge, scoring the opening try when the Barbarians beat the Boks 6-0 in Cardiff, the only game Avril Malan’s men lost in four months on tour.
In all other respects, he wasn’t a natural sportsman. He got sent off in a game of mixed hockey at college for picking up a lady opponent with a fireman’s lift. Cricket was an eternal mystery to him and when he came to South Africa in the ’90s as manager of the British Universities cricket team, he had to rope in his son-in-law to help with team selection.
It was on that trip that I tried to introduce him to the game of golf.
He had played no more than twice in a long and rich life and things were complicated by the fact that he was left-handed. It was an affliction that had dogged him since birth. He went up to Durham University to study dentistry in the late ’50s. No power tools in those days, and he soon discovered that all the equipment was designed for right-handed people. So he devoted his first term to learning how to use his right hand.
Obviously, the first thing I asked him was whether he could play golf right-handed. He admitted that he’d once tried, but it had been a disaster, so I invested in some second-hand clubs to set him on his left-handed way. Predictably, it was still a disaster. In his mid-60s he was fitter and stronger than men half his age, but he couldn’t transfer that power through the golf swing.
As something of an ‘enforcer’ in his rugby-playing prime, he was no stranger to throwing punches, and his diligent study of dental tools meant he could deliver telling blows with either hand. His natural inclination then, with golf club in hand, was to aim at the ball as though it were a chin. The natural corollary of this was that his swing stopped the moment after it hit the ball.
I tried my best to cure this problem, giving him Colin Montgomerie’s advice, that the ball should merely get in the way of the swing. It didn’t work, but there was one moment I will never forget. We were staying at Selborne on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast and he agreed to come and play nine holes. I filled my bag with extra balls and off we went.
He was just starting to get despondent when we came to a par three over water. I filled my pockets with balls and chose a club for him. He gouged the ground with practice swings and then came the moment of truth. The club described a slicing arc, the ball set off towards two o’clock, then turned back towards the green and landed with a thud, two feet from the hole.
His face lit up: ‘We can go home now,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ I replied, ‘first you have to get it in the hole.’
He duly four-putted and we went off for a full English breakfast.
RIP Derek Morgan, 30.11.1935 – 24.5.2024.
– This column first appeared in the July 2024 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
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