BALE’D OUT!
In 2019, Wales and Real Madrid football star Gareth Bale famously brandished a Welsh flag, featuring the slogan: ‘Wales. Golf. Madrid. In that order.’
Now, following his retirement from football in January, the former Welsh captain has been pursuing his true passion in life, by taking to the golf course and even playing in his first professional event, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in California.
The five-times Champions League winner is so obsessed with the game that he not only has three replica holes installed in the grounds of his house in Glamorgan but is also reported to have had a golf simulator installed at the team hotel when Wales played at the World Cup in Qatar last year, just so he could get around a team ban on playing the game.
Bale, 33, has a handicap of just two, meaning he’s good enough to turn professional and, certainly, he impressed all the right people at Pebble Beach, including the world’s number one player, Spain’s Jon Rahm, who told him: “You can’t be so good at professional football and golf at the same time, it’s not fair in the slightest.”
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Good news for golfers at Pyle & Kenfig Golf Club near Bridgend who will soon be benefitting from a state-of-the-art new practice facility, thanks to investment from Sport Wales and the Welsh Government’s ‘Programme for Government’.
The South Wales club was one of 30 beneficiaries to share £3.1 million of new capital funding and their £85,000 new training centre will not only offer high-performance training for the nation’s best golfers but also opportunities for players of all ages and abilities. The facility will also be designed so that it can cater for groups such as Bridgend Stroke Association and Tomms Care Autism Centre.
Visit www.pandkgolfclub.co.uk for more information.
UP FOR THE CUP
Proof that the future of Welsh golf is in good hands arrives with the news that two Welsh players have been named among the final 19 players in contention for a place in the Great Britain and Ireland team to play the USA in this year’s Walker Cup.
Current Welsh amateur champion James Ashfield, from Delamere Forest, and Carlisle’s Archie Davies, winner of the Welsh Amateur title in 2020, are hoping to make the 10-man side for the biennial event that pits the best amateur players from either side of the Atlantic against each other.
This year’s GB&I captain is Stuart Wilson. “We have selected a talented group of players who are key to our preparations for the Walker Cup and share our determination to win back the trophy from the United States of America,” he says.
This year’s event, the 49th staging, will take place on the Old Course at St. Andrews on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd September, and will mark 100 years since the match was first played at ‘The Home of Golf’.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
A charity that promotes golf for visually impaired players has reported a surge in membership in 2023. England and Wales Blind Golf (EWBG) says its numbers have risen by more than 10 per cent in this year alone, thanks, in part, to high-profile charity days it organised at The Warwickshire Golf and Country Club and the Trafford Golf Centre in Manchester.
The charity is planning further open days in the south-west and Cambridgeshire shortly. For more information visit www.ewblindgolf.co.uk
DID YOU KNOW…
Llanymynech Golf Club, near Oswestry, features 15 holes in Wales and three in England and on the 4th hole you tee off in Wales and then putt out in England.
