In the constant tsunami of junk emails that I receive, I’m now being regularly bombarded by messages from an online tarot card company.
Apparently, this cartomancy lark can help you connect with higher wisdom, seek spiritual growth and gain a deeper understanding of the universe through mystical guidance.
You can, of course, get all this and more simply by reading the enlightening meanderings of the Tuesday golf column on a regular basis. Or something like that. We all need a bit of navigational nous as we journey down the fairway of life, don’t we?
It’s Walker Cup week and you don’t need tarot cards or a clairvoyancy expert to see that GB&I’s amateurs have a tough old task on their hands against the USA at Cypress Point in California.
There are probably remote tribes in the wilds of Peru who are aware of the well-documented statistic that GB&I have won just twice on American soil in the 103-year history of the transatlantic tussle.
Cypress Point presents formidable challenge for Euros
Cypress Point, meanwhile, is one of America’s most exclusive clubs. You’d have more chance of chiselling your way into Fort Knox with a soup spoon than you would have of getting a glimpse of how this other golfing half live.
Due to demand and limited accessibility, there was a random ticket ballot for spectators wanting to attend this, the 50th Walker Cup.
If you were lucky to be plucked out of the tombola, an adult day pass would cost you about $200. At the Old Course for the 2023 contest, that same brief was about $32.
The price of exclusivity, eh?
It’s been 44 years since Cypress Point last staged the Walker Cup. The USA romped home in the final day singles and eventually won 15-9. It was GB&I’s 25th defeat in 28 meetings.
“Just as the rich are different from the rest of us because they have more money, so the United States keep on winning the Walker Cup match because they have more accomplished players than Great Britain & Ireland,” wrote The Herald’s golf correspondent, Raymond Jacobs, in his closing dispatch from California’s Monterey Peninsula that year.
“To look for any other explanation is to complicate unnecessarily a simple equation.”
Since 1981, of course, GB&I have enjoyed the odd, glorious spell. Three wins in a row from 1999 to 2003, for instance, was a jubilant and historic run that had the bunting permanently hanging up on the Royal & Ancient clubhouse.
It almost stayed there in 2005, but GB&I lost by a single point during a quite thrilling affair in Chicago which went right down to the wire.
Your correspondent was in the Windy City that week, covering the event for the Press Association, along with my trusted and seasoned colleagues, Jock MacVicar and The Herald’s much-missed golf writer, the late Dougie Lowe.
Poor Dougie’s luggage got lost in transit and Jock and I were hired as his personal stylists as we hastily careered around the cut-price clothing aisles at the local mall.
This combined sartorial expertise made dapper Dougie look like Cary Grant. Maybe not a million dollars, but 35 bucks goes a long way in Walmart.
U.S. has won 39 times at Walker Cup
But I digress. Here in 2025, the overall record in the Walker Cup stands at 39 U.S. wins to GB&I’s nine. The visitors have traveled to America’s West Coast looking to avoid a fifth successive defeat.
Down the seasons – and usually in the aftermath of a hefty trouncing – there have been calls to expand the GB&I set-up and incorporate golfers from continental Europe, like the Ryder Cup did back in 1979.
Some traditionalists would view this as an act of heresy punishable by ritual drowning in the Swilcan Burn.
Others would argue that, like everything, the Walker Cup needs to evolve in a changing golfing world.
Will it happen? We’ll need to dig out those tarot cards and crystal balls, but you never know.
Change, however slowly, does happen. Dean Robertson, the GB&I captain who has already savored victory over Europe in the St. Andrews Trophy the other month, is the first professional golfer to skipper a Walker Cup side.
The R&A also broke the mold in the women’s Curtis Cup last year with the appointment of Catriona Matthew as GB&I captain. Things move on.
For the time being, though, we can all sit back and savour one of golf’s most treasured team contests.
In an age when the professional game, and the money swilling around in it, is all-consuming, the Walker Cup remains one of the noble pillars of the amateur ideal.
When GB&I won at St. Andrews in 1971, to record a first success in the biennial bout since 1938, the triumph was splashed on the front page of The Herald above a story reporting that, ‘Man sits up in bed after 170 ft fall.’
Presumably, the stirring news from the Auld Grey Toun had bolstered the patient’s miraculous recovery.
Miracles occasionally happen. Perhaps Robertson and his troops can pull off another one this weekend?
I’ll see what the tarot cards are saying.
Nick Rodger is the golf correspondent for The Herald in Scotland, part of Gannett/Newsquest.
