Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (10 page)

One of the many enduring joys of playing with Simon and Scott is witnessing their ever-more creative line in swearing, as their rounds falter. In Scott's case, in particular, my respectful desire to see a mild-mannered friend play well is all too often countermanded by my desire to be entertained by a tragicomic drama of profane brilliance. Watching as he gets himself into another fine mess in a bunker was, I feel, a little like witnessing my own private episode of Laurel and Hardy, with Scott as a much skinnier, curly-haired Hardy, and his sand-iron as Laurel. A few weeks ago, before the tournament, I'd seen him worry terribly after breaking a cafetière in my kitchen, and with this in mind I'd been slightly concerned
about
the effect the tricky back nine at the Masters might have on his nerves. Today, however, he had brought with him what an American commentary team might have called his A-game. After holing a spectacular bunker shot for birdie on the seventeenth and securing his par on the eighteenth, it was clear that, at four under par, he was somewhere close to the lead, if not in it. A tense wait followed, with Scott, Ricky, Simon and me nursing bottles of Budweiser while the scores were totted up. As, in a voice evocative of a self-deprecating Scottish woodland animal, Scott repeated the phrase, ‘I won't have won, you know,' you would have had to have been made out of reinforced steel not to share his excitement.

Sadly, he was right to be pessimistic. I have no idea what caused twelve players to end up on four under par in the Cabbage Patch Masters. Drunkenness? Cheating? Laziness? A practical joke? Whatever the case, at three beers past my best, and not particularly relishing the prospect of bringing my iffy maths skills out of hibernation in such a raucous environment, I wasn't going to be the one to stand up and demand a recount. My heart, however, went out to Scott.

Everyone loves a play-off in golf.
⁵
On the whole, ‘playoff' – whether the five-hole kind employed to decide The Open, or the more universal sudden-death version – means the most extreme, nerve-biting thrills available to a sport fan. It means a pumped-up Greg Norman
throwing
away the 1989 Open by driving into a bunker he didn't think he could reach. It means ‘We apologise to viewers expecting to see the director's cut of
Amélie
, but due to extended coverage of the golf, the film has been cancelled, and will be shown at a later date.' It means Peter Alliss almost losing it and, for the 368th time in his commentary career, talking about the prospect of ‘a cavalry charge down the first extra hole'.

Of course, you never see anything that
genuinely
resembles a cavalry charge in televised golf. That would be far too undignified. In the more crowded play-offs – the 2002 Open's, for example, featuring Steve Elkington, Ernie Els, Thomas Levet and Stuart Appleby – the players tend to be split into two separate groups. There was no such faffing around at the Cabbage Patch Masters.

If you haven't seen twelve inebriated men playing a golf hole at the same time, let me tell you, it's a fearsome sight – the kind of thing that, if caught on tape and mailed surreptitiously to the R&A, could give the coronary ward of St Andrews Hospital a busy night. Here, striking out in unison, in dangerously close proximity to one another, was every swing in the book (but not, almost certainly, in the textbook). Long swings, stubby swings, exuberant swings, fearful swings, swings that looked as if they were digging for rare coins. Peering through the swaying, jeering crowd in the failing light, it was often hard to spot Scott's signature action – an action that always seems to say, ‘There is an invisible precipice six inches ahead of me, and if I follow through properly, I may tumble into the deathly, nettle-speckled chasm beyond it' – but it was apparent, as others fell by the wayside, that he was hanging in there. By the time the skirmish reached
the
fifth play-off hole, I'd offered my caddying services – I'm sure Scott didn't need any help carrying the three clubs he'd brought out with him, but I felt I could at least offer a calming word or two and some advice on Biddenden's trickier putts – and it had become a two-horse race. The coveted first prize (I made a note to myself: find out what the first prize was) could only go either to Scott, or to a Leeds United supporter called David with a rowdy fanbase and a swing that was beginning to show its mechanical shortcomings. With both players having executed their second shots, and Scott on the green and David ten yards left of it, the signs were good. The pressure doubled for my man, however, after David chipped to within two inches of the flag. Scott hit a poor first putt, and was faced with a three-footer which he needed to hole to keep the tournament alive.

When reading the contours of a green, it's important to get down as close to the putting surface as possible. Normally, this dictates a squatting position, since to flatten one's body against the green is considered uncouth. But this was an exceptional situation. As Scott took a couple of tentative practice strokes, I pressed my stomach to the grass and eyed every nuance of the slope.

‘Get the fuck up off the grass, Coxy, you hairy twat,' shouted one of the crowd.

I turned to Scott. ‘Left lip. Firm,' I said.

I walked away and rejoined Simon at the side of the green. Twenty yards away I spotted Andrew Seibert, who like the other two pros in the field had taken a back seat in the day's action. I tried to acknowledge him, but he was too wrapped up in the moment – all Hooters-related thoughts momentarily forgotten.

Scott crouched over the ball, took one practice stroke, then set it on its way. It started left, and stayed left, blowing a kiss at the hole on its journey past. As a dozen Leeds supporters charged onto the green and held their man aloft, Simon and I watched as ours turned to the heavens with a familiar expression. It was the same expression we'd seen not long ago, hovering above my deceased cafetière. The kind of expression that a million middle-aged mums would want to take home and bake something for.

Afterwards, we returned to ‘the tented village' (i.e. the canopy covering the DJ booth and the area stretching four or five feet beyond it), where I was immediately accosted by Jim, a friend of a friend, and one of the more boisterous members of the crowd. When I'd first met him three years ago he'd been a bit dismissive about golf, but now, he told me, he was blowing £100 a week on proper lessons and it was his new favourite sport. ‘All my footie mates are playing it,' he'd told me earlier.

‘But what about you?' he asked. ‘I thought you were supposed to be good. Shouldn't you have won this thing easily?'

‘Well,' I said, ‘it's not that simple when people have high handicaps and you're p …'

‘Sounds like a crap excuse to me!' he interrupted. A bit of drool had escaped from his mouth, and was working its way down his chin. Within a matter of seconds, it would land on one of his old school Adidas trainers. ‘What did you score?'

‘I think I was seven over par altogether.'

‘That's bloody shit, innit!'

Before I could answer, he turned and lurched in the
direction
of the barbecue, where there were some more interesting people to talk to – many of whom were beginning a singalong of the popular football-themed hit, ‘Here We Go'.

By this point in my golfing life, I was accustomed to having vaguely unpleasant experiences in the aftermath of a disappointing round. Over the years I'd been told to tuck my shirt in, informed that my ‘training footwear' (i.e. a pair of undramatic brown leather Velcro-strapped shoes from the Next sale) was not welcome in the Men Only Bar; I'd even had a man take me aside for ‘a quiet word' and tell me that the Handicap Chairman at my old club believed the ‘disgusting' golf book I had written about my misspent adolescence ‘shouldn't have been allowed' – but never once had I been told that the round I had just played had been ‘bloody shit'.

That's the thing about golf, at its most conventional level: it might dress like a complete tool and possess the political and social outlook of a 1982
Daily Express
headline, but it always respects a man's sporting dignity. Maybe today I was seeing the new face of the game: not so picky when it came to dress codes and staying quiet while the other bloke took his address, but a real, boorish stickler when it came to
competing like a man.

Did I like it? I thought so, but I wasn't completely sure. What I did know was that the SSG was sliding away from my initial vision of a quiet get-together with an emphasis on sexual equality,
⁶
lawless attire and
competitive
high jinks. But then, perhaps I'd felt that from the moment I'd founded it. Every anti-establishment golfer had their own ideas about what constitutes a satisfactory break from the staid golfing norm and, as a median of those ideas, the first alternative Masters could be judged a success.

As Renton Laidlaw says in
The Best Shots of the Masters
, ‘From small beginnings, great things are born.' It's a fairly vacuous statement, when you think about it – from small beginnings a lot of completely inane small things are born too. On a brighter note, though, you have to ask yourself just how many of those small, inane things allow you to play golf with your shirt untucked, shout a lot, and change your shoes in the course car park without fear of getting a bollocking.

1
What exactly is a ‘swing incubator'?

2
Used to acknowledge a putt that miraculously goes straight over the hole without dropping. Or, in the case of my former playing partner, Ernie ‘The Luck's Not With Me Today' Wilton, a putt that misses the hole by seven feet, never remotely looking as if it might drop.

3
The Hooters Tour's similarly sized rival tour – presumably for the more serious-minded struggling pro.

4
It would be interesting to find out exactly how many pitch-and-putt holes in Britain played between two hills are called ‘Dolly Parton' – I'd be willing to bet the number is in triple figures.

5
The possible exception being the eighteen-hole kind used to decide the US Open, which always seems blighted by the special kind of downbeat atmosphere only otherwise experienced after a social gaffe at an inter-village bowls match.

6
Despite several beseeching emails and phone calls, and a plea in the
Independent
newspaper, the Cabbage Patch Masters included only two female competitors.

‘IT'S NOT HOW
, it's how many,' is one of golf's most commonly used phrases. The point being that you can play sophisticated three-A-level golf from tee to green, make it look as fetching as possible, but what ultimately counts is the score, and nothing else. An ugly birdie is still, in the end, a birdie.

My feelings on this issue have always been: fair point, but as a sportsman, does one not have at least some duty to crowd-please? As long as I've loved golf, I've always loved the players who take a stadium-rock attitude out onto the course. The sporting accountants who grind out their scores with dollar signs for eyes – the Bernhard Langers, the Nick Faldos, the Padraig Harringtons,
¹
the Tom Kites – have always held negligible interest for me. I'm not all that fussed about the plodding classicists either: the Luke Donalds, the Jack Nicklauses, the Jeff Maggerts. What I want out of my pro golfers are very specific requirements:

1. The ability to play miraculous escape shots (yet not in a way that could fall under the unattractive heading ‘Scrambling').
   
2. A classic swing (but one that works in a natural, flowing way, rather than a join-the-dots way).
   
3. The capacity to hit the ball vast distances and to be always close to, if not at, the top of the driving stats (but always with an ultimate sense of having more firepower in reserve).
   
4. The power to make vast numbers of birdies and eagles in a row (but without ever looking as if putting could be described as one of your strong points).
   
5. A constant, lingering feeling of unfulfilled promise (but with the odd, heroic, against-all-odds victory thrown in).
   

Am I asking too much? Maybe. Does all this make me the golfing equivalent of an aesthetic fascist? Perhaps. It also makes for frequent heartbreak as an armchair golf fan, and probably goes some way to explaining why my favourite five golfers ever – Angel Cabrera, Eduardo Romero, Fred Couples, John Daly and Sergio Garcia – have amassed, at the time of writing, the piddling total of four major championships between them.

So, now
I
was a pro, was I really expecting the same swashbuckling standards of myself? Well, sort of. In all my dreams about playing professional golf, I'd always been less interested in the victories and the scores I would shoot to secure them, and more interested in the artful shots I would perform along the way. Since my life as a pro so far only amounted to two and a half holes of tournament play and an eighteen-hole pitch-and-putt
tournament
, it was probably too early for an attitude autopsy, but I had already noticed a significant difference in my approach to that of the pros I had met – something about it that was a little less … mathematical. I had imagined that ‘It's not how, it's how many' was something I would leave behind upon leaving amateur golf, along with rants about extended tee times on Ladies' Day and snide comments about my untucked shirt. It was an ugly, mustn't-grumble kind of phrase that I associated mainly with Roy-ish types who liked to kid themselves that their manifold golfing failings – e.g. inability to hit the ball more than 198 yards, propensity to swing their sand wedge as if involved in major garden-clearing project – did not matter in the grand scheme of things. But, slightly surprisingly, pros said it too.

In the professional golf world, though, the INHIHM mantra takes on a much more serious meaning. Here, in a kill-or-go-broke environment, one could not afford to put style first. The priority was doing whatever it took to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Pros were
very
interested in ‘how many'. I, on the other hand, remained a great advocate of ‘how'. When I'd come away from the Cabbage Patch Masters, what stuck with me and pleased me was not the birdie I'd made on the twelfth hole (reasonably struck wedge to fifteen feet, pretty good putt) but the sumptuously struck tee shot on the following hole: the one that felt like liquid velvet and flew the green by twenty yards. Similarly, if I hadn't quite revelled in my drive so much on the second hole at Stoke-by-Nayland, maybe I would have been able to get on with the more important business that followed: hitting the green, two-putting for a bread-and-butter par,
playing
the right ball … that kind of thing. Even in the better practice rounds I'd played at Diss, my memory of my scores had quickly drifted away (a 71 here, a 74 there, or was it a 73?) as I'd stewed happily in the shots that had felt nicest. I rarely worried that these shots were often the ones that had left me in the most difficult predicament.