Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  Life must have been great for Stig until we came along. A thousand members losing an average of two balls per round is a big load of balls, whichever way you look at it. And previous junior sections, by all accounts, had been far too well-heeled and complacent to waste their time crawling through wet grass in search of a Titleist balata. We, however, had a burning desire for free missiles, and, in our opinion, an awful lot more right to them than a pungent old man who didn’t even know what a Howson Hippo was. Ball-hunting expeditions took place early on Saturday evenings, straight after that week’s competitions, and probably saved us a good tenner of pocket money per fortnight.

  The architecture began going up about a month after our first expedition, and gave us the eerie feeling that we were being watched. There was always something portentous about destroying one of Stig’s creations. As mere barricades, they were so ineffectual that it was hard not to suspect something occult backing them up. The accuracy of the location for these erections, too, was astounding, and hardly to their creator’s advantage. Invariably we’d kick back the branches to be confronted with a dozen shiny white Titleists and Maxflis. More often than not, one of these was a cunningly situated dummy (a hard-boiled egg, usually), but the others certainly seemed authentic enough when we blasted them down the first fairway later that evening. None of it made sense. Here was a man who probably kept an entire database on the behaviour of errant shots, who could plot the average landing area of a slice from the fifth tee to the inch. Yet he was naive enough to imagine that a few elaborately arranged twigs and a dairy product constituted some kind of fearsome deterrent to a bunch of adolescents who habitually smirked in the face of danger and danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. It wasn’t even as if returning to his handiwork and finding it snapped and scattered persuaded Stig that a change of plan might be in order. He simply rebuilt it – not more robustly, just more elaborately. There was always the chance, of course, that he was deliberately trying to help us find the balls, but why would he want to do that? It all defied logic. Like that of Stonehenge or the Colossus of Rhodes, the precise meaning of Stig’s creations could probably only be elucidated by their architect.

  After a typical Stig-enhanced ball-hunting expedition, we divided our takings into three categories: onions, rocks and spuds. ‘Onions’ were the soft, balata-covered balls that the pros use, ‘rocks’ were the more solid, surlyn-coated, everyday hacker’s equivalent, and ‘spuds’ were the really cheap and nasty models, deployed by only the blind, the stupid and the senile. Golf-missile technology has now progressed to the point where even a budget ball gives a modicum of feel, but in those days the difference between hitting an onion and a spud was the difference between walking on air and wading through clay. Onions went straight into our golf bags, while rocks were added to the practice ball collection. Then came the exciting part.

  Like all the best games, Ching! evolved haphazardly out of boredom, instinct and a pioneer’s spirit. Provided there were enough spuds to go round, it could involve any number of players, but I think the most I ever saw participate was eleven. It was invariably played on Cripsley’s second practice fairway, a juicy eight-hundred by one-hundred-yard strip of grass out of view of the clubhouse, shielded by tall trees and backing on to a peacefully middle-class Legoland housing estate. The rules were simple: five points for tarmac or tiles, ten points for automobile, twenty points for glass, zero points for silence, and minus ten points for tree trouble (i.e. if your ball got snagged in the branches and didn’t make it to the housing estate). Anyone with a driver and an appetite for destruction could take part.

  Of course, in the absence of a referee standing beyond the trees and marking the results, the points system could be somewhat ambiguous. It was generally agreed, however, that ‘Thunk!’ meant your ball had landed on a road or roof, ‘Clang!’ meant it had made contact with a car, which you naturally hoped was moving at the time, and ‘Ching!’ meant you’d hit the jackpot and smashed someone’s window. The most astonishing thing – although we were starting to get used to this now – was the utter lack of repercussion. Ching! probably took place forty Saturdays per year for three years, and not once did we look around to see the vice-captain storming down the fairway, hands on hips, in our direction; not once did we witness an aggrieved resident storming into the clubhouse demanding to know who owned the Penfold Ace which had just inadvertently fitted his Rover 2.4i with a miniature DIY sunroof. Every game started with the crackle of revolution in the air, and ended with nothing more than the sound of a wood pigeon woo-woo-wooing in a nearby tree. Did the folks who lived between Rolleston Close and Aldman Road accept broken windows as a consequence of living within four hundred yards of a golf club, or were they glad of the free balls?

  It was certainly a mystery to Jamie. If you took the necessary measuring equipment and pinpointed the archetypal landing area for Ching! contestants, you’d probably find yourself in Jamie’s front drive. The extra challenge of trying to break his own bedroom window always meant that he played even more enthusiastically than the rest of us, yet in three years he didn’t even manage to hit his back lawn.

  Still, no one hurled himself into a game of Ching! quite like Stig. Stig obviously didn’t know what Ching! was, and probably still doesn’t, but it’s a testament to the self-discipline of the man that every week, without fail, he would arrive on the dot to witness the first shot go sailing over the trees.

  ‘He’s just there – over near the silver birch. I can see his wellies,’ Ashley would point out.

  ‘OK, after three, let’s all hit our spuds over his head at the same time,’ I would command.

  If you crouched beneath the level of the branches, it was possible to see Stig’s breakdancing feet simultaneously pulling him in five contradictory directions as our impromptu air raid rattled the trees above his head. He probably thought we were rich, wasteful brats, but that didn’t stop him from chasing our crossfire as if his next set of rubber footwear depended on it.

  Like most of Cripsley’s greenstaff, Stig wouldn’t communicate with us in normal human terms, to the extent that we speculated whether he had the mental facility to do so. Yet it’s quite possible he felt the same way about us. The warfare between the junior section and the Cripsley greenstaff took a spontaneous, primal form redolent of an early battle for territory between Neanderthals. It wasn’t something that began with any particular incident or argument; it simply evolved, as if purely by instinct or smell. You could say the whole thing was the result of an intuitive clash of collective personalities: we thought they were subhuman trash; they, on the other hand, thought we were spoilt little fuckers with too much time on our hands. Looking back and reconsidering the intricacies of this intellectual debate, I tend to see the greenkeepers’ point. If I had been haughtily instructed to reconstruct a piece of grass in the style of a billiard table, in the pissing rain, been paid the price of a Tracker Bar for the privilege, then looked on as two shiftless fifteen-year-olds destroyed it in a game of Divot Lacrosse, I think I would take a dim view of the situation too.

  At the time, though, the greenstaff often seemed like the one thing keeping Cripsley from graduating from occasional adventure playground to Garden of Unlimited Pleasure. We couldn’t understand why, when they could have been building a picturesque lake next to the seventh green, they always seemed to be throwing pointless sand on a green or digging an unfathomable trench in the rough bordering the fifth tee. More than that, though, we couldn’t understand why they were always there. Members weren’t our problem at this stage: they didn’t expect someone to be re-enacting the climactic scenes from Zorro with the flags from the practice putting green and so they could suspend their disbelief and not actually see it. But the ubiquitous greenkeepers were more perceptive. With them around, we could still sling clubs at each other and hide ornamental tee markers in one another’s bags, but always with the tottery knowledge that the weeping willow might be watching, that the pampas grass blowing harmlessly in the
breeze might have ears.

  Whether it had a mouth was a different matter altogether. Verbal consultation between juniors and greenstaff was conducted on the most economic scale. Most garrulous of the bunch was Rod, a man whose head, we reckoned, came as close to resembling a cauliflower as a human feature can without looking edible. Rod, who had acquired the nickname ‘Farmer’ after one of the adult members had joked he was attempting to grow peas in the seventh green, was the sole member of the team with whom we might attempt to conduct a conversation. Our encounters with him were brief and to the point. ‘Hello, Rod!’ we would say brightly. At which point Rod would mutter the words ‘juniors’, ‘bloody’ and ‘you’ in random order, then chunter off into the distance – presumably to plant some more peas. This would tell us he was in one of his more upbeat moods.

  Rod’s cohorts were nowhere near as talkative. In addition to Stig, they included Rog, a mysterious hunch-shouldered creature whose stubble grew furiously high on his left cheek but remained unfathomably barren elsewhere, and Reg, a human battering-ram who communicated through the medium of snapped gardening implements. We would hear them from over the fence as we approached the tenth green, a gently rising lunkhead chorus of grunts building to a lilting nimwad crescendo which sounded distinctly like, ‘Go home, Juniors!’ Whether they did this to break up the tedium of the daily grind or purely for our entertainment wasn’t clear, but we thought it only fair to respond by devising our own comparably drongoish response: a series of Quasimodo chants and spaz-wit groaning noises, punctuated with cries of, ‘My brain hurts!’ and, ‘Stop hitting it with that shovel, then!’ We would top this off with an impromptu game of Ching!, this time with the greenkeepers’ tool shed performing the function normally reserved for the trees to the left of the practice fairway – what, in a more sophisticated sport, might be referred to as the ‘net’.

  This ritual would go on for anywhere between five and twenty minutes, after which the groaning would fade out, Stig, Rod, Rog and Reg would get bored and move away – back to their half-open copies of Gravity’s Rainbow, presumably – and we’d celebrate by jumping into one of the bunkers that our enemies had just raked and holding Mousey down while we filled his golf bag with sand. Mousey never complained at this and seemed to understand that it was an essential part of the ritual. We all pictured ourselves as satirical wunderkinder audaciously mocking our unenlightened dogsbodies – rather than the puffed-up, confused milksops we really were, betraying our future selves by crossing swords with men who, very soon, might have served as useful allies. Once again, we would get away with it all and feel indomitable and invisible to our superiors, but, in our collective heart of hearts, we probably suspected the truth. And that was that even on a half-deserted golf course where cacophony and high jinks seem to be sucked up into the great big silence, you don’t spend ten minutes shouting, ‘Ohhhh … the bells! Fucking hell, the bells!’ at the top of your voice without someone of influence overhearing you.

  THE PERIOD SURROUNDING my fifteenth birthday represents my peak as a golf maniac – the moment when teenage pleasure-seeking and sporting excellence came together and briefly coexisted in seamless harmony. I might not have turned professional and left school, as I’d hoped, but that summer I compensated by shooting my first sub-par round – a (more innuendo) sixty-nine in the Crossman and White Shield – and became the first under-eighteen to win Cripsley’s hallowed club championship (though, I suspected from the way Jamie, Ashley, Mousey and Bushy were playing, not the last). By the autumn, I had a handicap of three, shelves groaning under the weight of silverwear, a regular slot in the Nottinghamshire county team, and the captaincy of the strongest junior league side Cripsley had ever boasted.

  Gordon Willard said I was lucky.

  Until recently, Gordon had been Cripsley’s oldest junior member. Gordon had passed beyond the official age for junior and youth tournaments a short time before I joined Cripsley, but he hadn’t let that stop him from taking a gloomy and obsessive interest in his successors. The ways Bob Boffinger and Gordon interpreted the job of junior organizing couldn’t have been more different. For Bob, junior organizer meant providing an endless supply of moral support, spare ties for prize-givings, free lifts, petty cash, imaginative fund-raising events and competitive holidays. For Gordon, it meant arriving out of nowhere at a singularly unhappy moment in your round, admonishing you with an inane golfing proverb – ‘Fairway wood, fairway dud’ – then vanishing until the next time you dunked an elementary pitch shot into piranha-infested waters. I’m sure Gordon must have contributed to our cause in some other, incredibly beneficial behind-the-scenes way, but we never saw any evidence of it. He appeared to have been created purely to revel in our misfortune. In the thirty or so rounds he witnessed me play, I don’t think Gordon ever saw me hit a good shot – which was remarkable, since I hit an awful lot of them. His disappearances between the outset of a perfectly executed backswing and the final revolution of a ripping drive were as confounding and sudden as his arrivals at moments of extreme golfing doom, violence and frustration. When Gordon decided to step down from his self-created post, by an apparent coincidence a golden era dawned for junior golf at Cripsley. This might have been viewed as a piece of prodigiously unfortunate timing for Gordon, but not by anyone under eighteen who had ever squiffed a bunker shot in his presence.

  Our relief, however, was short-lived. As we improved under Bob’s guidance, Gordon became, contrary to our hopes, a more, not less, central figure. He remained invisible for our searing long irons and masterful lobs, continued to take little to no interest in our ever more encouraging away results, still couldn’t growl the words ‘good score’ without sounding like he was extracting an unusually obstinate chunk of mozzarella from the side of his mouth. But Gordon’s role now had far more definition. In our eyes there was no longer any pretence of supporting the juniors. To us he was, quite brazenly, Hell’s Trucker.

  Accompanied by five or six obsequious goons, Hell’s Trucker stalked the fairways in the late summer evenings, a bit like Robert Duvall might have stalked the beach in Apocalypse Now if he’d been six inches taller and spent too much time with tarpaulin. With a haulage company inherited from his father, a fondness for Yorkie bars and a hairstyle which was more a cheek-style that happened to creep up onto his head, his mere presence provided a chilling warning to us all about the dangers of arrested golfing development. According to the general rules of golf, sevenballs are strictly forbidden, but Hell’s Trucker and his mob didn’t care, and – moreover – knew that no one would dare question them. As the sun began to set, you would see them swaggering over the ridge on the tenth fairway, the last gang in town, and you would make yourself scarce.

  For a whole year, Hell’s Trucker eyed us on the greens, hunted us in the rough, and hounded us in the clubhouse. I’d wondered in my early years at Cripsley why the adult members were so tolerant of junior shenanigans: were they simply an unusually charitable group of people, or had we just been lucky? Hell’s Trucker answered my question once and for all. Our luck had run out. We wondered how he found any time for trucking at all, since he seemed to be on the golf course every minute of the day, making our lives a misery.

  ‘Tom, what are they?’ he demanded, as I attempted to take a short cut through the clubhouse to the locker room.

  ‘They’re trainers,’ I said.

  ‘I know they’re trainers. What do you think you’re doing wearing them in the men-only bar?’

  ‘I thought I could just nip through to get my clubs out of my locker and change into my golf shoes.’

  ‘Well, think again. This isn’t a bloomin’ sports stadium, you know.’

  The climate had changed. One moment it was possible to smash an adult member’s greenhouse and ride home in the Sphincter a free hooligan, the next you couldn’t walk around with your trouser zip down for fear of being summoned to the competition room for a disciplinary hearing. Whether it was Mousey petulantly hurling his club into a pond after a m
issed three-foot putt, me pulling my trolley inside the line of the bunkers by the sixteenth green, Jamie wearing shorts with ankle socks, or Bushy failing to place his knife and fork together after a clubhouse meal, you could guarantee Hell’s Trucker would know about it. He couldn’t have been more vigilant if he had installed miniature spycams in our tee pegs and manned every bunker with a surveillance dwarf.

  The fundamental problem was that Gordon had been made Tournament Chairman. While that might have meant squat to the hunks of monosyllabic sinew that drove his lorries, within the boundaries of Cripsley it meant he was the closest thing to Maggie Thatcher, or at the very least God. Clearly, the adult members viewed Gordon slightly more positively than the juniors did. Tournament Chairman’s privileges included such luxuries as a reserved parking spot, a reserved tee time for Saturday competitions, being referred to as ‘Mr Tournament Chairman’ by fellow members and … well, that’s about it, really.

  ‘Hello, Gordon,’ I would say, upon seeing Hell’s Trucker emerge from his Ford Sierra Cosworth in the club car park (he didn’t drive any of his trucks up to the club), and he would stare me down, his swastika eyes noting my insubordination. The reprimand always came later on, from a messenger – Jim Prescott, or Clark Allydyce. ‘You must call the Tournament Chairman “Mr Tournament Chairman”, Tom,’ I would be informed. ‘Oh – you mean Gordon? He’s the Tournament Chairman now? Oh, right. I didn’t realize,’ I would reply, feigning innocence. ‘I’ll remember in future.’

  ‘Hi, Gordon,’ I would say to Hell’s Trucker, the next time I saw him.

  But he knew he would have his sweet revenge.

  When the shit hit the fan, the people who had been striving to get cool were invariably Robin and me. We weren’t the oldest juniors, but since those who were older were either part-time golfers or Ashley – who, despite being the most senior in age, was still only the size of Bob Boffinger’s leg and eternally nine in the head – we were looked upon, oddly, as the ones who should be ‘setting an example’. It had taken a while for the two of us to become friends – Robin was the son of a member, and I had originally thought he was a bit on the sniffy side, but all that changed after he was kind enough to share with me a bottle of Thunderbird he’d stashed in his locker. The other notable detail about Robin is that he looked a bit like Chesney Hawkes, the one-hit-wonder ego-rocker of the late eighties, but I decided that, since he seemed like a good laugh, I could let that go.