An Exclusive Dispatch From The Women's British Open

The Impressively Swinging Mel Reid

Combine British wit, an astute eye for design and an unyielding dedication to sustainable golf and what do you get? You get Peter Gorse, the outspoken founder of "Golf Refugees".

Peter spent last week at the Ricoh British Open and wrote the following dispatch from the media center at Woburn Golf Club, especially for us.

Golf Media Mannerisms
On arrival you receive a gift. Only the British would consider giving an umbrella for a major sporting event in mid-summer. Each journo is allocated a desk facing a manually updated scoreboard, fortunately the door between the food hall is left ajar and the waft of the cooking keeps you on your toes.

There’s an itinerary of set media events, from press conferences with leading players, to a Championship photo call with the imaginative theme of a traditional English tea party. I didn’t want to be a party pooper, but as an Englishmen it was all new to me. Obviously they’ve never seen The Royle Family TV show by the late great Caroline Ahern

You can never guarantee sunshine in the UK, hence the modestly warm and dry start to the week was a golden opportunity to be out and about in the field, taking pictures of the world’s best female golfers. With a media pass you’re allowed inside the ropes to capture the best possible images. And here I came across my first issue with the Ladies European Tour police. It’s never a easy situation for a bloke to be told ‘you’re not big enough’.  In spite of all the correct paperwork my camera lens just wasn’t up to scratch in the ‘length’ department. To appease officialdoms, I simply stated, "size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with that counts". Alas, this didn’t wash, especially when other seasoned media bods were carrying around their massive male egos. My next line of defence was to quote from the late great photographer, Jane Brown, whose attitude was a stark contrast to her mostly male peers. Jane was supremely uninterested in camera equipment. She bought all of her cameras secondhand, and preferred working with a single lens setting, conspiring to make the environment fit the setting. All this fell on deaf ears and I was forced to seek a bigger lens. READ MORE --->

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