SPECTATOR SPORT
Leftward swing
Frank Keating
ONE of the most poignantly misty images of the fortnight was that grainy longshot of Denis Thatcher giving himself a final swipe at golf in one of the fields alongside Chequers. Neither sheep, nor cow, in sight. Just the old boy letting rip with a mid-iron in a faraway reverie. Left- handed, too. Unless he was playing against himself. Left v Right. Rather apt if he was.
The cricketer, Brian Close, was the most ambidextrous I've ever come across; he batted left and bowled right; but at golf he would often play against — and bet against — his two sides. Once I walked round the championship course with him at Moor- town as he played alternate shots left and right — and he scored a phenomenal 76.
Unlike playing against yourself at chess, the trouble with golf is that you need, of course, to hump around two sets of clubs. President Bush, who had been running to the golf course as readily as Mrs T was going for the cricketing metaphors, is a natural left-hander who had to teach him- self as a boy to play the game with his right. `Just like Ben Hogan,' he says. The boast- ful Hogan won the Open at Carnoustie in 1953, but said he'd have 'done it twice as quick' as a southpaw, because only 20 years earlier, as a caddie in Texas, he was still a leftie.
Only once, in fact, has the Open ever been won with a set of left-handed clubs. In 1963, by the taciturn New Zealander, Bob Charles. And where he'd been a natural right-hander as a child, he taught himself the tack-handed swing because both his parents were lefties and he was having to borrow their clubs. That melan- cholic little bag of muscles, Kenny Rose- wall, the Australian tennis demon, had the same sort of trouble. He still writes left- handed, throws left-handed, and (well, occasionally) takes the money out of his pocket to buy you a beer, left-handed. But he played tennis with his right.
When Ken's dad, who ran a grocery store in the Sydney suburbs, decided his boy was going to be a champ, the only library books on coaching he could lay his hands on where by the orthodox righties, Fred Perry and Donald Budge. So they followed the pictures and diagrams exactly — and by the time he was 12, young Kenny was a right-hander. They always reckoned his weak serve was the reason Rosewall never won Wimbledon, and after the final time he tried and failed he wondered wistfully whether he might have, 'had Dad let me stay a leftie.'
David Gower, the cricketer, sometimes thinks the same — only the other way around. It is uncanny watching David, England's most languid leftie since Wool- ley with a bat, playing tennis — and certainly golf — right-handed. His father was in the Colonial Service and one day, when the boy was four or five, the family was messing about at cricket with a tennis ball in the garden in Rhodesia, and David begin to face-up as a left-hander. His father insisted he change to right, but mother said 'Let Bubbles do what he wants.' So he did. For ever. But only at cricket.
Other great lefties — Michelangelo, Leonardo, Holbein, Paul McCartney, Jack the Ripper, Laver, McEnroe, Connors, Navratilova, Jonah Barrington, Mark Spitz, Gary Sobers, Clive Lloyd . . . the legendary baseballers, Reggie Jackson and Babe Ruth, both swung the truncheon from left to right, as did their famed big-league manager, the onliest Casey Stengal, who left posterity with a stream of southpaw philosophies on sport and the art of life. Of all of them, his most enduring definition of locker-room team manage- ment was, 'Easy. All you gotta do is keep the five guys who hate your guts away from the five who are undecided.'
I daresay another venerable sporty southpaw was musing on exactly that as he carried his clubs towards the 19th at Chequers for the very last time.
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