Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (20 page)

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 progression 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:

Of the three of us, I probably had the most still to play for.

When people use the word ‘unmentionable' in golf, what they are usually referring to is a shank: the right-veering affliction I'd felt so wary of on the Europro Tour Qualifying School practice ground. But if the shank was the good golfer's
real
unmentionable, would it be mentioned so often? I think not. Surely even
more
unmentionable, to a good golfer, is the possibility of slipping into a three-figure score for one's round. A hundred is not only the first major target the beginner strives to beat, it is the score that no pro can live down. Much was made, for example, of Sandy Lyle's fall from grace after winning the US Masters and The Open, but even though, at his lowest golfing ebb, Lyle scored in the nineties, he managed to avoid the big one-oh-oh – presumably out of some final reserve of darkest-hour pride. A hundred is, quite simply, the line that separates a freak golfing disaster from rank, unforgivable amateur hacking.

A hundred is also just twenty-one shots short of the score Maurice Flitcroft shot in 1973: the worst score in Open history.

With three holes to play, I stood at twenty-two over par. Since the overall par of Hollinwell is 72, this meant that, in order to beat the dreaded figure, I would have to play the final three holes in five over par or better. Normally, even on Hollinwell's tough closing stretch, that would not have been too tall an order. On the most errant golfing day of my life, though, it gave me something to think about. A few minutes previously I had been patting myself on the back for persevering, when it would have been so much easier to give up and card
a
No Return. Now, though, a possibility loomed that was more
verboten
still.

Perhaps it was because I'd passed into a whole different realm of tiredness, but with this new predicament at the forefront of my mind, I immediately began to focus for the first time all day. Having holed a ten-footer for par on the sixteenth and very nearly birdied the par-five seventeenth, I hit a sweet eight-iron second shot to the eighteenth – a long par-four – only to watch, crestfallen, as it curved off the short grass and dropped into a steep-faced bunker guarding the front left edge of the green.