Gamble adds new win to list of honours – aged 72

Oct 2 2007 by Harold Brough, Liverpool Daily Post

THE individual Mike Gamble honours board at West Derby is being updated, yet again, following his success in the Club Captain’s event.

This is a remarkable achievement and not only because golf club honours boards usually relate to a specific club competition rather than the achievements of one member.

The other reasons are that he is aged 72 and not in the best health.

But then few at the Liverpool club and in his circle of golf friends would be too surprised at his latest successes. In addition to the Captain’s he has also won the Summer Pairs.

It takes a little time to read the details of his honours board. The board measures 11 inches deep and 16 inches wide and the list of his golf victories now totals 60, including the latest additions.

They come in so often that it is indeed fortunate that this is not the usual sort of honours board, made of wood and needing additions in gold paint. It is a computer print out, in an attractive gold-coloured frame, which makes the addition of new wins in his golf career an easy task.

It is his fifth win in the Captain’s, one more than Tommy Worthington, who played for Lancashire in the 1950s. He has been club champion 17 times, including six years in succession. He played for Lancashire 24 times and his list of victories includes the Merseyside Municipal Championship, the Daily Mirror, North of England Matchplay tournament, the David Marsh Seniors twice, the Pines at Hillside and many more.

He won this year’s Captain’s beating Jim Paton, himself a double winner, last year’s winner, the club champion, a scratch player and, says Gamble: “The best player in the club.”

Then, with his son Ian, he won the Summer Pairs, beating Neil Gravener, his victim in the Captain’s semi-final, and Phil Lamkin.

But, the individual Captain’s was special and comes against the background of major health problems and the sheer difficulties of walking round the golf course, the pain of playing the game.

“Obviously I am overjoyed to win, thrilled to bits.” he said. “I have had prostrate cancer and other health problems. I had a brain haemorrhage about five years ago and I have arthritis, everywhere. So I cannot walk very far and use a sit-on buggy.”

Gamble began playing golf as a lad at the Liverpool Municipal and across the Mersey at Arrowe Park. He played in the Bootle Boys Championship organised by “Tiny” Rimmer, so called because he was 6ft 7 ins.

Rimmer gave him his first handicap, five, when he was aged 12. When Gamble finished National Service with the Household Cavalry he joined Bowring Park and then West Derby in 1963. His handicap was one. He won the club championship the next years and the following five.

He always wanted to be a scratch golfer. That is a minor regret alongside never winning the Lancashire Championship or the Lancashire Seniors, although he has been runner–up there a few times.

“I do feel I could have achieved more,” he says.

Indeed Bobby Halsall, the famous professional at Royal Birkdale, once spent three hours trying to talk him into turning professional. But health problems apart, he worked for an American computer company, travelling the north, including Scotland and the Isle of Man, and with a 7-iron in the car boot and lots of golf balls he had found on his golf rounds.

“I used to hit the balls into the fields,” he says. “Lots of farmers must have wondered where all the golf balls came from.”

But he put family and work ahead of golf and was not prepared for the changes involved even to think about joining the professional game.

But he became an exceptional club player, the best in the history of West Derby, formed in 1896.

So the secret of his latest success?

”I don’t hit the ball the distances I used to,” he says.

“But I hit it straight. If I see the green I have a good chance. I think the other thing that has helped me has been my putting at the back end of the season, changing to a lot lighter putter.

“It has made a big difference. I started holing a lot more putts from six to eight feet.”

His handicap is now five, the same as when he started playing golf 60 years ago. But he does not have any golf ambitions.

He thinks it is to late for him to win the Lancashire Seniors. He says he is too old now, that there is a big difference between the seniors aged 55 and his age of plus-70.

“I cannot endure much more pain every time I play,” he says. “Without the buggy it is difficult to get round.”

He did not talk of ending his golf career.

He jokes that his wife says that, without golf, he would be unbearable!

“But, well, every game is a bonus now,” he adds.