Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (34 page)

I had reckoned on being the only pro at Shoreditch, but now it was plain that I would have some serious competition from Paul – or ‘Lucky Hands', as he would be known for today's purposes. The intimidation factor went up dramatically when I realised he had brought along not only his own caddy, but his own cameraman, in the form of two of his junior pupils from Spalding Golf Club. Once again, I had found myself without a bagman in an important tournament. A string of pleading last-minute text messages to friends had yielded only one offer, from my folk songwriter friend Chris Sheehan. But Chris, who like most musicians saw it as against his religion to get up before eleven o'clock on a Sunday, said he would only be able to join me for the back nine.

I had brought just a small portion of my golfing weaponry to Shoreditch – partly because of my aching back, partly because Shoreditch Urban balls tended to nullify the intricacies of lofts and shafts, and partly because the previous day The Bear had unleashed another virulent jet of steaming urine onto my new Taylor Made golf bag. But that wasn't the point. A pro needed a caddy. Inspired by the guttering bag of Doreen from the British Pitch and Putt Association, Edie and I had fashioned a temporary carrying apparatus out of a large cardboard tube, sealing one end shut and taping to its outside the strap from an ageing holdall. I couldn't have looked a very appealing prospect as I wandered awkwardly around outside the Tabernacle with my
Blue Peter
-style DIY Tour bag banging against my back, but, with less than a minute to go before I was due to tee off, I managed to find a man called Thom who, despite
having
‘only come for the free whisky' and knowing ‘sod all about golf', seemed happy to step into the breach. I soon learned that his day job was as a postman, which probably explains the instant ease with which he handled the packaging.

While not delivering letters, Thom played in an alternative folk band called the Outdoor Types (I was sure Chris would not, in principle, be heartbroken that I had found another man for the job, but that this man was another folk musician seemed like a slight betrayal). He had a fluffy, droopy moustache which was reminiscent of that sported by David Crosby from the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but I liked to think of it as having more in common with the model showcased by ‘Fluff' Cowan, Tiger Woods's old caddy. ‘Who?' said Thom when I told him this. My question about wind strength and pin position on the second hole drew a similarly blank response. He would obviously need a briefing on golf history, strategy and etiquette, but I sensed he was a quick learner, and by the time my ball had got itself stymied between an empty beer bottle and a lamp post on the third hole,
⁹
I was pleased to see that he was adopting the recognisable obsequious posture and wise, wizened tone of the true golfing underclass.

‘It's definitely a tough shot to read,' he said, crouching behind the ball and surveying the tarmac ahead. ‘Knock it over to the left, and let the slope bring
it
round. Either that, or smack it at that BMW and see what happens.'

There were good reasons not to use a normal golf ball in urban golf – not just the insurance issues, but the fact that, as Jeremy Feakes pointed out, ‘proper golf balls roll forever on tarmac' – but that didn't mean I didn't miss using one. As I lashed into my tee shots ever more fiercely, Thom, my playing partners the Baron, Malcolm and Andy yelped and cheered in an impressed manner, but there is only so far a hacky-sack can travel, even if it's being hit with a swing that incorporates a Happy Gilmore-style run-up. There were other frustrations, too. A few of the rules seemed a little vague. On numerous holes, not everyone appeared to be quite sure which fairway was which, especially since some of them cut back on themselves at 180 degrees. And if you hit the lid of the open fire hydrant that served as the hole, did it still count as having gone ‘in'? When my six-iron shot on the seventh fairway flew full-toss into a passing website designer, damaging his carefully coiffed ironic hairstyle and ending up in the gutter, should I have been able to replay the shot? Nobody could quite decide. ‘Not knowing the rules is sort of the point,' Feakes had told me before my round. ‘Otherwise it just gets too anal, and the fun goes out of it.'

To be fair, street golf was in its infancy, and could be permitted a few teething troubles. When Dutchmen began to fashion curved sticks and first play the ancient game of goff in the fourteenth century, it must have taken much drawn-out negotiation for them to decide on their definitive set of rules as well. I suppose the main difference was that those Dutchmen didn't
have
to decide where exactly was the correct place to take a free drop from beneath the wheels of a Renault Espace.

There were plans for other Urban Opens in the future, as far afield as Johannesburg and New York. Feakes talked of a special new ball being designed for next year's event that would go considerably further. The Shoreditch Open was now a regimented event, attended by several dozen marshals and police, with its terrain closed off to (all but the most vital) traffic for its duration. It was clear, though, that not everyone in the area had been put in the picture. On the eleventh, a motorcycle courier blatantly rode across the line of one of Andy's putts. A couple of holes later, a nasty scene almost arose when an Audi-driving local opened his door and got hit on the knee by my six-iron shot (he thought twice about protesting after the Baron – real name Paul – shot him a ‘Yeah, and what of it?' look). Scott, who'd played in the event in 2004, recalled a heated argument developing after one of his playing partners shanked his ball onto a nearby pub table, knocking over three full pints of lager. And I got a bit nervous when a passing wino muttered something about ‘golf twats' to Malcolm's bagman – a high-spirited hip-hop-loving American who called himself the Mack Daddy Caddy and claimed to be writing four books about his club-carrying experiences on the PGA Tour.

Even in the most raucous, drunken moments of my youth, I had never played golf in such chaotic circumstances. If I wasn't trying to maintain my concentration as the Mack Daddy Caddy shouted ‘The Squid!' at me, I was climbing over a wall to retrieve my ball from a
car
park, or turning around to get a club off Thom, only to find he had disappeared into a nearby pub. All year, I'd played the most distracted golf of my life. But now, in what were truly distracting circumstances, I found that the external chaos drowned out its more insidious internal equivalent. With only the extremely severe par system and the travails of my playing partners to go on, it was hard to work out what constituted playing well, but by the final few holes my scoring had improved dramatically. Realising that I could get the best results on the green by forsaking my putter for my six-iron, I racked up four birdies on the homeward nine. To add to the excitement, a group of eighty or so spectators had built up around my four-ball, beating my previous biggest gallery (at Hollinwell) by at least sixty heads. After a birdie chip-in from the kerbside, I acknowledged the cheers, thanked Thom and, as five or six complete strangers patted me on the back, threw my ball triumphantly into a nearby car park.

I walked over to the large blackboard leaderboard next to the Tabernacle and searched for my name. ‘Panicked Squid,' it said. ‘14.'

Fourteen what? I wondered.

A conversation with two men with walkie-talkies standing next to the leaderboard elicited the information that fourteen, in this case, meant ‘over par'. It didn't sound good, by normal golfing standards, but par here was what Peter Alliss would call ‘a tough mistress' – particularly on the hole where you had to carry a twelve-storey apartment block in order to reach the green in two. A further scan of the board told me that most other
players
who had finished had not fared any better than me.
¹⁰
Of those still out on the course, only two players seemed to be anywhere near my score: Lucky Hands, at plus twelve, and Mike Denardo, at plus fourteen.

‘So you're in second place,' said Thom, appearing beside me. ‘Fucking hell! We're going to win!' I was touched that he was so excited, and also that, in the six hours we had been together, his caddyspeak had come on so far that he now used the word ‘we' when referring to his player's good fortunes – I like to think that, in true caddy fashion, this would have reverted to ‘he' during my next bad round. It seemed the least I could do was to buy him a whisky and a baguette for his pains.

‘I wouldn't worry about the whisky. I've got these,' he said, producing eight or nine balls from his pockets. ‘They're special ones with stickers on. I picked them up earlier. You hand them in and you get a free drink.' He gave me three, which I thought was very magnanimous for a man who'd been forced to spend the last several hours sporting a bag with the phrase ‘PANICKED SQUID' on it. I gave him two back.

As I supped on what would regrettably be my second and last drink of the day, I began to rue bringing the car with me. I was so used to fleeing golf tournaments in disgust at my bad play, it hadn't occurred to me that I might want to bask in the aftermath of this one. Twenty minutes later, Paul ‘Lucky Hands' Creasey arrived in the doorway. He looked annoyingly cheerful.

‘That is probably the most free I've felt playing golf,' he said.

I told him that I knew what he meant, but my eyes asked him a question all of their own.

‘Oh, don't worry,' he said. ‘You beat me. I finished twenty over.'

Ten minutes later, the news came in: the final result was a tie between Denardo and me at fourteen over par. I asked a few people for information about my new sporting nemesis, but mainly elicited shrugs. All I could glean was that he was Canadian, that he had played golf before, and that he looked not unlike the TV mind-control expert Derren Brown. None of this information filled me with hope for a sudden-death play-off. That is, if there was going to be a sudden-death play-off.

‘No, we don't usually bother,' said Feakes, when I quizzed him on the outcome. ‘We'll probably toss a coin or something. You can share the trophy. Or you could, if the trophy was here – we're still having it designed, actually. Anyway, we've got to hurry, cos it's getting dark and we have to get rid of the winner's podium before they open the streets up again.'

As we waited nervously in the Tabernacle, Thom and I watched footage of the final stages of the Ryder Cup on the TV behind the bar. The closing ceremony – which included a tearful, gluey-haired Darren Clarke, a lady compère with a flesh-coloured mike, and the appearance of two little girls who looked like the dead twins from
The Shining
– would probably have been bizarre with the sound on. With the sound off, it seemed even more so. What was odder still was that normally I watched every minute of the event religiously, but this week I'd
completely
forgotten about it. The only time it crossed my mind was when I received a text message from Simon, who was over in Ireland at the K Club, watching the action live, to say that his dad had been hit on the leg by an errant Sergio Garcia drive. I had to admit that my chances of ever getting that head-to-head battle with Sergio were looking slim now. He was four hundred miles away, his usual mercurial, frustrating self (the deflection from Simon's dad's leg had sent the ball back out into the fairway, enabling him to make a birdie), helping his European teammates to another victory over the Americans. And where was I? Sitting with a drunk postman, after my one good round of the year, at a novelty golf event played with balls that went no further than I could kick an apple. I was no closer to Garcia than I had been at the beginning of the year, but I could honestly say that, at that moment, there was nowhere in the golfing universe I would rather have been.

It seemed to me that the Garcias, the John Dalys, the Seve Ballesteroses were the freak cases. They were the men – and this, perhaps, was where their real conjuring talent lay – who could make the robotic discipline required to play pro golf appear charismatic and explosive. On the whole, though, the people in pro golf who seemed to get the most out of it were the people who beat their own path, just off to the side of the well-trodden one: the Paul Creaseys, the Jeremy Dales, the Ben Witters, the James Days, the Gavin Christies.

But who was to say what golfing happiness was, anyway? Golf is a lonely game, and a player has to find his own fulfilment. For me, that fulfilment was not going to come from conventional tournament play. I might
reapply
for my amateur status, or I might not, and decide to give The Open qualifying one more shot for the hell of it. I might decide to play a bit of golf over the winter, or I might spend it writing instead. I might develop my trick shots, or work on my long driving, or I might just carry on playing in make-believe tournaments against Simon and Scott. My joint victory in the Shoreditch Urban Open might lead to a whole new subsidiary career, or it might not. The point was, I had options, and now felt relaxed enough to explore them without a big question mark chopping away at my brain like a sickle. Not far from where, only a couple of months previously, I'd seen a big door closing on my golfing life, other little ones were opening. And – this was the most surprising thing of all –
it was OK.

It was more than OK. It was exhilarating.

Thom and I had moved towards the podium now. As Jason Bradbury, the event's compère, thanked everyone for their participation, an old golfing worry kicked in like a reflex: the worry of ‘What am I going to say in my speech?', the worry of ‘What am I doing here anyway?' It did not take long to squish it. By the time Bradbury had handed out some auxiliary awards for Most Unusual Shot and Biggest Ladies' Man (winner: the Mack Daddy Caddy) and announced the scores, I felt calm, in my element. Asked to call, I chose heads. ‘Heads it is!' shouted Bradbury. Balls pelted the stage, and Bradbury helped me into the winner's jacket. It was hard to see it in the dark, but I don't imagine that the one that you get for winning the US Masters is anything like as comfortable.