It's Dangerous for Journalists to Retire - 25 July 2003

They used to call these the dog days and, if they're referring to the time when the Dog Star rises and falls with the sun, they're right but to most people it means the sultry time in our hemisphere, between early July and early September.

And sultry it certainly is, though I suspect that the weather you could complain about in Kent, England, is very different from the lamented dog days in Kent, Ohio.

I was just watching the 24-hour world weather station and in succession I saw and heard two different weathermen.

One was based in the south of England, his key sentence was: For the next day or two in the high 70s Fahrenheit, no relief in sight.

A little later, settling in here to a cool drink in a cool room, I saw Sam, our regular ABC weatherman, an affable fellow, who this time was practically soaring off into euphoria.

We've had a nasty stretch of hot weather. Indeed in over three quarters of this huge country everything from 115 in Phoenix, Arizona, to 92 in this here New York city.

So what brought on Sam's euphoria? "The next five days", he said, "are beauties, all seasonably cool in the middle 80s - enjoy."

Before we had air conditioning in houses it's a miracle we stayed alive during the dog days.

I remember sitting here at this desk naked except for a loin cloth, sweating out daily reams of prose worthy of the Mancunians who boasted, thanks to the holy writ of the then Manchester Guardian, that they thought today what London would think tomorrow.

I just found from an expedition into some old, yellowing files that it was during the dog days, and when I was in my 60th summer, that I had a note from my mother wondering what plans I had for retirement.

For retirement? It was as if the bailiff had rapped on the door and was ready to attach the house.

I wrote back and told her that it was dangerous for journalists to retire. They were apt to grow stupid.

No more was said in our house or has been said since about retirement.

I was left with the thought: surely the age-old rule, retirement at 60, is long overdue for abolition or revision when so much of modern medicine has become available to so many lower and middle class people and when the expectation of life at birth, among males in the Western countries, has increased by five years in the past three decades.

In this country, indeed, most legislators have abolished the compulsory retirement rule. The government - the federal government - came to with a shock and a bang about 10 years ago and discovered that the general population is ageing alarmingly.

Alarmingly? Yes. Most Western governments have discovered that by, say, 2035 there will be three pensioners for every two people working to pay for their pensions.

The day of doom in this country is said to be the year when the baby boomer generation retires.

They will then face the fact that there is nothing left in the social security fund. All that money they paid out in taxes to cushion their old age has already been spent cushioning my old age and seeing me for free through surgeries, hospitals, office visits, prescriptions, the lot.

A grim topic, let us move on.

A listener laments - the Masters came and went, the US Open, Wimbledon, the British Open, nary a word about golf or tennis.

I know, I know, but what most golfers and tennis players do not know is that - from a stern, reliable source - 94% of the United States population (and it's slightly higher in Britain) does not play golf, watch it or read about it. Tennis is even more a minority sport.

However, I hope I'm about to satisfy my golfer but also to attract the curiosity of people who belong in that 94% who live in outer darkness.

It's about a scientific experiment started five years ago at the most famous, surely, medical centre in the world - the Mayo Clinic, out there on the far-flung prairie in the vast, rolling farmlands of Minnesota.

The Mayo Clinic opened 74 years ago. It is not a hospital, it is a diagnostic clinic, and by this time is surrounded by hospitals and a hundred hotels for people who've come from every station in life, from every land, who hope they can be diagnosed and helped by the staff of the clinic.

The clinic is 22 storeys high, a dozen of the lowest ones given over to a single specialty.

So one whole circular floor looks into nothing but heart disease and is staffed by a dozen heart specialists; another floor urology, another paediatrics, another neurology, another the brain and so on, with other floors for various advanced kinds of medical research.

The experiment we're going to look at involved a team of neurologists, physicians, a brain man, a heart man, various medical technicians and - just in case - one expert in Parkinson's Disease, another in Huntington's.

And what they'd been working on and hope some day soon to know is whether putting is a mental, emotional or a physical disease.

I said putting - with a putter. The last type of stroke a golfer makes, having on his approach to the hole used normally a driver, a long or mid iron, then pitched or chipped onto the green and finally taken his putter and bang, holed out. Oh no, most of the time not.

I must refine my definition - the Mayo team is not homing in just on putting in general but on a bizarre ailment that afflicts many golfers. It's called the yips and it shows an inability to take the club back and return it to the ball and sink or nearly sink a short, three or four-foot putt.

The yips are no respecter of persons. Bad golfers may never have them. Most mediocre golfers get them at some time or another. So do the very greatest - Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead - and I never forget the pitiful sight of the great Ben Hogan in his last year or two on the tour standing paralysed over the ball, which had only three feet to go into the hole, addressing the ball, standing up, walking away, going back - same routine, a sweaty 30 seconds of no motion and then a jab and the ball sliding three, four feet on the other side.

The question is, is it the mind, is it actually something disabling about the nerves of the fingers, the deltoid muscles, what happened at breakfast, or are you not looking forward to a visit from your mother-in-law?

So how could the outcome of this study affect people who don't play golf?

A neurologist on the team says they're trying to find out enough to help other people who suffer from spasmodic hand movements or over-control of them - violin players, surgeons who occasionally or alarmingly lose their touch, writers who stop because of what they call writers' block.

In an outdoor test this week, 16 golfers of various trades, professions, skills - mostly low handicap golfers - started the trials.

The first hour was taken up with fixing 42 electrodes on each player - tiny jumper connections in various colours. An electrocardiogram registered the heart, a musclegram the muscles, another machine recorded brainwaves.

They've tried all sorts of conditions, knowing that being watched and measured might bring on the yips as might being left alone.

They tried to put them under various types of stress to mimic the nervous tension of a tournament.

So far the Mayo boys have drawn only one tentative conclusion which came from watching calm to violent activity of the brainwaves and I do believe this could be of use to many more people than golfers.

To golfers of every degree it could be a new golden rule. It is this: golfers were seen to be putting better when the left side of the brain, the analytical side, is quiet and when therefore the motion is taken care of by the right side of the brain, the instinctive side.

Most golfers know this in a semi-conscious sort of way, hence the cliché "paralysis by analysis".

I think of two golfers. Firstly one of the top three or four golfers in the world, who takes a minute or two in deciding the state of the grass - down grain, cross grain - tramps round the pin to see the putt from the wrong side, squats, holds his putter out like a surveyor's rod (it's called plumb bobbing) settles to the ball twice, tries three practice swings and misses every other putt.

And then the best putter I ever saw - I mean the most consistent - who approached the ball, arranged his feet, gave a single glance at the ball and stroked it - easy back, if only a foot or so - and then through the ball a foot or more. Never a tapper.

So remember the old poet, who says something like "who takes advice against his will holds to his own opinion still".

Bobby Jones recommended the same: glance at the hole - your brain has already told you the line - putt.

I hope there are enough golfer listeners who remember the most entertaining of all golf writers and talkers (half his audience never knew a mid iron from a midwife) the portly, wily, sly Henry Longhurst, who bore a remarkable resemblance to every crook and con man in a French movie.

One time he was walking to the first tee with a companion, who mentioned that he'd lately had an attack of the yips.

"Ever had them, Henry?" he asked.

Henry was about to say "no, fortunately" but he caught himself in time and he thought of a stroke of gamesmanship that would have made the inventor of gamesmanship, the late, great Stephen Potter, proud of him.

"Er, actually no, but I'm afraid I'm a carrier."

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