by Tom Cox
I turned to Nick, unable not to smile. ‘What the hell do you think?’ I said.
Watching from afar as Nick manoeuvred an Austin Allegro into a wheelie bin on a peaceful private cul-de-sac was one thing; sitting directly behind him as he hurtled down a heaving, narrow suburban street in a 2.5-litre death machine was something else entirely. If you discounted a couple of visits to Silverstone and Castle Donington, I had until this point only had one first-hand experience of genuinely fast driving: the time when I was four and my appendix burst, and my dad, foot stapled to the floor, had bravely risked the Sphincter’s life in order to save mine. But next to this, that was an underwater slug race. As we careered towards them, the red lights seemed to change shape and show deference to the Merc, like normally hardhearted bouncers spotting an esteemed punter in the queue. In our wake, pensioners didn’t so much jump out of the way as freeze in the manner of mortal souls dealing with a paranormal force. As we clasped corners and shaved bends, gravity seemed to suck extra-hard in empathy.
After twenty minutes of illegal right turns, screeching brakes and obscure T-junctions, we rounded a corner and finally found ourselves back in front of a familiar-looking gate. On top of the gate was a sign. It said: ‘Mapperley Golf Club’.
Out of it came a red Ford Fiesta XR3i, containing three members of the junior team from Sherwood Forest Golf Club.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Nick.
I knew what was coming next. This was no longer sheer hedonism; this was pride. Sherwood Forest juniors had beaten us in the league every year since 1982, and, if you ignored Worksop, probably represented Cripsley junior section’s archest enemies. So what if we didn’t even know the names of the kids in the car? This wasn’t about specifics; it was about revenge. Through four red lights, we stayed glued to the Fiesta’s tail. Lorries, bollards, no-waiting zones, pedestrians – these things were just scenery. At the junction with Carlton Hill, we nosed in front. But these boys clearly had local knowledge on their side. As we passed the Public Hair barbers’ shop, we realized they’d dangled a right-only-lane carrot in front of our noses.
Now they were a couple of car lengths in front. At the pelican crossing before Gedling village, Nick decided it was time to get mean, swerving neatly around a Chihuahua and edging back level with the XR3i. By the time we reached the turn into Richmond Avenue, there was a very real possibility of us going past on the bend, where the road opened up for the bus lane. As Nick floored the accelerator and whipped around a bollard, I saw that it was actually happening: Cripsley were finally beating Sherwood at something! As we scorched past, hollering out of the open window, the Fiesta seemed to slow and admit defeat. From the back seat, I turned to give our enemies one final two-fingered salute.
And saw that they had stopped for fish and chips.
His adrenalin undiminished, Nick pressed on. I surreptitiously checked the speedometer: seventy now, in a forty-mile-an-hour zone. It was obvious he could handle it, but my big worry was the hairpin bend, coming up in about half a mile, where Mapperley turned into St Annes and the downhill slope to the city centre kicked in. Having been to primary school nearby, I’d seen the aftermath of smash-ups there: spacious family estate cars transformed into fun-size runabouts with one flippant tap of the accelerator. I thought about pointing this out to Nick, but concluded it would make me look squarer than a paving slab. Still, I decided now might be as useful a time as any to put my seat belt on.
‘What’s the matter, Tom?’ asked Nick, clocking me in the mirror. ‘You getting scared? Don’t worry. I’ve driven on a professional rally track, y’know.’
He hardly had time to finish the sentence when we went in to the spin.
I remember it all in a series of freeze-frames now – the wheels seemingly slipping out from underneath us, the Volvo looming, the surprisingly soft and yielding impact, the big stone wall a couple of inches from my nose. The collision wasn’t remarkably scary, or life-altering, or dissonant, just remarkably slow even though, since Nick was driving at seventy-five miles per hour at the time, it cannot have taken more than a second or two. It was only when I stumbled out onto the pavement and went over the facts that I realized how lucky we’d been.
1. We had been in a high-speed, head-on collision with a Volvo.
2. We were all unharmed, if you ignored Nick’s whiplash and Mousey’s temporary loss of the power of speech.
3. I’d buckled my seat belt approximately point two of a second before impact.
4. The Volvo’s exterior suggested that it had crashed at speed, but into a paper aeroplane.
5. The Merc looked as if a giant had picked it up, folded it in three, used it as chewing gum for twenty minutes, then spat it out.
6. If you drove past the scene, you’d look solemnly at the Merc in the knowledge that anyone who had been in it was going to spend the rest of his life in unbearable agony, but only if he was very lucky.
7. Nick might be doing precisely that, when his dad found out about this.
For a moment, we were bona-fide local news: cars slowed, passengers stared, police and ambulancemen comforted, pedestrians lingered. It was tempting to make the most of the attention and complain about a partially fractured throat, but that would have been dishonest. I was no more shaken than I might have been if I’d fallen out of a dodgem. In fact, after the commotion dissipated, the entire experience swiftly became about as mundane as any other occasion when you have to spend an hour sitting on a mashed-in stone wall staring at the launderette across the road. I occupied myself by planning a way to keep all this from my parents, and wondering how I’d get home. After that, all I could do was wait for the inevitable: Bob Boffinger rounding the corner on his way back to Cripsley, double-taking at the view out of his side window like a man discovering he has woken up in the arms of a horse, and very nearly causing yet more heartache for Nottingham’s overworked emergency services.
Then, one by one, we were all at it. First Ashley in the wheezing seventy-quid Fiesta his dad bought him for Christmas, then Robin in an obscure Japanese monstrosity known only as the Tank, then myself in the inherited Sphincter, then finally – quite a lot later – Jamie in (typical!) the brand new Vauxhall Corsa his parents presented him with on his seventeenth birthday. If Nick’s crash passed quickly into Cripsley folklore, we learned approximately nothing from it. No matter how painstakingly our parents or driving instructors had grilled us on the rules of the road during our time as provisional licence holders, from the moment we passed our tests our frame of motoring reference stretched only as far as the space between the Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky and Hutch. Anything else was for grandads. We drove like rave musicians, not golfers. We all crashed and burned (almost literally in Ashley’s case: he narrowly escaped when his Fiesta caught fire on the way back from a tournament in Staffordshire). We all wanted to. We all screamed things like ‘Sheep’, ‘Gigolo Whippet’ and ‘Skirting Board’ out of the window at passers-by while we did it.
Then, when we had done that, we started driving really, really slowly. Not safe slowly, but stupid slowly. The kind of slowly where you pack eight teenagers into the car, drive at eleven miles per hour in a forty-mile-per-hour zone for no sensible reason, wait while a queue of thirty or so cars builds up behind you, wait again until one of them tries to pass you, then, as they do, suddenly start driving very very quickly and pulling faces at them.
When we tired of the simple pleasures of holding up traffic, props were introduced. These were usually random plastic body parts, brought along by Ben, whose dad taught Biology at one of Cripsley’s comprehensive schools. A fully reclined seat and a carefully placed endoskeleton could cause havoc in a traffic jam, but timing and placement could make the all-important difference between a convincing ghostly driver and a clavicle in the face. Far simpler yet equally satisfying was Wave Hello, Say Goodbye, the game where the driver turns the steering wheel from below with his real arms, while simultaneously waving to the car next to him with his
fake ones. Failing that, there was always Spleen Throwing. This was the most adaptable game, in that all it involved was a good throwing arm, a car (parked or moving – it didn’t matter) with an open window or sunroof, and one of the apparently limitless number of plastic spleens that Ben’s dad brought home from work. We didn’t always hit our target, but even the best basketball players miss the hoop sometimes. And, besides, they have an advantage: they’re throwing balls, not spleens.
When I look back and try to pinpoint the moment in my life when I first felt more man than boy, I don’t think of stubble or voting slips or fumbling teenage sex; I think of driving at thirty miles over the speed limit, fifteen minutes after passing my driving test. One of the indignities of being an obsessive junior golfer is being made to feel that you’re a lot younger than you are. At eighteen, you can conceivably still be a lowly ‘junior’; at twenty-one, an only marginally more impressive ‘youth’. Long after your college lecturers have started to respect you as an adult and your school uniform has gone to the charity shop, your golfing superiors are admonishing you for wearing trainers and talking down to you in the kind of tone that warns of after-game detentions. In space, no one can hear you scream. In a golf club, no one can hear your voice break. The introduction of a screech of teenage brakes into this environment is louder than bombs. By driving up to the golf course by our own volition, we were saying many things to the old grouchbags at Cripsley that our golf had only hinted at: ‘Fear me! I’m coming up behind you! I’m bigger than you now, and soon I’m going to be even bigger than that!’ It wasn’t a coincidence that all but a couple of us passed our driving test before our eighteenth birthday. It was a downright prerequisite. Without a car, we were trapped in a mini-kingdom where we could be punished for anything from an overhit three-wood to a wayward denim shirt. With a car, we were free.
Adults always talked approvingly about cars that would get them ‘from A to B’. We didn’t see much fun in that. We wanted vehicles that would get us from D to M, via C, X and, if at all possible, G. Every journey, whether it was to McDonald’s in Cripsley town centre or the Sandmoor Future Masters in Leeds, was an adventure. I had longed for a driving licence to liberate me from reliance on my dad for lifts and furnish me with the independence to stay at the golf course for as long as I pleased. Countless times I had spread out my competition entry forms on my bedroom floor and dreamed of the time when I could take off to any amateur golf tournament I fancied. I’d looked at the course names – Beau Desert, Coxmoor, Whittington Barracks – and pined for pines, gorged on gorse. What exactly was a desert doing in Staffordshire and where did a beau fit into it? What was a barracks doing on a golf course? I felt like the answers to questions like these could change my life. But I hadn’t even guessed at the unadulterated thrill of cramming five of your best friends into a vehicle that you’re not responsible for and driving to your local garden centre for no obvious purpose besides seeing how many handbrake turns you can do before you make your tyres bald. I’d also overlooked the way a fragile ego can feast on the superficial popularity that can come from being the Man with the Lifts. Most heinously of all, I’d neglected to allow for the caprices and flaws of adolescent will-power. Again.
However, perhaps I’m being a little harsh on myself. On all of us. Was driving more fun than golf? Sometimes. But, in the long run, probably not. We probably sensed, deep down, that before long we’d look upon it in the same way as our parents did, and get behind the wheel with the awe drained from our soul and replaced by a sense of grim inevitability. Golf, on the other hand, would be here for ever. If it wasn’t, why would so many of the living dead play it?
I now know that I am highly likely to relive the sensation of hitting a crisp, high, drawing three-iron over a lake into the heart of an elevated green or sinking a forty-foot putt over a hog’s back green – potentially several times. Whether I will again find six close friends willing to cramp themselves onto the back seat of my hatchback, shout ‘Pylon Lover!’ at mid-afternoon shoppers and wave plastic body parts out of the window is, however, very much in doubt (though don’t think for a minute I don’t live in hope). Unless you’re Michael Schumacher or a sales rep, driving is a duty which dresses itself up as an adventure for a fleeting, elusive moment. But golf, if you genuinely love it, is with you for life as an adventure – the exciting bits, the stressful bits, the crap bits, the dangerous bits – whether you like it or not. You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it, and you can’t use the harsh realities of the outside world to devitalize it. Believe me on this one: I speak with the long-suffering air of someone who, as he navigated the final, jagged passage to adulthood, had a bloody good go at doing all three.
I HAD OFTEN heard about Sunstarling during my stint as golf pariah. Within the social circle surrounding my family, he was a shadowy legend, whose cautionary tale could be viewed as the batik cushion propping up an entire generation’s morals. Although he was often spoken of with affection by my parents and their friends, I never met him, and whether he was fact or fiction remained unclear – as did whether Sunstarling was the name he used when he went to sign on for his dole money – but I felt I knew his story almost as well as I knew my own. In the late sixties, Sunstarling had been Wales’s star junior golfer, with a handicap of 0.4, a set of hand-tailored clubs, a place in the England youth squad, a swing like whipped cream,1 and the distinction of ‘once being bought a drink by Tony Jacklin’. His future as the missing link between Tom Weiskopf and Jack Nicklaus had looked guaranteed until, at eighteen, he’d been invited to the Isle of Wight Rock Festival by a non-golfing friend, the angel of this hippy fairytale. Standing naked in a field absorbing a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo with several thousand young people united by their constipation and overpowering body odour, Sunstarling had experienced his epiphany: from that moment on, he would renounce uptight old golf and its venal mores, and devote his life to ‘getting down with the land’ (whatever that meant) and ‘working on his music’.
I had three main problems with the story. One: it never seemed to end properly – we never found out just what Sunstarling did with ‘his music’. Two: nobody ever mentioned who he gave his clubs to. And three: it all sounded a bit smelly.
At the same time, however, a part of me is jealous of Sunstarling. When my life-re-evaluating revelation came to me, it didn’t come in the form of a Hendrix guitar solo. I didn’t see God in the opening chords of The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. I didn’t even get hip in time to bliss out to the Stone Roses at Spike Island. No. When I saw my life change direction in front of my eyes, the future spoke to me through the medium of David Byrne.
David-look-at-me-I’m-so-weird-with-my-strange-jerky-head-movements-and-Third-World-rhythms-but-kind-of-safe-with-it Byrne.
David Byrne used to be the lead singer of Talking Heads, the New York group who came out of the New Wave movement and, with 1979’s Remain In Light and 1980’s Fear Of Music, made two of my favourite albums of all time. In July 1992, however, I was only dimly, reluctantly, aware of this. By July 1992, Talking Heads were long extinct and Byrne had reinvented himself as the kind of curtain-haired, early nineties, sensitive solo artist who exists purely to help ease baby-boomers into musical middle-age and its inexorable co-conspirator, world music. This, I’m slightly ashamed to confess, is The Man Who Changed The Course Of My Life. My First Ever Gig. Which I Saw With My Parents And Their Friends. From A Sitting-Down Vantage Point.
Still, Byrne certainly had been a genius and iconoclast at one point in his career, even if he wasn’t any more. He didn’t interest me because of his kooky syllables or pseudo-Brazilian tunes so much as because he was playing music, at a louder-than-average volume, much of which seemed to whisper to me that there was more to life than breaking par in the Midland Youths Championship. The new songs might have been mediocre, but the old ones were like a revelatory trigger to an amnesiac. Hold on: I know every word of this, I thought for the third time, and suddenly I was blinded by the light. Yes,
I had actually liked music before I took up golf, hadn’t I! I still liked music, if only I could admit it to myself! It was good to be part of a huge group of people who weren’t going to let the fact that they had shot eighty-one/handed their essay in late/had a lousy day at work that day stop them having a good time together! That girl sitting directly in front of me was pretty sexy!
Let’s just say David Byrne caught me at a weak moment.
By July 1992, I’d been competing on the amateur golf circuit for four solid months and working in my second stretch as a waiter for three. During this period I’d travelled from one end of the country to the other, signed up for every tournament I could, bled my bank account dry, twanged the patience of the people closest to me, finished in the top ten of two tournaments, snapped the shaft of four clubs over my knee, and won one set of ‘deluxe’ tee pegs. I’d also been forced to endure more easy-listening ambience tapes than I would inflict on my worst enemy, and my weight had dropped from comfortably over ten stone to just under nine (not ideal, since I’m roughly six foot tall). It would be a massive understatement to say that things weren’t progressing fully as well as planned. It would be a massive understatement to say things weren’t progressing a quarter as well as planned.
My typical working day would progress as follows:
3.00 a.m. Wake up with jolt from recurring nightmare involving last place finish in that day’s tournament.
4.00 a.m. Return to fitful sleep, having finally convinced myself nightmare wasn’t real.
6.30 a.m. Get up and rush to window in order to check trees and bushes for wind strength.
6.31 a.m. Suffer anxiety attack, having deduced that wind is blowing in excess of five miles per hour.
