Our Editor, Modest as Always, Bares All

WHAT MAKES YOUR EDITOR SUCH AN EXPERT?

When the subject is golf-travel our founding editor Barry Ward claims to have all the tee shirts (he's a modest fellow...). but then, he has spent more than 50 years in the game, travelling the world to play and write about it. At last count his tally was 43 countries, from Australia to Zimbabwe, reviewing 450-plus resorts and golfing holiday destinations in the process and playing more than 2,500 golf courses en route.

“Any day not spent on a golf course is largely wasted,” he says. In which case he hasn't wasted too many. (We wonder sometimes how he finds time to to write his pearls of wisdom...) For some years, as Travel Editor of Golf Monthly, he would play at least one new course a day for weeks on end. Even now, many years later and with his travelling reduced, he still plays three times each week, summer and winter.“I simply can't imagine not playing or writing about golf,” he says. “The game is so much a part of my life it's in my soul.”

SO HOW DID HE BECOME A GOLF WRITER?

Always an active sportsman, Barry discovered golf in 1956 while working as a sports writer for the Bermuda Royal Gazette. It was a daily paper, published in the wee hours, so he worked at night. But that left his mornings free and he played at least 18 holes every morning. But not at weekends, though: Nope; then, fit as a flea on a butcher's dog, he played 54 holes every Saturday and every Sunday. “Wasn't quite dawn to dusk,” he says, “but it was pretty close, with a stop only for lunch and a reviver.”

He still recalls the day he first bettered 100, only a month after taking up the game.“I had shot 104 in the morning, then 98 in the early afternoon and finished at sunset with a 94. I never looked back.”

By then a member of Belmont Manor Golf Club, whose par 69 course overlooked Hamilton Harbour, Barry was initially given a handicap of 24. But within a year he was playing off 12. More significantly, his great passion brought about a major change in his life.

“The Bermuda Goodwill Tournament was launched that year and the Gazette needed a golf writer, I was the only staff reporter who played the game so I was elected.” he says. He could never guess where that decision would lead him.

SOME FOLK HAVE ALL THE LUCK! WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

A chance meeting with a visiting Australian newspaper executive had taken Barry to London where he became European Sports Editor for the Packer Group, owners of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. His job description: to cover every major sporting event in Britain and Europe likely to be of interest to his Sydney readers.

Naturally golf was uppermost on his list and he covered, among other major events, the World Matchplay Championship at Wentworth, the French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian Opens and numerous other events on the then-burgeoning European Tour.

July was the dream month,” he recalls. “I'd spend two weeks covering Wimbledon then high-tail it to The Open Championship.”

So within two years of becoming a golf writer he was covering his first Open Championship, watching Arnold Palmer win at Royal Birkdale.

SO WHEN DID ALL THIS WORLD TRAVELLING BEGIN?

Barry spent four years in Fleet Street and then, prompted by a miserable winter climate, he moved to Sydney where he worked first for the Daily Telegraph before switching to the Sunday Mirror. There, in addition to acting as News Editor, he wrote a weekly column covering all sports. Life was progressing comfortably when a union dispute prompted a newspaper strike affecting all the city media. It threatened to be protracted (in fact it lasted for 18 months) and Barry was forced to find other employment.

Once again he fell on his feet, becoming editor of Golf Australia magazine with a brief to cover the national golf scene, its various championships and the burgeoning Australasian Tour. This gave him entrée to play in the Tour's weekly pro-am events, which saw his handicap reduced to low single figures, and also made him known to the influential people in  Australian and Asian golf.

It was through one of these contacts that he was invited to visit a new golf resort in Fiji. This was Pacific Harbour and it had a course designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. The year was 1973 and it was his first experience of reviewing a golf resort. Little could he guess how many more he would visit over the coming years, starting with those in Australia where golf tourism was about to explode.

BUT THEN HE LEFT AUSTRALIA, CORRECT?

Not immediately. That didn't happen until 1978 when for various reasons he and his wife were forced to return to the UK. There they settled in Southport, his wife's home town: in fact their home was  in Birkdale; they lived no more than a drive and a two iron from the club where he had watched Arnold Palmer win The Open back in 1961.

Working for the local paper, he wrote a weekly golf column and reviewed events in the region until, in 1983, he became editor of Golf News, the UK's first free golf publication based in Worthing, Sussex. His first major story came when he covered the Open Championship won by Tom Watson at …...Royal Birkdale.

This experience brought him into contact with well-known golf writers, among them the editor of Golf Monthly. In time he became a contributor, writing features upon request and attending various major events before he was invited to become Travel Editor. Now the world was his oyster!

When he wasn't scouring the British Isles for golfing treasure he travelled all over Europe, and North Africa and South Africa, from Marrakech to Cape Town via Cairo, Zimbabwe and Sun City. He would visit the USA at least twice a year and over time became familiar with New England (“I could live there,” he often says), North and South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and California.

He even found time to pop back to Bermuda, where it all began, a trip he described as “nostalgic in extremis.” Through moist eyes he discovered that little had changed, “which isn't surprising because Bermuda is unchanging. That's part of its charm. Even now, 60 years later, it could be the 1950s, all over again.”

NO REGRETS? NO HAIRY, SCARY MOMENTS?

In truth, it hasn’t been all beer and skittles, he says. There’s been a price to pay for the good life: missed flights and interminable waits at strange airports for some less than salubrious aircraft, questionable hotels, second rate courses, upset stomachs, lost luggage, obstreperous immigration officials, arrogant speed cops on the make, “not forgetting dengue fever, which I acquired on my debut trip to Fiji and which recurred at the same time every year for the next six years...”

Also on the debit side have been some hairy situations, such as a night flight to Bangkok “where our 747 was like a feather in the firmament: the turbulence was so frightening that my fellow passengers were either screaming or chanting prayers. I requested a farewell glass of champers but it never arrived…..”

Driving in stair-rod rain on flooded, single track roads in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco was fun, too. Then there was being lost and out of fuel in a Casablanca shanty town that made Soweto look like Mayfair; and being unable to find water with his car radiator imitating a volcano during a pitch-black, midnight drive across central Spain with neither a spot of light nor a drop of water to be found. He relieved the situation simply by doing what came naturally.....

Yes, it's all been great fun... After many years “on the road” Barry has dramatically reduced his travelling but still accepts the occasional media invitation, to review a new destination or renew memories of another time, another place.... He also attends the major travel shows where our great game is part of the mix, where golf resort folk gather.

Golf tourism is a major part of the travel industry,” he says, “but the folk in it are like a big family: everyone knows everyone else. It's a delight to be involved. I'm a very lucky old golfer...”