Nice Jumper

by Tom Cox

  What I couldn’t have told you, though, was how to make a dignified path from the tool shed at the back of the eighteenth green to the car park, via the main clubhouse door, while not wearing any trousers.

  Until now, the tool shed had represented rare unpioneered territory for me, and probably would have remained that way had I not spotted, as I snuck out of the locker room, a couple of members of the ladies’ bridge team crossing the car park, and been forced to make a dive for safety. Not having the patience for gardening or breaking down communication barriers with the greenkeepers, I’d never seen much point in hanging out in a dank, stone building full of secateurs. But now, as the icy January wind whipped through the slit in my boxer shorts (I knew I should have got my mum to sew that button back on), I couldn’t help regretting my complacency. I’d forgotten Golden Rule Number One of the Hunted in the Land of the Hunter: Know Your Surroundings Like You Know Your Own Heart. If I could just have been here before – even once, briefly, with the express purpose of tying Rick Sweeney’s leg to a lawnmower – I might at least have an idea of a useful escape route.

  As it was, I appeared to be stranded. Every time one gaggle of adult members ceased their after-match chortling in the car park and I thought I saw my chance, another gaggle promptly replaced them. Hence I found myself performing a piece of mutant physical theatre based on a man with a stutter: start to run … hide again … start to run … hide again. Not only that; it was getting dark and cold and the unctuous, wriggling shapes in the murk in the corner of the room beside me suggested that, within a few minutes, my nether regions could be subject to the attentions of anything from a baby squirrel to a fully grown local radio DJ.

  I was beginning to rue my bravado. If only I’d chosen to gamble a less vital article of clothing – my golf glove, perhaps, or a sock – I’d probably be at home by now, tucked up in front of my Seve: The Legend Continues video, or at least in a semi-warm car, listening to the new Wing-Tipped Sloat album.

  Still, today’s game had been a skins match, and everyone knew the two unspoken rules of a skins match at Cripsley: 1. Risk Everything, and 2. Boast Like Crazy. Skins represents golf’s most popular form of gambling: competitors put down a nominal amount of money for each hole, along with bonuses for eagles and birdies. If a hole fails to produce an outright winner, the money accumulates and moves on to the next hole. The bigger number of players, the bigger the prizes, the more loaded the atmosphere.

  Junior skins matches at Cripsley had been ushered gently into existence around six months previously, typically with games involving no more than four players – all of whom were required to contribute twenty pence per hole and ten pence for birdies, but could generally get away with not paying up if they sneaked out of the locker rooms surreptitiously enough afterwards. However, by January 1992 skins had evolved into a twenty-legged monster with the potential to vacuum up an entire monthly allowance.

  This had been the biggest game yet. By the sixth hole, I’d already gambled and lost the wages from the Saturday supermarket job I held down, but I wasn’t worried about that because now, as we reached the eighteenth hole, the money from the previous nine holes had rolled up. If I won, I probably wouldn’t need a Saturday job ever again. We were talking serious jackpot here: twenty pounds, or perhaps more.

  ‘Who’s it going to be, then?’ asked Robin. ‘Who’s got the bollocks? Big money, boys, remember.’

  ‘Me,’ I replied, feeling the adrenalin surge through my fingertips. ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘You gonna put your money where your mouth is?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘I’ll do more than that,’ I said. ‘I’ll put my trousers there.’

  I don’t know where it came from, either.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My trousers. It’s a skins match, isn’t it? Well, if I don’t make a three up this final hole, I’ll give these to the winner.’

  I looked down at my grey slacks, formerly an integral part of my school uniform: they’d seen me through a lot, but I couldn’t picture myself missing them. Much rather them, for instance, than the rest of my utility golfwear. Put it this way: I certainly wasn’t going to give away the stripy, quasi-ethnic grandad shirt I’d bought from Nottingham’s ‘alternative’ boutique, Ice Nine, the previous week.

  Obviously I’d prefer to drive home with trousers on, given the choice, but I didn’t see any problem sneaking into the house. My mum would probably be out at a garden centre and the chances were that my dad wouldn’t even hear me come in over the cacophony of his new Bhundu Boys album. That just left the seventy-yard journey to the car to consider, and, while my golf friends could be malicious, I knew they’d at least let me get behind the steering wheel before I stripped. At least, I was pretty sure I knew.

  But what was I worried about? I was going to win anyway.

  I teed my ball up, using an old technique I’d learned from a Jack Nicklaus video. This required me to focus on the flag, in the distance, then on a spot of grass just ahead of me, directly in line with the hole, then on the flag again. The one flaw in this technique was that every time you looked back at the flag, you would forget which patch of grass it was you had originally focused on. That was the problem with grass: it all looked the same after a while. Still, I felt pretty sure I was taking dead aim at the target. The hole was 321 yards long, a gentle par four, with the wind helping. That meant if I struck my driver well, I could hit the green in one, setting up a possible eagle.

  I wound up my shoulders for a big one, picturing my swing as liquid silk and driving my wrists down into a clean, springy hit. I watched as the ball probed the sky, upsetting some pigeons, then eventually dipped as if attached by a drawstring to the green, took one abnormally huge bounce, skipped up the bank at the back of the putting surface, across a concrete path, through a door, and into Steve Kimbolton’s swing-improvement room. I stood stone still and gaped. The ball, I deduced, could only have landed on one of two objects: the plastic sprinkler head at the side of the green, or a passing armadillo. One thing was certain: there was no way back from here, unless, unbeknown to me, the club had recently introduced Local Rule 37.5, ‘Free relief for ball hammered into teaching equipment’.

  ‘OK, Faldo,’ said Ashley. ‘We wanna see you strip.’

  Now, three quarters of an hour on, with ice-cold air where my empty pockets should have been, I peeked through a crack in the tool-shed door. Already I was forgetting what it felt like to have legs. And was the car park ever going to clear? I wondered what conversational topic could be so interesting that Jenny Abrahams and the rest of her fourball had to hammer it out out here in the cold, as opposed to in the snug clubhouse lounge over freshly toasted teacakes. I’ll level with you: I was descending into panic. It was all very well flouncing across the clubhouse car park in an indie band T-shirt with the words ‘Suck Me: I’m A Moose’ emblazoned across it, but faced with the prospect of making the same journey in a pair of big flapping pants, the punk subversive inside me seemed to be taking a fag break. I pictured the scene the following morning as the club steward dragged my frozen, squirrel-mutilated body from among the shovels and rakes, and the subsequent wild celebration, hosted by Hell’s Trucker and Terry Clampett.

  ‘Well, Terry, I won’t say I told you so, but we knew this one would come to a sticky end.’

  ‘That’s right, Truckster. I saw it coming that day in August 1989, when I first saw him fail to repair a pitchmark.’

  It was no good. I was going to have to run for it.

  Seeing that Abrahams and friends had turned their backs, I crept out across the mushy leaves, ducked briefly behind a magnolia tree, then tiptoed across the asphalt – some idiot seemed to have turned its volume switch up – as nimbly as I possibly could to the door of the Sphincter, hyper-alert, key at the ready. Safely inside, visible to the outside world only from the shoulders up, I exhaled deeply, turned the key in the ignition, and paused for a moment, waiting for the car heater to rasp into action. Then, sensing something at t
he periphery of my vision, I turned my gaze ninety degrees to my left, into the car next to me, and looked directly into the limestone eyes of the lady vice-captain.

  Decked out in a pink sweater and cloth cap, she sat as still as stone. From her Medusa stare, it was impossible to tell whether she’d watched my entire journey, just the last bit of it, or none of it at all. In fact, I wasn’t completely sure she was alive. Still, she must have seen something. For a full ten seconds, we assessed one another unblinkingly. I knew that something had passed between us, but being pretty confident it wasn’t love, I decided there wasn’t much point sticking around, clunked the gearstick into first and headed for home, driving with a new-found prudence of the kind exhibited only by the old and the semi-naked.

  And, again, like the old times, the weeks that followed yielded nothing in the way of repercussion. Once more, the powers-that-be at Cripsley confounded me. The irony was infuriating. They could quite happily overlook us running around in front of their wives in our underwear, yet when it came to rolling a ball gently into one of their trolley wheels or failing to replace our divots on the practice ground, the competition room would suddenly be made over to resemble a scene in a John Grisham novel.

  Take my hair, for example. By this point, it had been carefully cultivated to reproduce the length and texture of a month-old Magic Mop. Yet somehow it remained invisible to the close-cropped Cripsley committee. If they disapproved, they chose to show it indirectly. To wit: the 1992 Cromwell Cup, where I shot a round of seventy-two, which gave me the prize for the best scratch score of the day. Upon strutting into the competition room after my round, I was met by the 1992 captain, Roy Skilling, and the competition manager, Clark Allydyce.

  ‘Hi, Clark! Hi, Roy!’ I said, buoyantly flicking a curly lock out of my mouth.

  ‘That’s a very fine score you’ve done today, Tom,’ said Clark. ‘But there’s a pressing matter which we’d like to have a word with you about.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes. It’s about your attire.’

  I quickly surveyed my reflection in the window opposite: shorts, shoes, stripy ethnic top. Nothing too controversial there.

  ‘It’s the socks, Tom,’ the captain cut in.

  ‘They’re the wrong colour,’ continued Clark. ‘It states clearly in the local rules that only white socks should be worn with shorts.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you should. Now – I suggest you show some respect and apologize to the captain.’

  ‘Er, sorry, Roy,’ I said, with as much feeling as I could muster.

  ‘“Mr Captain”, you mean,’ corrected Clark. ‘Now, it’s high time you juniors started showing some respect. It’s all very well shooting seventy-two, but I suggest you please wear socks that are white, and not grey, in future, or you could be looking at another suspension.’

  ‘But white socks are for Darrens.’

  ‘What do you mean, “for Darrens”?’ asked Roy.

  ‘Y’know: “Darrens”. Townies. People with no dress sense.’

  ‘I don’t care about dress sense. I care about the rules of this club. This is the captain you’re talking to here, don’t you realize? And do you know who’s in the room next to us? The president, that’s who.’

  ‘What? George Bush?’

  ‘No, Mr Peters!’

  I’d spoken to Mr Peters, who owned the club, only a few times during my membership. I could never understand why the other adult members spoke of him in such hushed, fearful terms. To me, he seemed like a repressed old man who mumbled a lot. Only the previous week I’d walked straight past him in my Never Mind The Bollocks T-shirt and he hadn’t batted a cataract.

  ‘Now,’ continued Roy. ‘Come back when you’re decent.’

  But I would never be ‘decent’ – not any more. All pretence that I could sculpt my personality to fit this strange, protocol-fixated environment was starting to crumble. At last, after years of being told by my parents that a graceful backswing might not be the only recipe for existential fulfilment, but stubbornly refusing to believe it, I was relenting. For the first time, I was acting unreservedly like a normal, messed-up teenager. Naturally, my dream of making it onto the USPGA tour and winning the US Masters hadn’t completely died, but I was beginning to feel the true weight of all the history standing in my way: the sheer boringness of the preparation required to get to the top in my favourite sport; my own pathological lack of self-control; the fact that nobody had ever sunk a winning putt on the eighteenth green at Augusta while wearing para boots bought from their local army surplus store. Besides, if I did play on the European Tour, most tournaments climaxed at the weekend. How would I make it back to Rock City, to headbang my way through Alternative Night with Jez and Dogan, the two ageing punks I’d befriended, if I was three off the lead with one round to play in the European Masters in Crans-sur-Sierre? Had I ever thought of that?

  Something had died – not just for me, but for all of the Cripsley juniors, and perhaps Bob Boffinger too. You could sense it in the way that we teed up without assigning professional alter egos to one another (‘I’ll be Fred Couples. No. Sod it. I’ll just be Tom.’) … in the way we only got fired up about golf when we were playing it for money or trousers … in the stoic, resigned look on Bob Boffinger’s face as we complained of our hard luck in some godforsaken sandy hellpit.

  For the first time, it was possible to arrive at the pro shop on a Sunday afternoon without the pre-ordained knowledge that there would be at least two of your mates sitting on Steve Kimbolton’s big leather chairs and throwing novelty pitchmark repairers at one another’s heads. One by one, we began to drift. Robin became a chef. Ben started a garden furniture business, and, having had his own epiphany in the form of a telepathic conversation with a dead Portuguese garden-centre owner, spoke excitedly of selling ‘energy waves’ to the masses. Bushy took up male modelling. Ashley started college, dropped out, started college, dropped out. Jamie – still young, and perhaps Cripsley’s one remaining hope for professional tour glory – took his GCSEs and began to spend more time with the Worksop team than he did with his own. Fez left for the world of lingerie. Mandy turned into a woman apparently overnight, began dating a thirty-year-old computer programmer and was never seen again. Nick Bellamy, meanwhile, vanished off the face of the golfing sphere, taking a large chunk of Cripsley’s magnetism with him for ever.

  I was probably the biggest surprise of all, with my ill-fitting clothes, mystifying slogans and insanitary music. Yet, for all my rebellious posturing, I often felt like the only one trying to hold the whole thing together. There was Mousey, too, of course, but he was a permanent fixture in the pro shop by now – a living, breathing, part of the furniture, more than any golfing being you could actually rely on. I was alone, constantly on the phone – convincing, persuading. Just because my golf friends preferred the Top Forty to the John Peel radio show, it didn’t mean I was going to relinquish my role as the junior section’s binding permanent element. Even as I was baffling them with obtuse tales of indie revolution and heaving moshpits, I was organizing seventy-two-hole scratch events, desperately striving to persuade my friends to cancel their new lives and keep our gang together.

  I’d fallen off the bucking bronco hard this time, but still I tried to scramble back up.

  At the end of my final year in the junior section, my fragmenting team finally won the county team championship. After Mousey and I slam-dunked pressure putts on the final green to beat Rushcliffe’s juniors, the five team members drove the trophy back to Cripsley, where we were greeted by Bob Boffinger, Pete Boffinger, Ted Anchor and Scampi, the clubhouse cat. If anyone else noticed or was pleased or proud, they forgot to say so.

  We had always seen ourselves as the stars of Cripsley’s wretched sitcom. If we weren’t, we contended, then why on earth would all those adults devote so much energy into the lost cause that was moulding us into gallant young men? Even when we had been burned by golf at its most
preposterously pedantic, we had always assumed there would be some profound point there, somewhere. Now it was dawning on us that perhaps there wasn’t. For all our bluster and pranks, we were hurt and shocked that our arch enemies didn’t care.

  I’d read enough golf books and seen more than enough golf videos to be only too aware of the way it worked. If you were eighteen, and your handicap was no better than it had been when you were sixteen, the odds were that you were never going to be Greg Norman. I’d tried, simultaneously setting my standards too low and too high in all the wrong areas in the process, and obviously failed. I was even prepared to admit that it might not have been my destiny to succeed, and that I was out of my element. But was this really all there was?