by Tom Cox
In truth, there are two distinct types of professional in the world of golf: one who plays, and another who talks about it a lot. These – grouped under the headings ‘touring’ and ‘club’ – are about as far removed from one another as David Beckham is from a non-league supersub. In most cases, the touring professional – the kind you see on TV – competes at the top level of the amateur game for several years, then qualifies for one of the tours (European or American if they’re exceptional; one of the inferior Eastern equivalents if they’re anything less). The club professional, meanwhile, is seduced into ending his amateur days prematurely, by financial worries, ignorance or impatience, before he’s had a chance to see if he’s truly made of the same stuff as the big boys. He then serves an apprenticeship in small talk, psychotherapy and club refurbishment, all the time with the knowledge that, while he’s sweeping up woodshavings, his amateur peers are perfecting their wedge shots. Finally, he might acquire his own equipment shop (attached to a club if he’s lucky, attached to the local retail park if he’s not) and get to play a little bit – by which time he’s invariably too old to ever really become Steve Pate, Sandy Lyle and Fred Couples rolled into one, and all the ambition has been slowly and mundanely sucked out of him. Once a golfer turns professional he gains the right to earn money from his teaching skills but loses all his amateur privileges. Sometimes this can lead to fame and physical fulfilment. Most times it leads to a full-time position recommending practice aids in American Golf Discount. The difference between the top rung of the amateur game and the bottom one of the professional game can be compared to the difference between the fourth year of primary school and the first year of secondary school: the difference between feeling big and tough and feeling small and getting picked on.
In many ways, the professional’s shop at Cripsley, overseen by the club’s resident teaching pro, Roy Jackson, was like any other pro shop in Britain. That’s to say, if you visited it at peak playing times, you’d find a patient young person (Mike), offering commiseration and encouragement, while anywhere between one and ten impatient old people ranted about their infinite golfing anguish in a manner that others might reserve for countrywide plagues and freak family tragedies involving heavy, serrated machinery.
‘Why does nothing go right for me?’
‘Is it something to do with the plane of my backswing or is God just out to get me?’
‘I played absolutely brilliantly but still shot a hundred and thirteen for the front nine. Why?’
That sort of thing.
If the golfing rehab group was lucky, there would also be a middle-aged person (Roy) present as well, but more typically he would be out on the practice fairway teaching an improbably glamorous female pupil about the nuances of wrist cock, or performing some other equally urgent task, like discussing green irrigation over teacakes with the vice-captain, or taking a local sitcom star on a tour of the putting green. These activities would – along with his personalized number plate – represent his reward for enduring seven thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven conversations about ‘the ball with the right velocity for you’ with recently retired seventeen-handicap car dealers – the kind of conversations he could now leave in the capable hands of his assistant.
Forget social workers and shrinks; in the therapy trade, nobody works harder than assistant golf pros. Mike’s advice reservoir was inexhaustible. Problem with a slight hook? He was your man. Striving for more width on your backswing? See Mike. Having trouble persuading Sally Hodgkinson to come to her senses and dump her seventeen-year-old, XR3i-driving boyfriend? Mike had all the answers. I liked to see him as the David Leadbetter to my Nick Faldo. Together, I resolved, we were going all the way to the top – me on the course, coasting to a penultimate round of sixty-five at Valderrama in the Volvo Masters; Mike on the practice ground, ever poised to fine-tune the fluid Cox action – an action that would surely come to be known on the European PGA Tour simply as ‘the Machine’. It was simple: here was a man who’d been perceptive enough to spot a rare talent which, if nurtured, could well come to define an entire epoch of professional golf, and he was going to do his best to hang on to it. Mike had never confirmed this to me, but from his eager, protective manner, it was pretty obvious that was the way he felt, and, if I was perfectly honest, I couldn’t blame him. If I was in his position, I’d want to be in on me, too.
My problem was that a couple of hundred recently retired car dealers seemed to view their relationship with Mike in exactly the same way. If they could just hit upon that elusive, magical swing-thought, they too, accompanied by an acquiescent Mike, could make it to the first page of the leaderboard in the Volvo Masters, in spite of acute sciatica and a putting stroke better suited to the construction industry.
A few minutes seized with Mike in the murky pro shop began to feel like a stolen kiss in the dressing room of some modish, enigmatic movie starlet. The two of us would just be getting to first base, discovering the secret to the eradication of my narrow arc problem on long iron shots, when we’d be gatecrashed by Warren Ardle, wondering if the new rubber grip for his three-wood was ready, or Colin Allerton, enquiring if Mike had any thoughts on bump and run shots. Didn’t these old men have jobs to go to? I wondered. Why couldn’t they take their doomed quest for simplification via befuddlement elsewhere? Didn’t they understand that Mike was mine?
It wasn’t just the adult membership with whom I competed for Mike’s attention. As an entire section, the juniors squabbled over him ferociously. There were around ten or fifteen of us now, all aged between twelve and sixteen, all playing golf regularly with a determination in our eyes that might remind an impartial onlooker of the time he was bitten by a rabid squirrel. Without Mike’s encouragement, many of us might not have become members of the club at all, and now we took it for granted that he would continue to act as a mirror for the best side of our golfing selves. When Ben Wolfe, a thirteen-year-old with an unorthodox flying-right-elbow backswing, turned up on the first tee flaunting a graphite-shafted driver with eight degrees of loft, boasting that Mike had ‘loaned’ it to him, the rest of us felt as jilted as a child watching the birth of its first sibling. All of us felt we had a right to Mike’s wisdom and equipment, yet none of us ever paid him for it.
Stealing time with Mike, I worked out, would require a rare level of cunning, and I soon learned all the tricks: the ‘pretending to be practising my bunker shots a few yards from the shop while keeping one eye on the door’ trick, which might lead to a free ten-minute putting lesson; the ‘just happened to be passing as you locked up for the night’ trick that might snatch me five holes together with Mike in the twilight; and the ‘I was thinking of buying some clubs like these’ trick, which might lead to a go with his two-hundred-quid driver. But hanging around the pro shop could be an intimidating business. The more time I spent around the place, the more I was convinced there was something strange going on there. Standing on the Astroturf in front of the practice net on the late summer evenings of 1989, Jamie and I would catch our breath as an Austin Allegro, bedecked with the Acid House logo, handbrake-turned its way into the shop car park, ejecting a lucky dip of characters as incongruous as they were terrifying. The gang was invariably led by Nick Bellamy – Cripsley’s very own answer to Henry Winkler. My first-hand experience of Nick up to this point had been limited to the time I saw him swinging Ashley around by his pants, and a further fearful encounter in which he pointed out that he had been ‘watching me’, made a grab for my testicles, and snarled that my sort ‘never learn’. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it sounded extremely daunting.
More often than not Nick, who occasionally helped Roy out in the shop, would be accompanied by Mad Terry. I usually managed to avoid Terry, and I didn’t know what you had to do to make him mad, though legend had it that he held the East Midlands record for Headbutting the Wall of your Local Marks & Spencer Without Falling Over. Other bit players included a trail of skinny, pale girls wearing black lipstick and
too much mascara, and Nick’s techno DJ mate Trevor, a mini celebrity around East Nottingham since being caught urinating on a nightclub dance floor and making page seven of the local paper. To my knowledge, none of these people had handicap certificates or attended barbecues at the club president’s beach house.
‘What do you think they do in there?’ I asked Jamie as we watched the shop door close, giving way to enigmatic giggles.
‘You mean you don’t know? Bellamy sits in the equipment room at the back and lets those goth girls do stuff to him, while Trevor and Terry watch. He has about five of them a week.’
‘Bullshit. How would you know?’
‘Mousey told me.’
‘How would he know?’
‘’Cos he’s Bellamy’s slave.’
‘Mousey’ was our new name for Ross, who, despite (or perhaps partly because of) a burgeoning predilection for fairway vandalism and boasting about people he’d ‘decked’ at school, had by now established himself as the junior section’s victim figure. Hindered by a voice that made the average seven-year-old girl sound like a movie trailer voiceover man, Mousey understandably felt a more profound need to impress than most. His favourite antic – saying ‘HELLO! … twat’ to senior members in a style which ensured only we, and not the senior, heard the ‘twat’ bit – required immense levels of voice control and timing and, in what must have been several thousand attempts, never backfired. But no matter how many balls Mousey fired at patio windows, no matter how vocal and risque his ‘twats’ got, he was always faced with two fundamental problems: a) that he sounded about as dangerous as Tweetie Pie, and b) that we would squeak his sentences derisively back at him every time he opened his mouth. The harder Mousey tried to cloak his emasculated rasp in an insouciant sneer, the more ridiculous he sounded. The more we squeaked back, the more obnoxious he got, graduating from ‘HELLO! … twat’ to ‘HELLO! … fuckwhippet’, and casting aspersions on the sexual preferences of the most benign adult members.
For Mousey, winning the favours of Bellamy’s gang was the ultimate revenge. Already, a savage rivalry had grown within the junior section. With a handicap of 14.3, I might have been the best of the new generation of juniors, but Jamie, back up at 16.8, was closing in, and the Cripsley grapevine whispered that his mum was planning to buy him a new gold-shafted three-wood for his birthday, so I was watching my back. Mousey, meanwhile, had been admitted into the inner sanctum of the pro shop. Who knew what nuggets of advice my so-called guru Mike – not to mention Nick, whose prowess with a seven-iron was almost as lethal as his reverted Taiwanese bollock grip – was passing on to him?
I needed to know what was going on in there, and luckily I had a foolproof way of finding out.
The plan was simple. Earlier in the summer, I’d been to see the school careers officer and made it clear to him that I would merely be going through the motions for the remainder of my school life, and that my future was a bright thing that glittered in the opulent fairways of the European PGA Tour. After which I’d taken him through the specifics, from my first major amateur victory, to the securing of my tour card at La Manga in Spain, right the way to the attaining of my tenth Grand Slam. Clearly relieved at having his job done for him, he’d recommended without hesitation that I apply for some work experience in ‘the golf area’.
The following day, I marched into the shop and demanded two weeks’ unpaid work from Roy Jackson, who responded with the far-off look of a man forming a mental picture of extra helpings of teacakes and wrist cock. The conversation was left in mid-air when Roy broke off to greet a local second-division soccer player who happened to be approaching the putting green, but I took his remote smile to mean the deal was sealed. For two weeks, while my classmates destroyed plantpots at garden centres and stole Sony Walkmans from the Co-op, I would be leisurely swatting three-iron shots up Cripsley’s practice fairway, intermittently pausing to serve an isolated customer or solder the head of a fractured sand wedge. Moreover, I’d have unlimited access to the Shalcross wisdom, and would investigate – and possibly usurp – Mousey’s role as shop prodigy.
I might also witness some debauchery involving semi-naked goth girls, but, given the potential perks of working alongside Mike, I could write that off as a necessary evil.
The thing that really interested me about the pro shop, even more than the goths and Mike Shalcross, was the fact that I’d only seen half of it. If you can imagine a serial killer’s tool shed masquerading as a village post office, you’ll have a vague idea of what a curious, sinister vision it offered from the outside. The interior, meanwhile, was nowhere near as inviting. Customers had been known to make a special trip home to change into overalls before hunting for clubs in its more dingy corners. I’ve seen better illuminated medieval theme centres, and the place’s aroma – old rubber, fur, petrol and something indistinguishable but defiantly deceased – was so powerful that even now a stroll past a slaughterhouse or tyre yard can send me into a nostalgic reverie. I found the shop’s unchartered alcoves endlessly fascinating. It may as well have been Dr Who’s Tardis. I’d been granted the privilege, a couple of times, of entering the room directly to the rear of the till, and discovered it had a lot of used pizza boxes and smelled even more strongly of fur. But there were at least five rooms beyond this, and, best of all, the cellar. What kind of hidden treasures lurked there?
On my first week of work experience, I found out: more pizza boxes, lots and lots of club shafts without heads, a couple of porno mags, and some wire wool. I found this out because my first job of the first day was to clear the place out – a task which, from what I could estimate after an hour of separating tee pegs from half-eaten Kit Kats, had last been attempted at some point during the summer of 1947. I half expected to find the skeleton of the last work-experience boy in one of the cobwebby cupboards, still glued to the fatal Kit Kat.
Next came my lesson in club design (Mike filed away at an ancient five-wood; I caught the wood shavings in a small bucket). But, finally, it was time to play. That is, Mike, Nick, Mousey and Roy went out to play the first eleven holes and the eighteenth, while I stayed back, manned the till and listened to the echo of their laughter as they strode euphorically towards the first green. I wondered how this was going to help me win the United States Masters.
Day two started with a jolt. Arriving with the intention of having words with Mike about my ‘training’, I was confronted with Nick, sitting on the counter, fingering a packet of Benson and Hedges. He seemed to be making a beeline for my crotch, so I, in turn, made a beeline for a set of Spaldings I’d been eyeing up on the other side of the room. ‘Where’s Mike?’ I ventured.
‘Oh, didn’t he tell you? He’s off for the next two days, playing in a tournament in Middlesbrough,’ said Nick. ‘It’s my turn to be your daddy now,’ he added with a cackle.
I did my best impression of someone whose heart wasn’t making a dive for his stomach. How could this have happened? If Mike was going to Middlesbrough, why hadn’t he asked me to caddy for him? With his powerfully coiled backswing and my astute course management, we could be an unbeatable team. Obviously there’d been some sort of mistake. He couldn’t do this to me, could he?
I checked Nick’s face for signs of a wind-up. Nothing. Was that the trace of a smirk? No – it was just a malicious grin. Mike had let me down once and for all, and for the next couple of hours, until Roy rolled in for his 9.45 lesson, I was stuck here. I shivered.
‘OK. Let’s see it.’
Clearly he wasn’t wasting any time. Resigned to my fate, I reached for my belt buckle.
‘Your swing.’
‘Eh?’
‘Show me your swing, Tom. Show me your swing.’
For the rest of the morning, the two of us went at it tirelessly – in the practice bunker, in the cellar, in front of the shop, behind the shop. Me in front of the pro shop mirror, Nick behind me, making miniature adjustments to my hand action. Roy arrived, and swiftly departed for his ten o’clock teacakes,
and we barely noticed. By lunchtime, my new swing was buffed to perfection: my shoulder turn was redoubtable, the club was no longer hooded on my take-away, and my wrists were working in unison, hitting against a strong left side. I had a new mentor now. I couldn’t decide which was more wrong: the teachings of Mike Shalcross, or my assumptions about Nick. Without Terry and Trevor, Nick was about as dangerous as a children’s TV presenter.
After four hours, I was finally permitted to hit a shot – though ‘hit’ isn’t really the right word, taking into account how sweetly and lightly it glanced off the club-face. From what I could work out, the place it landed was somewhere between John o’Groats and Iceland. Elevated by the knowledge that if I could just remember thirteen swing thoughts all at the same time I could repeat this performance flawlessly, I was in a state of rapture.
Afterwards, while Nick nipped over to the men-only bar to prise Roy from an insistent teacake, I sat alone with a can of suspiciously chicken-vindaloo-flavoured Happy Shopper lemonade and drifted into a flawless reverie. My eight-iron to the final hole of the 1993 British Open came crisply into focus – the easy, wide backswing, the unhurried downswing, the compressed strike, the high flight … So crisply into focus, in fact, that I completely missed the tell-tale screech of the Austin Allegro’s brakes outside. My first hint that I was in the presence of Mad Terry and Trevor came with the slamming of the shop door and the barked instruction, ‘Hide!’ Before I’d had chance to see the eight-iron shot’s third bounce – the one where the backspin kicks in and it screws back down the sloping green towards the hole – I found myself hunching under the cash desk.
