by Tom Cox
‘Ooh no, I was never good enough to play the Carris,’ I replied.
Now, it’s possible that there was no correlation between this negative statement and the tee shot that followed. It is, however, equally possible that had I not started talking about ‘not being good enough’, I might have buttered my drive 300 yards onto the green, instead of hitting a slappy duck-hook 190 yards onto a gravel path, three feet from the out-of-bounds posts. It is also possible that I would not have gone on, in the subsequent holes, to find five water hazards.
It was the same with that 86 comment. When I’d spoken to Karl, I’d picked the figure out of the air as a random example of a suitably horrible round, but I could just as easily have said any score between 77 and 100. That 86 happened to be exactly what I ended up scoring in the first round at Mollington may have been mere coincidence. When you think of all the permutations, though, it seems unlikely. During the last few holes of that first round, my prophecy had loomed ever larger, desperate to fulfil itself. The Evil Brain Worm had sprung up and slithered back to life, with new expert maths skills: ‘What if I make Tom birdie the sixteenth, then put his tee shot in the pond guarding the green on the seventeenth, then three-putt the last? What would that add up to? 87? OK, we need to give him one more shot back. We’ll let him sink that awkward final seven-footer, but we’ll send it round the rim a few times first, just to freak him out.’
Was I finding out The Secret after all these years? Was this what golf was all about, when it came down to it? Were all the wrist hinges and stances and grips and trigger-thoughts of ‘oily’ and ‘smooth’ and ‘eau de golf’ utterly irrelevant? Was it really just a matter of believing something would happen with enough conviction and then allowing it to play itself out? If so, I wanted my money back! This wasn’t the multi-faceted, unpredictable, highly nuanced game I fell in love with!
My second-round 80 was an improvement, but there was a depressing inevitability to it. In my new, more realistic golfing mindset, to have one round in the 70s had become my target, and it had looked a very reachable target as I stood on the final tee, knowing that I needed a par for a 76. What was most disheartening about the quadruple bogey that followed was not the two nervy, foozled chip shots, or even the way that it demonstrated how easily I’d abandoned all that Karl Morris had told me.6 What was most disheartening was that 80 was the exact score I was trying to avoid – the Evil Brain Worm had leeched onto that fact. Why couldn’t it have made me shoot 86 again, or 95? How much did that slithering little tyrant know, exactly? Was it aware, for instance, that 80 was the exact score that I needed to come 128th at Mollington, in last place of all the competitors who completed two rounds?
At first glance, the GMS Classic looked like another catastrophic step on my pro expedition. It was another missed cut, another last-place finish, another fight with myself that I’d lost. But there was something to be salvaged from the wreckage. I’d had not only my first Europro Tour birdies, but my first Europro Tour eagle as well – in the second round, after driving the green at the par-four fourth – and even with that quadruple bogey finish, had beaten the second-round score of one of my more experienced playing partners. I’d at least had a go at cutting the Evil Brain Worm down to size, even if, like all worms, it just grew back with a vengeance. It was hard, also, not to take solace from completing two full rounds in a tournament that I’d feared I would barely start, much less finish.
To say that Mollington seemed a bit ordinary after Hollinwell is a bit like saying that having a kick-around on a school playing field seems a bit ordinary after playing in the FA Cup semi-finals. Situated just north of Chester, it had an unprepossessing, barren look to it. If not for a sign at the entrance and a few slightly shabby-looking tee boards advertising the Europro Tour sponsors Motocaddy and Partypoker.com, I doubt I would have guessed it was holding a pro tournament. What it looked like, from a distance, was a large, tightly-mown wasteground that just happened to have some flags stuck in it. Evaluating its yellowing terrain from afar, I thought back to a comment Jamie Daniel had made: ‘Most of the courses I’d played as an amateur were awesome, but as soon as you turn pro, you find that you’re going backwards in quality. If I’d been asked to play a Junior Open on a lot of those places, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.’
I was experienced enough to know that not every golf course should be judged on first impressions. I remembered the mini-break I had taken at the Stapleford Park golf resort in Leicestershire last summer. That had been a similarly uncharismatic course on first viewing, but it had turned out to be stimulating enough. But when I’d arrived at the driving range at Stapleford, as an amateur nobody, I’d been greeted by a perfectly formed pyramid of brand-new Srixon balls, begging me to lay into them. By contrast, when I inserted my first thirty-ball token into the ball-dispenser at the range at Mollington, it made a noise suggestive of a severe respiratory disorder, then rasped up a single weatherbeaten TopFlite. A second token prompted a colourful eruption of twenty-two of the most abstruse balls manufactured between 1984 and 1997, all of which fell into a flimsy rubber basket that, as I bent to pick it up, proceeded to split, causing them to scatter in several different directions.
I tried to stay open-minded as I signed in, spent another £12 on another one of those scrawly monochrome yardage planners, and made my way over to the first tee. But as I was passing the putting green, the Geordie man from the Europro Tour who had just happily taken my £275 entry fee called me back over to the clubhouse.
He pointed to my shorts. ‘I’m afraid that if you wear those on the course, you’ll have to pay a £50 fine,’ he informed me.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Even for my practice round?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s Tour regulations.’
It’s always frustrating to be told to change your clothing while you are at a golf club – mainly because the person telling you to do so will invariably be dressed like your worst sartorial nightmare. But when it so happens that your clothing is clothing that you would not wear off the golf course, clothing, in fact, that you have specifically bought, against your better instincts, to appease the golfing authorities, the frustration is considerably greater. Over the years I’d frequently come a cropper in the area of shorts-related golf-club dress codes – most of which defy the whole point of shorts, by striving to make them not shorts at all, but two-tone trousers that just happen to have a three-inch gap in the middle – but I’d felt that with the baggy, dark-blue legwear I’d purchased from H&M I’d got it just right for a change. It was confusing enough when I’d been a member at Thetford Golf Club in Norfolk, and been told off for not wearing white knee-length socks with my shorts, but I’d hoped that the PGA would be more open-minded. Did the Europro Tour not realise that it was 30 degrees outside? And surely, if they were going to ban an article of clothing, their disciplinary energy would have been better focused on those nipple-clinging synthetic polo shirts I kept seeing everywhere?
‘It’s thought that shorts aren’t gentlemanly,’ said James7 Holmes, a pro from Crewe who joined me for a few holes during my practice round. I hoped I detected something mocking in his tone, but couldn’t be certain. He looked pretty serious.
James and I had met on the first tee, where I was warming up and he was squinting into the distance, trying to work out the identity of the player up by the green, 360 yards in the distance. He thought it was Jason Dransfield, the Liverpool-based pro he’d arranged to practise with. I thought it was Sergio Garcia. As it turned out, we were both wrong. But then, this was a day when I was turning out to be wrong about a lot of things.
Another one was that little yardage book. ‘Why is it that you have to pay so much more for these, when they’re nowhere near as good as the colour ones you can normally get from the pro shop?’ I asked James, flapping the little yellow-covered chart in his direction, though not at such close proximity that he would see the remnants of the mosquito I’d squished with it the night before.
‘Oh, I thi
nk these are lots better,’ he said. ‘These are put together by Dion Stevens.’
His manner suggested that this explained everything. It was the same way he might have said, ‘These are put together by Gary Player,’ or ‘These were put together by Madonna, in some spare time shortly after her Like a Prayer album.’ I feigned knowledge, replied with an ‘Oh, right!’ and resolved to find out exactly what this Stevens guy was famous for.8 Whatever it was, I suspected it wasn’t art – at least not if his drawings of the trees at the side of the second fairway were anything to go by.
While I might have stepped fully into the cauldron of tournament play at Hollinwell, my four days at Mollington gave me a proper chance to swim around in it, take its temperature, become accustomed to the bittersweet taste of its contents. By speaking to James Holmes, James Conteh, Tim Stevens and Ian Keenan – a pro from Hoylake who, just three days before the comedown of practising with me at Mollington, had been awarded the privilege of playing as a non-competing marker in the final round of The Open – and others, a picture of the average Europro Nearly Man began to emerge. He tended to be around twenty-seven (the make-or-break age for a pro golfer, it seemed). His hair was shortish, geometric at the back and gelled (though not as heavily gelled as that of his younger peers) on top in that popular ‘bedhead’ style that bore only the politest resemblance to hair genuinely ruffled by sleep. He supported himself with part-time bar work, part-time pro-shop work, familial assistance or a sponsorship from a wealthy member at his local club with a gardening-equipment or tool-hire company (sometimes this would involve said member getting a share of his prize money, sometimes it would be what Karl Morris called ‘one of those sponsorships that’s another way of saying “handout”’). He drove a BMW or one of the sportier Volkswagens, on whose back seats he had slept on at least one occasion during his pro life. While at a golf tournament, he very rarely went out into the nearby city. He didn’t drink, though sometimes, if he was one of the more sociable and prosperous players on Tour, he split the weekly rent for a holiday cottage with some of his peers and relaxed there by watching DVDs. He had at some point ‘lost his swing’ or ‘got too technical’, and was now desperately trying to regain form, with the nagging knowledge that, if golf didn’t work out, he had no significant qualification to fall back on. He was a man of few words. When he did talk, the conversation always seemed to flow towards one of the following areas:
1. Michelle Wie
In the summer of 2006, the sixteen year-old, six-foot-one-inch Wie had become one of the hottest topics in the game: a child prodigy whose amateur achievements outshone even those of Tiger Woods, and who could hit the ball further than many of her male counterparts. She had also had the temerity to take a break from her Ladies PGA Tour schedule and enter a couple of PGA Tour events. This did not seem to have gone down well with the lower male pro ranks. Even the cuddly Andrew Seibert had surprised me by telling me about refusing to wear a free badge inscribed with the words ‘Go Michelle!’ at a Nationwide Tour event.9 I’d overheard a couple of similar conversations at Hollinwell, and Conteh and Stevens seemed keen to air their opinions on the subject during the fallow periods in our round.
Stevens: ‘If they [women] can play in our events, I don’t see why we can’t play in their events too.’
Conteh: ‘There should be one big Tour with men and women, then they’d see. It would destroy women’s golf.’
Stevens: ‘Poulter reckons that if he played in women’s events, he’d win 80 per cent of them.’
Conteh: ‘It doesn’t matter. She [Wie] will play again and she’ll miss the cut again. It just means someone like us who’s struggling to make a living is missing out on a place. It is equality, but it’s their kind of equality.’
Stevens: ‘Yeah, it’s bullshit.’
2. How Things are a Lot Harder than they Used to be in Every Way
All the Europro Tour players I spoke to seemed to agree on this. There were always more players pushing up from the junior ranks – players off plus six and plus seven who were fitter, sharper, who had started playing earlier. It was also harder to find the sponsorship and the equipment perks that made life easier. When James Holmes finished fourth on the Europro Tour order of merit in 2004 (total earnings: £24,565), Titleist agreed to give him a set of clubs, a hundred gloves, thirty-four dozen balls and two sets of shoes for the following year. Now they had stopped doing so. He also added that Taylor Made used to give every Europro Tour player who played with a Taylor Made driver £100 per event, but didn’t any more (‘Because they don’t need to’). Other players talked about the old days, when the Tour would give the pros good-quality Titleist balls to use on the range, ‘but they stopped when people started sneaking them into their bags’.
3. Quality of the Course
Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Course is good, isn’t it?’
Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘Yeah, brilliant. Not a shithole at all. Honest.’
4. Boys’ Toys and Speed
Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘What did you shoot last week?’
Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Fucking shanked it round. ‘Mare, mate. Didn’t drive home very fast after that. Honest.’
Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘You still got that Peugeot?’
Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Yeah. What of it?’
Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘Time you traded it in, innit?
Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Fuck off! I can get that bastard up to 140 on the M6. Toll bit, mind.’
Stevens to Conteh on thirteenth hole of second round: ‘How long does it take you to get back?’
Conteh: ‘About two hours.’
Stevens: ‘Uh.’
Conteh: ‘Be quicker than that after this round, though, cos I’ll be driving at about 150.’
Stevens to Conteh, four holes later, upon spotting an unusually large aeroplane in the sky: ‘Wonder how fast that fucker goes?’
Conteh: ‘Dunno.’
5. Clichéd Exclamatory Banter
In-vogue examples included:
‘Taxi!’ (Translation: ‘My putt has gone past the hole by quite some distance! It’s like when a vehicle you are trying to hail doesn’t bother stopping for you, but with a ball and grass instead of a car and a road!’)
‘Grow … Some … Fucking … Bollocks!’ (‘My putt has come up some way short of the hole, and as a result I am now quite understandably questioning my masculinity!’)
‘It’s on the dancefloor!’ (‘My ball is not particularly close to the hole, but it has arrived on the green safely.’) ‘H2O!’ (‘I have put the ball into the water. I am sad!’) ‘Luckier than a queer with two arseholes!’ (‘I did not hit a very good shot there, but, unexpectedly, it has worked out well!’)
‘About as much use as a chocolate fireman!’ (‘I did not hit a very good shot there, and it has not worked out well!’)
I tried my best to join in on all of these topics, but it was obvious that I was lacking the requisite social skills. I’d never been a great connoisseur of the Bruce Forsyth brand of golf banter; I tried to keep in the spirit of things, wheeling out a few old aphorisms, but it quickly became apparent that ‘over the cellophane bridge’ was just, like, so 1992. Sometimes, to keep myself amused, I would invent entirely new, and utterly meaningless, golfing phrases – e.g. ‘Straight off the lunchbox!’ or ‘Damn! That’s the third Tarbuck I’ve hit today!’ – but these didn’t seem to catch on either.
The car topic was a dead loss, right from the get-go. Nobody calls a Toyota Yaris a ‘baby’ or a ‘mutha’, or talks about ‘gunning’ a one-litre engine, and I felt that if I really stretched myself to do the whole manly ‘What are you driving?’ thing, I’d only end up offending somebody by asking why, when their winnings totalled £343 for
the year, they chose to drive a car worth more than £20,000. It was an area of pro life that flummoxed me, right from the boasting about speeding to Jamie Daniel’s obvious embarrassment that he ‘only’ drove a ten-year-old (sporty, sleek, retro classic) Mazda.
When I suggested to Conteh and Stevens that perhaps it’s only right that Wie and her LPGA Tour compatriots get the chance to compete in male events, considering all the ways the male golfing establishment has tried to suppress women over the years, I was met with only awkward silence.
Golf might not have been the best social sport in the world, but I’d always felt it had the potential to be. My view on the long spaces between shots was that they were excellent opportunities for conversation: a gift that golf, almost alone among sports, could offer you. Naturally I refrained from opening my mouth whilst my partners were swinging, addressing the ball or contemplating their shots, but it was obvious that my habit of theorising about the game and constructing sentences longer than three words was viewed as something that made me ‘a bit quirky’. Throughout all this, I tried to keep my backstory brief and to the point – I’d given up golf for a few years, but decided to give it another go – but sometimes, faced with an unusually inquisitive pro, I would mention that I’d written a couple of books, too. Without exception, they all asked the same question.
‘How much does that pay, exactly?’
‘I read a book not long ago,’ Steve Lewton had said at Woburn, during the second or third version of this conversation. ‘I forget what it was called now. Fucking brilliant! Shit, what was it? Ah … that’s it. The Da Vinci Code!’
I was used to feeling out of place on golf courses – at one time, in my late teens, I’d even gone out of my way to play up to it. But now I was actually trying my best to fit in, to dress innocuously, to not talk about books or films or TV or any of the things that I talked about normally, or if I did, to not be too challenging or distracting – and it amazed me how easy it was to stand out. At one point on the range in the prelude to round two, I’d heard my name mentioned, and while I didn’t get the context, the conversation definitely included the word ‘character’. Was it so odd that I was the only person who didn’t think it remotely weird to want to wear his shirt untucked in the middle of a heatwave? Was my equipment so outdated that every third person needed to inspect it and pull a confused face?10 Was my straw boater so eccentric that Michael Welch, the former ‘next Sandy Lyle’ and eleventh-place finisher on the 2005 Euro Pro Tour order of merit, was justified in pointing and laughing at it as I walked past the putting green?11 It seemed so.
