DICK FARRANT was 15 when he first picked up a golf club and now some 56 years later he still doesn’t mind going out and “giving it a whack”, as he says.

Dick has tasted some personal success in his long golfing career, getting down to a very respectable seven on a few occasions and winning the odd club or country tournament here and there.

But these days Dick is much more focussed on what he can contribute to golf and the social and camaraderie aspects of the game rather than any personal playing satisfaction he may get out of it.

Dick is the new president of the NSW Veteran Golfers Association (NSWVGA), an organisation that helps offer veteran golfers, that is those aged 55 and over, with an unparalleled smorgasbord of golf tournament and competition opportunities across the state.

The NSWVGA currently oversees some 48 “Week of Golf” tournaments from the top to the bottom of NSW and way out west to Broken Hill.

As much as possible, the tournaments are organised in geographic loops so competitors can be on the road for weeks at a time just going from vet event to vet event.

There are also five state championships, including a stroke and a matchplay event, and next year NSW will host the National Veteran Golfer Championship based around Port Macquarie.

In addition, affiliated veteran groups run regular weekly or monthly competitions at club level.

All those golfing opportunities are of course great for the many older golfers that take advantage of them, but the regional tournaments can also be a huge boost to local economies when a couple of hundred golfers roll into a country town for a week or so.

…just putting back some of what the game has given me

All that golf also means a whole lot of organisational and administrative work and it is people such as Dick Farrant and those like him who make it all possible.

“To my mind I am just putting back some of what the game has given to me,” Dick says.

Exactly how much that “bit of time” is Dick finds hard to quantify, but his wife Marie commented some time after he retired that he seemed to be busier with his golf administration duties than he had been at work.

Dick doesn’t necessarily agree with that but he has certainly at times piled on the responsibilities, for instance for nine years he was jointly holding down the very time demanding roles of President of Kiama Golf Club and Secretary of the NSWVGA.

A former high school mathematics teacher, Dick has been involved in volunteer golf administration for some 43 years.

“I was elected to the position of secretary of Wauchope Golf Club in 1966 and apart from four separate (single) years since then the administrative association has continued,” Dick says.

“At Wauchope I was on the golf committee for 10 years and in that time I covered position including secretary, publicity officer, handicapper, match committee and for the last two years I was vice president.”

“Then I received a promotion in my job and in 1977 took up the position of head teacher mathematics at Bowral High School, and within a year I was elected to the board of directors at Bowral Country Club and served there for 10 years, for eight years of which I was club captain”

“Then I was transferred to Kiama at the beginning of 91 and became a member of Kiama and one year later elected to the board, had 14 years on the board, five years as vice president, following by nine years as president.”

At about the same time as Dick became president of Kiama Golf Club, Des Coady, the then president of the NSWVGA, approached him about becoming secretary of the association.

Dick held that position for almost 12 years until last December when Des Coady stood down after 16 years at the helm. Dick threw his hat in the ring and was elected president.

Now some five months into the new job (as at May 2009), Dick is very mindful of the need to “consolidate and polish” the strong foundation and legacy that has been left to him.

“I wanted to consolidate what had been put in place to make sure that what Des Coady had set up, which seemed to be working pretty well, would continue,” Dick says.

What really drives the organisation in its mission to promote golf to veterans is the Week of Golf calendar.

The tournaments are typically four day events held Monday to Friday with a day off on Wednesday. Towards the end of the week there is usually a very well attended and much enjoyed presentation dinner.

Dick says the biggest event is held at Yamba/Mclean and attracts something like 420 competitors.

“Orange recently had 380, Coffs Harbour is usually around the 300 and just under the 300 mark would be Hawks Nest, Coolangatta/Tweed and Griffith. Then there’s another 10 or 12 events with over 200.”

At the other end of the scale are events like Gloucester.

”At Gloucester…they just kill you with kindness”

“You get a tournament like Gloucester which is only a nine hole course. They only take 80 people and they are delighted to have those 80 people four days out of the five.” Dick says. “They have a shotgun start at Gloucester and they reckon they have a ball and they‘ve got home cooking and scones and all sorts of things there and they just kill you with kindness.”

“That is again harking back to the economic influence of the tournaments in some of these districts because it is pretty big for them.”

Many veteran golfers really make a feast of it and travel for weeks on end, often as either a single or group of caravaners.

“The first veterans tournament I ever played, would you believe, was the National Veteran Championships in Port Macquarie in 94. That’s the first veterans event outside my own club,” Dick says.

“In the last round I played with a chap from South Australia, this was about October/November, and he and his wife had left home in February in their van and gone right up to the top of Queensland and come back and were on their way back home and they had a combination of just staying at caravan parks, site seeing plus playing golf.

“It was my first introduction to a concept of people going out on the road and travelling and following their ideals of site seeing, touring and playing golf.

“And that’s one of the driving things we’ve to do in the NSW program is to work it geographically so you can go from one tournament to the next and there is not a long distance to travel in between.”

“For example I have friends of mine who at the moment are getting ready to go to Tamworth, they’ll be playing a week of golf at Tamworth then they’ll be going to Narrabri for a week of golf then they’ll be going to Moree for a week of golf. So it that concept that they go away for three weeks at a time, or four or five weeks, whatever it may be.

“That was the first time I struck they idea of how, what’s the word, almost how dedicated some of these people were to getting out on the road, getting in their van, touring, holidaying, playing golf, and I thought that was great. It is certainly a feature of the NSW program that concept.”

The Lumley’s and Turell’s play at least 20 tournaments a year

Theoretically, you could play in 38 Weeks of golf in NSW a year.

“No one plays in all 38 but I could name a few people, the Lumley’s from Coffs Harbour would play a lot, the Turrell’s from Dubbo the same.

I hope I’m not misquoting them but they probably play at least 2o tournaments a year,” Dick says.

All the tournaments have mens and womens competitions and couples and singles are encouraged to take part.

Marie Farrant is an avid golfer of 20 years and she and husband Dick regularly attend tournaments together. Marie in fact won the ladies section of the NSW Veteran Matchplay last year and will be defending the title in the Illawarra in June.

“It is a very healthy exercise to be getting out on the road playing golf” Dick says.

“You have got people who are in their late seventies, early 80’s, who are quite good supporters of the tournaments. It is a tremendous mental thing for these people that they can get out, still be meeting people, still be competing. Because golf has handicaps, theoretically with your handicap you are able to compete against everyone else. Once you take out the younger folk and everyone is at least 55 years old you don’t feel you have to keep up with the Tiger Woods type young people who smash it a mile. Its very good camaraderie and I think also giving the women the opportunity to travel with their partners is a big plus.

“You get a few blokes who are on the road who play a lot of this golf who unfortunately have lost their wife and they find this terrific. They just get out there and meet everybody and it just puts the memories on the back burner for a little while.”

“You also get a lot of interaction between the people who are towing vans. Invariably they will get on these loops, say they might do the Tamworth, Narrabri, Moree events in consecutive weeks and when they get to the caravan parks they will all arrange to be booked in close to each other and they have their happy hours after golf and it is terrific. It is wonderful to be able to interact with people.”

As Dick says, he feel he is just giving back some of what golf has given him, but he is also confident he has a lot to contribute because of his long golf administration experience.

He acknowledges there are many others enthusiastically donating their time and expertise, firstly citing the “excellent” NSW executive team around him.

“An important thing which is probably taken for granted sometimes is the professional approach of all the (regional) tournament committees,” Dick says. “There are some very capable people who are running these tournaments and they are often people who have come up through the ranks not unlike myself who have been involved with their home club and now they are in there running a veteran tournament and handling big fields and results and things like that in a very professional manner.

“I suppose the strength of the association is firstly the network of all the group secretaries, so that’s the communication and dissemination of all the information, as well as the tournament directors. They’re the strength and they’re doing a tremendous job. And the tournament directors if they are worth their salt, which they all are, will have a very effective committee. You can’t afford to be a one man band. All of the events are run in a vey professional manner.”

Dick Farrant can’t say how long he will be at the helm of veteran golf in NSW. It depends, he says, on his health and how long he (and those around him) feel he has something to contribute.

Maybe it is just like his golf.

“I just like to get out and whack it and enjoy the company and the interaction afterward,” he says.

NSWVGA 2009 Week of Golf Calendar

NSW Veteran Golfers Association website

Actor Sean Connery, the original and best James Bond, has revealed that preparing for the movie Goldfinger led to his lifelong passion for golf.

In his just released memoir, Connery says he came to see golf as a metaphor for living, that it greatly enhanced his life and was the nearest he ever came to having a religion.

The autobiography, “Being a Scott” was released this week on Connery’s 78th Birthday in Edinburgh.

The following excerpt was published in the UK Telegraph.

I never had a hankering to play golf, despite growing up in Scotland just down the road from Bruntsfield Links, which is one of the oldest golf courses in the world. It wasn’t until I was taught enough golf to look as though I could outwit the accomplished golfer Gert Frobe in Goldfinger that I got the bug. I began to take lessons on a course near Pinewood film studios and was immediately hooked on the game. Soon it would nearly take over my life.

I began to see golf as a metaphor for living, for in golf you are basically on your own, competing against yourself and always trying to do better. If you cheat, you will be the loser, because you are cheating yourself. When Ian Fleming portrayed Auric Goldfinger as a smooth cheater, James Bond had no regrets when he switched his golf balls, since to be cheated is the just reward of the cheater.

Ext. Golf course - day Bond spots Goldfinger cheating.

Bond: “You play a Slazenger 1, don’t you?”

Goldfinger: “Yes, why?”

Bond: “This is a Slazenger 7.”

Bond shows Goldfinger his own golf ball.

Bond: “Here’s my Penfold Hearts. You must have played the wrong ball somewhere on the 18th fairway. We are playing strict rules, so I’m afraid you lose the hole and the match.”

During the filming of Goldfinger, I learned the essential challenge of links golf at Royal Dornoch in the north-east Highlands. Ever since then I have been drawn to links golf and its enduring challenges, and I’ve learnt to play a variety of shots under constantly changing conditions. It’s quite naked golf. There aren’t many trees, or other features, to aid your alignment. Much is left to the imagination and to picturing the shot. Then there’s the wind, always a factor on a links course. You’re required to play run-up shots and to work the ball this way and that.

Within a few years of Goldfinger, my golf was good enough to play against professionals in competitions. I was invited to join one of Bing Crosby’s showbusiness amateur teams against professional golfers in America, which was an early forerunner of the pro-ams. It gave me the idea of promoting a pro-am tournament in Scotland to showcase our Scottish International Education Trust. Since one of its first board members, the shipbuilder Sir Iain Stewart, had fabulous connections in the world of golf, the planning got off to a flying start.

We settled on the out-and-back Ayrshire course of Royal Troon, and chose the week following the Open. Since all the key players in the world would be congregating at St Andrews that year, travelling down to Troon from Fife would hardly be crossing the Atlantic. Because the Troon course had been having problems with encroaching tides and with crowd control, we recruited rugby players as volunteer policemen, who made a great job controlling the 20,000 who came. The amateurs included the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, the footballer Kenny Dalglish and the boxer Henry Cooper, along with Eric Sykes and me.

Sponsors put up generous prizes and we allowed them to place their logo on the holes for £1,000. Eagle Star Insurance took the first hole, which was a driveable par four. But when two players in the first half-dozen holed out in eagle to each claim their prize of £500, Iain Stewart thought we’d all be left penniless. Fortunately only one more player holed out in two. The tournament was a great success, with Christy O’Connor becoming the all-round winner, and it re-established Royal Troon as a venue for future Opens. In 1970 I won a trophy at a tournament in Morocco, La Coupe du Roi de Maroc. Then the next day I was drawn against a brilliant player who had won the women’s trophy. That was Micheline Roquebrune. We were married one year later.

In the late 1960s, when I was mastering the game, a remarkable book came out, catching the spirit of the times. Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom took the frustrations that often befall the average golfer and turned them into a mystical Zen experience. A young golfer takes lessons from a wily left-handed all-knowing professional called Shivas Irons. It’s a name charged with meaning for the impressionable young man from California, straight out of college, on his way to seek enlightenment in India. Shivas is a seer who delivers golfing nuggets of Celtic wisdom in the spirit of a Zen master. His name comes from Aberdeenshire and could derive from the old Scots verb “shiv”, meaning to push or shove. Then there’s the debatable phrase “to be blown to smithereens”, which he shifts to “shivereens” so as to connect the name to Shiva - the ancient Hindu god of destruction. And redemption. So Murphy finds his shaman, not in an Indian ashram with his mystic guru Aurobindo, but out there on a golf course in the Kingdom of Fife.

Over the years golf has taught me much, and its implicit codes of conduct have provided me with the nearest I have ever come to a religion. A golf player is on his honour to call a shot against himself and to be considerate to other players following up behind. I can illustrate this well from an incident I heard about when playing a round at Pine Valley in America.

Cliff Robertson, a veteran golfer in his 80s who carried the whole history of Pine Valley on his shoulders, came up behind a foursome. Etiquette would have normally let him play through. He asked the caddie for permission for this from the foursome, but he returned to say that their answer was no. So he got on his cart and went up to them.

“Before you say anything,” he told them, “you have no standing. There is no one in front of you. Now you are not going through.” Then he turned to his caddie: “Take all their bags back on the cart to the clubhouse.”

“Hey, don’t touch our clubs!” one protested.

“Who invited you?”

“Some member.”

“You will never set foot on Pine Valley in your lives again. And your friend is now barred from Pine Valley for a year. Now I would like to play through.”

What a marvellous lesson that was.

I am always keen to slip away for a round of golf whenever a movie schedule makes it possible. When filming John le Carre’s The Russia House I was invited by that all-round sportsman Sven Tumba to play on the first golf course in the Soviet Union. The enterprising Swede had not only threaded his nine fairways around high-rise tenements a 10-minute drive from Red Square, he had also founded a golf school. One of its most gifted students, the teenager Denis Zherebko, was ready to tee off with us to inaugurate the course in 1989.

The Moscow City Club has since grown, with membership now every bit as expensive as

its American counterparts. Having long banned the game in the Soviet Union for its bourgeois decadence, how Stalin would have scowled.

During the war, when the British embassy was packed with Scots, the UK enjoyed remarkably close relations with the USSR. Bob Dunbar, the press officer who later ran the London Film School, told me how they would often break away from Foreign Office etiquette to sink a few drinks with such adversaries as the film director Sergei Eisenstein and even Stalin himself. The ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, was a witty Australian Scot who had forged close relations with Stalin. When he left Moscow towards the end of the war he met his replacement, Sir Maurice Peterson.

“How do you think you’ll manage to get on with Stalin?” he asked the new ambassador.

“Easy, old boy, I’ll invite him out regularly for a round of golf.” In fact this routine diplomat soon alienated the dictator. The nights of hard-drinking bonhomie were gone for ever. Stiff-upper-lipped diplomacy became the order of the day, as international relations began their slow freeze into the Cold War.

Not all Communists were so averse to golf. When President Eisenhower made the front page of The New York Times by hitting a hole-in-one, Fidel Castro was driven to ask Che Guevara to teach him the game.

“He had been a caddie once to earn some money in his spare time,” the Cuban president remembered. “I, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing about this expensive sport.” Expensive sport or not, Cuba now boasts a world-class 18-hole golf course at the beach resort of Varadero. Through an improbable international sports initiative, Cubans are now being coached by British golfers in exchange for Cubans training British teams in baseball. Whoever brokered that one must surely deserve promotion.

Golf has greatly enhanced my life. Through golfing I have met remarkable people, some of whom have been truly inspirational. It was through golf that I met Sir Iain Stewart, who pioneered new industrial relations on the Clyde, which opened my mind to the possibility of political change.

I met the flying ace Douglas Bader on the golf course. He never let the loss of his legs affect his game, eventually getting his handicap down to an extraordinary five. Long before the aerial Battle of Britain he had lost both legs in a flying accident. To the Germans he became a legend, because every time they shot him down he escaped. His last camp commandant eventually clipped his wings by locking away his prosthetic legs.

One senior Australian golfer back in the news and back on the competitive golf course is Greg Norman.

 For a number of reasons, the 53 year old has found a new lease of golfing life.

 As we write this, Norman is set for his second straight event in the US and plans a number of tournaments in the coming months, including the British Open in July.