The First Golden Paratrooper - 2 July 1999

I put a call in the other afternoon to a friend of mine I miss a great deal, that's because he quite suddenly left New York, for good or ill, when he received a golden parachute.

For the uninitiated may I explain, it used to be a golden handshake now it's a parachute. This man is the first golden paratrooper I've known. His story is simply, if to the rest of us enviously, told.

He was, for about 20 years, the European manager of a famous New York bank. He did, I think, 10 years in Geneva, seven years in Paris, six years in London, came back here as senior vice-president.

Last year his bank absorbed another famous New York bank and since there couldn't be two senior vice-presidents they decided to keep on the younger fellow and offer my friend a golden parachute which he happily - shall I say? - jumped at.

Sold his New York City apartment, bought a colonial mansion in Vermont, has a nice house in Florida and since the arrival, I presume, of the first cheque has paratrooped through Scotland, Ireland, the Carolinas, Florida, Long Island, playing golf at just about every eminent course from Seminole in Florida to Myopia in Massachusetts.

Did I say Myopia? I kid you not. I'd better throw in at once that Myopia was a club founded more than a hundred years ago to stage an annual horse show, polo match and steeplechase. But like many another polo club it tumbled out of business during the Great Depression and afterwards was crafted into an interesting and notable golf course.

It kept the original name - Myopia - which was chosen by the three founding members because they had an affliction in common - they were all near-sighted.

Well, my friend the golden paratrooper has gone berserk as a stereotypical rich playboy. The enviable thing about this outrageous man is that he's only 58 years of age.

We talk several times a week - our lifeline is a shared passion for golf and tennis - so we check most days when one of the four major championships is on. But the occasion of my call to old Hagerty - young Hagerty - was to know what he was doing in this hideous weather, which has been in the mid-90s and is moving up to 100.

Some 400 miles more to the north in Vermont the weather systems that drenched down the entire north eastern seaboard are no respecters of latitude.

I called to see what Hagerty could possibly be doing on the one day since his retirement he has not played golf.

"He's out" said his wife, "on the golf course, of course."

He called me back 20 minutes later.

"Are you more insane than I think you are?" I asked him. "I don't know what you think but I tell you three holes was enough, I don't know what's the technical definition of dew point but I think it's when the atmosphere turns into jelly."

I kidded him with the suggestion he should play in the comparative cool of the evening and see that his course was equipped with huge saucer lights.

"Night play," he said, "is reserved for Florida."

Can you believe it? There are nine-hole courses in Florida playable by night, since the necessary 60-odd acres are planted with high poles shedding those colossal arc lights - as brilliant and effective as the lights that shine down on the top tennis courts here at the US Tennis Centre in Flushing as soon as the sun goes down.

By the way this thought, this suggestion, always come up in the American press the first day Wimbledon is washed out by rain.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece the other day called "Splendour on the Grass Perhaps". "Wimbledon's grass courts," writes this iconoclast, "are nice to look upon but look much else that tourists come to see they're archaic."

He then explains that the bounce of the ball on grass is so dubious - being more like a squirt - that the best thing is to allow it no bounce. In other words: "Wimbledon has been the quintessential serve and volley tournament."

I remember a year or two ago when Wimbledon enjoyed or suffered a more normal alternation of dry and wet days there was a big to-do about reforming the men's game, since the emergence of the 120-mile an hour server had reduced the average men's rally to three or four strokes.

Everywhere else in the world - on clay or hard courts, slower courts that produce a high, dependable bounce - there are lots of rallies. In Paris, for instance, I counted several rallies running to over 20 strokes.

This year it's not been so bad at Wimbledon because the first week was very dry and the courts were hard and, as the American commentators remarked, were getting almost hard court bounces.

When they reformed the men's game furore was at its most furious, with such serious suggestions as reducing the size of the service box, abolishing the men's second serve - ouch - Pete Sampras, the world's champ, was consulted.

"Very simple," he said, "if you want rallies abolish grass."

Well we'll finish off this unpleasant topic by reporting simply the American consensus taken from a survey. Which is that sooner than later Wimbledon, like every other country, will go to a hard court surface, illuminated for night play and even better, like Australia, have at least the Centre Court covered by a retractable roof which is moved over during rain.

Most youngsters consulted on these reforms think they're cool. The oldsters and the establishment shudder to the tip of their club ties.

And another variation on the main theme - which if you hadn't noticed is how games change and never go back, in spite of the groans and sighs of the old folks - when metal woods came in in golf an old friend of mine - an amateur golfer of international standing - swore he would never desert his beautiful persimmon wood clubs - remarking with a snort that metal woods made an obscene tinny sound.

Today he's joined the rest of the world and remarks what a funny, flat sound wooden club heads make. We'll never go back since metal woods added 30 yards to a pro's drive and remarkable length even to a duffer.

And in tennis I have it on the authority of Mr Rod Laver that if Tilden and Budge and Perry had played with the modern racket they'd be right up there with Sampras and the best.

"Imagine," an even older friend remarked who goes back to Bobby Jones's first British Open at Lytham St Anne's in 1926 - when I was stupidly three miles away playing cricket in the not-so-fresh air emitting from a slaughter house.

"Imagine," the man said, "how even more miraculous Jones's competitive record would have been if he didn't have to play with hickory sticks and had modern irons and a sand wedge, not to mention fairways that looked giant billiard tables with bunkers that had been beautifully smoothed so the speedy modern ball wouldn't have to find itself in a nasty little cup or depression."

And - my old Scottish teacher used to groan - the poor fellows are now allowed to pick the ball up on the green and give themselves - what he called - "a niggly nice lie." We're never going back.

A more pleasing side to this topic was opened up to me when I came, the other day, on a publication called Ladies Golf, published in 1904. The frontispiece photograph is of the very fetching author, a former champ - Miss May Hezlet.

You might think she was got up for a wedding in the Winter Palace at St Petersburg - a wide, cavalier fur hat, a gorgeous, all-embracing fur collar and a smashing long three quarter coat barely covering her sweeping voluminous gown.

It is the preferred costume for a lady golfer. And inside there's a big piece about summer costume - a huge, billowing skirt, great, fluffy, leg of mutton sleeves on a high-necked blouse. How any woman became a champion of anything, except tiddlywinks, is not explained.

Today there's not a woman - young or old - on the women's professional tour who does not wear shorts. What did it take to transform the woman golfer from a billowing bolster into a 100-metre sprinter? It took, as all revolutions do, a bold transitional figure. And I found the one who banished the lady golfer of the 1910s and made way for the graceful bare-legged nymph of the 1990s.

One October day in 1934 - the first day of the English Ladies Championship - a larger crowd of journalists than usual had gathered round the first tee because a rumour had gone around that one unknown woman was about to outrage some convention of the game - nobody knew who she was or what she was up to.

A little later there suddenly whisked into sight a large, yellow motor car, and out of it stepped a Miss Gloria Minoprio. She had two shocks to administer.

The lesser one - she was carrying one club, an iron, would be about a three iron today. That was it - she was going to play the championship with one club.

She did, but the big shock that made the journalists stagger, Miss Minoprio was wearing a neat little black cap, a polo-necked white sweater and, wait for it, tight-fitting midnight blue trousers - what today would be called ski pants. Tight, fitting the shapely - the very shapely - Miss Minoprio who, as Damon Runyon remarked "had bumps where dolls are supposed to have bumps."

She was, we'd say, a stunning sight. She was an outrage to the presiding authority - the Ladies Golf Union - which put out an instant notice deploring anyone who "departs from the proper decorous costume of the traditional lady golfer".

Well Gloria lost that day but she was back next year with her Monday round - with the same one club - and won, was defeated however on the Tuesday - giving rise to the inevitable newspaper headline "Sic Transit Gloria Tuesday".

But let's hear it for Gloria Minoprio, who struck the first blow for women's liberty on the links.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.