Nice Jumper (29 page)

I was probably the biggest surprise of all, with my ill-fitting clothes, mystifying slogans and insanitary music. Yet, for all my rebellious posturing, I often felt like the only one trying to hold the whole thing together. There was Mousey, too, of course, but he was a permanent fixture in the pro shop by now – a living, breathing, part of the furniture, more than any golfing being you could actually rely on. I was alone, constantly on the phone – convincing, persuading. Just because my golf friends preferred the
Top Forty
to the John Peel radio show, it didn’t mean I was going to relinquish my role as the junior section’s binding permanent element. Even as I was baffling them with obtuse tales of indie revolution and heaving moshpits, I was organizing seventy-two-hole scratch events, desperately striving to persuade my friends to cancel their new lives and keep our gang together.

I’d fallen off the bucking bronco hard this time, but still I tried to scramble back up.

At the end of my final year in the junior section, my fragmenting team finally won the county team championship. After Mousey and I slam-dunked pressure putts on the final green to beat Rushcliffe’s juniors, the five team members drove the trophy back to Cripsley, where we were greeted by Bob Boffinger, Pete Boffinger, Ted Anchor and Scampi, the clubhouse cat. If anyone else noticed or was pleased or proud, they forgot to say so.

We had always seen ourselves as the stars of Cripsley’s wretched sitcom. If we weren’t, we contended, then why on earth would all those adults devote so much energy into the lost cause that was moulding us into gallant young men? Even when we had been burned by golf at its most preposterously pedantic, we had always assumed there would be some profound point there,
somewhere
. Now it was dawning on us that perhaps there wasn’t. For all our bluster and pranks, we were hurt and shocked that our arch enemies didn’t care.

I’d read enough golf books and seen more than enough golf videos to be only too aware of the way it worked. If you were eighteen, and your handicap was no better than it had been when you were sixteen, the odds were that you were never going to be Greg Norman. I’d tried, simultaneously setting my standards too low and too high in all the wrong areas in the
process,
and obviously failed. I was even prepared to admit that it might not have been my destiny to succeed, and that I was out of my element.
But was this really all there was?

If the seventeen-year-old failed golfing prodigy feels like a tiger squeezed into the cage of a kitten, his eighteen-year-old equivalent feels like that same tiger left for dead on the hard shoulder of the motorway. Perhaps that’s too severe a metaphor – we’re talking golfers here, not starving Iranian orphans – but you get my point. As soon as we were old enough to vote, we were old enough not to matter, but, infuriatingly, not quite old enough to command respect. No one told us that there were other jobs to be gained in golf, besides those of world number one or assistant professional slave. Everyone told us that we were wearing the wrong-coloured socks.

We still knew how to mess about, but the knowledge that we would never prove the fogies wrong by winning that first British Open title took the edge off the anarchy somewhat. When we stole a soda water bottle from behind the men-only bar and soaked one another under the disapproving gaze of the Past Captains wall, or hid random items from lost property in the pro shop, we did so with the lacklustre aura of those who know there’s more to life, but aren’t quite ready to admit it.

A new generation of juniors had arrived – nearly all,
Bob
Boffinger reliably informed us, considerably better behaved and less motivated than us. If we didn’t get to know them or teach them in the ways of mischief, it was because we hardly ever saw them. One of the few rebels among them was turfed out of the club after having the misfortune to drive his ball into the same committee member’s trolley two weeks running. When we heard this, we didn’t shout in indignation, or plan our retaliation; we merely nodded and frowned vaguely – a reaction which, a year before, would have been unthinkable.

When we claimed the county team championship, we gave Bob Boffinger his long-deserved recompense for his love, time and patience, but something was missing. It wasn’t that it wasn’t a classic victory. Nor was it that I didn’t contribute to it. You could even say for once that I fulfilled my expectations. And there was certainly nothing wrong with the barbecue at Bob Boffinger’s place later the same night. Yet buried deep at the core of the triumph was the implication that that’s all it was: a triumph. At club level. With your mates. Not a step or a bridge or a kickstart. Not the road to anywhere particular. Not a crusade. Not even a David Byrne concert.

Don’t believe everything you hear about revelations. They don’t always arrive in one big flash at moments of transcendental artistic brilliance or great natural beauty. Mine came in two parts: the first during a
passable
version of a song I’d loved as a kid, the second a year later over a spare rib. As I masticated wistfully, and surveyed my friends – people who were closer than any schoolmates could ever have been, people I loved, people I could feel moving away from me, some of them perhaps for ever, even right now as they said and did familiar things – then and only then did it finally hit me that I never wanted to play golf again.

NO MATTER HOW
deep a part of him his territory has become, a fanatical golfer can never quite prepare himself for the first time he sees his home course at midnight. Beyond the overwhelming darkness and the ensuing transformation of conical ceramic tee markers into genuine health hazards, a more subtle sense of transformation overpowered me as I tramped up Cripsley’s sixth fairway for what I was sure would be the last time: something pristine that the daylight, or the proliferation of ten-tone knitwear that came with it, or maybe just my escalating cynicism, had served to blot out.
This place was beautiful
. OK, so perhaps local ruffians occasionally hopped over the chainlink fence and took a shit in one of the holes, but overlooking that, this was the nearest thing to heaven you could find within the boundaries of the A37 ring road. Being somewhere so familiar yet feeling so illicit – it was like
buying
a ticket to a private view of the inside of my own head.

The weirdest thing was: I was sure that even if I hadn’t been accompanied by two notorious lyricists from Nottingham’s hardcore punk scene, a girl clad almost entirely in tassles, a three-foot-long ghetto blaster and a sandwich bag filled with dope, I would have felt exactly the same.

Covered by a blanket of black silence, it took a while for us to find the precise spot, but my orienteering skills surprised me in this oddly, wrongly exotic place. Unnervingly, my feet seemed to be performing Braille, my subconscious navigating them over and around the hazards – the gorse on the eighth, the stream on the twelfth, that funny little crater on the ninth. A few paces behind me, my friends – Dogan, Ellen and Smelly Jez – did their best to keep up, occasionally tripping over the lip of a bunker, frequently shouting ‘Fore!’ or ‘Birdie!’ or ‘I’ve got a big shaft!’ or one of the other things non-golfers used to shout whilst taking the piss out of my favourite pastime … things that would have annoyed me, not so long ago.

Did they notice how quiet I was? Perhaps – though I don’t imagine they knew the reason we were here, beyond the superficial one that, after five pints of Red Stripe, breaking into your local golf course to smoke a joint and listen to the new Archers of Loaf album seems like a brainwave of history-altering proportions.
I
eyed them through the gloom and found myself struck by the enormity of the fact that not one of them knew what a greensome stableford was. Not one of them had ever felt the compressed rightness of a cleanly dispatched nine-iron. Not one of them had ever been told off by a fellow human being for not calling him ‘Mr Immediate Past Greens Committee Chairman’ or reprimanded by the same human being for wearing a sweater without a shirt collar underneath. I’d known them all for not much more than three months, having met them in the mosh pit at a Dinosaur Jr gig at Rock City. In that time, we’d learned a lot about which bands one another liked without learning much else, or feeling that it was important to. Until now, I’d shielded my golf life from them, referring to it – if at all – like you would refer to a particularly irksome skin complaint that you had left behind for good. They were here not because I wanted to show them my dark past – if I gave them even the remotest hint of the person I’d been a couple of years ago, surely they’d dump me for ever – but because I wanted to prove to them, and myself, that that’s what it was: a past.

Yet, right now, they seemed sort of intrigued.

‘What’s an eagle?’ asked Smelly Jez.

‘It’s a score of two under par for one hole.’

‘And what’s par?’

‘It’s what a good player would be expected to complete the hole in.’

‘So being below par is actually a good thing in golf?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s fucked up, man!’

‘I know. So is golf.’

‘Is golf sort of, like, really boring, Tom?’ asked Ellen.

I gave this one some serious thought. ‘Well, yeah and no.’

‘So that’s why when you see it on the telly, you hardly ever see anyone playing, but you always see the camera focusing on some horse in a field nearby or a fat bloke in the crowd?’

‘Sort of. But … it
can
be really exciting. There are just quite a few pauses in the action.’

On we hiked, looking for the place. Thinking in the kind of black and white terms that only those who locate life-enhancing qualities in the lyrics of Jane’s Addiction can think in, I’d pictured this moment as something momentous and final. But now I was losing sight of exactly what. Perhaps it was just the weed interfering with my sense of purpose. At least, I hoped so.

Maybe it didn’t matter if we didn’t find the exact spot. After all, there were plenty of landmarks on this course that had contributed equally to my metamorphosis from golfing squarepants to world-weary anarchist rebel. Wasn’t it utterly arbitrary to pinpoint only one? Surely the point was in the act itself, the finality of the thing I was going to do when I got there?

Finally, we stopped. I couldn’t remember exactly
where
Ashley’s ball had made contact with Reg Forman’s trolley, all that time ago, but where we stood, a few yards shy of the sixteenth green, seemed near enough – and, even if it wasn’t, it didn’t make any difference. It was Cripsley I was saying goodbye to – as a whole, not a hole. Dogan handed me the practice ball bag, I turned it upside down, and an avalanche of balata raced itself to the ground. Ellen clicked ‘play’ on the ghetto blaster, and for probably the first and only time, insomniac residents of the villas overlooking Cripsley’s most gruelling par five were privy to the high-octane opening chords of The Archers of Loaf’s ‘Web In Front’.

I couldn’t see the reservoir, but I knew it was there, beyond the line of ghostly willows ahead of me. We had the rest of the night, and we were probably going to need it. There were around three hundred balls in total. The ones that didn’t make it to the water would probably wind up on the playing field of Alfred Crown, the local secondary school, where they might be put to use by a budding player, or – more likely – pelted at the class spanner. But I couldn’t afford to worry about that now. The whole point of this exercise was that the concept of destination – destiny itself, even – had to be a thing of the past: my past. I didn’t believe in it any more.

I steered the first ball into an inviting lie with the sole of my driver, and took aim. My friends watched, almost
as
awestruck as they were perplexed. The strike was business-like. The shiny white dot climbed and probed impressively – more impressively, somehow, than it ever could have in daylight – before being sucked up into the Marmitey darkness for ever. It felt good, not seeing it land.

‘Fuckin’ ‘ell!’ said Jez. ‘Why would anyone want to give that up?’

It could end there, if you wanted it to.

It could end with me smashing the last of my practice balls into the great unknown and trudging back home with my flinty mouth and overburdened eyelids to leave big bad golf behind for ever and begin my groovy new life – the one I should have been living all along. I could start editing a fanzine on American lo-fi rock, snag a job writing for the music press, meet endless fascinating people, none of whom will use the phrase, ‘Got your putting boots on today, son!’ or be materialistic or narrow-minded or unaware of art-house cinema. I could keep golf in a seedy little drawer somewhere, stashed away for an ironic day.

You could stop reading here.

You could do that. Or I could give you the more complex version of events: the one that reflects the
frailty
of character (well, mine, anyway), the non-linear nature of life, and the realities of adulthood.

I did intend to leave golf behind for ever, that unearthly hour in the summer of 1993, when I walked home from Cripsley with my new friends, to a dawn chorus of chinking milk bottles. I was snotty enough to think that was not only The End, but A New Beginning. I did start a fanzine, I did get a job as a journalist. I did meet people who couldn’t believe I played golf. I did do all the things I said, kind of.