by Tom Cox
We talked some more, telling stories of our former junior cohorts. Most unfathomable among these was Ben Wolfe, Cripsley’s resident entrepreneur and ‘energy waves’ enthusiast, whose twin obsessions of hubcap-collecting and befriending clothing designers had led him away from the fairway into the world of fashion, and who had, for mysterious reasons, changed his first name to Ricardo by deed poll. But Mousey had his own unusual story – one that may have gone some way to explaining his newfound insouciance.
In the mid-nineties, not long after I lost touch with him, he’d started a new job in the stockroom of a department store, and had been having a bad time, not getting on with his co-workers. One night he went out to the Black Orchid, a nightclub in a retail park just outside Nottingham, and began seeing shadows in front of his face. ‘The next morning, I lost it,’ he said. ‘I started thinking all sorts of weird stuff, like that my dad was going to kill me and shit. I was telling strangers that I’d won the lottery.’ Jamie remembered taking nonsensical calls from Mousey from the hospital, asking ‘When are you picking me up? You were supposed to be here ages ago!’ Mousey was put on several kinds of medication, and spent the next few months in hospital. On his birthday, he received a card signed by several of the members at Cripsley. ‘I don’t remember any of it now, but I punched this nurse and escaped and came up here and ordered some food from the bar. Steve Kimbolton had to phone my dad and get him to take me back to the hospital.’
This all rang only the slightest bell in my head: an encounter with my friend Robin when I’d learned, without specifics, that Mousey ‘hadn’t been well recently’. I felt terribly guilty, suddenly aware of how completely and impetuously I’d removed myself from golf back then. Certainly, I’d needed a break, but had I really had to lose touch with my friends so drastically that when one of them had a major life crisis it completely passed me by? I said I was sorry that I hadn’t been around at the time to visit him in hospital.
‘Don’t worry about it, chief. I don’t know why it all happened. I think I just used to let things get to me. It’s a long time ago now. These days I don’t let anything bother me.’ The six-iron second shot that he launched onto the (once virtually unreachable) par-five fifteenth green appeared to confirm this.
Had he not thought about turning pro at all, in the years since he’d been feeling better?
‘No. Too much fucking hard work, yoof.’
He was right, of course. The difference between him and me, perhaps, was that he had never kidded himself it could be any other way.
As much as I told myself I was having fun, I had worked hard this year. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of graft I’d experienced when I’d worked in a supermarket and a restaurant aged seventeen, or on a factory floor aged nineteen, but it had taken more out of me than any of those things. I’d lost three quarters of a stone in weight, hit around 50,000 balls, stared at thousands of miles of motorway, given my body some worrying wear and tear, and brought the office home with me like never before.7 But even that wasn’t the work of the real pro; it was the work of the guy who thinks he can find a shortcut, who thinks he can busk through on maverick spirit alone. I’d tried being fire, I’d tried being ice, I’d even tried being lukewarm water. None of it had worked – at least not for long. Every sensational golfing doctrine was a contradiction of another that could be equally revelatory, if you saw it in the right light, and had got bored enough experimenting with its antithesis. In the end, being a great golfer at the highest level wasn’t primarily about attitude or methodology, it was about making a long, arduous sacrifice to your green god and doing all you could to mould yourself in his image. Chevy Chase was right: you really did have to ‘be the ball’.
I was sure other sports took plenty of dedication, but it was hard to believe that any could be quite as consuming and insular as golf, or could have so many people willing to call it a career while earning next to no money. ‘If you go for a trial at Manchester United or Everton and Alex Ferguson says you’re shit, you give up and go and do something else,’ Karl Morris had said to me. ‘In golf, though, there’s nobody to tell you you’re not good enough.8 There’s no cut-off point. No matter how bad it gets, there’s always the belief that there’s something great around the corner.’
Even now, based on the high points from Bovey Castle and Mollington, I could see a future for myself on the Europro Tour. It would involve even harder graft, more practice, more money, going to a chiropractor, getting fit,9 and then, one day, in a year or so, when my biorhythms were good and there was no wind and there was no farmhouse ghost keeping me up the night before and I genuinely focused on my awareness of the shaft and didn’t modify that and focus on the ball instead and I got out of my own way but didn’t swing as if I was trying to get myself out of the way and didn’t dwell on what I had to lose and I kept my hands light on the club, I might, just, if I was lucky, shoot a couple of rounds of one or two under par and make the cut in a tournament. And I would still not even be verging on the kind of dedication that it takes to compete at the top level of the game.
Today was so much simpler: three old friends having a laugh, occasionally taking the piss out of one another (yes, I did remember the time I tried to get in that sauna with all my clothes on; yes, Mousey did remember when he’d claimed the definition of a links course was ‘woodland or fir’), driving the odd par-four (well, three of them, in Mousey’s case) and exorcising the odd demon (my eagle on the sixteenth, a hole that had once seen what I was certain was the most unfortunate ricochet in the history of the Cripsley Club Championship: a collision with a sprinkler head that had sent my ball from greenside safety into the back garden of a minor committee member). Maybe this was what Ben Hogan, that most professional of professional golfers, had derisively termed ‘jolly golf’, but it was also golf that didn’t leave you gibbering on the floor, golf that brought out the best in me. Maybe this wasn’t what the three of us had hoped for when we’d lain flat on the ground behind the range at Wentworth, studying every inch of Seve Ballesteros’s swing through the crowd’s legs, but this was adulthood. And part of adulthood was realising that getting close to perfection did not necessarily make you the happiest person, or the best person; it just made you close to perfection.
And who said golf was a game of perfect, anyway?
In the bar afterwards, over a pint of Guinness, George reminisced about one time that his wife, Maggie, had arrived here to pick Jamie up and been reprimanded by a stuffy member who explained that she had crossed the boundary into the gentlemen-only bar (‘That’s funny,’ responded Maggie, without missing a beat, ‘because I don’t see any in here!’). We contemplated the wall of past captains’ photographs, stretching back to the 1920s: waste-management executives and foremen and landlords in suits and ties, peering proudly at the camera like noble border collies on the front of old-fashioned boys’ birthday cards. For all the nicknames we gave them, these men had once seemed like prime ministers to us. Back then, we’d been sure that we wanted to be pros, but how could we have been trusted to know what to do with our lives, when our world was this insular?
George talked about the moment when he realised that Jamie might not have what it takes to be a top pro. ‘It was at the British Amateur Championship, and he was five up on the kid he was playing, and he turned round to me and said, “I feel sorry for him.” You can’t afford to feel sorry for anyone in this game.’
I looked across the table at Jamie, half-expecting him to bristle at this, but he had an even, accepting smile on his face. I’d never seen him more relaxed. Knowing nobody else could do it for him, he’d been brave enough to decide on his cut-off point a couple of years ago, and was happier for it. Now he could afford to feel genuinely sorry for his former opponents, many of whom were still in the thick of it, juggling their credit cards and trying to get out of their own way. It was up to me to decide on my cut-off point too, and now seemed as good a time as any, at the course where I’d started playing, a course it was highly likely I
would never play again, in good company, with an eagle fresh in my mind, and my insides suffused with the warm glow that only a good inconsequential round of golf, an empty stomach and a pint of Guinness can create. The dream was almost over, but I was going to allow myself just a couple of final pit stops on the journey back to my senses.
1 Barrington joked that one of his problems in tournament play was that ‘My putts sometimes go as far as my drives’.
2 In order to achieve the stillness of head required to swing well, Nicklaus had his head gripped by an assistant pro during practice for an hour every day for a whole year.
3The great game is not only a major exercise in military strategy and tactics,’ wrote Cooke, ‘but also a minor rehearsal of the Ten Commandments.’ I could see what he was getting at, but I hadn’t spotted any oxen on the Europro Tour. And if I had, I doubt I would have had time to covet them. That said, some cud-chewing skills might have come in useful after my second shot on the eighteenth at Bovey Castle.
4 Mousey’s real name is Ross Jones.
5 These were, by contrast, three times as big as they had been when I last saw him.
6 Well, burning Urethane Elastomer, to be exact.
7 Which was saying something, since my writing office was at home in the first place.
8 As of July 2006, Karl Morris remained unfamiliar with the working methods of Gavin Christie.
9 That clicking in my hip told me that my dozen or so swimming sessions and two aborted attempts at yoga just weren’t cutting it.
Eleven
Streets Ahead
‘RIGHT,’ SAID LIAM White, producing a fistful of £20 notes from his pocket and licking a finger, ‘let’s see how we did, Tom, cos I haven’t got a flippin’ clue.’
A little baffled about where ‘we’ came into this, I watched as he counted the money and looked around the clubhouse of Wollaton Park Golf Club in Nottingham, wondering what he intended to do with it. There appeared to be quite a lot of it, and with the exception of a fruit machine and a menu offering some teacakes and a small selection of hot beverages, very little potential in the nearby vicinity for disposing of it.
‘Not bad,’ he said, with a nod. ‘I’ll get this.’ He gestured to the pot of coffee on the table in front of us.
By his own admission, Liam was a little hungover this morning. In the five minutes we’d been sitting in the lounge of Wollaton, three people had approached him and said the same thing: ‘Hello, Liam. You look … well!’ In truth, he looked a little grey-green around the gills. As he poured a second cup of coffee, and then, quickly, a third, his hand shook. He had been to the casino last night, he said, and it had ‘turned into a heavy one’.
I’d last seen Liam fifteen years previously, when he’d been Nottinghamshire’s best golfer. Back then I’d watched with my friend Ollie as he’d flashed and lashed his way around Coxmoor Golf Club in an important county match, one of his last games as an amateur. He’d seemed oddly outgoing for a good player, and had taken time out from his tussle with Lincolnshire’s Jim Payne – another soon-to-be-pro, but an altogether more serene golfing being – to chat with us and ask us about our handicaps. Watching his quick, wristy swing and his chirpy manner with the crowds, Ollie and I had been convinced we were seeing a future star: a kind of blond Seve on permanent fast-forward, or maybe more appropriately, with the benefit of hindsight, a British council-estate Sergio Garcia.
That autumn, he’d been selected for the Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup team to play against America at Portmarnock, and alongside Ireland’s Paul McGinley had defeated Bob May and the mighty Phil Mickelson in the foursomes. Chubby Chandler from International Sports Management had been waiting on the final green, contract in hand, and Liam had immediately turned pro, going on to win the 1994 Danish Open with an astonishing final round of 63. Rumours followed about his sleeping on the beach the night after the tournament and spending a vast chunk of his prize money on a handbag for his girlfriend. But then … nothing. His name vanished from the money list. When I asked, ‘What happened to Liam White?’ most of my Nottingham friends just shrugged. There was talk of a very public disagreement with a veteran European Tour player, and a subsequent social blackballing. When I’d brought Liam’s name up with fellow pros this year, I’d drawn a blank. After much research and a lot of help from Bob Boffinger, I’d finally tracked him down to the Chesterfield branch of JJB Sports, where he was the manager of the Bike, Golf and Fitness department.
‘Is this a wind-up?’ he asked, when I told him I wanted to talk to him.
He’d suggested we meet at Wollaton, a gently captivating parkland course three miles from the city centre, where I’d once narrowly missed decapitating a deer with a skulled seven-iron, and where Liam had been playing the majority of his golf since his mid-teens (Liam had been a late starter, as well as an early finisher). That had surprised me slightly. One of the Liam rumours I’d heard involved him being banned from Wollaton’s clubhouse for putting his cigar out in a committee member’s drink. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve been barred twice. Once was for fighting at the men’s Christmas dinner. I can’t remember what the other was for. The worst thing about it was that I weren’t allowed to come in and see me cabinet. That hurt. One day I played with three committee members and I couldn’t even come in and look at my stuff.’
Liam’s cabinet, which he also referred to as ‘The Shrine’, still stood intact in Wollaton’s foyer. Packed with clubs, trophies, newspaper and magazine articles and other memorabilia from Liam’s glory years, it must have served as a constant reminder of how much he had lost. It was also evidence that Liam had once been on a fast track to the big time: not just another former scratch player scraping a living, but a player so promising that GQ magazine had awarded him with a five-page profile (‘They must have taken 2,000 photographs of me, but they only used three’).
Liam had been late for our meeting, and while I waited for him my brain had gone into overdrive hypothesising about what he might look like. My image of him was a little fuzzy, and it always gives you cause for fertile thought when someone says, ‘I’ll meet you outside the pro shop – I’ll be the one with the Mohican.’ By the time I saw a bright yellow souped-up Fiat Punto hurtle into the car park, I’d got a bit carried away and was starting to picture an ageing version of the synth-pop star Howard Jones in an Argyle sweater.
The Punto scouted around for a space then, seeing none free, pulled flamboyantly into a no-parking area in front of the clubhouse delineated with orange stripes.1 The figure that emerged from the driver’s seat was instantly familiar, but that owed more to his John Wayne walk than his frightened-cat’s spike of hair. He did not look a bit like Howard Jones.
In their 1992 profile, GQ had said that Liam looked more like a rugby player than a golfer. Now he looked more like an ex-rugby player with a job in retail management. He had an old-fashioned way with slang and a smoky, cardigany scent that reminded me of a bygone working-class Nottingham: the Nottingham of my granddad, the Nottingham of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His upside down traffic cone of a body seemed kind of old-fashioned too. It was too short and stout to be a modern golfer’s physique. Going down from his huge, jutting shoulders, everything tapered. His forearms were enormous, but his wrists were, as he pointed out, ‘tiny’.
‘That was what finished me, really,’ he explained. ‘I got tendonitis in my wrist. I kept going to tournaments, and I’d just end up in agony, hitting these 150-yard shots to the right off the tee. Even when I play now, it throbs for a couple of days afterwards.’ At the end of 1994 he applied for a medical exemption from the European Tour, but his application arrived too late. For a few months, he’d continued to receive invites and to practise hard. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘all of a sudden a year had passed and I’d only played a bit of golf, and I didn’t miss it. Easy as that.’
Liam’s last round of golf before speaking to me, which had taken place the previous Friday, had been only his ninth in two yea
rs. ‘It’s still so easy. Even now, people say to me, How can you just pitch up and shoot the scores that you do? The thing is, I’ve never thought about the game. I’m lucky, you see. It’s easy to me. There are very few people who are pros – Lee included – who can’t play without having some kind of thought.’
It was his first mention of Lee – and I guessed he meant Westwood. Did he ever watch his Nottinghamshire peer and find himself thinking, ‘That could have been me!’?
‘Loads of people ask that,’ he said. ‘I tell you what, I’ve lost more money on that silly prat than anything, and that’s the only time I get pissed off with him. I just love seeing him do well. People don’t realise – outsiders, especially – that there’s no bitchiness or jealousy, because when you’re at a certain level, you know your day’s gonna come. You’re always pleased for other people, and when your day does come, they’re always pleased for you.’
Had Westwood usurped White’s place at the top of the pecking order in east Midlands golf? It seemed that way. But the truth was that, aside from the fact that they had both been paid for hitting a ball, shared the same management team, initials and home county, the pair had very little in common. Their swings alone were as different as fire and ice. Where Lee appeared to talk to people through the layers of a protective shell, Liam had no such psychic protection, and it was hard to imagine he ever had done. Wollaton’s clubhouse was scantly populated this morning, but every person who entered it made a beeline for Liam, and he had time for all of them. There was nothing guarded about him as he talked of his friends, all of whom seemed to have nicknames like ‘Village’ or ‘Trigger’2 and were either gravely ill or a ‘brilliant laugh’ or permanently drunk or mucking up their life by going out with an ‘ugly bird’.
