Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (25 page)

I hadn't been to a football match for close on two decades, but of the five people with me on the seventeenth tee, it was those Manchester United kids with whom I'd felt the greater kinship: kids who probably tried to hit the ball as far as they could at their local driving range, shouted a lot, and got chucked off golf courses for wearing trainers. After I'd teed off and Conteh and Stevens had walked ahead, I hung back and, feeling sorry for the oldest kid, asked him if he was having a good time (‘Brilliant!') and if he'd seen much good golf (‘Yeah! This bloke hit it and it went about two feet away from the flag and did that spinny thing!'). As a result I was a little late getting to my ball, and rushed my second shot.

Which probably said a lot about why Stevens scored 72 for the round, and I scored 80.

If I had ever had that phlegmatic geek gaucho manner, it had long since been beaten out of me. I'd strayed too far beyond the out-of-bounds for too long. I was an outsider, and people could smell it.

Was I really all that alone in feeling a little bit alienated and lonely, though? Every player I'd spoken to who'd had any experience of playing on the Europro Tour or the Challenge Tour had talked about how solitary the experience was. ‘Nobody talks much.' ‘Everyone keeps
themselves
to themselves.' ‘I find it kind of cliquey.' ‘Nobody goes in for a drink after the round.' ‘It's fucking bleak out there.' These comments kept recurring.

‘I find it hard speaking to a lot of golf pros,' I'd been told by Paul Creasey, the ex-Europro Tour player who'd caddied for John Ronson at Hollinwell. ‘Most of them are very one-dimensional. All they seem to be able to talk about is golf. I used to just spend a lot of time in my hotel room after tournaments, listening to my iPod.'

So why couldn't everyone just agree to have a better time, I wondered. Maybe go out to a few gigs together, take in a bit of theatre, kick back with a few beers? It obviously wasn't that simple. The sombreness and incurious attitude to non-golf matters was all part of the grand sacrifice, inextricably woven in with the endless practice, the lonely travel and lonely nights, the tunnel vision, the keeping things simple, the staying out of your own way.

Maybe I'd achieve that sombreness too, if I stayed out here long enough. I felt certain it would help my game. As for what I might lose in the process? It was a big question, and one I felt I already knew the answer to. But I couldn't think about that now. If I did, I would just begin to ponder all the other elements that I was realising were part and parcel of this golf pro business. The list would unfurl and unfurl, until it smothered the positive things that I could take out of the week – like the fact that I hadn't completely embarrassed myself; the fact that I had managed to complete another tournament; the fact that, in the evening after my first round, I had lain flat on my bed for four hours straight with the most crippling back spasm I had ever experienced,
uncertain
whether I'd be able to get vertical, much less play, the next morning. I tried to hold onto my paltry achievements, but it was hard to, as my admiration grew for the people who did this week in, week out, for how much they had forfeited.

Edie was waiting for me when I arrived home. I'd called her the previous night, when I'd been in so much pain, and I think she was beginning to reconsider some of her earlier jibes about the sedate, untaxing old bloke's sport with the balls and tees. In truth, she wasn't the only one. What was I thinking when I had remembered tournament golf as a gentle stroll that ‘wasn't
proper
exercise'? I'd played almost every major sport, at one time or another, but I had never been as frazzled as this, ever, in the aftermath of a sporting event.

Her eyes scanned my seaweed hair, my sticky clothes, the bags under my eyes, my Steptoe posture, the coagulating purple mess on my ripped thumb, and gave me a ‘Why do you put yourself through it?' look. ‘So,' she said cheerfully, ‘did you win anything?'

‘No,' I said. ‘But on the plus side, I did get a free pitchmark repairer.'

‘Well that's all right then!' she said.

As I began to unload, she surveyed the boot of the car resignedly. We'd both long since given up on cleaning it, on the basis that until all this was over, it was futile to try to stem the flow of ingrained mud, grass, stray local rules sheets, scorecards, empty Titleist sleeves, banana skins and empty drinks bottles. ‘I've, er, been watching golf this afternoon,' she said.

I was astounded. ‘Really?'

‘Yeah. Well, I actually had a nap while it was on. All
the
sounds are so slow, they're very good for sleeping to. I did watch a bit, though. They kept talking about “the money list”. Don't you think it's weird how they seem to measure achievement by how much money people have won? I mean, I know it's sort of like that in other sports too, but they're not so barefaced about it.'

‘Yeah, I suppose you're right.'

‘I was also thinking how “golf” is “flog” backwards. It's sort of appropriate, don't you reckon? Not just in the selling sense, but in the torture sense.'

I could only concur. Looking as flayed as I did, it would have been silly not to. We gave each other a hug, and I told her how much I'd missed her. I decided to leave it a few hours before telling her about the next, imminent bit of flogging: the bit that I had hastily arranged on my mobile phone earlier in the day. I had a feeling it was going to be quite extreme.

1
Not that I blamed James for this in the slightest. ‘Put your time into working on a new, bigger branch of your incredibly successful and modern underground metropolitan golf franchise, or into guiding the career of a man who can't even break ninety in The Open?' was hardly the kind of dillemma that would keep me up at night either.

2
It would have been a lot less of a tussle if Simon and Scott, sympathetic to my distress, had not awarded me a special ‘have your handicap back' dispensation for the day. I should probably also point out here that the ‘Cup' part was purely figurative – as, indeed, was the £10 that, with a birdie on the last, Simon ended up winning from me and Scott.

3
Baker-Finch's commentary career has been a lot steadier than his golfing one, but if's still had its wobbly moments – such as the one where he called the American pro Billy Andrade's sports psychologist his ‘psychiatrist'.

4
I was finding out that the long-held idea of the practice ground as a sacred place, where greater good could be done to one's game than on the course, was becoming increasingly obsolete. Perhaps I hadn't been doing myself a disservice by bunking off practice to play the back nine at Diss after all. The wunderkind Steve Lewton said he ‘hardly ever practised', and now, hearing Karl Morris's thoughts on the subject as well, I was beginning to truly re-evaluate all those times, as a kid, when I'd been told by adult members at Cripsley that ‘Half an hour of practice is worth three hours on the course.' If only I'd known this supposed aphorism had just been a ruse to keep me and my mates from getting in the way of the Captain's thrice-weekly fiveball sweep!

5
Fact: if you call your son James and live in England's Home Counties, there is an approximate 47 per cent chance he will become a golf pro.

6
I said that I'd already made two mistakes by the time I left the driving range. The second was to change ‘awareness of the shaft to ‘awareness of the ball'. It had worked well at first, but pretty soon ‘awareness of the ball' begat ‘awareness of just how small the ball is', which begat ‘awareness of just how many wrong ways there are of striking the ball', until, finally, I abandoned that kind of awareness altogether, and let my mind wander to other matters, like whether I was going to regrow my beard, or where in the greater Chester region one could get a caramel-flavoured iced coffee at this time of day.

7
This James business really was getting ridiculous now.

8
That weekend, with the help of Google, I did. What I found out was that he was famous for making yardage charts.

9
I assumed he meant ‘Go!' in an encouraging way, rather than in a ‘Bugger off back to your silly women's tournament kind of way.

10
I'm sure this wasn't anything to do with the cat piss, which seemed to have evaporated by now. But my bag had good reason to be paranoid. If it had been a human, I feel certain that by the end of the second round at Mollington it would at least have been frantically wiping its nose, certain it was displaying some stray snot, or reaching around on its back, trying to locate the ‘I do it with sheep' Post-it note that someone had stuck there.

11
I checked a moment later: it definitely didn't have any snot or abusive Post-it notes on it.

TO BE TRUTHFUL
, I'd been thinking about calling Gavin Christie all year. I'd even picked up the phone and begun to dial his number a couple of times but chickened out at the last second. As fondly as I remembered him, I also knew there was a chance that an encounter with him could crush me for good – possibly not just as a pro, but as a golfer full stop. Friends who knew him had expressed their doubts as to whether he'd agree to speak to someone who made a living as a writer (Gavin had never done an interview before, so why would he agree to do so now, at the age of sixty-five?), and told me of the nickname he'd gained when he was coaching out on Tour, ‘Rhino' (‘Because he's thick-skinned and charges a lot'). I could still remember the day, sixteen years ago, that he'd first appeared in my golfing life, emerging out of the fog at a driving range in Nottingham like some stubbly dry-witted ghost, to tell me that what I was doing was ‘fucking craaap', then, with sleight of hand, taking approximately two minutes to get me hitting the purest shots of my life. He'd disappeared – after making sure to collect
adequate
remuneration, naturally – just as quickly and mysteriously. The following week I'd gone on a golfing exchange holiday to Portugal and shanked almost every shot I hit.

Bob Boffinger, Cripsley's then junior organiser, had his own theory about my shank attack: ‘It had nothing to do with Gavin – the only reason you were shanking is because you fell for that Portuguese girl, Shue, and allowed it to distract you.' Bob seemed to think that my decision to reacquaint myself with Gavin was a good idea, but when he wished me luck on my trip up to Edinburgh his voice had the tone of a man seeing someone off on a journey from which they might not return. For all anyone listening in might have assumed, I could have been Martin Sheen, off into the heart of darkness to track down Marlon Brando. Bob, who now worked for the English Golf Union as a junior selector, knew only too well that Gavin's ornery genius took no prisoners. A golfer might not come back from seeing him with the same psychological defences he had when he left. As a reminder, Bob invoked the story of Steve Bow, a member at Cripsley Edge who, many years ago, had been sent to see Christie, only for his prospective mentor to draw the lesson to a close after two minutes with the words, ‘Och, Steve, it's nae good – let's go inside and have a cup of tea instead.' Christie, it was rumoured, had shed his people-pleasing side since then.

Christie was at the centre of so many questions I had still to answer about my golfing life. I wanted to know if the genius I'd felt touched by that day at the foggy driving range had been real, or just a figment of my easily impressed nascent imagination. Had Gavin been the one who'd diverted me from my path to the European
Tour
, or had I misinterpreted his teachings on that trip to Portugal? Was my actual mistake not seeking him out again and persevering with his methods? So many of my conflicting thoughts about my swing seemed to be dim memories of his ideas doing battle with the modern swing philosophy that I'd read about and been taught by Steve Gould at Knightsbridge. For Gavin to have met me once, for thirty minutes, more than a decade and a half ago, and to have retained this much influence – well, that had to say something special about him, didn't it? The way I saw it, if, when I arrived in Edinburgh, he told me I was ‘fucking craaap', I couldn't feel any less confident about my game than I already did. And at least I would have put some demons to rest and given myself a much-needed break from my endless musing over the psychological side of my game.
¹

It seemed totally in keeping with my mystically tinged memory of Christie that he had not been surprised to hear from me on the phone. ‘Ah, Tom,' he said. ‘I remember you. You were the one who called me suave and sophisticated in your book, weren't you?' He was referring to a passage where I'd confessed that, upon first encountering Christie, I'd mistaken him for a passing vagabond who just happened to have a demon eye for
hand
action. In fact, when I met him at Edinburgh's Waverley station a couple of days after our phone call, he looked very dapper, and could easily have passed for a man twelve or thirteen years his junior. I asked him how he was keeping.

‘Och, not good, Tom,' he said. ‘I went to the doctor last week about my liver. I asked him what he could give me for it. He said, “How about some onions?”'

Jamie Daniel, who'd been with me at the range that day all those years ago, and who still sometimes saw Gavin for lessons, said he could ‘listen to Gavin talk for hours', but had warned me about the jokes.
²

On our way to the King's Acre golf course, six miles south of the city, Gavin talked passionately about British junior golf (‘Once a kid gets selected for national amateur coaching, he has to change coaches – if he doesnae, he doesnae get picked!'), national selectors (‘They're pointless! Get rid of them and replace them with an order of merit system!') and his three-decade relationship with the veteran British pro, BBC commentator and ex-Ryder Cup captain Mark James (‘That's when coaching really works – when there's a continuity to it and a closeness, when you're learning off each other …').