Tony back on Alliance duty for 55th year

Nov 13 2007 by Harold Brough, Liverpool Daily Post

FORMER professional Tony Coop, who has been out of the game for more than a year with a foot problem, is ready to make a return to the competitive golf scene tomorrow and in the Liverpool Alliance, where he first played more than half a century ago.

Coop, who counts Gary Player and five-times Open champion Peter Thomson among his friends, will also return to his duties as captain of the Alliance, one of the oldest in the country with its origins dating from the 1920s and probably earlier.

Coop, aged 73, remembers his Alliance debut as the day King George V died in 1952.

Since then he has played in the Alliance events every winter.

He has won the Liverpool Championship. the Spalding Cup, the Nelson Cup, each three or four times and more Alliance events that he can count.

But for the last 13 months he has not hit a golf ball. He has had problems with his feet.

“I had to have them straightened,” he explained at his Southport home. “They were pointing at ten o’clock and two o’clock. They went out of line over the years.”

But at the end of last month with the use of a buggy he returned to golf, playing with a friend at Southport and Ainsdale, the club where as a boy he caddied, earning two shillings and sixpence a round and a sixpence tip if he did not lose a ball.

If he has the use of a buggy he will play again in the Alliance when it meets at Southport and Ainsdale tomorrow.

It will be a welcome return.

“The Alliance does mean everything to me,” he says. “When it started it was the place where assistant professionals could play competitive winter golf. There were simply no other competitive events to play in the winter and it did keep my swing going.

“I suppose it was a source of income, too. I remember that the first prize was about £5. That apart, I have made many friends there over the years.”

The Alliance must, indeed, have kept his swing in good shape. He played in the Open several times.

The Liverpool Alliance is in good shape again. The records include a hand-written ledger covering the 1920s-30s and the Spalding Sports Company donated a foursomes championship trophy in 1923, which suggests the Alliance was operating some years earlier.

The Alliance flourished in the years between the two world wars of the last century when traditionally club members would take their club professional for a competitive day’s golf and continued with a healthy membership into the 1970. But then standards went into a decline in the 1980s.

The executive decided that action was necessary to reverse the decline. A new committee was formed with the late Trevor Rushton as secretary and Bill Yates as treasurer handed the task of improving standards.

“The trend has been totally reversed,” says Yates, now secretary-treasurer. “Players, particularly amateurs, approach me about playing in Alliance events and now membership is at an all-time high and we have a waiting list. It is a very happy situation.”

The Alliance reputation and its improving standards now makes it welcome at around 25-30 host clubs in the area where green fees, members using catering and bar facilities in midweek do provide a useful source of income, particularly during the quiet days of winter.

The Alliance has a proud record of helping talented young players in their careers and in the National Alliance Championship, started in 2001 for a trophy donated by the Manchester Alliance president John Dowd. Liverpool were second in the first two years, then held the trophy in 2003 and 2004 and sharing with Manchester in 2005.

Manchester is the biggest Alliance. But then as Bill Yates says of Liverpool “small is beautiful, too.”

Coop, of course, has been among its greatest supporters. He was a junior member at Hillside before becoming assistant professional at Southport’s Hesketh between 1949-1952, where he earned 15 shillings a week, working seven days a week cleaning members’ clubs and shoes and helping with the duties in the shop.

When he finished National Service in 1954 he became professional at Dean Wood and he was there when he retired 45 years later.

The golf swing which he kept in good shape playing in the Alliance during the winters did lead him to play seven times on the last day of the Open championship, where he finished 13th at Royal Birkdale in 1961.

He has walked the fairways with many of golf’s greatest players. And the best?

“Peter Thomson was the best ever,” he says. “Everything was so simple. He did influence me.”

When he retired from Dean Wood in 1999, Peter Thomson and Gary Player were among those who sent their good wishes.

So what lies ahead?

“It is just pleasure golf now,” he says. “I do not expect to win now. I have just one golf ambition now and that is to play to my age.”