Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
It was nice while it lasted but alas The Moodie Report’s Interim Dead Sea Bureau is now closed. What a beautiful setting, not just to run my business from but also for the (excellent) MEADFA Conference 2015.
I’ve now set up shop, as it were, in Dubai. I’m staying at the Jumeirah Creekside Hotel, owned by Dubai Duty Free, hosts of the Dubai Duty Free Golf World Cup which tees off later today.
Over 100 players from the global travel retail industry will take part in the two-day, 36-hole event, beginning today at the Al Badia Golf Club and concluding tomorrow at the Dubai Creek Golf and Yacht Club.
Reading the small print today I noted that the event is “open to amateur players”. This is a positive development for me as I am the definitive amateur player, my game carefully honed by approximately three rounds a year, in Cannes and Dubai. Mind you, I score so poorly during those three rounds that in terms of actual number of shots played during the year I’m right up there with the best of them.
Unlike a certain Dermot ‘Divot’ from the Galway branch of The Moodie Report, who had the temerity to win this very event (pictured below) in 2013 – while, to make it even worse, I was back in London churning out War and Peace-like volumes of copy. And I thought life got easier when you became the boss. We’ve had words since, of course, and the Divot has promised me he won’t let down our hard-won reputation for sporting uselessness ever again.
My chances? Well, given that I have an incurable case of both the putting and chipping ‘yips’ (and the rest of my game is not much better) I’m reminded of that exchange from Dumb & Dumber.
Lloyd Christmas: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a girl like me… ending up together?
Mary Swanson: Well, Lloyd, that’s difficult to say. I mean, we don’t really…
Lloyd Christmas: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Mary. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?
Mary Swanson: Not good.
Lloyd Christmas: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?
Mary Swanson: I’d say more like one out of a million.
Lloyd Christmas: So you’re telling me there’s a chance… YEAH!
So I do have a chance then. Yeah! That glittering Dubai Duty Free Golf World Cup trophy is the Mary Swanson to my Lloyd Christmas game. But let’s stretch the odds a little more to be realistic. Shall we say 100 million to one? Most likely though that chance, like many a ball I hit in the next 48 hours, will be dead in the water.
Talking of which, I should have practiced at the Dead Sea. At least there my golf balls, like (readers of a nervous disposition look away now) Richard Kennedy, Patrick Dorais, Joe Harvey and Gordon Ratcliffe below, wouldn’t have sunk.
[Richard Kennedy, ‘launched’ as the new face of The Moodie Report, peruses the publication on the Dead Sea while Patrick Dorais contemplates a public float]
[Moodie Blues and Muddy Waters]
[Tourvest’s Joe Harvey, free of duty at last]