PGA Features

PGA Scottish Region chairman Alan White has enjoyed a career which has seen him teach the rich and famous as well as commentating on football and learning to dance from the best. He looks back on his career with Ron Marshall.

He's danced with Ginger Rogers, regularly talks football to radio listeners in 22 countries, plus the entire British Naval Fleet, and, in his chosen career path, has taught golf to such luminaries as Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster and Admiral Alan Shepard (the astronaut who hit a six-iron on the moon all of 37 years ago).

The man in question is PGA Scottish Region chairman, Alan White, who's been head pro at Lanark Golf Club since 1996. White, now aged 46, can look back on a career that began in 1982 under the tutelage of Gleneagles Hotel golfing supremo, Ian Marchbank. Teaching mainly transient hotel guests - here today, gone next week at the latest - White reckons that was the best kind of practice for burgeoning pros with a bent for instruction.

"Hotel guests are like any other golfer - they want instant success. If they didn't improve, you'd either got the theory wrong or your explanation wasn't good enough. The great thing was - they were leaving anyway. So what you had to do was tell yourself you'd got it wrong, and figure out another way of getting the message across next time."

Seven years of honing his teaching skills with Connery, Lancaster and Shepard were followed by another seven as head pro at Murcar, just north of Aberdeen. There he began to realise that, in whatever competition he chose to play, a number of his playing partners would initially winkle out a few tips from him as to what was troubling them, and, more often than not, those same players would arrange lessons with the new Murcar pro.

"I've never advertised as far as lessons go - one pro would tell another, that kind of thing - and at the moment I have 19 Scottish professionals coming to me; I reckon overall 35 have come and gone."

Among the best-known on the Scottish domestic circuit are former Scottish PGA champions Chris Kelly and Craig Ronald, plus two of the country's brightest prospects, Stevie Gray from Hayston and Sam Cairns, who represents Westerwood Hotel and Country Club, near Cumbernauld.

"Ronan Rafferty's also been a regular this year. He and I have been pals for a long time, we play regularly all over the place, and now that his wrist's healed up (he had an operation in Australia over the winter for a fused bone) he's keen to get his game back into some kind of shape."

But if, like most pros with a reputation for teaching, he prefers to teach the better players, he has no doubt about the biggest challenge he's faced on the teaching ground. "I started a series for BBC Radio Scotland last year, teaching an employee at the Beeb called Ian Hamilton, who decided he wanted to play golf. Ian has a bigger handicap than most of us - he's totally blind.

"Normally, your approach would be explanation, demonstration, application. Obviously in this case I couldn't demonstrate so your explanation has to be spot-on. He can now hit his driver a couple of hundred yards, and keep the ball pretty much on the fairway. We also had a putting competition a couple of months ago in the studio, and Ian actually beat the presenter, John Beattie (a former British Lions Rugby forward). We didn't tell him, though, that we'd had a wee secret practice!"

For the last 12 years, Alan has been head pro at one of the country's finest heathland courses, Lanark Golf Club, but he still fondly recalls his days at Gleneagles Hotel. The Ginger Rogers episode, for example, wasn't the result of a lesson he'd given.

"I was in the shop, and she came in after her round. She'd be in her early 70s maybe, but was a pretty competent golfer. Another of the assistants, Derek Brown (who became golf manager at Valderrama), found some music on the pro shop radio, and she gave me a dance lesson for about 15 minutes. A wonderful memory to have!"

It's always worth remembering, too, when Fred Astaire gets too much credit for their brilliant dance routines - she did everything he did, going backwards - and on high heels!

Finally, it's hardly surprising that Alan White should be covering football for the British Forces Broadcasting Service - his father, Davie, was manager of Rangers from 1967 for two seasons.

"I know Alistair Murning, who does football for BFBS. They needed somebody to comment on golf, so I volunteered. I quite fancied a go at it. I've been doing the football for about three seasons - you fly by the seat of your pants a lot of the time, doing goal flashes and reports that last maybe five or six minutes.

"But you don't do this for the money - I'd make more spending the afternoon doing lessons. It's just an enjoyable hobby."