by Tom Cox
If the seventeen-year-old failed golfing prodigy feels like a tiger squeezed into the cage of a kitten, his eighteen-year-old equivalent feels like that same tiger left for dead on the hard shoulder of the motorway. Perhaps that’s too severe a metaphor – we’re talking golfers here, not starving Iranian orphans – but you get my point. As soon as we were old enough to vote, we were old enough not to matter, but, infuriatingly, not quite old enough to command respect. No one told us that there were other jobs to be gained in golf, besides those of world number one or assistant professional slave. Everyone told us that we were wearing the wrong-coloured socks.
We still knew how to mess about, but the knowledge that we would never prove the fogies wrong by winning that first British Open title took the edge off the anarchy somewhat. When we stole a soda water bottle from behind the men-only bar and soaked one another under the disapproving gaze of the Past Captains wall, or hid random items from lost property in the pro shop, we did so with the lacklustre aura of those who know there’s more to life, but aren’t quite ready to admit it.
A new generation of juniors had arrived – nearly all, Bob Boffinger reliably informed us, considerably better behaved and less motivated than us. If we didn’t get to know them or teach them in the ways of mischief, it was because we hardly ever saw them. One of the few rebels among them was turfed out of the club after having the misfortune to drive his ball into the same committee member’s trolley two weeks running. When we heard this, we didn’t shout in indignation, or plan our retaliation; we merely nodded and frowned vaguely – a reaction which, a year before, would have been unthinkable.
When we claimed the county team championship, we gave Bob Boffinger his long-deserved recompense for his love, time and patience, but something was missing. It wasn’t that it wasn’t a classic victory. Nor was it that I didn’t contribute to it. You could even say for once that I fulfilled my expectations. And there was certainly nothing wrong with the barbecue at Bob Boffinger’s place later the same night. Yet buried deep at the core of the triumph was the implication that that’s all it was: a triumph. At club level. With your mates. Not a step or a bridge or a kickstart. Not the road to anywhere particular. Not a crusade. Not even a David Byrne concert.
Don’t believe everything you hear about revelations. They don’t always arrive in one big flash at moments of transcendental artistic brilliance or great natural beauty. Mine came in two parts: the first during a passable version of a song I’d loved as a kid, the second a year later over a spare rib. As I masticated wistfully, and surveyed my friends – people who were closer than any schoolmates could ever have been, people I loved, people I could feel moving away from me, some of them perhaps for ever, even right now as they said and did familiar things – then and only then did it finally hit me that I never wanted to play golf again.
NO MATTER HOW deep a part of him his territory has become, a fanatical golfer can never quite prepare himself for the first time he sees his home course at midnight. Beyond the overwhelming darkness and the ensuing transformation of conical ceramic tee markers into genuine health hazards, a more subtle sense of transformation overpowered me as I tramped up Cripsley’s sixth fairway for what I was sure would be the last time: something pristine that the daylight, or the proliferation of ten-tone knitwear that came with it, or maybe just my escalating cynicism, had served to blot out. This place was beautiful. OK, so perhaps local ruffians occasionally hopped over the chainlink fence and took a shit in one of the holes, but overlooking that, this was the nearest thing to heaven you could find within the boundaries of the A37 ring road. Being somewhere so familiar yet feeling so illicit – it was like buying a ticket to a private view of the inside of my own head.
The weirdest thing was: I was sure that even if I hadn’t been accompanied by two notorious lyricists from Nottingham’s hardcore punk scene, a girl clad almost entirely in tassles, a three-foot-long ghetto blaster and a sandwich bag filled with dope, I would have felt exactly the same.
Covered by a blanket of black silence, it took a while for us to find the precise spot, but my orienteering skills surprised me in this oddly, wrongly exotic place. Unnervingly, my feet seemed to be performing Braille, my subconscious navigating them over and around the hazards – the gorse on the eighth, the stream on the twelfth, that funny little crater on the ninth. A few paces behind me, my friends – Dogan, Ellen and Smelly Jez – did their best to keep up, occasionally tripping over the lip of a bunker, frequently shouting ‘Fore!’ or ‘Birdie!’ or ‘I’ve got a big shaft!’ or one of the other things non-golfers used to shout whilst taking the piss out of my favourite pastime … things that would have annoyed me, not so long ago.
Did they notice how quiet I was? Perhaps – though I don’t imagine they knew the reason we were here, beyond the superficial one that, after five pints of Red Stripe, breaking into your local golf course to smoke a joint and listen to the new Archers of Loaf album seems like a brainwave of history-altering proportions. I eyed them through the gloom and found myself struck by the enormity of the fact that not one of them knew what a greensome stableford was. Not one of them had ever felt the compressed rightness of a cleanly dispatched nine-iron. Not one of them had ever been told off by a fellow human being for not calling him ‘Mr Immediate Past Greens Committee Chairman’ or reprimanded by the same human being for wearing a sweater without a shirt collar underneath. I’d known them all for not much more than three months, having met them in the mosh pit at a Dinosaur Jr gig at Rock City. In that time, we’d learned a lot about which bands one another liked without learning much else, or feeling that it was important to. Until now, I’d shielded my golf life from them, referring to it – if at all – like you would refer to a particularly irksome skin complaint that you had left behind for good. They were here not because I wanted to show them my dark past – if I gave them even the remotest hint of the person I’d been a couple of years ago, surely they’d dump me for ever – but because I wanted to prove to them, and myself, that that’s what it was: a past.
Yet, right now, they seemed sort of intrigued.
‘What’s an eagle?’ asked Smelly Jez.
‘It’s a score of two under par for one hole.’
‘And what’s par?’
‘It’s what a good player would be expected to complete the hole in.’
‘So being below par is actually a good thing in golf?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s fucked up, man!’
‘I know. So is golf.’
‘Is golf sort of, like, really boring, Tom?’ asked Ellen.
I gave this one some serious thought. ‘Well, yeah and no.’
‘So that’s why when you see it on the telly, you hardly ever see anyone playing, but you always see the camera focusing on some horse in a field nearby or a fat bloke in the crowd?’
‘Sort of. But … it can be really exciting. There are just quite a few pauses in the action.’
On we hiked, looking for the place. Thinking in the kind of black and white terms that only those who locate life-enhancing qualities in the lyrics of Jane’s Addiction can think in, I’d pictured this moment as something momentous and final. But now I was losing sight of exactly what. Perhaps it was just the weed interfering with my sense of purpose. At least, I hoped so.
Maybe it didn’t matter if we didn’t find the exact spot. After all, there were plenty of landmarks on this course that had contributed equally to my metamorphosis from golfing squarepants to world-weary anarchist rebel. Wasn’t it utterly arbitrary to pinpoint only one? Surely the point was in the act itself, the finality of the thing I was going to do when I got there?
Finally, we stopped. I couldn’t remember exactly where Ashley’s ball had made contact with Reg Forman’s trolley, all that time ago, but where we stood, a few yards shy of the sixteenth green, seemed near enough – and, even if it wasn’t, it didn’t make any difference. It was Cripsley I was saying goodbye to – as a whole, not a hole. Dogan handed me
the practice ball bag, I turned it upside down, and an avalanche of balata raced itself to the ground. Ellen clicked ‘play’ on the ghetto blaster, and for probably the first and only time, insomniac residents of the villas overlooking Cripsley’s most gruelling par five were privy to the high-octane opening chords of The Archers of Loaf’s ‘Web In Front’.
I couldn’t see the reservoir, but I knew it was there, beyond the line of ghostly willows ahead of me. We had the rest of the night, and we were probably going to need it. There were around three hundred balls in total. The ones that didn’t make it to the water would probably wind up on the playing field of Alfred Crown, the local secondary school, where they might be put to use by a budding player, or – more likely – pelted at the class spanner. But I couldn’t afford to worry about that now. The whole point of this exercise was that the concept of destination – destiny itself, even – had to be a thing of the past: my past. I didn’t believe in it any more.
I steered the first ball into an inviting lie with the sole of my driver, and took aim. My friends watched, almost as awestruck as they were perplexed. The strike was business-like. The shiny white dot climbed and probed impressively – more impressively, somehow, than it ever could have in daylight – before being sucked up into the Marmitey darkness for ever. It felt good, not seeing it land.
‘Fuckin’ ‘ell!’ said Jez. ‘Why would anyone want to give that up?’
Epilogue
It could end there, if you wanted it to.
It could end with me smashing the last of my practice balls into the great unknown and trudging back home with my flinty mouth and overburdened eyelids to leave big bad golf behind for ever and begin my groovy new life – the one I should have been living all along. I could start editing a fanzine on American lo-fi rock, snag a job writing for the music press, meet endless fascinating people, none of whom will use the phrase, ‘Got your putting boots on today, son!’ or be materialistic or narrow-minded or unaware of art-house cinema. I could keep golf in a seedy little drawer somewhere, stashed away for an ironic day.
You could stop reading here.
You could do that. Or I could give you the more complex version of events: the one that reflects the frailty of character (well, mine, anyway), the non-linear nature of life, and the realities of adulthood.
I did intend to leave golf behind for ever, that unearthly hour in the summer of 1993, when I walked home from Cripsley with my new friends, to a dawn chorus of chinking milk bottles. I was snotty enough to think that was not only The End, but A New Beginning. I did start a fanzine, I did get a job as a journalist. I did meet people who couldn’t believe I played golf. I did do all the things I said, kind of.
But, at the same time, I kept going back – tentatively and mockingly at first, then, as I learned more about the outside world, increasingly confidently and acceptingly. There was the first time, in 1997, when I regained my handicap, played every week for six months, got my hair cut, wore a complete lack of offensive T-shirts, won a couple of competitions, and still got told off for wearing the wrong-coloured socks in a manner that most people would reserve for scolding mischievous toddlers for pulling the legs off insects. There was the time the following year when I visited the club for a reunion party, got drunk with my old friends, and as I talked to them in a brand new way – i.e. without the lingering subtext of who’d played the best golf recently and managed to look least bothered about it – felt a dysfunctional part of my fifteen-year-old self rise up out of my body and leave me for ever. There was the time just after that, when I went to clear out my old locker wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and got seriously ‘checked out’ by the security guard the club had installed in the car park (I swear I even saw him pick up his radio at one point and mouth that he had a ‘one-eight-six’ or something in progress).
Meanwhile, layer by layer, my post-golf idealism was being stripped away. In the outside world, the coarse little realities slinked up on me. Perhaps loving music wasn’t synonymous with being a wholesome person. Perhaps being left wing and working in the media and wearing sandals didn’t go hand in hand with an inherent lack of duplicity. Perhaps I did prefer the Carpenters to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Perhaps I did need to get some fresh air.
My subconscious kept drawing me back to golf. Maybe it was a great game after all? Maybe it was a more enjoyable way to spend your free time than standing in a pool of vomit swigging watered-down lager while three bearded Americans attack their guitars with violin bows?
I started to get the tee peg dream again – naggingly, relentlessly. The following day, I would find myself en route to my local driving range, without having made any quantifiable decision to go there. Having arrived, I would line up in my enormous flares, comedy sideburns and unruly hair, and ease ball after ball into another time zone with yesteryear’s equipment, while men with baseball caps and space-age drivers looked on, perplexed. I felt addiction kicking in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw people in tank-tops whispering about me. I arrived home with flaps of raw skin hanging off the palms of my hands. I started to break things in the house with my clubs again and concoct preposterous excuses in front of my wife. (‘I don’t know how it happened. I just walked into the room and for no reason a picture frame dropped on to the lamp, which fell off and smashed the mirror. No: of course it was nothing to do with my putter!’) Doubtfully, I told myself it was all ‘research’.
There was one thing I still needed to do, and then I’d know.
I arrived at Cripsley in July 2001 with a few things I’d never arrived there with before – a hairstyle I was comfortable with, a semi-modern, smooth-running automobile, a sense that there was more to life than golf but not much more – anticipating that the place would counter my personal development with its own. Since I’d last been a serious golfer, Tiger Woods had revolutionized the game, breaking ancient barriers of race, class and age, but Cripsley seemed somehow oblivious to all of this. The painted white line still warned of the hideous retribution available to those unscrupulous females who dared cross over into the men-only bar. Around the corner, a couple of silver-haired oldsters sat, each with one eye on me and one eye on the TV, which showed the tee shot of an incredibly dull-looking, badly dressed young British professional with the kind of haircut that should, by rights, be torn off the head and thrown high into the air and shot at as a statement. His name, the graphic below informed the viewer, was Justin.
I’d arranged to meet my playing partner for the day, Pete Boffinger, at 1 p.m., which gave me ten minutes to kill. Pete would be older and thinner on top than when I’d last played with him, just as my sideburns would be bushier and wider than when he’d last played with me, but until then, time seemed to be standing still. In the car park, the same security guard looked up from his Daily Mail and eyed me with the same ill-disguised suspicion that he had done a few years before. In the practice net, Jack ‘Net Man’ Mullen bashed away, still searching for that elusive backswing trigger. I watched him, becoming momentarily distracted by what sounded like a bee attacking me from behind, and turning to see Steve Kimbolton bellydancing a plate of teacakes over to the pro shop.
‘Hi, Tom,’ said Steve, as if he’d seen me at some point in the previous four years.
‘Er … Hi, Steve.’
Was someone screwing with my mind here?
Outside, the world had changed immeasurably. The internet had arrived, and quickly mutated into the world’s biggest shopping mall. Global leaders had risen, fallen and committed inappropriate acts with cigars. Pop music had coughed out its dying breath, keeled over, then got up and eaten its own corpse for the hell of it. I’d gone from punk to soft rock, from elitist anger to cheerful uncoolness. But golf hadn’t moved. It had merely been waiting for me to stop revolving.
I glanced down at my clothes, noting that, after years of sartorial felonies, I’d inadvertently found my natural look in the fashions of the 1976 British Open. I looked at Pete, who’d joined me on the tee – not some alien
golfing being from my past, but a downright ace fella, with whom I could discuss the recorded output of Crosby, Stills and Nash. I looked at the immaculate fairway. I looked at the brilliant white ball, sitting squarely – securely – on the tee peg, inviting me. In this sleepy corner of my past, I felt every event nudging me further towards myself, and let it.
About the Author
Tom Cox’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Jack magazine, The Times and the Guardian, for which paper he was Pop Critic between 1999 and 2000. He is the author of two books: Nice Jumper, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, and Educating Peter. He was born in 1975 and lives with his wife in Norfolk.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHING
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
A Random House Group Company
www.transworldbooks.co.uk
NICE JUMPER
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552770767
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446497456
Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers
PRINTING HISTORY
Bantam Press edition published 2002
Black Swan edition published 2003
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Tom Cox 2002
The right of Tom Cox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
