Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  Imagine how good I would have felt if I had actually been able to hit a golf ball.

  The next morning, it was never quite the same. Sleep, I concluded, was the big problem. If I could somehow keep swinging all night, the next morning I would be able to flash it around Cripsley like Greg Norman’s kid brother. But four reluctant hours of Rapid Eye Movement – four reluctant hours of Rapid Eye Movement during which I dreamt about nothing but the first one and a half feet of my golf swing – would kill the feeling. I’d still play better than ever the next day, shoot some of my lowest scores, but I knew in my heart of hearts that I wasn’t the all-embracing golfing beast who’d been under the spotlight the night before.

  Then there was the lawn to contend with. It looked like it had recently doubled up as the venue for a Monster Truck rally.

  ‘That’s it,’ my mum would announce, ‘no more divots. There are clods of earth everywhere! You could at least have replaced them!’

  ‘I think, actually,’ I would reply, ‘if you ask any professional greenkeeper, you’ll find that divots should not be replaced; they should be filled in with sand and seed.’

  ‘Well, fill them in with sand and seed then!’

  ‘Haven’t got any.’

  ‘I’m going to put my foot down this time, Tom. If you want to swing your clubs, you do it at the golf course. New grass costs money, and until you make it onto the professional tour, that’s the one thing you haven’t got.’

  ‘What – grass?’

  Grimace.

  ‘Look – if it makes you feel any better I’ll just swing with my three-wood. When you’re playing with a wood, you use a sweeping action. It’s not steep, like an iron, so it doesn’t take any divot.’

  ‘No. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to become a professional?’

  ‘Don’t try to bribe me. No more swinging in the garden. That’s my final word on the subject. Why don’t you come inside and think about something other than golf for once? Listen to some music. Remember? You used to like music. It might help you swing better and relax. Me and your dad bought the new Lou Reed album the other day. It’s a bit dark in places, but track five’s an absolute killer.’

  Whoever Lou Reed was, I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to help me rediscover the sense that my forearms were made out of elastic.

  Feeling thoroughly misunderstood, I would slink off to Cripsley, where I’d console myself by hosting a game of Who’s This?. I might have lost the Swing – the all-conquering, strangely personal (yet classic) amalgam of all the smoothest techniques I’d observed at the PGA event the previous day – but I hadn’t lost my mental image of the handiwork of the pros themselves. Who’s This? was a game for two or more players, and required them to assume the roles of THE MASTER and the minions. THE MASTER would swing the club in the style of a well-known professional, and the minions would be required to guess who it was in as little time as possible. A variation on this was Who’s This (Tramp)?, which was limited to impressions of players with average annual earnings of less than eighty thousand pounds.

  I invariably got to be the host of Who’s This?, owing to my ability to execute, at a moment’s notice, a technically perfect impression of any swing in the top two hundred of golf’s world rankings. You name the action, I could replicate it, whether it was Payne Stewart’s ‘rolling wrists’, Jack Nicklaus’s ‘backwards sway’ or Eamonn Darcy’s ‘just killing this shrew – be with you in a minute’. If there had been a captive mainstream market for physical golf parody, I would have been in the top league, Phil Cool in plus fours. (Pulling faces was easy. Converting your hands from a ‘cup holding’ position to a ‘door knocking’ position in 0.2 of a second? That was hard.) However, as things stood, I was naturally blessed with the world’s most useless party trick. Have you ever tried bellowing, ‘Hey, everyone! Watch! Here’s my Davis Love III!’ to a packed big city bar?

  My golf friends, however, were absolutely floored.

  ‘Wow! You really captured that way Faldo has of driving the club into the ground like it’s a big hammer.’

  ‘Tom, do your Christy O’Connor Junior. Go on! Please. I love it when you do Christy.’

  ‘How cool! Do another! Your impressions are so good. Have you ever thought of actually swinging that way on the course? Wouldn’t you be just as good as the pros, if you did?’

  It was a good question, and one I’d considered at length. Well, sure, I could use my ‘Fuzzy Zoeller’ in this week’s Midlands Youths Championship. I could use it to shoot my best score ever, and win the tournament easily, and be incredibly popular among my peers. I could make my path to the European Tour qualifying school a hell of a lot easier. But it just didn’t feel right. By borrowing someone else’s swing, I’d feel like a fake. I didn’t want to be a body double; I wanted to be the Best. Compromise was death. I had to do this on my own terms, even if they were frustrating, masochistic and unpredictable.

  I knew, if I could just be patient, that the dream back-lawn action would be back for good. It would have helped, though, if I could get on my back lawn. My mum’s ban became even more stringent after I caught a microscopic fragment of gravel on the downswing of my ‘Ben Hogan’ and propelled it through the patio windows, rudely interrupting her in the final stages of some heavy baking in the kitchen. I thought she was overreacting, to be honest, but looking at the strength of her grip on her egg whisk, I judged that it might not be a good idea to say so, and opted to take my crusade indoors.

  Living-room golf was less messy, at least. Divots were no longer a problem (although if you lift up the armchair in one corner of my parents’ living room it’s still possible to see the scuff mark left by my seven-iron), there were no strong winds to distort my swing, and it was always dry. What’s more, unlike back-garden golf, missiles were permitted. In most pro shops you can buy a certain kind of hollow practice ball, designed to go approximately an eighth of the distance of a normal ball. For the serious golfer, these items are a joke – until, that is, that same serious golfer is stuck in his parents’ living room, desperate to work on his delayed hand action, with his local course closed and a small yet fearsome middle-aged woman blocking his exit to the back garden with a potentially lethal kitchen utensil.

  By the simple act of closing our heavy living-room curtains and clearing the furniture into the corners of the room, I would construct my own practice net. I doubt the curtains would have withstood the venom of a proper ball constructed with balata-coating and elastic innards, but with my Airflo balls I could bash away as fiercely as I liked, and within an hour had usually worked myself up into a rare sweat. If my parents objected, they didn’t say so, or perhaps they hadn’t clocked what I was up to.

  My major mistake occurred not during one of these practice sessions but en route to a half-time break. I had been feeling pretty pleased with myself, having pummelled the curtains with a hundred perfect ‘Craig Stadlers’ in a row, and was heading to the kitchen for a well-earned glass of Coke when I heard the ripping sound. I knew it couldn’t have been caused by me because, though I still had hold of my three-wood and it was trailing freely behind me, any imbecile knew that a three-wood head – which is rounded and smooth – couldn’t make anything rip as destructively as that awful noise had suggested. It had been more of a fully realized tear than a rip: a spiteful cleaving sound, the sound that something jagged makes when it is working its way through something soft and precious and relishing it.

  I scanned frantically for the family cat, eager to assign the blame, but was pretty sure I remembered seeing Woosnam (What? You didn’t expect me to name him after a professional cricketer, did you?) passed out in the airing cupboard half an hour before, and besides, his blunt, out-of-service claws had long since become a running joke with neighbourhood mice. Then, very slowly, I allowed my eyes to follow the shaft of my three-wood from my hands, past the rubber grip, along the smooth shiny metal, down to the clubhead.

  Which wasn’t there.


  In its place was an ugly, serrated metal stump. On the end of the stump was some stuffing, and a gash. Hosting the gash was my parents’ art-deco sofa. On the far side of the room, at the foot of the curtains, was the head of my three-wood.

  It had flown off during my last shot. Lost in the narcissistic daydream of my performance, I hadn’t noticed. It was understandable, really. But potentially not to my parents.

  Acting quickly, I restored the room to its former state, opening curtains and rearranging chairs and tables. It looked like the kind of living room you find in a Habitat catalogue, if you ignored the fact that its centrepiece had its guts spilling out all over the place. But that was a problem that could be solved, too. On the chair on the far side of the room, I spotted the cat blanket. Folded in half and placed carefully it covered the entire rupture. Who could tell? I thought. The old fools might not even move it for weeks. If I could just get the cat to sit on it and never move again, I had no need to worry.

  It was astonishing: with a bit of quick thinking, I’d fully reversed my earlier mistake. I rewarded myself by going to get that Coke.

  I remained a free man for approximately seven and a half minutes.

  I could tell from the portentous tone of the knock on my bedroom door that I was in trouble. A voice followed.

  ‘Tooooommm?’

  There was an important decision to make here, one which could change my life, if not the entire future direction of professional golf. Confess, or concoct an elaborate excuse? The decision wasn’t as easy as it sounds. A straight confession would seem far-fetched enough on its own: would my mum really believe that the clubhead just happened to fall off as I was swinging, and that the tear happened not during a golf swing but during a mundane stroll across the living room? More to the point, would she care? No: she would simply come to the conclusion that I had ripped her sofa because of golf, that golf was inherently dangerous and – horror of horrors – that golf was in control of me, and I wasn’t in control of golf.

  Slowly, silently, by the collar of my Le Shark polo shirt, she led me to the scene of the crime. With the blanket gone, it was a thousand times worse than I remembered.

  ‘What’s this?’

  It was final decision time. Confess, or pass the blame? Take my medicine and a few weeks without living-room swinging until she begins to forget it ever happened, or jeopardize my career and, moreover, be wrong in the arena of golf?

  ‘Oh no! That’s awful. I can’t believe that cat!’ I said.

  That left only the videos.

  There were around three hundred of them in total – a few purchased from WH Smith, the majority taped off the telly. You would find among them every single moment of BBC golf coverage broadcast between January 1989 and August 1992, with the heart-rending exception of the final two shots of the 1991 Benson and Hedges International, which my dad had erased with an episode of The South Bank Show. It was a more appropriate replacement than I realized at the time: I didn’t merely consume televised golf; I turned it inside out, upside down, then subjected it to the kind of in-depth analysis normally reserved for cubism or the complete works of Alberto Moravia. When the BBC’s soft-spoken swing expert Alex Hay observed that Tom Watson was hitting a six-iron, even though it was blatantly obvious that he was hitting an eight-iron, he probably had no idea that he was undermining a Nottingham teenager’s entire faith in humanity. Anyone who watched golf with any sense of purpose, watched it again, memorized it, dreamed about it, then watched it again with his finger on the freeze-frame button, would know that Tom Watson hit a typical eight-iron in calm weather conditions one hundred and fifty-one yards.

  Nothing of this seemed remotely unusual to me: not the filing system (alphabetical and chronological, naturally), not the list of past British Open winners on my bedroom wall, not the obsessive note-taking during the final round of the US Masters. From the first time I entered the pro shop and overheard Mike Shalcross and Roy Jackson having an inscrutable conversation about a tour professional who was ‘changing to graphite’, I resolved not only to know what phrases like ‘changing to graphite’ meant, but also to know everything and anything it was possible to know about the professional game. It was only later, when I began to invite golfing friends up to my bedroom and watched their mouths form silent question marks as they saw the endless rows of filed and numbered tapes, that I began to get an inkling that my behaviour wasn’t run-of-the-mill for a wannabe pro. And it is only recently, having met a few thousand too many Star Wars fans, that I have started to realize that my habit of forcing guests to watch repeatedly the BBC’s coverage of the 1989 Suntory World Matchplay final and miming along with my favourite bits of Bruce Critchley’s commentary – ‘And that is miles past Nick Faldo!’ – might have been a touch on the irritating side.

  In an unofficial poll conducted among everyone I’ve ever known who has never played the game, golf has been voted the Worst Television Sport in the World, outdulling – among others – horseracing, bowls and (I can’t believe this) darts. The people who have decided this are quite clearly misguided, if not psychologically disordered. Admittedly the camera’s habit of lingering on birdlife for periods of up to ten minutes doesn’t exactly serve as an advertisement for the game’s sex appeal, and the commentators don’t do themselves any favours by letting slip political leanings of the Ottoman era, but golf has a spectrum of environments, permutations and inside knowledge that no other spectator sport can begin to match. Anyone can thoroughly enjoy a football game. It takes imagination and perseverance to get the most out of a golf tournament.

  I have worked out the exact amount of time I spent watching golf as a teenager but won’t list it here, since it cripples me to think just how much of it I could have spent having sex or listening to Three Dog Night’s greatest hits. Let’s just say if you took the amount of hours I owned of golf on video, multiplied this number by ten, and added an extra hundred hours to allow for tapes borrowed from friends, you’d be fairly close to the mark. I saw professional golf as my own version of the magic potion in Gosciny and Uderzo’s Asterix books, which I could drink (watch), then carry inside me in order to fight (play) better, before going back to my druid (telly) to replenish my supplies (tapes) every day or two. The fresher the potion was in my system, the better.

  My final act before setting off for an important round wasn’t to check I’d packed my waterproof bottoms and flat cap; it was to rewind my British Open tape and watch Payne Stewart butter that three-hundred-yard drive one last time. I’d then carry the image around for the rest of the day, with its accompanying commentary (‘And that’s right down, over the bunkers, through the gap … He really snorked that one, Bruce!’), and pit it against my friends and their favourite images. While other teenagers heard the jangle of the Stone Roses in their heads while they swaggered, we heard the whisper of Peter Alliss in our heads while we swung. Tame or not, it had exactly the same effect: it momentarily lifted us out of our frustrating adolescent predicament and allowed us to see ourselves as something far more stylish than we really were.

  These images made us better players and more desirable people, we imagined. Merely by humming the easy-listening theme tune to his Fred Couples instruction video (‘Chck-Chck-Chck-Chckkk-Duh-Duh-Dah-Duuuhhh’), Ashley could inspire me to crunch fifty flawless five-irons in on the trot up the practice fairway. By assigning one another the names and characteristics of famous professionals on the first tee and saying things like ‘Good one, Ray’ in a ridiculous Kentucky accent, we knew we would reach a higher standard. If I pretended that the monthly medal was the British Masters, and that asthmatic old Ron Schofield, my twenty-one-handicap partner for the day, was actually Jodie Mudd – ‘a three-time winner on the tour this year, Bruce’ – it would stoke my competitive fire immeasurably. None of this embarrassed me in the slightest. Why should it? I was only rehearsing for adulthood, wasn’t I? In a matter of a year or so, when I’d reduced my handicap to scratch, I’d gain my PGA tour card and I’d no longer n
eed to pretend. All this would be normal: the person standing next to me on the tee really would be Fred Couples; an American man called Bob really would be yapping hysterically about the ‘air brakes’ on my sand-iron shot. I just wished it would all hurry up and happen – that hormones and furniture and windows and general rules and the temptations of Ching! would stop getting in the way. I wanted the professional golf world to come along, swallow me, and seal me off from the outside one. And if that seems weird, don’t laugh – it wasn’t. You would have felt exactly the same way if you had three hundred golf videos and no girlfriend.