by Tom Cox
People who run across golf courses tend to split into four discernible categories. There are those who’ve lost their ball in long grass and been obliged to hotfoot it back to the tee to replay their shot, those who’ve reached the fourth green and realized that they’ve left a tap on back at home, those who’ve crawled through a hole in the course’s boundary fence for a dare involving ball theft, and those who feel like running for the hell of it. The third category has probably never come across the word ‘etiquette’ and doesn’t even realize that running across a golf course is a perverted thing to do. The other three categories have one feature in common: they look like idiots. I fell into the fourth category.
The one thing you could say in favour of Ashley, Ross, Jamie, Bushy and me when we decided to charge down the fairway of Cripsley’s seventh hole for no reason was that at least we’d made a pact to look like idiots. This agreement took a telepathic form. No one said ‘Run!’ after the last of our tee shots had torpedoed over the fried-egg-shaped bunker safeguarding the fairway, but we all somehow knew that’s what we were going to do, as if we’d collectively heard a silent starter’s gun.
‘Your ankles are like a four-year-old girl’s,’ Jamie pointed out to Ross, as Ross crouched to tee up his ball.
‘Well, at least I don’t look like a lizard,’ said Ross.
The next thing I knew, our shots were dispatched, and we were in flight: five whooping adolescents in polyester sweaters, each carrying several kilograms of rattling metal and wood on his back, doing the stampede of the swinging cretin.
It was April 1989 and I’d been a member of Cripsley for eight months. I’d met Jamie (12) and Ross (13) the previous summer at the junior lessons hosted by Mike Shalcross, and the three of us had been granted membership shortly afterwards, swiftly becoming friends and rivals. Jamie wore John Lennon spectacles, was tall for his age and had the quietly competitive aura of someone who might steal your girlfriend from under your nose without you noticing. Ross was more or less his opposite – undersized, high-pitched, and all out to prove he wasn’t. Ashley (14) was a veteran Cripsley member of eighteen months with the physical characteristics and temperament of a hyperactive bull terrier, who’d long since outgrown junior lessons. I’d first encountered him a couple of weeks earlier, in Cripsley’s pro shop, where I found him flailing desperately at inanimate objects, crimson-cheeked, while Nick Bellamy, one of the club’s older, more sadistic juniors, swung him around by his knicker elastic at irresponsible velocity. Bushy (13), whom I’d also met at the junior lessons, was a dark, silent enigma, making up in premature stubble for what he lacked in words.
The friendship the five of us enjoyed was in its early stages, and over the last few months had often resembled the part at the beginning of a boxing match where each competitor weighs up his opponent for flaws. Nobody quite knew who each other was yet, with autobiographical factoids being eked out tentatively and strategically. I, for one, was still in the midst of my own reinvention, shining in the role of the all-round Respectable Boy – the kind who, given another arena in which to display his talents, might have made complimentary remarks about his auntie’s Richard Clayderman album, delivered leaflets on behalf of his local Tory MP, and generally got the living crap kicked out of him a lot. Were my new friends putting on an act as well? Possibly. I’d learned, through overheard conversations, that Bushy’s dad drove a ten-year-old Ford Cortina, Ross’s mum lived alone with him and his sister and worked as a receptionist at the local brewery, Ashley’s dad was a PE teacher, and Jamie had once almost been enrolled at a local independent, progressive secondary school. Did my mates, like me, come from homes where joss sticks smoked away on the mantelpiece and Bob Dylan croaked away on the turntable? It was difficult to tell. I was, however, pretty sure they didn’t live in houses with posters of existentially naked German women on the walls.
What I did know for certain about Jamie, Bushy and Ross was that, like me, they’d eyed the posh brats who turned up at Mike Shalcross’s junior lessons with unbridled scorn. Every week, there’d be five or six of them, though never the same five or six: kids who unlocked the rear doors of their parents’ Granada Scorpios to miraculously unveil lustrous high-tech clubs that would probably double up quite nicely as shaving kits, then sleep-hit their way through the lesson in a style that suggested they believed they could tame their personalized golf balls with sheer manners. Together, the four of us would watch them gradually vanish, for ever, back to their three-car garages and private educations, and we’d sneer to one another in the secret, satisfying knowledge that we were the odd ones out – the ones whose parents didn’t play, the ones who turned up every week, the ones who were here for the duration. We might not have known much, but we knew we were impostors at the golf club. We’d known it since the first day we stood side by side and contemplated one another’s swings and clothes and packed lunches. But we were going to take a little while before we could admit it to ourselves.
It had been an interminable first winter – through my eyes, six very limited golfing months, during which I’d visited Cripsley as often as school and daylight permitted, but emerged with very little to show for it, other than a twenty-four handicap and nine increasingly dark, rusty, ball-shaped indentations in the centre of my irons. With the evenings dark and use of the course restricted for new junior members, the practice ground continued to serve as the amphitheatre for my dreams. Meanwhile, I took a fifty-pence-per-round Saturday job caddying for the junior organizer, Bob Boffinger, which gave me an opportunity to test out just how robust my Golf Tom persona was.
I still consider Bob a friend today, and, equipped with what I know now, tend to believe that he saw right through my attempts to fit in and made me out for the lefty hippy spawn I really was. At the time, though, I was convinced I’d fooled him with Golf Tom almost as cunningly as I’d fooled myself. Under Bob’s tutelage, Golf Tom learned the importance of a replaced divot, a firm handshake and a carefully read putt. Golf Tom held flagsticks, spoke when spoken to, laughed dutifully at the same jokes – ‘Hey, Boffinger! Your golf bag’s bigger than your caddy!’ – he heard every week, and resisted the temptation to cough-mutter ‘Miss it!’ as hostile, patronizing opponents reached the top of their backswing. When Golf Tom sensed that the Red Sea had relocated to his lower bladder area during a mixed doubles match, Golf Tom made the noble decision to spend the next hour in agony, for fear that urinating in the vicinity of lady members might be perceived as discourteous. Golf Tom said things like ‘Good shot!’, ‘I like your red, purple and yellow Pringle socks!’ and ‘See you again same time next week?’, but not much else. Golf Tom probably gave his parents nightmares involving incubator swapping and small children with the head of Norman Tebbit. Golf Tom quashed everything inquisitive and imaginative in his nature. But what Golf Tom really wanted to do, if he was truly honest with himself, was drop all this protocol rubbish and get down to playing some golf.
In the spring, the hankering came to an end. In late March, Bushy, Jamie, Ross and I were permitted to play the course unaccompanied by an adult member for the first time, and from here things began to change. With the longer days, after-school golf turned into a golden reality, and we began to take full advantage of our new habitat. At four o’clock on any given weekday, you could find between three and five of us striding up the first fairway, screaming at our airborne Titleists – ‘Bite!’, ‘Run!’, ‘Go!’, ‘Get down!’ – as if they were disobedient guard dogs. Assigning famous alter egos for one another, we swung into the dusk and beyond, then said goodbye without asking if we’d be meeting at the same time in the same place the next day, because it went without saying that we’d be mad not to.
For more than half a year, to varying extents, we’d done a terrific job of pretending to be other people. We’d pulled our trolleys around the greens as mindfully as we’d instructed our parents to drive around the clubhouse car park. We’d replaced our divots after a shot on the course as neatly as we replaced our cutlery af
ter a meal in the men-only bar. We’d spoken when spoken to in front of our elders, and always in the most cheerily uncontroversial manner possible. We’d talked to each other about brands of clubs, knitwear and wrist action, but not much else. Unsupervised golf didn’t free us from these shackles, but it loosened them considerably. Gradually, we began to test for rebel credentials and talk to each other like friends, not humanoids.
‘Have you ever been in a fight at school?’
‘Might have been.’
‘I was in one last week. Some twat who reckoned he did karate. I battered him.’
‘How come your dad can’t afford a better car?’
‘I suppose cars just aren’t important to him.’
‘Have you heard of Curiosity Killed the Cat?’
‘Yeah. They’re shit. I prefer U2.’
As we set out on our round that night in April, it was with the fresh, thrilling insight that we were all normal, cursing adolescents after all, but with something else bubbling up inside too, a wriggling frustration that had built up over the winter months that we hadn’t quite found a way of releasing. Running down the fairway didn’t feel strange; it felt predestined. Nobody remembers who started first; it seemed to happen poetically, in perfect synchronicity. I’ve often wondered if other golf club’s junior sections have had similar experiences, if a fairway sprint is a natural induction ceremony in the life of all teenage golfers. It certainly felt like it for us, because, after it happened, nothing was ever the same.
The seventh tee at Cripsley is shielded by a passage of conifers. Beyond that sits a gurning hundred and fifty yards of gorse, with a corridor of grass cut through it for players to walk along until, finally, the hole is governed solely by the colossal Georgian mansions which flank the right-hand side of the fairway. On a normal evening, a resident of these mansions would be able to look complacently out of one of the windows of their eleven bedrooms and admire a scene of utter serenity, punctuated by only the most infrequent, refined examples of human life. But not if they’d happened to be looking out of their window today, at just after 6 p.m.
‘How good is this? We’re running up the seventh fairway for no real reason!’ Ross shouted, as we ran up the seventh fairway for no real reason.
‘We’re severely fucking about!’ he observed, as we severely fucked about.
‘Ashley’s balls have dropped at last!’ he continued, as Ashley, neglecting to check if the zip was fastened on his golf bag, allowed four or five brand new ‘Go Further’ ninety compression balls to scatter between his feet.
The initial impulse, while running on a golf course, is to break down laughing. In fact, it’s possible that there are only two things funnier in life than running on a golf course. One is running on a golf course in tandem with several people you don’t know very well. The other is listening to a running commentary on it as it is happening. I did both.
‘We’re almost at the bunker now. And we’re still running!’ shouted Ross.
I was the first to fall over, but the others soon followed: boys in pleated slacks, polo shirts and tight-fitting Slazenger jumpers, sprawled out panting like dogs rescued from a hot car.
It should, of course, have ended there. We could have picked up our golf bags, calmly executed our second shots, written the whole thing off as a freak occurrence, and resumed the rest of our lives as law-abiding golfers. But, in all probability, it was too late. You could feel it. The world was spinning, in that way it does just before something bad happens. I found myself running off a mental checklist as I lay gathering my breath in the semi-rough, a bit like the inventory you go through when you’ve left the house in a rush and have a chafing micro-suspicion that you’ve forgotten to put on your socks. I knew something was missing; I merely had to work out what.
Ashley, Bushy and Jamie: lying to my right, giggling asthmatically.
Gardens lining the fairway: deserted.
Adjacent ninth fairway: no sign of life.
Gut-pink imitation-leather golf bag: a few feet to my left.
Clubs: still in the bag, all intact.
I’d accounted for everything, apart from Ross. I’d just about had time to work this out when behind me I heard the ‘thacckkkrunch’ of his three-wood making contact with his ball. I swung round, in time to follow the ball’s majestic flight from my friend’s clubhead, up over the boundary hedge, directly towards a glass conservatory belonging to one of the Georgian mansions to my right.
‘Get up, ball!’ commanded Ross, maniacally.
‘Sit down, ball!’ screamed the rest of us.
‘Get up, ball!’ commanded Ross.
‘Sit down, ball!’ screamed the rest of us, helplessly, wincing for the inevitable smash.
Nothing happened.
Defying the laws of physics and the building trade, the ball seemed to have located an invisible satin pillow in the midst of several thousand pounds’ worth of glass-work. Either that, or an unusually agile pigeon had stolen it in midflight. Time seemed to freeze, as we looked where the ball had failed to land. We continued to wait, statue-like, sensing that the slightest twitch might cause the conservatory to be blasted to smithereens. I scanned the adjacent fairways for an outraged Immediate Past Captain or Greens Committee Official, but all of them remained deserted. We looked. We waited. We waited and looked again. Nothing continued to happen.
Over the following few days, we padded around the course and clubhouse warily, half expecting some kind of repercussion – a passing greenkeeper, at least, who had witnessed the whole thing and reported it to Bob Boffinger – but none arrived. Slowly, we began to relax and believe our luck.
By running, we’d passed through an invisible door into a new era. Before we ran, we’d been five spotty, sporty adolescents doing our best to get to know one another and convince ourselves we didn’t feel adrift in a world we weren’t cut out for – a world of reserved parking places, pedantry and stiff upper lips. After we ran, we felt like five intimately correlated mavericks let loose in a freshly mown promised land, where every act of rebellion would be automatically amplified. Here was a place with a unique, winning combination: a low sense of risk combined with a high sense of danger, something that was missing in the outside world inhabited by our peers. If you could hammer a penetrating, two-hundred-yard shot at a glass conservatory and come away unscathed, what else could you get away with?
Even the most dedicated future British Open Champion could be forgiven for laying his putter aside for a moment and marvelling at the possibilities. Golf itself was fun – I’d known that from the first hedgehog-sized divot I’d torn out of my mum and dad’s garden – but the stuff surrounding it being fun too? That was a prospect I’d never prepared myself for.
‘AND THAT WAS all it took,’ Mike Shalcross explained to me. ‘After I’d reduced my handicap to five and passed the arithmetic and handicraft test, I qualified for my card. I’m now an official member of the Professional Golfers’ Association.’
‘You mean that’s really all there is to it?’
‘Yep. You could be a pro, too, one day in the not-too-distant future, with a swing like yours.’
Coming from Mike, this was the best possible news. I’d had my suspicions all along, of course – my ability to out-hit men twice my age and point out the hidden flaws in the shoulder turn of Ryder Cup players had given me an inkling that I was in possession of a special golfing something. But now I had the concrete proof. In six months of competitive golf, I’d already reduced my handicap from twenty-four to fourteen, claiming first prize in such prestigious tournaments as the Rabbit’s Cup and the Crumpwell Charity Gong. Even if you took into account next winter’s break and the odd mediocre performance, it didn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that I’d be turning professional shortly before my fifteenth birthday. Obviously, I’d have to leave school a year early and forfeit my GCSEs, but I couldn’t foresee this playing on my mind too much while I sat in some plush hospitality tent on a German hillside sipping champa
gne and comparing sand-wedge hosels with Bernhard Langer.
‘Are you sure?’ asked my dad, later that evening.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ I replied. ‘I mean, Mike told me, and he’s a pro. Of all people, he should know.’
Since a year previously, when he’d instigated the subterfuge that was my membership at Cripsley, I’d come to regard Mike as my rightful mentor. To me, he was Steve Pate, Sandy Lyle and Fred Couples rolled into one. With a Frank McAvennie haircut and the kind of blond good looks that you might have found leaning against a Ford Capri in an ad in a seventies issue of Playboy, Mike apparently had it all. His iron shots took off like scud missiles, browsed the sky, discussed the weather with a passing hot-air balloon, then finally agreed to come down, mechanized in their accuracy and spin. His drives, meanwhile, were a genuine concern to the RAF. In that I never questioned what such a finely tuned golfing animal was doing selling tee pegs to retired bookbinders in an East Midlands backwater, it now strikes me just how busy I must have been using Mike to boost my own ego. It also strikes me that much of the allure of Mike’s game might have been down to its scarcity.
Mike, you see, didn’t get out much.
At fourteen, I had yet to learn that ‘professional’ is the most misleading word in golf. While other sports clearly discriminate between mediocrity and excellence, golf frequently chooses to make them sound equally alluring. The clubhouse declaration ‘I’m turning pro!’ might sound exhilarating enough to a beginner or outsider, but the seasoned player knows it can often have all the life-altering significance of ‘I’ve just got a job on the meat counter at Asda!’
