The article below is one of those pieces which starts with a phone call (in this case: 'Can you drive to Carnoustie and do a story about the torrential rain which is going to ruin the Open golf championship?') and ends up being something completely different.
It takes about an hour and half to drive from Edinburgh and I had problems as soon as I got to Carnoustie - a tiny wee place which could be the model for the narrow, introverted village in James Robertson's novel, The Testament of Gideon Mack. Problem No 1: it wasn't raining, so there wasn't a weather story. Problem No 2: security was as tight as a gnat's chuff - I couldn't get on to the course or near the press centre to get any kind of piece about the condition of the links, or Tiger Woods's baby, or whatever else newsdesks might be interested in.
What to do? I wandered into Carnoustie Golf Club, which sits beside the championship links but is separate from them, and walked straight into a guy called Joe Gourlay. And he had the story which got me the whole of page 3 of the Times. I wrote the piece up in a pub in Dundee, the only place I could find with WiFi. And this is what I wrote ...
1 comment:
Wow, from no story to a whole page. Luck must have been on your side that day. Then again, you're a journalist. Was it luck or did you know exactly what you were doing, where to go, and who to engage into conversation? Hmmmmm!
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