by Tom Cox
It struck me as curious that, although I’d lived a matter of minutes away from Hollinwell for a whole decade of my life, try as I might, I couldn’t remember ever eating at any restaurant or café in the area. As I steered in the direction of Nottingham, I realised that there was a very good reason for this, and that was that in north Nottinghamshire people don’t sell food. Driving through town after town, forlornly looking for an outlet that might offer something pre-cooked and halfway edible, I began to see the logic to the arrangement: this was the heart of what remained of Sherwood Forest – a landscape not lacking in wildlife. Perhaps north Notts types simply preferred to forage, primeval-style, for their light snacks.
By the time I’d driven through Annesley and Hucknall and Bullwell – places that one could be forgiven for presuming couldn’t possibly be as desultory as their names make them sound, right up to the moment of visiting them – I’d weighed up the options and decided I might as well head all the way into the city itself. I couldn’t fail to find sustenance there.
Had there been a camera on me – and, this being Nottingham, UK capital of CCTV, no doubt there were several – the following two hours could have been edited into a useful How Not to Prepare for a Golf Tournament instructional video. It would begin, perhaps, with an introduction by Renton Laidlaw in his Best Shots of the Masters style, featuring a short lecture about the traditions of The Open. Then we would see footage of me going about my business, with Renton explaining just why each of my actions was not becoming of a sportsman, and bold red letters and exclamation marks stamped upon the screen to emphasise each of my cardinal sins. There would be the bit where I went to
Starbucks to get a Caramel Macchiato and said, ‘No, actually, make that a medium, not a small … no, a large – did I say medium? I meant large …’ (CAFFEINE CAN CONTRIBUTE TO NERVES!). There would be the moment when I decided to just quickly pop into HMV, to see if they had a Creedence Clearwater Revival album that I could listen to in the car (UNSETTLING HIPPIE NOISE TERROR!). We’d then see a shot of me realising the time and making a run for it back to the car park (NEEDLESS INCREASE IN BLOOD PRESSURE!). Perhaps finally we’d see me in the car, driving along the B600, looking hot and flustered, trying to overtake a tractor (STRESS RISING!).
When I arrived back at the course, play had long since restarted. If Jamie’s philosophy was to be believed, I was now beginning my practice routine at the ideal time: almost precisely an hour before I was due to tee off. My caddie, however, was already by the first tee, waiting for me. We shook hands. Pete gave me a ‘Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?’ look, and began to meticulously rearrange the pockets of my bag: separating the tees from the balls, separating the local rules sheet from a week-old banana skin, and adding various supplies of his own – a couple of energy drinks, a bath towel with which to keep my grips tacky. I knew I could rely on Pete, a former scratch player and a sturdy, calming presence. Whether he could rely on me, however, had already been cast into some doubt.
‘Did you know I turned down Dave Musgrove so you could work with me today?’ I asked him.
He looked at me like a man who had heard this kind of bull too many times before – mainly from me.
‘OK, I’m lying. But I did ask him.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Pete.
‘He said, “I bet it would be fun.” But when I asked him again he just looked a bit nervous then suddenly saw someone he knew on the other side of the driving range.’
‘Is that your London Golf Show glove on the floor over there?’ said Pete.
My first few shots on the range glanced softly off the clubface, aided by my new ‘light hands at address’ approach. There was just one notable howler, but it was the kind you don’t easily forget: a four-iron where the clubhead hit the ground a full six inches too early, sending the ball a grand total of seventy yards. Fortunately, neither of the pros flanking me – a round-faced teenager with a grimacing way about him and a backswing that reminded me of the spring device on a pinball machine, and a stocky forty-something with a home-player strut who kept making pronouncements on the day’s outcome – seemed to notice. I moved on to the less potentially destructive environs of the putting green, and then to the tee. Here, I watched the group ahead of mine laser long-iron shots into a fairway that seemed even narrower than yesterday, met my playing partners, John Ronson and Mick Hempstock (who turned out to be the round-faced teenager from the range), declared my ball to them, memorised the dots on it, got a quick briefing on local rules from the starter, memorised the dots on my ball again, and did some breathing exercises.
A few minutes later, something happened that had never happened to me on a golf course before: I went temporarily blind.
The transition in ocular perception didn’t occur until I was over the ball, probably about thirty seconds after the starter had announced my name into his microphone. I remember taking my practice swing with my rescue club (another new concept for me: a supposedly more forgiving version of a two-iron). I remember looking up at the fairway, then realising that all I’d done was look up at the fairway, and not really picked anywhere to aim. I remember brushing an insect away, and I remember seeing the first six inches of my swing and thinking that a golf ball had never looked smaller. And then the ball disappeared. And by ‘disappeared’, I don’t mean ‘vanished into the blue yonder’ I mean it disappeared before I could hit it. All I could see was grey.
Attacked by such an affliction, many people may have stopped what they were doing, walked away, rubbed their eyes … called for a member of the medical profession. I, on the other hand, chose to complete my swing. It only took, at most, an eighth of the second to do this. Nevertheless, possibly aided by being shut off from the seeing world, I was able to formulate a surprising lengthy and articulate internal dialogue with myself. The dialogue went something like this:
Me One: You are playing in The Open?
Me Two: I am playing in The Open!
Me One: It’s a bit scarier than the Europro Tour Qualifying School, isn’t it?
Me Two: What do you mean, ‘a bit?
Me One: Do you realise that you haven’t practised your chipping once in the last twenty-one days?
Me Two: I realise this.
Me One: Do you realise that it would, in theory, be a lot easier to miss this ball than to hit it?
Me Two: I realise that is the truth. And I realise that it is even more the truth now I can’t sodding see anything.
Me One: Do you also realise that if you were to miss this ball completely, it might scar you for life? And that people who had seen you miss it would tell their friends, and that they would tell their friends, and that you would become The Bloke Who Missed the Ball on the First Tee of the Open Qualifying?
Me Two: Yep, I realise that. Thanks for not mentioning how that coffee has probably made all this even more terrifying, or what incredibly bad timing it was for that insect to land on my ball a millisecond before I took my swing. After all, it’s best not to get too negative, isn’t it?
When I looked up as my follow-through twanged back on itself, I could see again. Thirty people were standing around the tee staring at me. Their silence made me feel as if I was underwater.
I turned to Pete. ‘Did I hit it?’ I asked.
‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing eighty yards right of the fairway, into a speckled quilting of heather and dogweed. Already I could see a search party of seven or eight spectators moving in that direction.
I’m sure I must have said something in the few minutes that followed, but all I can remember is staring in dumb, stunned admiration at the purples, the browns, the yellows, the richer, more intriguing greens – all the pretty colours that you get on the illicit bits of great English golf courses.
* * *
After that, the search party was rarely out of work. I was a generous enough employer to knock my tee shot to fifteen feet from the hole on the par-three fifth and to make a conventional tee–fairway–green progres
sion up the par-four tenth, but these constituted rare breathers in their packed schedule.
Everyone knows about the hard graft of the caddies and the greenstaff and the scorers at a big tournament, but there are so many gestures from other bystanders that too frequently get forgotten – gestures like crawling on your hands and knees under a gorse bush just to find the ball of a complete stranger. It is these gestures that can stop a merely abysmal round of golf from becoming a permanently damaging moment of Kafkaesque despair, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mick Hempstock’s dad, that bloke called Colin with the umbrella and the lisp, and the various other spectators who had the misfortune of following Group 34 in the 2006 Regional Open Qualifying at Hollinwell: you may not think you played a significant role in proceedings, but you did. For one troubled newbie pro, your foraging skills were a Godsend.6
Something fierce comes over men when they’re searching for a golf ball. All too aware of the five-minute search limit and the looming two-shot penalty, they get a look in their eyes that suggests they have momentarily forgotten who they are and reverted to a primordial, right-brain state. One cannot be seen to be twiddling one’s thumbs at a time like this. Even if you are not really looking for the missile in question, you must appear to be doing so.7 But I couldn’t help noticing how the attitude of my ball-spotting team gradually altered over the course of my round. On the second hole I could see them looking at me with sympathy, viewing me as a talented, gritty competitor suffering a brief misfortune. But by the time I’d lost my tee shot off the tenth in the trees on the right of the fairway, run back to the tee, then hit the next ball into a gorse bush in the left-hand rough, I could see the light of enthusiasm dying in their eyes. At one point, when I was upside down under the bush fishing around with my driver, thirteen gorse needles stuck in my bottom, I even overheard a couple of them slacking off and taking time out to discuss Nick Faldo’s potential as a Ryder Cup captain.
I couldn’t blame them. I was clearly long past saving by then.
It’s a mistake to think that any great round of golf can be put down to a swing adjustment or a new club or an unexpected confidence boost. When a player goes out onto the course and shoots 64 or 65, what you are seeing is not just good biorhythms or good swinging or good putting, or even a combination of all three: you are seeing a combination of a thousand little factors rubbing together and making sparks. A horrific round is similar, in a way. The only difference is that when all the little negative factors rub together, there are no sparks: the player just gets more and more bruised.
Later, I would spend hours wondering why I had fared so poorly at Hollinwell. I would look for answers in that ill-advised trip to Nottingham, in my bad calendar-keeping, in my lack of practice, in the pitiless nature of the course, in inappropriate glass-is-half-full thinking, in inappropriate glass-is-half-empty thinking, in my lack of sleep, in my ever-increasing back pain, in my lack of self-belief, in the way that my swing seemed to have lost its young Baker-Finch sparkle and mutated into the movements of a panicked squid. In the end, I found no one easy explanation – just an unbroken vicious circle of tiny explanations working together to create something so vile it shook me to my core.
And why did it shake me to my core? Because I knew that I could have scored considerably better even if I had gone out with just a seven-iron in my hand? Because I knew that even if I’d been trying to shoot a bad score, I probably wouldn’t have fared so appallingly? Because it was the worst round of golf I’d played since shortly before my fourteenth birthday? No. Even though all those things were true, that wasn’t quite it. It shook me to the core because, in my heart of hearts, I knew it could have been worse.
It was a day when I looked into the darkness and realised that there is no limit to how bad a round of golf can be.
When you’re playing as abysmally as that, you feel a need to sweep yourself away from people. I imagine, for John and Mick, my partners, watching me must have been a bit like being unexpectedly introduced to someone suffering from a rare wasting illness: they presumed it wasn’t contagious, but couldn’t be completely sure; still, it would probably have been impolite to ask for confirmation. By the ninth green I’d already alienated my caddie, whose excuse about ‘needing to get back home and bath the kids’ was no doubt genuine, but probably would have been even more genuine had he not just seen me move catastrophically to eleven over par. Climbing the cripplingly steep slope to the twelfth tee, bag weighing on my back, the lost-ball fiasco on the eleventh and the resulting six-over-par ten weighing on my mind,8 I should perhaps have been worrying about logical matters – like how I could muster up the strength to hit another shot, or where I could find a nice bush to hide beneath until the year 2016, when all of this would be forgotten. Instead, I could only think about what a drag I must have been to watch. I was particularly worried about distracting Mick, who was judiciously putting together a beautiful round of golf and, avoiding serious hiccups, looked odds-on to qualify.
‘I’m sorry about all this,’ I said to Mick and John.
They both muttered something along the lines of ‘Don’t worry, it happens to us all.’
But it didn’t happen to us all. It didn’t even happen to me, usually, and I was certain it didn’t ever happen to them – at least not to this extent – and, in the unlikely event that it did, they didn’t go apologising to their playing partners about it. I might have been in the same group as John and Mick, on the same course, but that was where the similarities between their tournament and mine began and ended. Come to think of it, it was probably where the similarities between John’s tournament and Mick’s began and ended, too.
John was not what, in my short time as a pro, I had come to recognise as the archetypal modern golfing machine. If his swing had ever been on that conveyor belt Steve Gould from Knightsbridge Golf School talked about, it had clearly long since fallen off, brushed itself down, and attempted to tread its own grubby, indignant path to the end of the production line. A swing coach by profession, yet without a full PGA qualification, he had a terrier-like demeanour and a way of holding his arms aloft and looking around when he missed a putt that suggested he had decided the golfing gods held a personal vendetta against him alone. His life had become what his caddie, Paul Creasey, called ‘a proper Tin Cup story’. Golf had broken up countless relationships and driven him ‘half-bonkers’. Once, he had got so depressed during a round that he had jumped in a lake and attempted to drown himself (‘I changed my mind, though, and decided to swim to the other side and tee off’). Despite all this, at the age of forty-two he was still here, giving it another go. And, while he frightened me slightly and I made sure I didn’t get close when he lipped out a six-footer for par, it was obvious that the 2006 Open Qualifying was a richer event for his presence.
‘John might not be a big bloke, but he’s one of the biggest characters you’ll meet out here,’ said Paul, a sometime tournament pro himself. ‘It’s my job today to calm him down.’
Mick could hardly have been more different. He traversed Hollinwell’s fairways with the aura of a seventeenth-century nobleman striding out onto his newly inherited acreage. For fourteen holes, he barely hit a shot that didn’t go exactly to plan. When I asked him what he wanted out of his golfing life, he replied, without hesitation, ‘I want to win lots of money and be in the Ryder Cup team – preferably sooner rather than later.’ Did he expect to qualify for the European Tour this autumn? ‘Of course – you’ve got to. You’re a fool if you don’t.’
There was nothing self-harming about Mick, who hit his three-wood about as far as Jamie Daniel hit a driver, which was about as far as I hit a club that had yet to be invented with a nozzle at the top where you poured the petrol in. He would discuss each prospective shot only in the most positive terms with his caddie, a man in his sixties also called Mick. Then, as it flew straight and true, the pair would be sure to celebrate its brilliance. It was hard not to get swept along in the upbeat rhythm of their chat
:
Mick the Caddie: ‘Three-wood, Mick?’
Mick the Golfer: ‘Every time, Mick.’
Mick the Caddie: ‘Nice and easy, Mick.’
Mick the Golfer: ‘Nice and easy, Mick.’
THWACK!!!
Mick the Caddie: ‘Pured it, Mick?’
Mick the Golfer: ‘Pured it, Mick.’
Mick the Caddie: ‘Should leave you about 155 to the flag, Mick. Perfect nine-iron distance.’
Mick the Golfer: ‘Should leave me about 155 to the flag, Mick. Perfect nine-iron distance.’
Pete had done a terrific job in his half-round as my caddie, combining patience and encouragement with octopus-like club-handling skills, but I couldn’t help wondering what a bagman like Mick could do for my game. He seemed like the golfing equivalent of a horse whisperer. Mick the Player, meanwhile, seemed to have a tunnel-like perception of Hollinwell as a series of beautifully mown stretches of grass and welcoming flagsticks; so different from mine – a leering wilderness of sand-traps, Brillo-pad rough and wrist-wrenching heather.
It was obvious that each of the three men in Group 34 played a game with which, to paraphrase Bobby Jones, the others were not particularly familiar. Nonetheless, as we stood on the elevated sixteenth tee, the result of all my defeatism, all John’s self-flagellation and all Mick’s self-belief was that we were three more men who were probably about to miss out on playing in The Open. One of us was going to miss out marginally (Mick’s great run had come to an end with a quadruple bogey at the fifteenth), one was going to miss out easily, and one had never been in the running – but the end result would be the same. We were all tired, we were all miserable, and we were all going home empty-handed. As I looked across the treetops in the direction of Newstead Abbey from the tee – one of the few views in the north-east Midlands that seemed truly to merit the oft-used tourist tag ‘Robin Hood Country’ – I felt as out of breath as I had ever felt on a golf course. It seemed as if I had played fifty holes, not fifteen. I then looked at my scorecard and had a small revelation:
