Michael Alexander meets a Perthshire pensioner who overcame a leg amputation to become a golfing legend – and has now written his debut novel aged 80.
The sun is streaming in to the ground floor garden flat and the air is thick with tobacco smoke as 80-year-old Archie Blair lifts one of his crutches to shake me by the hand.
“Please have a seat. Do you mind if I smoke?” he says, making chat from the open plan kitchen as he makes me coffee.
By his own admission, the Blairgowrie grandfather shouldn’t really be smoking at all.
Vascular problems
It was most likely his lifelong addiction to cigarettes and the vascular problems which followed that forced surgeons to amputate his left leg in 2002.
But the passionate golfer and former rugby player, who gave up smoking for a short while after the amputation, quickly realised he could not let his new situation define him.
“You are left with a simple option, “he says. “ You can just curl up and that’s it, end of life. Or you fight it – and I opted to fight it.”
Edinburgh born Archie invited The Courier to his home in Blairgowrie to talk about his debut novel Going for Gold.
Two years-ago the retired sales executive graduated from the Open University with a BSc (Hons) in social science and politics.
He followed this by writing a fictional drama based on the age old struggle between Israel and Palestine. It concerns Dov Gold, a young Israeli professional golfer who wins the Irish Open and qualifies to play in The Open at Muirfield. The drama sees two Hamas assassins sent to eliminate him because of the world wide attention he has received.
Humour
But as Archie settles down in his chair and lights another cigarette to talk about his book, it’s impossible not to be fascinated by the twists and turns in his own life – and the humour he brings with it.
Born in 1935, Archie left the capital’s Broughton High School to serve an apprenticeship as a mining surveyor with the National Coal Board. After a spell in marketing, he spent the rest of his working life in sales, including time as part of the Xerox team that sold the first Fax machine in Scotland.
A past captain of Edinburgh’s Ravelston Golf Club, he was an eight handicapper before his amputation. But encouraged not to give up playing by his friends and Strathmore Golf Centre club professional Andy Lamb, who helped him with balance, he was back on the course in less than a year and found himself experiencing a very unexpected “15 minutes of fame”.
It was Halloween in 2007 that the one-legged golfer bagged his sixth hole-in-one on the sixth hole with a six iron.
And his unprecedented “666” moment attracted considerable media attention with everyone from the golfing press to the BBC taking an interest.
“The fact that I got three sixes – my sixth hole-in-one with a six iron on the sixth hole – was quite something,” the keen churchgoer laughs.
“But what made it really interesting is that it happened on Halloween. So it was 666 – the sign of the devil! Word soon got around!”
Prosthetic
Archie’s exploits are made possible by his prosthetic leg. He shows off his “summer leg” – a cyborg-like extension which he describes as a “brilliant piece of German engineering” – and also confides he has a winter leg with padding to “keep out the cold”.
A keen Hibs FC fan with a penchant for travel and classical music, Archie’s passion for sport once extended to writing. As a young man, he wrote golf and rugby reports for the now defunct Edinburgh Dispatch newspaper and The Scotsman, describing his early delve into journalism as a “hobby”.
It was his recent decision to study at the Open University, however, which rekindled his passion for research and writing and led on to his debut novel.
“I’d always regretted having not gone to university,” he says. “I was lucky to get the job I did when I did.
“But going to the Open University a few years ago was the best move I ever did. It was six years of really hard work but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve always been interested in politics. Another great thing about the OU is it opened my eyes to people like Socrates – people I never knew anything about.
“It broadened my outlook on life. In fact I’m now back studying The Ethics of War run by the University of New South Wales through distance learning. I was inspired to take that course because of the Chilcott Report, and now I can impress – or bore – my friends!”
Archie had been thinking about knocking the novel off his “bucket list” for a while and laughs when he recalls how he decided to write it in his “gap year” aged 79.
“One of the joys of writing the book was all the research,” he adds.
“And it was great getting Blairgowrie High School art department to run a competition for the cover.”
- ‘Going for Gold’ is available on Amazon for £1.90.
