Authors: Tom Cox
I now know that I am highly likely to relive the sensation of hitting a crisp, high, drawing three-iron over a lake into the heart of an elevated green or sinking a forty-foot putt over a hog’s back green – potentially several times. Whether I will again find six close friends willing to cramp themselves onto the back seat of my hatchback, shout ‘Pylon Lover!’ at mid-afternoon shoppers and wave plastic body parts out of the window is, however, very much in doubt (though don’t think for a minute I don’t live in hope). Unless you’re Michael Schumacher or a sales rep, driving is a duty which dresses itself up as an adventure for a fleeting, elusive moment. But golf, if you genuinely love it, is with you for
life
as an adventure – the exciting bits, the stressful bits, the crap bits, the dangerous bits – whether you like it or not. You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it, and you can’t use the harsh realities of the outside world to devitalize it. Believe me on this one: I speak with the long-suffering air of someone who, as he navigated the final, jagged passage to adulthood, had a bloody good go at doing all three.
I HAD OFTEN
heard about Sunstarling during my stint as golf pariah. Within the social circle surrounding my family, he was a shadowy legend, whose cautionary tale could be viewed as the batik cushion propping up an entire generation’s morals. Although he was often spoken of with affection by my parents and their friends, I never met him, and whether he was fact or fiction remained unclear – as did whether Sunstarling was the name he used when he went to sign on for his dole money – but I felt I knew his story almost as well as I knew my own. In the late sixties, Sunstarling had been Wales’s star junior golfer, with a handicap of 0.4, a set of hand-tailored clubs, a place in the England youth squad, a swing like whipped cream,
1
and the
distinction
of ‘once being bought a drink by Tony Jacklin’. His future as the missing link between Tom Weiskopf and Jack Nicklaus had looked guaranteed until, at eighteen, he’d been invited to the Isle of Wight Rock Festival by a non-golfing friend, the angel of this hippy fairytale. Standing naked in a field absorbing a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo with several thousand young people united by their constipation and overpowering body odour, Sunstarling had experienced his epiphany: from that moment on, he would renounce uptight old golf and its venal mores, and devote his life to ‘getting down with the land’ (whatever that meant) and ‘working on his music’.
I had three main problems with the story. One: it never seemed to end properly – we never found out just what Sunstarling
did
with ‘his music’. Two: nobody ever mentioned who he gave his clubs to. And three: it all sounded a bit smelly.
At the same time, however, a part of me is jealous of Sunstarling. When
my
life-re-evaluating revelation came to
me
, it didn’t come in the form of a Hendrix guitar solo.
I
didn’t see God in the opening chords of The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. I didn’t even get hip in time to bliss out to the Stone Roses at Spike Island. No. When I saw my life change direction in front of my eyes, the future spoke to me through the medium of David Byrne.
David-look-at-me-I’m-so-weird-with-my-strange-jerky-
head
-movements-and-Third-World-rhythms-but-kind-of-safe-with-it Byrne.
David Byrne used to be the lead singer of Talking Heads, the New York group who came out of the New Wave movement and, with 1979’s
Remain In Light
and 1980’s
Fear Of Music
, made two of my favourite albums of all time. In July 1992, however, I was only dimly, reluctantly, aware of this. By July 1992, Talking Heads were long extinct and Byrne had reinvented himself as the kind of curtain-haired, early nineties, sensitive solo artist who exists purely to help ease baby-boomers into musical middle-age and its inexorable co-conspirator, world music. This, I’m slightly ashamed to confess, is The Man Who Changed The Course Of My Life. My First Ever Gig. Which I Saw With My Parents And Their Friends. From A Sitting-Down Vantage Point.
Still, Byrne certainly had been a genius and iconoclast at one point in his career, even if he wasn’t any more. He didn’t interest me because of his kooky syllables or pseudo-Brazilian tunes so much as because he was
playing music, at a louder-than-average volume
, much of which seemed to whisper to me that there was more to life than breaking par in the Midland Youths Championship. The new songs might have been mediocre, but the old ones were like a revelatory trigger to an amnesiac. Hold on: I know every word of this, I thought for the third time, and suddenly I was blinded by the light. Yes, I had actually
liked
music
before
I took up golf, hadn’t I! I
still
liked music, if only I could admit it to myself! It was
good
to be part of a huge group of people who weren’t going to let the fact that they had shot eighty-one/handed their essay in late/had a lousy day at work that day stop them having a good time together! That girl sitting directly in front of me
was
pretty sexy!
Let’s just say David Byrne caught me at a weak moment.
By July 1992, I’d been competing on the amateur golf circuit for four solid months and working in my second stretch as a waiter for three. During this period I’d travelled from one end of the country to the other, signed up for every tournament I could, bled my bank account dry, twanged the patience of the people closest to me, finished in the top ten of two tournaments, snapped the shaft of four clubs over my knee, and won one set of ‘deluxe’ tee pegs. I’d also been forced to endure more easy-listening ambience tapes than I would inflict on my worst enemy, and my weight had dropped from comfortably over ten stone to just under nine (not ideal, since I’m roughly six foot tall). It would be a massive understatement to say that things weren’t progressing fully as well as planned. It would be a massive understatement to say things weren’t progressing a
quarter
as well as planned.
My typical working day would progress as follows:
3.00 a.m. Wake up with jolt from recurring nightmare
involving
last place finish in that day’s tournament.
4.00 a.m. Return to fitful sleep, having finally convinced myself nightmare wasn’t real.
6.30 a.m. Get up and rush to window in order to check trees and bushes for wind strength.
6.31 a.m. Suffer anxiety attack, having deduced that wind is blowing in excess of five miles per hour.
6.45 a.m. Clean clubs covertly with bathroom nailbrush and mum’s face flannel.
7.00 a.m. Watch Fred Couples video and practise positive visualization.
9.00 a.m. Get lost in nondescript Black Country village while searching for tournament venue.
9.25 a.m. Arrive at venue in panic. Suffer second anxiety attack as sky darkens.
9.26 a.m. Scramble over to pro shop to stock up on balls and tee pegs, while simultaneously trying to put on waterproof bottoms.
9.27 a.m. Fall over errant waterproof bottom-leg hole and land face first on putting green to horror of club president.
9.28 a.m. Arrive panting on first tee and meet allotted playing partners for the day, Barry and Roy, both of whom try to conceal distaste at my outmoded equipment.
9.29 a.m. Hit tee shot in what appears to be the perfect direction, only to be told by Roy that I have dunked ball into local sewer.
1.00 p.m. Arrive in clubhouse, having shot fifth worst score in entire field.
1.30 p.m. Stride to first tee for second round, revitalized by complimentary teacakes. Snarl encouragement to myself under breath, only to be given funny look by passing greenkeeper.
3.00 p.m. Decide it’s time to get mean and stop being the course’s ‘bitch’.
3.01 p.m. Hook ball into neighbouring farmland, scaring cows.
5.00 p.m. Begin journey home.
5.02 p.m. Start to philosophize and rationalize mistakes. Use words like ‘concentration’, ‘smooth’, ‘cocooned’, ‘Worksop’ and ‘buttclunk’.
6.45 p.m. Begin waiting shift at local theme pub. Get called ‘lazy student fucker’ by restaurant supervisor.
8.00 p.m. Get into argument over pronunciation of ‘chicken escalopes’ with fat chef.
9.00 p.m. Begin to wonder why there are only two waiting staff catering for forty-two tables. Perceive shedding of final supply of adipose tissue.
9.30 p.m. Accidentally on purpose spill horseradish sauce over strange beardy regular who attempts to befriend me by calling me ‘Tommy’.
10.00 p.m. Begin to go slowly insane to the sound of Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel’s hit duet, ‘Don’t Give Up’.
10.11 p.m. Serve girl from my old school who I used
to
fancy. Ask her what she is doing now. She says A levels. She asks me same question. I say golf, and, well, this, what I’m doing right now. Conversation dies.
10.41 p.m. ‘Don’t Give Up’ rolls around again. Kate and Peter actually feel like they’re doing forward rolls in my brain now, sending me a message. Message seems to be ‘don’t give up’. Submessage seems to be nothing.
11.40 p.m. Stagger home across building site still in bow tie, jeered at by smoking juvenile delinquents, but comforted by fact that I have hidden fat chef’s free supper beneath bar.
12.10 a.m. Lie in bed replaying day’s golf in head: yardages, swings, concentration levels. Everything goes better. I win. Pete and Kate continue to sing. Why?
Had I thrown my eggs so forcefully into one basket that they’d smashed?
One thing was for certain: I was playing out the stereotype of the sporting hero who scrimps and saves and sacrifices and slaves then reaps the rewards on the playing field, with one missing element – the vital, final one. Granted, I still waved artificial limbs out of car windows and made prank phone calls to pizza-delivery companies, but I worked hard on my golf too, particularly in my head. Everything I’d read about the history of the game told me that my story would have a happy ending, but I was starting to get impatient. My handicap hung in limbo: two one week, three the next.
Terrific
by most standards, but somewhat lacklustre by the constricted, fanatical ones I’d set for myself. With no school or college to bolster me and the bemused gaze of my parents turning more sceptical with every tournament I botched, golf defined me to an extent that it never had before – which would have been fine, had I been playing it well or feeling comfortable within its pedantic, conservative social infrastructure. Unfortunately, I was doing neither, and it was starting to scare me. The question ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ was only just below the surface, tempting me to abandon my childish vanity and look it straight in the face.
I arrived in July at the Beau Desert Stag tournament in Staffordshire knowing that it was one of my favourite competitions of the year, at one of the most testing courses in the Midlands, and that even if I played brilliantly in it, I’d still be thinking about all the opportunities, money and energy I’d wasted earlier in the year. In that frame of mind, something had to snap, but for once it wasn’t the shaft of my five-iron. I forget my score now, perhaps because it was the first one that year that I didn’t record on my wallchart, but I’m almost certain that on any other day I could have beaten it blindfolded, with a golf bag full of garden hoes and one hand tied behind my back.
By the eleventh hole of the afternoon round, I’d reached the single lowest point of my golfing existence.
My
tee shot had been ostensibly a thing of utmost splendour, sailing over a ridge into what I’d presumed would be a scrumptious lie in the middle of the fairway, but I’d skipped down the hill only to find it nestling in the tracks of some abstruse burrowing animal – an elephant, by the looks of things. When this sort of thing happens on TV, a long delay ensues as the professional in question calls in a referee from the opposite side of the course, who leafs through his local rules book until he happens upon Rule 593.2, ‘Ball buried in woolly mammoth shit’, at which point he allows the pro to remove his missile and drop it without penalty onto some more verdant terrain a couple of yards away. For an amateur like me, however, there was no such relief.
I peered ahead, beyond a channel of heather, over a cavernous bunker, to the flagstick, which, from what I could work out from my yardage chart, was located somewhere in North Kenya. The most depressing aspect wasn’t the impending task’s gruelling nature, but its devastating lack of significance. Even if I pulled it off, my playing partners, Barry and Roy, would still think I was just another ploddingly decent low handicap golfer who couldn’t handle the pressure of tournament play. I’d still go to bed that night with a reef knot in my stomach and a slow-motion replay of my round on repeat play in my head. My dad, who was walking round the course watching me, would still look
at
me in that way that simultaneously said, ‘Hard luck,’ and ‘How much longer?’
Then it hit me. This didn’t need to be a dead end. There was
one
way of changing this. If I just picked my ball up, shook hands with my playing partners, walked peacefully back to the car and stopped worrying about tomorrow, everything would be OK. Sure, it would be an irresponsible act, contravening every rule of decorum and conduct that had been drilled into us by our superiors, but what if I gave it a go?
Could it make me feel any worse?