I Love The Frustrations Of Golf !

GM’s new columnist Dan Walker tells us about his passion for the game...

- Jeremy Ellwood

Dan Walker is one of our most popular and likable sports presenters. The 39-year-old from Crawley – son of a church minister and Welsh mother who once played tennis for her country – has come a very long way since his MA in Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield in 1999.

After starting out in radio, his move into television came when someone simply suggested he “should try doing some telly.” Walker followed that advice, and got himself a six-month contract at Granada TV. When his boss uprooted for the BBC in 2006, Walker went with her.

Since then, his rise has been meteoric, progressing from news to sport and covering the Six Nations, golf, horse racing, Wimbledon and football. Since 2009, Walker has been the face of Football Focus and more recently one of the faces of BBC Breakfast.

Through it all, golf has remained a personal passion. Walker refers to that first call-up to cover golf as “the phone call I’d long dreamed of!” and now, from our May issue onwards, Walker will have his own Golf Monthly column, offering his insight and opinion about a sport he has loved since childhood.

Here, Dan tells us more about his love of the game from both sides of the lens ahead of next month’s debut column…

How did you first get into golf?

I remember after school one day going down to Tilgate Forest, which is a municipal in Crawley, and the guy who was giving this lesson to 20 kids was ‘leathered’. Mum said I don’t really want you going there, but I kept going back with my friends after school. I got my first 7-iron for Christmas that year and would just swing that in the back garden a lot, watch golf on telly and obsess about being Nick Faldo’s friend. I was hooked from an early age!

What is your handicap and what are the strengths of your game?