by Tom Cox
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Tom Cox
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Driving Range
Course
One: You Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’?
Two: The Sweet Smell of Success
Three: Patch Work
Four: Wind of Change
Five: Banality Check
Six: Welcome to Par-adise
Seven: No Mouth and All Trousers
Eight: Agolfalypse Now
Nine: Shut that Door
Ten: Mighty Mouse
Eleven: Streets Ahead
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Author
Tom Cox’s writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Guardian, Financial Times and Golf International magazine. He is the author of four books – Nice Jumper, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, Educating Peter, The Lost Tribes of Pop, a collection of his columns for the Observer, and Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man – and is a founding member of The Secret Golf Society (www.secretgolf.co.uk). He was born in 1975 and lives with his wife in Norfolk. For more information about Tom, visit www.tom-cox.com.
Also by Tom Cox
Nice Jumper
Educating Peter
The Lost Tribes of Pop
In Memory of Jeremy Feakes
Tom Cox
BRING ME THE HEAD
OF SERGIO GARCIA!
Prologue
It has often been pointed out, both by people who do and don’t play my favourite sport, that there is nothing about me that screams ‘Golfer!’ I don’t look like I should play golf, I don’t speak like I should play golf, and I don’t dress like I should play golf. But that’s just the superficial stuff – what you might call ‘presentation’. If you really want to see how illogical my love of the game is, you need to experience the way I handle a day at the golf course.
It’s not as if I don’t begin the day with the best of intentions. I have a reliable body clock, so I’ll rise early, giving myself ample time for the drive to the course and half an hour’s warm-up. Having clumsily lugged my golf bag through the house, chipping paintwork, I’ll set off for my local club, only to realise, after about three miles, that I’ve left my pitching wedge in the front room. Fifteen minutes later, after a swift journey back to retrieve a club that, in all honesty, I would probably have done better without, I’ll arrive in the clubhouse car park. Here, I will change into golf shoes still damp, mud-caked and full of bunker sand from my last full round, eight days previously, and be told off for not using the locker room by a man in his sixties with hair on all the wrong parts of his face and knitwear that hurts my eyes. Because of my flustered state, it will only be an hour or two later that I come up with a pithy riposte to Colonel Stuffy Sweater (‘Apparently the locker room has shaving facilities too – you might want to use them on your nose’).
With my tee time drawing ever nearer, I’ll hurry across to the club professional’s shop, where I’ll stock up on balls, tees and water, and – in order to mark my scorecard – a pencil, which I’ll lose somewhere in the region of the third tee (I will find this three weeks later, along with six of its brethren, in a forgotten pocket of my bag, only for all seven to have mysteriously disappeared by the time of my next round). I’ll then remember that the pro shop – which, though never less than up to the second in golf equipment, in financial terms is only just reaching March 1997 – doesn’t ‘do’ debit card transactions of under £20 and that I never did get to that cashpoint on the way here, as I’d hoped. Deliverance from panic will arrive in the form of £16.51 credit behind the counter, my winnings in a sweep I hadn’t realised I’d entered, in a competition from the dim and distant past.1 At which point I’ll head out to the first tee, to meet my playing partners for the day.
It is unlikely that, in any other walk of life, my path would cross those of Ron or Roy. A sweet soul at his core, Ron will have the nervous laugh of a man trying to make light of a funeral for a non-blood relative, a keen interest in bird life, and a slight limp. Later, as I watch his swing, I will be reminded of the spider that I accidentally drowned whilst running a bath earlier that morning. Roy, on the other hand, will be an all-out mercenary – a quick-walking, quick-talking, born competitor: the kind of guy who shoots 82 off a fourteen handicap and doesn’t just call it a 68, but believes it’s a 68. During my first creaky backswing of the day, he will jangle some change in his pocket and, as my scuzzy, insomniac’s six-iron shot limps toward the front apron of the green, I will see fire in his eyes.
I tell myself that I don’t want to be the kind of golfer who only plays with people of his own ability and age group. I tell myself that I like the way golf allows me to mix with people that I would never otherwise meet. I tell myself that this is why I phone up at the last minute to get a place in my club’s monthly medals, and find myself playing with people like Ron and Roy. But these are lies. The real reasons I take my place at the last minute are: a) I am a freelance journalist, and thus chronically incapable of planning ahead, and b) I’m worried that, if I put my name on the competition entry board in advance, I will tempt fate, and it will rain. Despite knowing all this in my heart of hearts, I convince myself that by playing with Roy and Ron I am doing something goodly karmic and wholesome, and it is only as I reach the eleventh tee that I begin to ask myself questions like ‘What the piss am I doing here?’ and ‘Didn’t I learn anything from last month’s Cyril Harris Greensome Stableford Shield?’
At seven over par with just seven holes remaining, it might seem, to all intents and purposes, that there is little left to play for, but it will be around now that a steely inner resolve kicks in. Who knows what will flick my switch? Maybe it will be losing my last Titleist and resorting to playing with that antediluvian ball – the one with an inner core seemingly made of pure Norfolk flint – that has been lurking at the bottom of my bag since the last Conservative government. Maybe it will be Ron’s habit of shouting ‘Great shot!’ at me every time one of my drives goes more than 130 yards. Maybe it will just be that, after almost three hours of trudging through wet grass looking for balls, crouching under foliage getting a faceful of pine tree backwash, having my flared cords eyed suspiciously (‘I know there is a by-law prohibiting these somewhere – I just can’t think where,’ say Roy’s raised eyebrows), losing my headcovers, and watching more late-middle-aged fury than you’d find in an episode of The Sopranos, I decide that, since it’s not productive to get mad, I’d better get even (par).
Whatever the case, over the next few holes I will play something close to the top-quality amateur golf of which I know I am capable. As my drives sail three hundred yards down the fairway, my short-iron shots spin in a way suggestive of hidden air brakes, and the occasional medium-length putt begins to find its target, nothing will stand in my way: not the esoteric, free-with-a-1984-issue-of-Golf-World rubber gadgets that Ron keeps getting out of his bag, not Roy almost playing my ball by mistake for the sixth time, not the fact that my favourite eight-iron is still somewhere near the thirteenth tee. I know from experience that when you’re on a roll like this it’s best not to consult your scorecard, and mobile phones are banned on the course, so as the three of us stand on the eighteenth fairway, waiting while a man in plus fours sizes up a putt from eleven different angles (‘This for a 95’), I quickly tot up my scrawled pencil marks, then listen to a voicemail from an editor who wants to know if I can turn around a 1300-word think piece on ‘Why Golf is Trendy’ for five p.m. that day. The inevitable double bogey
that follows is not quite enough to fully dampen my spirits.
‘Yes, I enjoyed that,’ Ron and Roy will say as they shake my hand on the eighteenth green and I thank them for the game. They will say it as if genuinely surprised, as if they really didn’t expect to enjoy it, but in truth, everyone I play club golf with always says, ‘Yes, I enjoyed that’ – I’m never quite sure whether that’s just what you say these days at the end of a round, or that’s just what you say these days at the end of a round with a hirsute ungolfy author in his early thirties with a mucky pitching wedge.
‘I thought I had you on the back nine,’ says Roy, who in his head has been pitted against me in some kind of Clash of the Titans. Because I have been marking Ron’s card – and because Roy scares me slightly, and I have been keeping to the opposite side of the fairway from him whenever possible – I have no idea what Roy has scored. It could be 79, it could be 112. ‘I can see you gloating there,’ he continues. ‘That’s me, though – I was born unlucky. You’ll realise that as you get to know me better, Tim. You’d realise it even more if you saw my ex-wife!’
I know that in the next few seconds I am going to be asked into the clubhouse for a drink. It’s a tough call: I’m aware that, as time goes on, I’m getting a bit of a reputation at my home club for ‘skipping off’ after rounds. Also, I like having a chat with Jacqui, the no-nonsense Scouse barwoman. On the other hand, if I wanted to eat stale egg sandwiches and listen to sexist banter whilst staring at portraits of self-important men with prominent chins, I’d have joined the local Rotarians. Then there is Roy, who, since finding out I write for newspapers for a living, seems keen to talk to me about ‘a potential piece of investigative journalism’ regarding some garden tools that were recently stolen from his allotment. Offering my excuses – that call from my editor comes in handy – I hurry to my car, not bothering to change my golf shoes. I feel that I must run from this place, and everything that it has put me through: the tedious banter, the fluffed chip shots, the lost balls, the taunting bit in the middle where, very briefly, I became Tiger Mickelson III Jr.
I may look calm, but inside I’m churning. As I deftly manipulate the clutch and accelerator in soft spikes, leaving clods of earth in the footwell, I begin to evaluate the day’s performance. I wonder why I bother with this game, which is still largely played by blinkered people with no dress sense and senses of humour that would have been booed off a stage in Blackpool in 1967 for being ‘stuck in the dark ages’, this game which mocks me with flashes of a better life but ultimately always results in an experience comprised of at least 70 per cent abject woe. I think about all the other, more productive, ways I could have spent the last five hours. And then I really start in on myself. Why didn’t I take a penalty drop from behind that tree on the seventh, instead of attempting to curve a seven-iron eighty yards in the air, left-to-right, Seve-style, to a green two hundred yards away? When will I learn that I cannot play well without warming up amply beforehand? I can’t shake the feeling, after a bad or indifferent round of golf, that something heavy has fallen on top of my life, crushing the air out of it.
It is at this point that the final stage of my post-round analysis, Release, arrives, and I remember that I am an adult, established in a profession I love, and not sixteen, playing the Midland amateur circuit, desperately trying to prove that I have what it takes to be the next Nick Faldo or Ian Woosnam. This is crazy! It’s only golf! Nobody is making me play! I could even give up if I wanted! After all, I did it once, didn’t I?
It’s only about twenty minutes before I feel a desperate, nagging need to hit another ball.
I suppose if an outsider was witnessing all this they might mistake it for a mild form of madness. Why bother with something that puts you through this much pain and disappointment? It’s at times like this that I think of a favourite P.G. Wodehouse story of mine, ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’, where a disgruntled young player storms into the clubhouse with virtual steam coming out of his ears, and asks a wise old member of the club, ‘Is golf any use? … Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any practical good?’ I’ve asked myself the same questions a million times. Golf has always got me where it hurts, infuriated me and repelled me, but it has always beckoned me back seductively, too, and I know that the masochism is part of the appeal. I managed to stay away for eight years at one point – Wodehouse’s hothead only manages what appears to be about half an hour, before being talked round – and I don’t know how I did it. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to come back – a failing of character. Wasn’t I perfectly happy, living without the wretchedness of missed three-foot putts, final-hole double bogeys and obnoxious blokes called Roy? Living without bad sweaters and unimaginative ‘I’d like to thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course’ victory speeches? Perhaps. But the truth was, golf and I had a score to settle, and it was probably always just a matter of time before we renewed our acquaintance. Probably better that we did it while I was still (just about) supple enough to make a full-length backswing and yet to descend into the kind of argyle-wearing middle-age dementia that makes your major life priorities whose table you end up on at Saturday’s dinner dance and getting a reserved parking spot that says ‘Greens Committee Chairman’.
And, when golf and I got back together, it was always going to be a struggle. Some people – me, mostly – were inevitably going to ask, ‘Is this really any use?’ There was also the likelihood that, before I’d had a chance to work out the answer, I would get a little carried away.
But isn’t that the nature of unfinished business? That it’s always going to be tough?
Otherwise, you probably would have finished it earlier, wouldn’t you?
1 The same competition whose prizegiving I had failed to attend due to ‘other commitments’ – a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, probably – and whose third place prize of some hideous cut glass I had been accidentally on purpose forgetting to collect from the club secretary’s office for the past fourteen months.
DRIVING RANGE
‘The only way to find out a man’s true character is to play golf with him.’ – P.G. Wodehouse
‘Golf is an antechamber to death.’ – John Peel
Sometimes I think none of this would have happened if I hadn’t met Jerry. At other times I think it was all down to the most perfect eight-iron of my life, struck one idyllic summer evening on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. At other times I just blame it all on Sergio Garcia.
Sergio Garcia is a Spanish man with strong wrists, a hyperactive manner and dubious shaving habits. He is also periodically my favourite golfer, but it would perhaps be better for my health if he wasn’t. When, after a long lay-off, I began to get an urge to play golf again, Garcia had just exploded onto the pro scene, and he was largely responsible for reigniting my interest in the game. Often, I think he is the most exciting player who ever lived. Equally often, for the very same reasons, I think I hate him. Over the last few years he has played with my emotions like no other pro. There is not another modern European player who seems more capable of winning multiple major championships, yet nobody has so frequently got in the running, only to make a cow’s arse of things. You never know what you’re going to get with Garcia from one round to the next. He could reel off five birdies in a row and hit an impossible shot from behind a tree and go charging off up the fairway in pursuit of it like a hyperactive child. Alternatively, he could make a double bogey, then take his shoe off for no apparent reason and throw it in a bunker. When Garcia gets angry, he does so in a wholly original manner; in the early noughties, he even invented his own golfing affliction, when he suddenly became unable to stop waggling the club whilst addressing the ball. I like that kind of irrational behaviour in my golfers. That’s another reason I am drawn to Garcia: he reminds me of me.
It’s probably important that I qualify that statement. In many ways, I am nothing like Garcia. I do not have a penchant for lurid, buttock-gripping man-made
fibres that make me look like the Studio 54 answer to Bananaman. And, while I do have some Spanish in my blood, from my mum’s side of the family, my Latin temperament is more likely to come out when I’m being kept in a call waiting queue than when I’ve just missed a downhill six-footer for par.
More importantly, I am nowhere near as good as Sergio Garcia at golf. But, when it comes to a general tee-to-green mission statement of ‘Crap One Day, Dead Good the next’, Sergio and I have a lot in common. The difference, perhaps, is that one can almost believe Sergio’s erraticism is a deliberate gesture in the name of entertainment – a stand against conveyor-belt robopros, and those big-chinned men who sit in the commentary booth muttering about there being ‘no pictures on the scorecard’1 – whereas, with me, it seems a little more like a disease.
Of course, you’ll find lots of golfers who will tell you that this is the nature of the game: one day you’ve got it, one day you haven’t. It’s just that, for me, the essence of each of those days happens to be exaggerated. I’m not talking about the bigger picture here: we’ve covered that. Chaotic my wider golfing life might be, but there is at least a predictability to the chaos. What I’m referring to here is the meat of the equation – the striking of the ball itself – and the frustration that comes from not knowing whether your seven-iron will fly 130 yards or 170 yards, of not knowing whether you will hit your driver like Greg Norman or Norman Wisdom. It is the same frustration that makes you feel, sometimes, as if you are living a golfing lie. But just occasionally, it can make you feel like God.
As luck would have it, these ‘God’ days tend to occur most frequently when I’m on my own – those late-summer evenings when the birds are singing, there isn’t a Ron or a Roy in sight, and, for once, the imaginary game between the two scuffed, regenerated lake balls that you bought from the pro shop (i.e. ‘Mickelson’ and ‘Garcia’) doesn’t seem quite as much of an exercise in childish fantasy. But, every so often, they have occurred when I’ve been with Jerry.
