God it hurt late last year when I wasn’t part of the action for the first time in decades. I watched from the comfort of my lounge on the TV every shot of Pete Senior’s remarkable victory at the age of 53 in the Australian Open at The Lakes in conditions most foul. It was the same the following week when Daniel Popovic, virtually unknown to all but his family and friends, won the Australian PGA Championship at Coolum and if ever there was a story that tugged at the heartstrings his was one. His father, Radi, was watching too from their Templestowe home in Melbourne as he continues his fight against an incurable form of bone cancer.
I know Senior well, I consider him a mate. We’ve played poker together on tour which was always a mistake for he was either an extraordinarily gifted player who perhaps should sit opposite Shane Warne in those celebrity events the ex-cricketer played before he met Liz Hurley, or downright lucky – Senior that is. He always took the money. I don’t know Popovic at all, not ever have our paths crossed.
Their respective victories on the Australasian Tour perfectly sums up why I quit as golf writer for the Sydney Morning Herald with my copy also running in its sister paper The Age – two months short of 50 years in the newspaper industry after starting at The Age on January 23, 1963 – for I felt I was becoming a golf writer with a television and a telephone, quite often speaking with players I’d never eyeballed at a tournament. Newspapers are dying, slowly being strangled by the new media that is the Internet and iPad’s, and mobile telephones and the like. Accountants now seem to run newspapers, not journalists whose shoes were ink-stained from the floor from the bowels of at newspaper office where the rotary presses at full belt sounded like the engine room of a cruise liner.
In the late 1960s and 1970s when I followed the legendary and late Don Lawrence as golf writer at The Age I covered every tournament on the Australian tour plus the Australian Amateur Championship and inter-state series no matter in which state they were played. I covered the British Open every other year. Golf was an important sport, now it is becoming increasingly irrelevant with the focus firmly on the respective codes of AFL in Melbourne and rugby league in Sydney.
I joined the Sydney Morning Herald in 1994, and was still covering around 10 tournaments a year but that was down to just a handful and rarely travelling inter-state simply because of budgetary constraints. We now live in an instant world. Give people a quick fix of the news of the day on the new technology and bugger the days when folk would wait for the newspaper to be thrown over their fence in the morning with an in-depth, insightful and indeed beautifully crafted piece of the event the previous day.
Now, anyone with the slightest gift for words can compile a story without even being on the spot. You can watch the television and then go to the Internet for a transcript of the media interviews. You don’t have to know the historical facts from your own personal filing system, you simple Google want you want and run it as if it’s your own intellectual property.
The Internet can make you a genius, albeit a fake one.
What is missing, though, is the behind-the-scene drama not captured by the TV pictures, the emotion of the moment, the colour. That’s how stories came to your breakfast table each morning.
Now it’s just a fast fix with a computer with an alert to your iPhone on whatever subject you’ve coded in. Damn it, get a bit of newspaper ink on your fingers reading your special interest by specialist writers.
How the newspaper industry – and the way stories are compiled and transmitted – has changed? When I started, if you didn’t go back to the office to write, you’d pick up the telephone and dictate to a copy typist, often on deadline, off the top of your head. Some tournaments had a telex operator and you’d take your typewritten copy to him, or her, to be sent, spilling into the office like some winding indecipherable white snake of paper with holes in it. At the British Open, you’d have to sling the British Post telex operator twenty quid at the start of the week to move your copy immediately you handed it over because of the time difference deadlines.
It was all part of the challenge, the enterprise you had to show on the road.
Then came the first of the new technology. A computer with a set of couplers you attached to a telephone handpiece and it crackled away until it was sent. Often it was so corrupted by a bad phone line that it had to be resent or translated to a sub-editor sitting in an office. Then, it was Email and the Internet. Send it out into the ether and it would lob. Or you hoped it would.
Times have changed so much in the reporting of golf. I grew up in an age where lasting friendships were made. Media conferences weren’t orchestrated; if you wanted to talk with a player after his round you’d hang around the scorer’s hut or head to the bar where, invariably with just a few exceptions, you’d find a player indulging in strong drink either as a toast to his exceptional play or a drop of the deadener to ease the pain of a sub-par performance.
I had their phone numbers, now you have to go through managers and the player, should he feel so inclined, will telephone you. Greg Norman still answers his phone when I ring, so does Jack Nicklaus. And, so many others from what I’d say were the good old days when personal contact – and friendship – formed a lasting and trusting bond.
You socialised with the players, you went to their weddings, but now it is all so different – and impersonal. Call me a dinosaur if you wish, but I’m proud of it, as I am with the majority of the work I’ve done through the years. I haven’t retired but I’m done with newspapers that are surely just a foot from the grave. No, let’s make that 30cm.
I’ve got to step out of the past sometime.