KEY POINTS:
Here's the problem. You're a fanatical fan of the England football team. You also play golf for a living and one of the year's richest tournaments clashes with the European championship quarter-final against Spain.
How can you play golf and watch the football? Easy. Take a portable TV and watch the game between shots.
Outrageous but true - and the golfing football fan is in Christchurch this week as one of the star attractions at the first New Zealand Women's Open.
Laura Davies, the pride of Coventry, perpetrated this unlikely scenario during Euro 96. At the time she was one of the best players in her game. She'd won the LPGA Championship in America and was defending champion at the rich Evian Masters in France.
But her final round of the Evian coincided with the showdown against Spain at Wembley. It was the perfect afternoon. England won the football - for once they prevailed in a penalty shootout - and Davies won the golf tournament, shooting the day's best round with 68.
One rather prissy golf correspondent suggested she wasn't taking the tournament seriously. Considering she won by four shots, it's just as well for the rest of the field that she was distracted.
Such are the exploits of this larger-than-life figure, one of the great personalities of world sport. She may be a decade or so past her prime but, with four major championships, 20 wins on the LPGA Tour and more than 70 victories, there's no doubting her status in the game.
That Davies has entered the New Zealand Open with its modest purse of $150,000 is a major coup for the Clearwater event starting on Friday. But it represents the more realistic attitude of women professionals, compared to the mostly mercenary attitude of their male counterparts.
There is no all-year-round women's schedule and, apart from a 36-hole event in Brazil today and tomorrow, no others anywhere during January. The Ladies European Tour begins with the Australian Ladies Masters on the Gold Coast next week and the New Zealand Women's Open is leaning on that proximity to snare a few top playing attractions for their 54-hole event.
As well as Davies, the other big stars are Australia's Katherine Hull and Europe's top player, Gwladys Nocera of France. Like the Englishwoman, they want the market for their skills to expand and have the attitude that even if the purse is small, the tournament is worth supporting because it might grow into something really worthwhile.
Hull, who played here as a junior amateur before going to college in Los Angeles, is now the 26th-ranked woman player in the world. Last year, as well as winning her first LPGA Tour event, she holed out for an albatross or double eagle at a tournament in Virginia. She hit a 3-wood 206 metres in a round of 64 for just the 29th albatross in LPGA Tour history.
Apart from Davies, Nocera is the player in this field who really knows about winning. There were five victories last year; 10 since 2006. In one of her wins last year, at the Goteberg Masters in Sweden, she was 29 under par for four rounds. Put another way, that's an average score under 65 for four days.
Nobody will go close to that sort of scoring around Clearwater, where there's usually some sort of a breeze. It's a hard to place to post a low number if the nor'easter gets up in the afternoons.
As far as I can tell, England don't have a fixture next weekend and Davies' other great love, Liverpool FC, will be playing in the middle of the night. So she'll be free to concentrate on her golf.
