Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (28 page)

His anecdote-telling skills obviously needed a little sprucing up, and it was possibly a bit of a shock for all concerned to realise that there was still someone alive in Britain who used the phrase ‘bevy of beauties' in a non-ironic context, but the result was successful. A couple of minutes previously, my playing partners, Paul Coburn and Adam Hawkins, and I had all made tight-lipped, perfunctory introductions, then immediately retreated into our cocoons of concentration, but now we began to quiz each other merrily about our golfing fortunes over the previous eight months. And if this was only out of fear that if we let up for a moment we might be subjected to another recollection of a ‘humorous moment' – possibly involving ‘lithe lovelies' or some other would-be caption from a 1975
Sun
newspaper pictorial – it at least passed the time. The moment to tee off was upon me quickly, and when it was, I felt loose and focused. This was the happy kind of being caught off-guard: finding yourself wholly in the present, with no time for negative hypothesising.

What Gavin Christie preached was sometimes referred to as ‘the flail'. It was all about spring and twang: the golfing equivalent of skimming a stone. I'd managed to
keep
this springiness for more than a week now, but I sometimes yearned for Gavin's gruff tones in my ear, spurring me on, reminding me of the movement's true texture. Now, however, as I took my backswing, I could almost hear him: a granite Obi Wan Kenobi telling me to ‘use the force' of my hands (but obviously without
too
much force, and with an ultimate sense of effortless power). The ball took off straight and true, just like those of Paul and Adam, but when we arrived in the fairway five minutes later, there was an unexpected ego boost: I had outdriven both of them by around twenty paces. At 340 yards from the tee, I was left with only an easy pitching wedge to the green. Devilish pond? What devilish pond?

For the next few holes that same confidence always seemed within reach, but I wasn't quite able to touch it again. The Brain Worm did its bit, but this time its wiggle was a subtle one. My ball-striking, and my luck, were just a fraction off. Putts would eye up the hole, but fail to drop. A well-struck iron would catch an untimely draught and fall just short of the green into the maws of a deep bunker. A wayward drive would find an adjacent fairway subject to a freakish out-of-bounds rule of which I'd been unaware.
⁵
The outcome was that, as I stood over my ball in the wiry rough to the right of the sixteenth fairway, surveying the miserable result of a tee shot that, two minutes earlier, I'd been sure had been on the short grass, I was certain
that
my seven-over-par aggregate represented the worst I could possibly have scored. It was a naïve conclusion at which to arrive – one that paid no heed whatsoever to what I'd learned at Hollinwell about golf's infinite capacity for disaster – and the smothered six-iron that followed, finding a water hazard to the left of the fairway, probably served as punishment. It was just then that I saw the camera.

I'd watched a considerable chunk of Sky Sports' Europro Tour coverage before, though it was easy enough to overlook. Presented in edited highlights form, it was usually broadcast at least a week after the tournament in question, squeezed in between a minor-league darts match or a crucial heat of intervillage amateur league curling. And by ‘highlights', what I really mean is ‘me-diumlights'. Although the leaderboard gave evidence of plentiful birdies and eagles – it was not uncommon for Europro Tour events to be won with scores of ten or more under par – the camerawork rarely backed it up, instead lingering on unremarkable lag putting and caddieless players indifferently shoving irons back into their bags, whilst commentators outlined the ‘action' like bored CCTV operatives, seemingly permanently on the verge of a yawn. The one obvious attempt to pep things up had been the addition of presenter Ruth Frances, a blonde model with a look of the golf-wife-in-waiting about her who was best known for her work on late-night viewer-participation quiz shows, but even she had disappeared from more recent programmes (much to the disappointment of some of the more chivalrous players on the Tour). One could only deduce that she'd died of boredom.

I'd long since found out that the Europro Tour, with its two-men-and-a-dog galleries and conspicuous lack of autograph-hunters, was not a place oozing with glamour, but it wasn't half as unglamorous as the TV coverage made it look. Now I had the chance to witness the problem first-hand. Maybe there had been more than one camera on the course, but if so, I hadn't seen the others. And now it was trained on me. Not Kevin Harper or Sean Whiffin, the joint leaders at four under par; not Phil Rowe, who was putting together a very nice round of 67; but Tom Cox – currently at seven over par, and poised to make a dramatic move further in the wrong direction. Quite frankly, the Evil Brain Worm found this outrageous. In view of the fact that he was facing a chip – his friend the Panic Squid's least favourite kind of shot – he made an informed decision. If this camera crew was going to waste so much time on his pathetic servant, he would at least make an effort to put on a show for them.

Over the years, much has been made of the putting yips, the dreaded affliction where a player – through nerves or a mental block – is liable to jerk putts of six feet and under far wide of the hole. Few golfers are unaware of the cautionary tale of Germany's Bernhard Langer, the disease's most notorious repeat sufferer, who was once struck down so extremely that he took five putts on one green in The Open. Less has been said about the putting yips' even more malevolent brother, the chipping yips – or chyips. If, to borrow one of my favourite non-PC Tiger Woods phrases, you ‘yip-spazz' a three-foot putt, it does not skitter thirty yards through the green into a water hazard. It rolls past the hole.
Then
, once it has, and you have apprehensively dollied the five-foot return putt to the holeside, you safely tap in. A chyip, by contrast, has almost unlimited capacity for destruction.

The chyipping of the ex-European Tour player-turned-Sky Sports pundit Ross McFarlane became so terrifying during the later days of his playing career that he would aim to mishit the ball into the flagstick to stop it. Sometimes, in desperation, McFarlane would hit chip shots one-handed from as much as sixty yards from the flag. Then there was Dan ‘Jellylegs' Davies, my fellow Cabbage Patch Masters organiser, who had been known to emerge from playing a perfunctory twenty-yard lob shot with matching grass stains on his knees.

There were remedies for chyipping out there, but nobody seemed agreed on their reliability. Back at the beginning of summer, I'd watched an outsider called Chris Coake overcome his chyipping demons by placing his left hand awkwardly below his right on the club, and go on to win the PGA Tour's Zurich Classic of New Orleans. But the purist in me didn't much like the look of the technique. I wasn't exactly encouraged, either, by a search of Internet golf sites, which informed me that yipping your chips is: a) ‘an official medical condition', b) ‘an affliction that has nothing to do with nerves and pressure' and c) ‘an affliction that is all about nerves and pressure'. I'd been struggling with my wedge game all year, but I had enough other golfing ailments to worry about, and it always seemed easier to shove my chyips into a cupboard and deal with them later. I could find temporary ways to ignore them, using a putter from
further
and further off the green,
⁶
but I probably should have anticipated that, with the pressure on, the cupboard doors would burst open and my denial would rear up and bite me.

Now, with the camera trained in my direction, I looked desperately for something to draw on – a good chip from the recent past, perhaps – but I found nothing. I searched for that 1930s seven-iron, but it had slipped so far down into my bag that I couldn't get it out. My fingers might as well have been made out of sponge. It was an effort even to drop the club limply down into the grass two feet behind the ball and advance it onto a grassy knoll, six yards short of the green. It was an even bigger effort to subsequently skim the bastard thing ninety feet past the hole. This could have gone on indefinitely. The resulting quadruple-bogey eight shouldn't have felt like an achievement, but it did.

Half an hour and another dropped shot later, standing on the tee of the par-five eighteenth with a driver in my hand, my small sense of achievement from earlier had turned to unadulterated self-disgust. In 2006 I'd already had embarrassing rounds, scrappy rounds, and desperate rounds, but this was different. It was a
squandered
round. As such, it was probably my most painful to date. My golfing objectives now boiled down to a simple need: I wanted to hit the ball, hard, and when I had, I wanted
to
run after it, and hit it again, even harder. A delay on the tee amped my frustration. All thoughts of yardage charts were gone now. Who cared where the ball went, as long as the little white fuckpig was out of my sight? When the fairway finally cleared, the threeball behind us were waiting with us on the tee, and the group behind them were tramping noisily up the gravel path from the seventeenth green. I should have waited for the noise to stop. I didn't. I also realised belatedly that I hadn't put my glove back on after taking it off to putt on the previous green, but what help would a glove be? Could a glove take me back to the first hole? No. My drive, on the other hand, could. And that – possibly out of a subconscious need to rewind the recent past – was precisely where I put it, hooking it so far to the left that it carried past trees, boulders and rough and found the middle of the adjacent fairway.

As a reminder of what I'd frittered away, it was too cruel. I'd stood on this fairway five hours earlier, in almost the same spot, facing in the opposite direction, as a sportsman. Now I was no better than a flailing caveman with a stick. I thrashed and watched, surprised, as my ball soared towards the spot where I thought – or rather, haphazardly hoped – the green was. Later, looking at my yardage chart, I would realise the implausibility of what I'd attempted: a 290-yard carry over a copse and rough that probably hadn't seen a lawnmower since Harry Carpenter was the face of BBC golf. What was amazing was how close I came to pulling it off, how late in the ball's flight it crashed against an overhanging branch.

Earlier that day on the practice ground, I'd heard a
pro
– possibly one who'd recently spent some time in the company of Gavin Christie – ask his friend, ‘If a man says something wrong in the woods and there's no woman around to hear him say it, does he still make a sound?' As jokes went, it wasn't quite the worst I'd heard in the last two weeks. But I preferred my own, new version. It went like this: ‘If a ball falls in the woods and there's nobody around to see it drop and those woods happen to have two-foot grass and leaf mulch within them and there are two groups waiting behind to play their shots, and it's the last hole, and the ball's owner is more tired than he has ever been in his adult life, and he doesn't open his mouth, does he still make a sound? Yes. He makes the sodding sound of his fucking soul slowly dying.'

I would have to remember to use it – possibly some other time, when my soul wasn't slowly dying.

For five minutes, Adam and Paul and I – helped first by a couple of spectators and then, finally, also by a rules official – searched frantically. For five minutes, we found every long-forgotten sunken, misshapen ball imaginable. Mine, though, had vanished. I was long beyond caring about my score now. All I could think about was that ever-growing queue on the tee behind as.

The rules official was speaking into his walkie-talkie by this point, just out of earshot. They did that a lot, these Europro Tour officials, and I sometimes wondered if they quite liked it, and how many of their discussions involved anything more vital than that night's dinner. But now paranoia struck. What could the official possibly be saying?

‘It's that Cox again, holding play up. Yes, that's right,
the
one with the REO Speedwagon hat. What's he want to advertise his love for REO Speedwagon for anyway? They were shit. Although I suppose “Keep on Lovin' You” is all right to sing along to, if you've had enough to drink. Over.'

‘Yes, I know. He's a pain, that one. I already had to come away from my sudoku to give him a ruling on the fifteenth when he put that ball in the stream, then make him retake his drop because his hand was in the wrong place. Bit of a puffy swing, too, I noticed. Over.'

He turned back in my direction.

‘I think your five-minute time limit is up,' he said. ‘Come on. I'll buggy you back.'

In a professional golf tournament, players are prohibited from using buggies,
⁷
but in ‘special circumstances' – for example now, when play needed speeding up – a member of the tournament staff may be permitted to give them a lift. It is impossible to say quite how grateful I was for this ruling, as we zipped back through the rough, and I think I can safely say that Paul and Adam, who were now putting up on the green, felt the same.

I stood, once again, in the fairway of the first hole, just a few feet from the divot mark my wedge had made at the beginning of the round. I was now playing my
fourth
shot on the eighteenth. After another drop – for which I tried to strike a balance between ‘raising my hand high enough to stay within the rules' and ‘not raising my hand so high that it looked as if I was taking the piss' – I selected a four-iron. As I waggled, I told myself, ‘Just a safe shot, back into the fairway, then let's wedge up onto the green.' Maybe I could still salvage a bogey six out of this.

I knew the shot was going to be sweet, six inches into the downswing. I looked up, confidently …

To see the ball heading into the exact same deadly copse where I had hit my previous shot.