by Tom Cox
The setting was Shifnal Golf Club, in Shropshire. The event: I can’t remember for certain, but it’s likely it was the Shifnal Junior Open. Westwood: lacing up his Footjoy shoes in preparation for his afternoon teeing-off time. Me: returning, rosy-cheeked, from a gratifying round in the low seventies, somewhat startled to find myself alone in the same room with the Midlands’ nearest thing to Tiger Woods.
‘Good round today, Coxy,’ said Lee.
The comment threw me off balance on four counts. Firstly, he had made it without looking up from his golf shoes. Secondly, in the twelve minutes it had taken me to hole my final putt, sign my card, put my clubs in Bob Boffinger’s car and neck a can of Happy Shopper drink, Lee had managed to gain the knowledge that I had shot a ‘good round’. (This was unbelievable! Did he see me as a competitor?) Thirdly, he was aware of my existence. And finally, he was aware of my existence enough to make up his own nickname for me. I was impressed! So impressed, in fact, that I said this:
‘Thuaaankhghgsds, Lee.’
I’ve been fortunate enough, over the years, to meet several of my heroes, and brave enough to insult some of them. I’ve telephoned the New York rock-and-roll icon Dion and told him that he isn’t ‘always the best judge’ of his own work. I’ve implied to The Who’s Pete Townshend, six minutes after meeting him, that the follow-up to Tommy, Lifehouse, might be a load of pretentious old codswallop. I’ve hinted to the original punk rocker, Jonathan Richman, that he should spend less time talking about cement. But to a boy two years older than me who happened to be quite good at hitting a ball around a field with some holes in it, all I could say was ‘Thuaaankhghgsds’.
Which should give you an idea of how big a deal Lee Westwood was in Nottinghamshire junior golf in the early nineties.
Westwood was by no means the only one. Around 1991, it seemed blindingly obvious to everyone on the Midlands golf scene that the Worksop team of today was the European Ryder Cup side of tomorrow. They probably could have sent out their under-thirteens team and still beaten, say, Lincolnshire. It didn’t matter how well the rest of us were playing: as county team members from rival clubs, we always felt a little like charity cases, third-reserve goalkeepers called up for a friendly match but only because the top man ‘couldn’t be bothered’ and his immediate understudy had a partially fractured thorax.
Many were the hours when Robin and I and even Jamie puzzled over what exactly gave the Worksop boys their edge. It wasn’t as if their techniques were flawless. Danny Parfitt, one of the youngest and most universally bum-sucked of their ranks, looked to have the wrist strength of George from Rainbow, and Westwood himself had an unusual swing where, mid-impact, he appeared to nod at the ball as if he was encouraging it to go closer to the hole.
With hindsight, though, it’s quite obvious where we were going wrong. While we were trying to banish our less impressive rounds from memory by retiring to a nearby copse to throw pine cones at one another’s heads, the Worksop contingent were compensating for theirs by trudging back to the practice ground to iron out the kinks in their backswings. While we saw the act of being in the vicinity of the golf course morning, noon and night as dedication enough in itself, they weren’t satisfied until they’d hit enough shots to put blisters on top of their calluses. North Nottinghamshire boys in general were taller, wider, grittier and less imaginative than their southern rivals. I might have spent my early childhood in a mining village not far south of Worksop with people who substituted the word ‘sery’ for ‘man’ in their everyday dialogue, but I played my golf further south, and in the eyes of Westwood and company that made me virtually a Londoner. Subtle signs – the outmoded nature of my equipment, my complete lack of friends called Justin, the absence of the phrase ‘got my putting boots on today, yoof’ in my repertoire of humorous quips – gave me away.
But what really set me apart was my parents.
Don’t get me wrong here. My mum and dad couldn’t have been happier that I spent my wild years hitting golf balls towards flagsticks rather than throwing dogs off pedestrian footbridges like most of the other boys from my school did. But the curious archaic rituals of the game, the sheer grasp it held over my life, bamboozled them.
They gave it their best shot, it has to be said – even if, as far as my mum was concerned, it was at a distance. She never spent too much time watching me in competitive play after the occasion, in the aftermath of an early Cripsley junior event, when she recklessly stepped over the painted white line dividing the unisex area of the clubhouse from the men-only bar and received a ‘talking to’ from the club’s snotbag steward. Thereafter her support was offered telepathically, usually from the safe haven of a nearby garden centre. My dad, on the other hand, stayed right by my side, no matter how many Immediate Past Captains commented on the inappropriateness of his corduroy trousers or bristled at his enquiry regarding whether the furry headcover on their putter was ‘real otter’. It was either that or the garden centre, after all.
I’d witnessed the kid-bashing that went on on the fairways of the Midlands. I’d seen Darren Cheeseman’s dad stalk after him down the fourteenth at Retford, repeatedly chastising him for his morally objectionable choice of club off the tee, and I’d heard about the sun-visor-flinging scene in the car park that erupted afterwards. I knew all about what John Chittock’s mum thought of her son’s putting stroke. (‘Bloody pathetic! You’d of thought we hadn’t trained him!’) That head-down, cocooned look of the north Notts boys arriving on the tee wasn’t concentration; it was fear. I didn’t want any of that.
That said, a bit of gentle encouragement every month or two wouldn’t have gone amiss.
‘Did you see that?’ I would ask, turning to my dad and frothing as my five-wood shot sailed over a giant oak tree, two bunkers, a lake and several potentially murderous amphibians to within four feet of the hole.
‘Yes!’ he would reply, looking through his binoculars, in completely the opposite direction. ‘Jackdaw, wasn’t it? Terrific.’
‘I meant the five-wood.’
‘Oh. Fine. Can’t say I was watching. Go get ‘em, kid. Great birdlife around here!’
It was only on the bad rounds, however, that I found this really hard to deal with.
‘Fuckin’ ‘ell. That’s three long-iron shots I’ve sliced today. What the shag’s wrong with me?’
‘Oh well. Just think: your mum’s cooking pepper sausage pasta tonight, with that nice basil sauce she does.’
It seemed, at times, as if he was having a conversation with his other, more mellow son, who just happened to be standing behind me, and invisible.
I’m sure the other golf parents felt even more bewildered in his presence.
‘Mr and Mrs Case, who pick the county team, say our Wayne might get called up for the England squad this year.’
‘Oh, really? Some lovely wildlife in this part of the world, don’t you think?’
‘He’s really done well this season, and that coaching he’s got from Steve Loach has worked a treat. He’s shortened his backswing. Can you see? And that low hand position? It’s really helped. But I just wish he’d stop trying to hit those long shots out of the rough grass and take his medicine. I’ve told him a hundred times, wood in the rough, wood in your head.’
‘Mmm? Well, never mind. We’re having pepper sausage pasta for dinner tonight. Look at the size of that buddleia!’
My performances in county events were a constant disappointment to me. Away from Cripsley, where I could often idly knock the ball round in two under par in practice, the game seemed more complex, and I found myself unable to relax.
‘Concentrate,’ advised my mum, which worked for a while, but essentially left me concentrating on concentrating, as opposed to on getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. I couldn’t have tried much harder. My preparations – whole hours devoted purely to playing holes in my head – bordered on the catatonic. Yet my away results – the away results that counted, anyway – never reflected the gol
fer my pragmatic self knew I was, let alone the one my hotheaded adolescent self hoped I was.
On 21 August 1991, I found myself standing on the first tee at Church Brampton Golf Club in Northamptonshire, playing for the biggest prize of my career: my legs, and possibly several other vital body parts.
That morning, just before I set off for Northampton, an envelope had arrived, containing my GCSE results. ‘Do you mind if I open it this evening?’ I’d asked my parents, nonchalantly. ‘I don’t want the results to put me off my game.’ I said this, but what I’d meant was: ‘I am going to open this envelope, but first, in order to demonstrate the insignificance of my exam results, I’m going to win this golf tournament and prove to you just how great I am at golf, so you don’t shout at me quite as loud.’ I knew I’d messed my exams up. My revision had amounted to a half-arsed half an hour per subject between putting practice on my bedroom rug, and I’d made it perfectly clear to my teachers that, nice though their subjects were, they weren’t going to help me loft a blind nine-iron over trees to a postage-stamp green in the Sun City Million Dollar Challenge. During my multiple-choice Biology exam, I picked answers at random in order to leave more time for designing dogleg par fives in the margin.
Golf was going to save me. I could sense it.
At Church Brampton, however, I came a mediocre twentieth, then sat very quietly in the back seat of Bob Boffinger’s car on the journey home to my doom. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bob. ‘I’m sure you can make it up to your parents.’ I was sure I could make it up to them, too. I could shoot sixty-eight in tomorrow’s event, the Kibworth Open, for starters.
I was putting miles too much pressure on myself. If I went around the course in eighty, I didn’t think in terms of how I could ameliorate with a seventy-three; I thought about how I could ameliorate with a sixty-three. Every time I teed the ball up, I betrayed myself by shouldering the expectations of a miracle-worker, yet somehow simultaneously not realizing how good I really was.
I now know I could have done better. With more realistic standards, I might have been playing off one handicap instead of three; I might have won the county boys championship; I might have been the one who got younger every year. But then again I might not have. I won’t kid myself that my starry-eyed standards were the only excuse for my inability to perform. In all honesty, I don’t think I wanted to win enough. For all my dreaming and planning, the idea of stepping up to the prize table in my jacket and tie, in front of all those golf parents, never really appealed to me all that much. On the rare occasions when I was in contention with a few holes to play, I would instantly begin talking myself out of a potential victory. Think about all those expectant, gormless faces, the coward part of my brain would whisper to me. Do you really care about impressing them? And what about the speech? Can you cope with the sheer monotony? Just how much do you want to be bum-scratched by hundreds of people who aren’t really your friends?
I don’t remember ever blowing a good round deliberately, but it was slightly alarming how often I would wake up from the spell of my Coward Demon to find myself on all fours re-enacting a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre using my ball, my three-iron and a nearby holly bush as props, when just a couple of holes previously I’d been challenging for the tournament lead.
Junior amateur golf speeches are all the same. And by that, I do mean exactly the same. If your most boring, cardigan-wearing uncle had been feeling particularly shiftless and uninspired one dreary bank holiday afternoon and decided to pen a few verses in tribute to his local Inland Revenue office, he couldn’t have come up with something more flat and insipid than the anti-climactic declamations I witnessed in the clubhouses of north Nottinghamshire. It wasn’t long before it got to the point where me and Robin, standing at the back of the room fidgeting, could mime along.
‘I’d like to thank t’ greenstaff, for t’ condition of t’ course,’ that particular week’s austere north Notts winner would begin, with all the effervescence of a boy who’d spent the last four hours coaxing otters into a cage with a large stick. ‘And t’ catering staff, for t’ food. And …’
Come on! You can do it!
‘And …’
Now, now – no peeking at that copy of The Marshall Brickman Guide to After-dinner Anecdotes.
‘… And t’ organizers, for putting on t’ event.’
At which point, to a chorus of ‘Well done’, the winner would shuffle back to his seat to give his powers of mental agility a well-earned rest, and the whole event, the thing we’d spent so many hours preparing for and bitching about and living for, would just kind of … die.
Was that it? I used to wonder, no matter how many times I saw it happen.
Bushy was the only one I ever saw handle matters differently. As the surprise winner of the Waldman Carr Trophy at Bulwell Forest Golf Club, he subverted the rules entirely. Bushy didn’t care about the greenstaff, the clubhouse’s steak and kidney pie wasn’t a patch on his mum’s paella, and he probably didn’t know who the shag the two hundred inane faces grinning at him were, much less want to know. What Bushy said was short and to the point, and did that rarest of things: it reflected his true feelings at the time. It also ensured that his name was a talking point on the Notts golf scene long after the hormonal whims of the pupils of Nottingham Girls High School had transformed him into a part-time player.
All Bushy said was: ‘Bad luck, lads.’
Bushy never was selected for the county team, funnily enough.
Unlike Bushy, though, I never won a county event – not a proper county event, under the gaze of Big Brother. I never got to stand there, look out onto that monotone sea of propriety and say, ‘Look! My clubs aren’t as good as your clubs, my clothes don’t have labels on them, I drink Happy Shopper ginger beer on the course, and my parents don’t even play or like the game, but I’ve still beaten the lot of you!’ Or something which said the same thing in a more witty, concise manner and concluded with the phrase, ‘So, neh-neh-neh-neh-neh!’ I’m still slightly bitter about that, but I’m learning to deal with it. At least now I can hold up my hands and say, ‘Look, I wanted golf to be fun off the course, as well as on, and it wasn’t, so I couldn’t quite give it my all, and – you know what? – that’s OK.’ At least now I can say, ‘Perhaps I simply wasn’t made to be a proper county golfer. Perhaps I was made to be a good golfer, but one who likes to throw pine cones and hide large pieces of wood in his fellow players’ lockers. And – you know what? – that’s OK too.’
Back then, though, I had a long way to go before I could be so philosophical. Somewhere inside, an illogical mid-adolescent war was raging between the hormones that wanted desperately to be part of something and the ones that wanted to tear that something down. I loved golf. I hated it. I was supposed to be winning the British Open in just under a year. It all mattered so, so much.
IF I WANTED to be a better player, I concluded, I needed a better golf course to practise on.
I first saw Par-adise as a spectator, but the sensation that we belonged together was as immediate and overpowering as it might have been if I’d won my first PGA Tour event there. Ever fallen in love at first sight? Remember the feeling? The twittering innards. The blancmange legs. The freakish, intuitive perception of a complete stranger’s soul. Now, take that same enchanting stranger, and imagine their body stripped naked and magnified to a size of five square miles … picture every hump and hollow exaggerated, enabling you to examine them in a manner you never believed possible. Imagine them with not only bumpy bits and crevices but pine trees. Imagine a four-hour hike across their surface, with the result that, no matter how hard you tried to get to know them, there would always be more to explore.
Sneering bunkers, marble-slick greens, ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!’ rough, pine-patrolled fairways which seemed always to be lurking in mist, and a regal, ghostly clubhouse conspired to make Par-adise the greatest golf course I had ever seen. What made it something more than that, somethi
ng carnal, was the way it revealed itself: slowly, teasingly at first, then – without warning – ostentatiously and imperially. One second you’d be tootling through some bog-standard Robin Hood country, counting off lumberyards, one eye on the road, one eye on your Good Golf Course Guide. A moment later, you’d take a right turn down a dusty track, pass through a corridor of woodland, and – blam – there it was, letting you look right down its top.
Par-adise was set in a deep bowl, hemmed in on all sides by monolithic Forestry Commission land, and gave the impression of being an entire, separate country, never mind merely a golf course. Par-adise didn’t have houses backing on to it – not even big, stately ones – for fear, presumably, that a quirk in the tastes of their residents might taint its majesty. Where most clubhouses had strict dress codes, precluding the wearing of things like jeans, trainers and Sigue Sigue Sputnik T-shirts, Par-adise’s probably had a different underwear by-law for every one of its umpteen chambers. Par-adise knew it was gorgeous and enigmatic, and asked you what precisely you were planning to do about it. Par-adise – let’s face it – wasn’t really called Par-adise, because that would be crap and tacky. Its actual name was something proud and evocative. If Par-adise knew that I was calling it Par-adise, right now, it would be utterly affronted.
Good.
Par-adise broke my heart.
I should have known it was too good to be true.
Par-adise, it seemed to me, didn’t have junior members. While it might have mutated into a leering, gnashing host during big tournaments, for the majority of the year it sat there two-thirds deserted, admiring itself and licking whatever it had where mortal golf courses had wounds. It didn’t seem to manufacture star players in the way that most of the north Nottinghamshire courses did, and, on the odd occasions when it did, these too were solitary, enigmatic (and, I assumed, unusually rich) creatures. So when Ted Anchor offered to help me gain membership there, I was somewhat taken aback.
