KEY POINTS:
My journalistic colleagues might suggest I've jumped the fence, gone to the dark side or changed from poacher to gamekeeper.
Last Thursday night, I became part of Auckland golf officialdom when the provincial association appointed me a representative selector.
It was not a job I chased or had
even thought about until I was approached by some members of the association executive to fill one of the vacancies.
Many might say, in the light of what happened with the Auckland representative team in 2007, this is both a hospital pass and a poisoned chalice. I see it as a challenge.
To recap, the Auckland team was decimated last September when seven prospective representative team players decided to play the Waikato strokeplay championship rather than the annual Auckland-Wellington match at Taupo.
As a consequence, those seven players were banned from playing for Auckland for the rest of the season. An under-strength team represented the province at the national championships, where they finished eighth out of 15 teams.
I'm not going to re-litigate that issue. Suffice to say, it was a terrible episode in the often fractious relationship that's developed between some top players in the city and the provincial association.
That the country's most populous golfing province has not won the national title since 1995 is unsatisfactory.
I guess the reason that I was approached about this role is that I became the sole selector at the Akarana club for the Bissett Shield team last year and I'm doing the same job again this year.
I see golf as the easiest sport of all to select teams for. There's no need to make subjective judgements like a rugby or cricket selector.
Golf is all about putting numbers on the board in competitive situations. Last year and again this year at Akarana, I held a series of trial rounds, gave every player the chance to discard their worst score, and picked eight players of a 10- man team based only on those scores, with a couple of "wildcard" choices to make up the number.
It's not an especially original idea, because in a longer form, that's how Ryder Cup and President's Cup teams are picked.
It means you can't play favourites. It seemed to work at Akarana last year. We came second in the Bissett Shield, while a four-man team was runner-up in the National Interclub Challenge, and already this year we've won the Auckland Interclub Challenge.
It helps, of course, to have some really good players and my club is fortunate to have a top group at the moment. But then the Auckland association has always had enough good players to regularly contend for national honours. Too often though, one or more of those top players was not willing to make the representative commitment.
I'm not promising that things will improve overnight. After all, I'm only one of three selectors with Mark Watson of Titirangi and Tony Barrow of Manukau and their ideas might be different to mine.
What I do know is that communication, honesty and integrity with the players is vital if the best are to perform at their best for the province. With that in mind, those who want to play for Auckland this year are meeting at The Grange so we can talk about representative commitments as part of players' overall schedules, and discuss an honest and transparent selection policy.
And I know there may come a time when the integrity of this column and the commitments of officialdom may clash. I'm confident I can recognise and address that.
