Golfing with Goldfinger

There's an excellent article about golfing in Wales in the September Spotlight, which went on sale yesterday. Coincidentally, yesterday was a special day for golf because one of the game's most passionate players, Sir Sean Connery, celebrated his 80th birthday. "I met my wife through playing golf," Connery once said when talking about the painter Micheline Roquebrune. "She is French and couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations — that's why we got married really quickly." That was 1975.

In 1979, Sean Connery bought the Domaine de Terre Blanche in the south of France where he planned to build his dream golf course. The golf course remained a dream, however, and Connery sold the estate to German software billionaire Dietmar Hopp in 1999. And here's another Connery-golf-Germany connection: One of the best James Bond films, Goldfinger, stars Connery as 007 and Gert Fröbe as the title character, Auric Goldfinger. Fröbe died in 1988 and Toshiyuki Sakata, who was the villain "Oddjob", died in 1982, but Sean Connery is still playing golf.