by Tom Cox
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t really reflect how good I am. I’m a bit of a bandit actually,’ I would reply.
‘A bandit?’
‘Yeah. In golf, a bandit is someone who’s a better player than their handicap indicates.’
Another schoolfriend might have found it irresistible to use the similarity between ‘bandit’ and ‘arse bandit’ as an excuse to cast aspersions on my sexual orientation. But the ever inquisitive Gary would scratch his chin attentively and probe on. At last! I thought. Someone from the humdrum outside world who gets something approaching the true measure of how fascinating golf is – and by extension I am.
‘I expect the clubs must weigh a bloody ton?’
‘Yeah, but you get used to it.’
‘And seeing as you are so good, you probably get loads of people offering to caddy for you in tournaments.’
The answer, in all truthfulness, was no. Thus far in my amateur career I’d found the levels of enthusiasm and loyalty among the caddy ranks to be little short of contemptuous. Upon being informed that he would be rewarded via the medium of my practice ball collection for his day’s work, my first baghandler, eleven-year-old Paul ‘Raz’ Berry, had looked at me like I’d just stolen his favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, before vanishing from my employ on a permanent basis. It wasn’t as if he had even come close to fulfilling his obligations. On numerous occasions during the day I had rolled the grip of my driver around in my hands to find it hadn’t been rubbed to the essential level of tackiness. Moreover, I felt his ideas about club selection covertly undermined my ability, and the recalcitrant look on his face when I requested that he retrieve my four-iron lob (I’d lobbed the four-iron, not the ball) from a holly bush to the left of Cripsley’s sixteenth green hadn’t exactly been a buoy for my confidence at a critical moment in my round. After Raz and I had gone our separate ways, I attempted to replace him with a couple of Cripsley’s other eleven- and twelve-year-old members, but was barely met by the level of wide-eyed fervour I expected.
That left my grandad, who had burned his caddying bridges by putting the flagstick to the eighth hole in my golf bag by mistake, and Bob Boffinger, my regular caddy in Nottinghamshire junior and youth events. The problem with Bob was that I couldn’t help viewing his habit of running off, mid-hole, to offer assistance to fellow Cripsley juniors as an act of gross infidelity. I had, after all, been on Bob’s bag for fifty pence a round during my first few months at Cripsley, and now, with our roles reversed, I wondered if there wasn’t a little residual bitterness. Granted, Bob was fifty-eight. But I couldn’t help suspecting that he nurtured his own small but perfectly formed dream of marching up the final hole at St Andrews in the 1990 British Open to a standing ovation with faithful little Tom Cox on his bag. By running off up the parallel fairway to find out how Jamie was scoring when, at two over par with four holes to go in the first round of the Midland Youths Championship, I needed him to help me find my ball, perhaps he was paying me back. Whatever the case, I made sure it was the only kind of payment that was happening.
Not that I was going to tell Gary any of this.
I could see what my new friend was driving at, and it required some serious thought. I played golf in an aspirational middle-class suburb, the kind of place where couples in sandals hold hands in front of estate agent windows; I went to school, on the other hand, in an evolutionary cul-de-sac with closed-circuit TV surveillance on its main street: a place whose principal form of boredom-prevention was an annual event involving semi-paralytic, eighteen-stone men racing prams down hills, seeing who could drool the furthest, then passing out. If my brain was a mansion for my interests, then golf luxuriated in the opulent master bedroom, while school was stuffed away neglectfully in the servants’ quarters. The two passed one another on the stairs occasionally, but were on nodding rather than speaking terms. Sure, I gave my teachers and fellow pupils absolutely no doubt that they were in the presence of a legendary swinger-to-be and that they should be grateful I was magnanimous enough to attend the same classes as them. But when it came to actual interaction, I knew the two worlds should be kept roughly three solar systems apart. I had found this out, to my mortification, via an English oral assessment the previous term, during which, while dressed in a Lyle and Scott sweater, slacks and sun visor, I attempted to explain the intricacies of such golfing terminology as ‘stiff shaft’, ‘rimming out’, ‘sweet spot’ and ‘tradesmen’s entrance’ to thirty fourteen-year-olds who viewed double-entendres as a synonym for comic genius.
Gary, however, was not one of them. He was always sprucely dressed – one of the few kids who wore trousers, not jeans, on Non-uniform Day – probably didn’t find the word ‘wormburner’ the least bit amusing, and had the kind of haircut most of Cripsley’s most eminent lady members would want to take home and feed teacakes to. These things convinced me that Gary would be the ideal caddie. Well – these things, and the fact that he didn’t expect to get paid.
Still, as a golfer, it’s easy to forget just how bewildering the game’s viper’s nest of decorum can seem to a novice. Mindful of this, I made sure that Gary would make his début in the most innocuous of club events (the somewhat anonymous Monthly Medal), surrounded by the most tolerant supervisors (Jamie and me), during the quietest part of the day (late afternoon, when the majority of Cripsley’s committee members would already have filed their cards and be tucked up in the clubhouse with a plate of steaming teacakes). In such an atmosphere, Gary could make the standard tenderfoot lapses – a mistimed cough here, a misplaced putter there, a badly situated trolley here – without causing any serious chaos.
On competition days, I made a point of arriving at the course ninety minutes before tee time, allowing myself ample opportunity to check on the day’s early scores, slug a leisurely fifty or so shots up the practice fairway, develop a feel for the pace of the greens, and receive a good-luck dead leg from Nick in the shop. My pre-round routine was planned out in the finest detail in a notebook the night before under such headings as ‘Alignment’, ‘Exercise’, ‘Relaxation’ and ‘Mental Adjustments’. I was, after all, due to turn professional in just under a year’s time.
Today was a Sphincter day, so I insisted my dad drop me half a mile away from the club in the car park of the local Texas Homecare superstore. Given a choice between humiliation at the hands of newly-weds buying woodchip or humiliation at the hands of members of the Cripsley league team, I opted for the DIY enthusiasts every time.
As I walked up the club’s winding drive, a familiar figure came into focus, sitting by the first tee, wishing a foursome of octogenarian Irish doctors good tidings for the day. ‘Morning, Seve!’ shouted the figure. He was wearing a Pringle sweater, identical to the one Nick Faldo had donned to win the World Matchplay Championship the previous year. The crease in his Farahs would work equally well as a culinary aid and samurai weapon. As I got closer and my gaze moved down his immaculate figure, I tried to ignore my stunned face looking back at me from a pair of spiked Footjoy shoes that had been buffed to within an inch of their life.
‘I did say I was teeing off at two forty-seven, didn’t I? Not one forty-seven?’ I asked Gary.
‘Yeah, I’ve been here a while.’ He sounded chirpy.
‘You managed to find the club OK, then?’
‘Oh, easy. I took the liberty of scoping out some of the pin positions. Checked some yardages as well. My dad whizzed me up in the Testa Rossa an hour or so ago. It’s just his runabout for weekends. Your club captain seemed to like it. I thought he was going to make my dad an offer.’ He chuckled.
Speechless, I surveyed my own attire for the day: £2.99 jumper from factory seconds shop, school trousers, cheapo polo shirt handed down from Dad, £13 all-weather golf shoes replete with ill-concealed hole in left toe.
‘Hi, Gary,’ hollered a passing Mike Shalcross, ignoring me.
‘Right, buddy. Are we ready to kick some arse, or what?’ said Gary, turning to me. But I hadn’t caught up with
him yet. I was still a good forty seconds behind, my mind attempting to process the fact that he really had used the phrase ‘scoping out some of the pin positions’.
The first hole passed tidily if uneventfully, Gary silently observing as I racked up a couple of model tee-fairway-green-putt-putt par fours. The trouble began on the third, as my squirty seven-iron approach tailed off into the greenside bunker.
‘I’ve been thinking about something quite obvious that’s wrong with your swing,’ said Gary, as we left the tee.
I allowed him to continue, poised to crush him like you might crush a caterpillar that had misguidedly crawled beyond the spectator ropes at the British Open.
‘Well,’ he went on, ‘John Jacobs, the golf teacher, whose book I was reading last night, says that a strong left-hand grip can leave a player guarding against a destructive hook shot. I’ve noticed that your left hand shows four knuckles when you grip the club, which is very strong, and leaves you trying to compensate at impact. You kind of got away with it on the first two holes’ – here he began to demonstrate – ‘but it crept up on you on this shot.’
The guy had spent a couple of hundred quid on golfing paraphernalia and suddenly he was Tom Kite.
‘Really?’ I replied, doing my best ‘you-have-much-to-learn-young-Skywalker’ voice.
The problem was: he was right. My grip was too strong. And, if I gripped a club now, I’m sure it would still be too strong. It’s the least conventional thing about my game, and leaves me holding the club awkwardly through impact so it remains square to the target, in much the same way that you see Paul Azinger, the American touring professional, doing. I’ve had a go at correcting it over the years, but it has never felt right, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if Paul Azinger can use it to win one major championship and come second in two more, I should be able to live with it.
That’s not to say, however, that it doesn’t bug the shit out of me.
‘Shut your face and carry the bag, Gary,’ I told Gary.
By the difficult dogleg par four seventh, relations had fully deteriorated. Having been advised that I had a treacherous ’spinning right foot’ on my follow-through, warned about the dangers of a ’decelerating putting stroke’ and reprimanded for ’hitting from the top’, I’d made a deal with Gary: if he stopped playing junior golf doctor, I’d resist the temptation to fling him by his head into a nearby bunker.
How on earth had he learned so quickly? He must have been up all night, every night, since he’d offered to caddy for me, memorizing every instruction manual on the market. In golf, there’s not quite such a thing as a ‘textbook’ style. Even a photogenic swinger, like, say, Fred Couples – who always seems to aim twenty degrees left of his target and can look as if he’s poised to keel over like a skittle at the top of his backswing – has the odd defect. But Gary’s ideas were about as orthodox as they come. Lowly baghandler or not, he’d planted malignant seeds of doubt deep within my hitherto reliable methods – the kind of flaws that the quality player shouldn’t even concern himself with during a competitive round when, between that big-lipped sandy deathtrap on the right and that gorse bush on the left, there’s no room for technical tinkering.
This probably went some way towards explaining why I was eleven over par after ten holes.
Jamie, on the other hand, was hot. At one over par, he was already seven better than the score his handicap suggested he should be achieving. I watched as, gradually, Gary gravitated towards him. I didn’t mind since, although this meant I occasionally had to fetch my own seven-iron, it also meant I could remind myself what it felt like to play while not under a microscope. Besides, it had been fun to watch Jamie assault Ross a couple of weeks ago with the extra-long, bendy flagstick from the twelfth hole, and I had a feeling that if Gary kept making those adjustments to Jamie’s hands at the address position he was in for similar treatment.
But then a very strange thing happened: Jamie started playing even better. He birdied the thirteenth and fourteenth, holed a bunker shot at the fifteenth, and from tangled rough at the sixteenth hit a three-iron shot further than most helicopter pilots travel in a year. By the seventeenth, I was lagging behind the two of them, like a sulky child being dragged on a country walk. By the eighteenth, Gary was carrying Jamie’s bag as well as Jamie’s swing secrets, and the pair were crouched studiously over a putt for a round of seventy-one, while over in a copse to the left of the green I poutingly attempted to locate my ball, unassisted, and salvage a miserable eighty-nine.
I saw less and less of Gary after that. The nods we exchanged in school corridors went from courteous to imperceptible to non-existent. It was the sad end to what might, without my strong left-hand grip, have been a beautiful (I never did get to see the au pair in the shower) friendship.
Or almost the end. In 1994, as a very different kind of golfer, I handbrake-pirouetted into the car park at Stoke Rochford Golf Club in Lincolnshire, fifteen minutes before my teeing off time in the Midlands Youths Championship, and noticed a crowd shielding the first tee almost as effectively as the cloud of dust I had disturbed was shielding the Sphincter. Keen to see what the commotion was – it was a big event, but not that big – I put off changing out of my ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ T-shirt and hoofed it over to the tee. I arrived in time to see a faultless grip, followed by a swing which only one word would do justice to. ‘Conformist’? Almost, but not quite. ‘Textbook’? That was it.
‘Still sticking rigidly to that warm-up routine, I see, Tom,’ said Gary.
As his playing partners teed off, the two of us caught up on our edited highlights of the preceding half decade. Gary had packed in college and, supported by his dad’s Ferrari business, was dedicating his life to the amateur golf circuit, with a view to turning pro. I, on the other hand, had packed in the amateur golf circuit and, supported by the state, was dedicating my life to drinking myself stupid, punishing my eardrums with discordant rock music and chasing after girls in Nirvana T-shirts, with a view to getting laid and having an extremely good time.
I walked down the fairway of the par four opening hole with Gary and watched his second shot rocket towards the flagstick. I said goodbye, and watched from a distance as he strode resolutely towards the green – even his walk was textbook – and couldn’t help wondering if he was as hard on himself as he once was on me. Then, gently encouraged by a greying administrator in a bottle-green suit, I moved the Sphincter out of the space marked ‘Club Captain’ and changed into some more appropriate attire for the day’s events.
MY FIRST IMPRESSION was that it was a shelter for ailing guinea pigs.
The configuration of twigs and branches before us, where we hunkered in the bushes to the left of the eighteenth fairway, could also have been mistaken for a latent bonfire, but it was doubtful that even the most highfalutin arsonist would have had the patience for something of this complexity. There was the additional suggestion of an animal’s nest, but what animal, bar the most overdeveloped chimp – of which you didn’t get a lot in suburban Nottingham, and which, besides, didn’t nest – was this dexterous? No: this was art. It had layers, meanings. If you bumped into it on a black night, while camping on an ancient burial site for Indian warriors, you would be very, very scared.
As it was, we bumped into it in broad daylight, a few feet to the right of an ancient burial site for pet cats, hence weren’t very scared at all. It didn’t take us long to work out who was behind it.
‘I’m going to boot it down,’ announced Jamie.
‘No – don’t. He might have set a trap in there,’ I said.
‘It’s probably where he lives,’ mocked Ashley, relishing the snap of the first twig.
‘Does he really think he can keep us away by building these?’ I said.
‘He’ was Stig. And this was one of his masterpieces: an edifice designed entirely, it seemed, to trap lost golf balls – though not particularly effectively. It was far from the first example of Stig’s creations we had encountered, a
nd it had all the hallmarks of his postmodernist style: the ‘portcullis’ formation of twigs on the roof, the big diagonal branch across the entrance, the overall sense that anyone over the age of three would be able to destroy the whole thing with one swipe of the hand. This was the third piece of Stigart we’d destroyed in the last three hours, and we were starting to wonder why he bothered. If he was really trying to keep us away from the stray balls of Cripsley’s members, surely he could have used a more effective contraption – a rabbit trap, say, or a twenty-foot-deep viper pit with a net and some leaves over the top of it.
Stig, who looked like Norman Mailer might do if he took baths in the local pond and tailoring tips from the skip to the rear of Allied Carpets, was one of Cripsley’s greenkeepers. This meant he was paid somewhere between seventeen and ninety-four pence per week and naturally inclined to supplement his income. He did this with a sideline in balls. The system worked something like this: Roy Jackson sold brand-new, expensive balls to the members, who hit them in the direction of Stig, who sold them back to Roy Jackson, who sold them back to the members as practice balls. The members, of course, didn’t know they were hitting their balls in the direction of Stig; they just thought they were hitting them in the direction of undergrowth. But Stig and undergrowth were more or less synonymous. He seemed to spend two-thirds of his life in it. He knew all the angles: the conifers to the right of the seventeenth, the gorse to the left of the sixth, the tangled rough to the right of the ninth known to us as Snakeland. There was a rumour that he even kept a snorkel and goggles handy for use in the pond at the eleventh. Someone must have been tipping him off, since he was permanently in six places at once. If you went down to the practice fairway to ease a destructive hook out of your swing, Stig’s molecules would miraculously materialize among the enormous pine trees on the left. I once thought I saw him mowing a green, but now I come to think of it, the sun was low and I had the beginnings of a hazy headache at the time.
