Peter Corrigan took his first steps onto a golf course when he was 28 years of age. He had started his journalistic career as a copy boy with the South Wales Echo at the age of 16 and 12 years later joined the Daily Herald in Fleet Street as a football writer. In the summer of 1964 the Herald decided to broaden his sporting knowledge by sending him cover the Daks golf tournament at Wentworth.
He wandered around aimlessly trying to work out what was going on and to make matters worse it was pouring down. In an effort to cover his total ignorance of golf, he renamed the event as the Ducks tournament and christened the winner, Neil Coles, as the ’Raining King of Wentworth’.
Not surprisingly, it was ten years before he was asked to cover golf again. By this time he had served on the Sun and the Daily Mail and had become chief football correspondent of The Observer. He was sent to the 1973 Open Championship at Royal Troon to assist the Observer’s renowned golf writer Peter Dobereiner.
Corrigan continued to cover The Open every year in his minor role and in 1979 decided to take up the game at the same time as his son, James, who was eleven years old. Corrigan senior was a slow learner and after three years James was refusing to play with him in the Father and Son competition. It was about this time that James’s application for a place at Dr Banardo’s was refused on the grounds that having a bad golfer as a father was not the same as being an orphan.
By this time Peter was sports editor of the Observer, a position he held for ten years during which he ran a golf competition to send four readers to play in Bermuda for several years. Of course, he and Dobereiner had to accompany the winners and a close study of Corrigan’s swing led Dobereiner to describe it as ’like a policeman trying to break down a door’.
By the early 1990’s, Dobereiner had retired and Corrigan was appointed to replace him. At this time he had reached the dizzy heights of a 19 handicap but it is a strange paradox that travelling around the finest courses in the world covering the top tournaments doesn’t leave much time to play golf yourself.
His golf deteriorated and was also hit by an attack of the chipping yips. He had advice from some of the best players in the world but it has improved only slowly.
When he left the Observer in 1993 he joined the Independent on Sunday for whom he became chief sports columnist. He also began writing the Hacker column for them about 14 years ago, chronicling the dramas and disasters that can befall the less gifted players.
His forlorn mission for much of that time has been to break 100 in a medal round. When he wrote his last Hacker at the end of January, it completed 60 years of writing for newspapers but it didn‘t mark the end of his quest to break 100.
That carries on remorselessly in this thegolfinghacker website, along with many other unfulfilled dreams.