For the time being the work on his back swing will have to wait. From Bootle to Bermuda, Steve McMahon has paced the fairways of some of the world's finest golf courses in the past 12 months, reducing his handicap to 11. But now the irons are back in the garage and the 38-year-old has gone back to basics.

After leaving Swindon Town 15 months ago he bided his time and recharged his batteries, and this week he ended his sabbatical by taking charge at Blackpool Football Club. Battered and beleaguered, Blackpool come complete with a government health warning. So it is fortunate that McMahon has never been greatly concerned about the hazards of his occupation.

Few have crossed him and come out on top, certainly not without bruises to show for it. And when you have taken on mother nature and survived to tell the tale, as he once did on the 14th hole at Wallasey, the prospect of taking over a club whose fortunes have nose-dived more spectacularly than the town's big dipper holds little trepidation.

"I was playing in a testimonial golf day for Alan Hansen and the weather was terrible," McMahon says, recalling the day he came close to meeting his maker. "Playing in weather like that is just about the worst possible thing to do, but for some reason we carried on regardless.

"All of a sudden this flash of lightning came out of the sky and, bosh!, it hit me. It was quick, just a big `whoosh' and then it was gone. Those were the days when I had some hair, and I looked like Bart Simpson with it all stood in the air. None of the other players could believe what they were seeing, and I wasn't best pleased either. I wasn't really injured but it was quite scary all the same." "Scary" is not usually a word predominant in the McMahon vocabulary and he knows it. "I wasn't as scared as the lightning. I soon frightened it off." His current mission is to halt a downward spiral that has left Blackpool's diminishing fan base afflicted with a severe case of vertigo in recent years. They have been a club in decline for longer than they would care to remember, the victims of unfulfilled promises on a downstream tide which has left them washed up and hung out to dry.

Blackpool's main reception doubles as the club shop. The terraces are strewn with moss. Old posters flap from dilapidated stands, and what is left of the tangerine paint hangs away from crumbling walls engulfed by the unedifying stench of years of neglect. The repair job will be immense in a town where the youthful supporters of tomorrow prefer to spend their Saturday afternoons in the gaudy amusement arcades on the Golden Mile rather than the wind-buffeted terraces of Bloomfield Road.

When Blackpool beat Cambridge United in November, the visiting manager Roy McFarland did not attempt to hide his embarrassment with the damning verdict: "Blackpool are the worst side I have seen in two years - and we still lost." But this is a more experienced McMahon than the one who at Swindon had his fingers so badly burned. He guided them to the Second Division championship in 1995-96. They led the First Division in November 1997. He was talked about as a future Liverpool manager - and then it all went horribly wrong.

Before his appointment Swindon's leading players had negotiated Premiership wages for themselves, and the financial burden was too much for a club of humble means. With the red bills gathering, McMahon was ordered to break up his side. Another day, he arrived at work to be told that five of his backroom staff would have to go.

The team went into free-fall and McMahon was blamed. His wife Julie was verbally abused outside the ground, and supporters invaded the pitch after a 4-1 home defeat by Watford. Finally he decided enough was enough and moved his family back to Merseyside.

Since then he has joined the labour-exchange-for-out-of-work managers that is Sky Sports, as well as working with the under16s at Everton, where his son Stephen is on the books.

As he opens a generous pile of good-luck messages in his less than palatial office, he composes his argument for leaving the sanctuary of Sky's studios to succeed Nigel Worthington in charge of a team at the wrong end of the Second Division, where supporters have taken to providing handouts for new transfers and the owner Owen Oyston has a rape conviction on his curriculum vitae.

"The media work is enjoyable but I never thought of it as a long-term thing," he says. "Some people get into that comfort zone, but not me. I took my coaching badges long before I stopped playing and management has always held something for me.

"They were difficult times at Swindon, but don't forget I am in their history books as one of only two managers who have won them a championship. They never wanted me to leave. In fact they begged me to stay. But losing my staff because of all the cost-cutting was the last straw. They told me on a Friday and I had to make sure it was done before the weekend. It was like cutting off my right arm.

"I did well there and I knew that whoever took over could not do as good a job. When you look at the club now, it hasn't kicked on since I left, has it?" Privately McMahon still harbours ambitions to manage Liverpool but, like the golf, that has been put on the back burner. Now his priority is today's visit of Luton Town. "No manager gets a job in January if everything is hunky-dory," he concluded. "The club are in big trouble but at least I know where we stand."