COVER FEATURE
l-r: ‘Lady Danger’
team - Rachel
Drummond, Zoe
Hardman, Denise
van Outen and
Kirsty Williams
Denise
something about them. “I love them; it
seems that they’ve changed so much over
the last few years.”
For Valentine’s weekend, van Outen
and her boyfriend, Eddie Boxshall,
went to Stoke by Nayland Hotel - an
experience she relished. Asked to
describe what a glamour-girl like herself
wore for golf on Valentines Day, she
came up with the cheerful suggestion that
she resembled “a walking ice-cream”.
It was all “pinks, cream and baby
blues” - at least until she had to don
something warmer and more waterproof.
Van Outen’s love of a challenge is well
known. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro
in helping Comic Relief to raise 5
million, while she has also done a Dame
Laura Davies in walking a section of
the Great Wall of China for the Royal
Marsden. On the latter occasion she and a
couple of friends collected £33,000.
Such experiences almost certainly
paved the way for her to ignore the
bad weather that interrupted her Stoke
by Nayland stay. “I didn’t mind when
it turned nasty” she said. “The course
was still a picture and I loved the extra
challenge.”
So much does she feel at home at
this well-known golfing resort that she
wasted no time in booking in for her 41st
birthday in May - a weekend which was
going to coincide with a Murder Mystery
event. It sounded like her idea of fun.
Did no-one ever tell van Outen when
she was given her first set of clubs last
year that golf was not exactly a ‘cool’
game for someone like herself?
She was not sure if anyone had.
“If someone were to say that today,
I wouldn’t take too long to put them
straight,” she insisted.
“Personally, I think golf is a really cool
game for women. It’s very social. I’m
not working as hard as I used to because
of my four-year-old daughter, Betsy, so I
wanted to find something I could do with
my girlfriends while she is at school and
golf fits the bill.
“You can play at home and you can
travel abroad with this game. It feels
grown up and it feels cool and I feel
passionate about it. Also, I’ve met so
many different people from so many
different walks of life - and everywhere
I’ve played, I couldn’t have been
van
Outen
“Golf is a cool game
even if I resemble a
walking ice-cream!”
WOR DS Lew ine M a i r
While enjoying a break at Stoke by Nayland
Hotel, Golf & Spa Resort, the presenter and
actress tells us why she is hooked on golf
I
n the 2012 final of Strictly Come
Dancing, Denise van Outen danced
in front of around 12 million people
without feeling nervous. Does she
feel like that when she stands on the first
tee at golf? The answer was a succinctly
humorous ‘No’.
To explain, when this talented
show-business personality played with
Buckinghamshire’s Rachel Drummond in
a LET pro-am at Stoke by Nayland last
summer, she had been alarmed to find a
little gathering hanging about the tee in
anticipation of the opening drives. “It was frightening,” she
acknowledged. Before too long, though,
she was into her stride and finding that
the pressure was working for her rather
than the reverse. “Pressure can be a good
thing, especially if you’re playing well in
the first place,” she avers.
34
pDeniseVanOuten.indd 34
Van Outen and Drummond - the latter
played for England in the Nations Cup got on like the proverbial house on fire
and today they make up a four-strong
team which does the rounds of the
various charity golf days.
The team has a name. “We called
it ‘Lady Danger’ after my favourite
red lipstick,” said the latest recruit to
EastEnders.
It was one of the tabloid papers which
noted that van Outen loved dressing up
for golf and quoted her as saying, “I feel
naughty in my golf outfits; they bring
out the devil in me.” (Hardly your usual
women’s ‘golf-speak’.)
She says, with a chuckle, that a) she
never spoke to the author of the article
and b) that she said no such thing.
Yet it is 100% true that she thinks that
the latest in golf fashions have a little
Denise enjoys a glass
of wine in one of the
luxurious Country Lodges
at Stoke by Nayland
W&G MAY/JUNE 2015
At the Fifty
Shades of Grey
premiere; on the
lodge balcony at
Stoke by Nayland
with boyfriend
Eddie Boxshall
made more welcome. It’s all added up to
an amazing new experience.”
What did she think about the R&A
having taken 260 years before having its
first batch of women members?
She knows, from what she has been
told, that golf was traditionally a man’s
game but she can see why the all-male
clubs would be revising their views.
“There are so many more independent
women around nowadays who want
to have the same rights as men. It all
makes sense. Personally, I can’t wait for
someone to ask me for a game over the
Old Course.”
Van Outen is coached by Kevin Merry
at The Grove in Hertfordshire and,
though she has not yet had time to get her
handicap sorted out (she plays off 36 on
the pro-am scene) she has drawn much
confidence from what Merry has had to
say about her progress: “He has told me
that I have great potential - and that he
can’t believe how much I’ve come on in
the space of a year.”
Though she recently added a Lynx
driver to her original set of TaylorMade
clubs, she is currently being measured for
a custom-built set of Srixons. “I need to
have them custom-made because I can’t
just pick up a women’s set of clubs and
find that they all work for me,” she says.
“I’m better when I use men’s irons.”
Her dancing origins could have
something to do with that. Back in the
1960s, Marley Harris, one of the greatest
English women champions of all time,
credited her dancing background with
helping her to get off on the right golfing
foot and it would seem that van Outen is
of the same opinion. “I’ve definitely got
good co-ordination,” she acknowledges.
So what would van Outen do to make
golf more popular among teenage girls? Lap up some Luxury in a Lodge
Stoke by Nayland Hotel,
Golf & Spa Resort is
an award-winning
family owned business
situated on the Suffolk/
Essex border. It includes
an 80-bedroom hotel,
two championship golf
courses (host of this
year’s LETAS WPGA
event 8-10th October),
covered driving range/
short practice facility,
Spa and Fitness centre,
conference centre, and
a 2AA Rosette Lakes
Restaurant.
Five luxury Country
Lodges were completed
two years ago on the
golf course, and they
are perfect for groups
of families and friends.
Lodge guests can
enjoy complimentary
transportation around
the resort, use of
the hotel’s luxurious
facilities, and they also
receive discounts off
spa days and golf green
fees. For info visit:
www.stokebynayland.com
As one who has already introduced her
four-year-old daughter to putting, van
Outen says that she would do everything
she could to have golf played in schools.
“It’s a perfect sport for children and
should be encouraged. Apart from the
physical exercise, it’s a game which calls
for you to be mentally focused.”
The bosses at EastEnders have said
that van Outen will send sparks flying as
her character gets romantically involved
with one of the stars. She has been sworn
to secrecy as to which star that might
be, though she herself is well-versed in
precisely what is in store. “You find out
before you sign along the dotted line,”
she said, before mentioning, lightly, that
she might try to do her bit to broaden
golf’s appeal by somehow introducing the
game to the programme.
Still dealing with showbiz issues, van
Outen had been to see Fifty Shades of
Grey with Boxshall just a couple of days
before this interview took place.
What did she make of it? Clearly, she
was not that smitten:
“I thought it was OK - better than I
imagined but I wouldn’t rush out to see it
again.”
In 1999, van Outen was given the
‘Rear of the Year’ title while, on another
occasion, she was deemed to have “the
most desired bikini body”.
You ask her to name the finest
compliment ever played to van Outen
the golfer and she has one at the ready. It
came from Justin Rose on the same day
as she played in that aforementioned LET
pro-am.
When she looked at Twitter comments at
the end of the day, there was one from the
Rose which read “Great Swing Denise!”
It was an observation which had him
soaring to the No. 1 spot on her list of
golfing heroes.
“What could be better,” she asked“ than
being paid a compliment by someone of
his calibre?”
www.womenandgolf.com
30/03/2015 23:42