Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (12 page)

‘It's quite a nice evening out there,' Edie would say, as I theorised on the way that Buffy and Angel could never be truly together in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and why it was a metaphor for the way you could never play a perfect eighteen holes, and would never ultimately want to. ‘Why don't you nip down to the club and work on your long irons? Take your time. No hurry to be back here at all. Maybe pop into the driving range on the way back. While you're at it.'

I probably
was
spending a little too much time indoors. One major indication was that I'd begun to succumb to a deadly strain of Golfcommentaryitis P72. Telltale symptoms included finding myself staring wistfully at squabbling ducks and saying, ‘Steady on now, steady on,' in a half-senile granddad voice; suddenly referring to people on TV whom I had never met by their complete names (e.g. ‘Jonathan Adam Belushi, you do crack me up!'); overusing the phrase ‘Cor blimey O'Reilly'; and throwing screwed up bits of paper at dustbins, missing, then discussing where the missile ‘finished' and how ‘You just can't legislate for that.'

There are plenty of good things to be said for an indoor golfing life – even if it does subject you to a lifetime's worth of Muzak and make you talk like a human cardigan. With a truly grotty spring churlishly following one of the mushiest winters in recent East Anglian memory, I was
glad
of such time-honoured living-room classics as Wifey Foot,
⁴
Coffee Shotty,
⁵
Curly Matt Ball
⁶
and, on the computerised side of things, Mario Golf.
⁷
I was also glad to have the chance to catch up on my golf-movie watching.

In truth, most golf movies are a bit like most rounds of golf: they have their great moments, and they have their embarrassing moments, but they never quite get within reach of perfection. It's as if golf's natural up-down pattern is so all-pervading, it can't help invade the quality of its fiction, too. I've probably watched
Caddyshack
– frequently proclaimed as the greatest ever golf movie – almost as many times in my adult life as I've bought new shoes, but even I would be forced to
admit
that, without the bits featuring Chevy Chase (that's Cornelius Crane Chase to you, Golfcommentaryitis sufferer) and Bill Murray, its ‘Hey, you old squares – loosen up and dance!' humour would be as badly dated as a Tupperware party.
Happy Gilmore
, its spiritual descendant, is more consistent, but is marred by an underlying suggestion that life isn't about golf at all (arguably true), but actually about finding a lover who resembles Anthea Turner (almost certainly untrue).
Tin Cup
has its gnarled charm, and its line ‘You can't ask for advice about the woman you're trying to hose from the woman you're trying to hose' is probably one that will stay with me into my dotage, but it's spoiled by all those cruddy bar songs about double bogeys, and Kevin Costner overdoing the rough'n'ready shtick. Then there's the more gravitas-heavy
The Legend of Bagger Vance
and
The Bobby Jones Story.
I could just about excuse Matt Damon's chronically bent left arm on his backswing in the former, but did anyone really ever talk like this, even in the golfing American South of the early twentieth century? To watch these two swollen monuments to the age of the plus four and the necktie-constricted swing in the same day is to slip into an alternative dimension, where it's hard not to find yourself wanting to accompany even the most mundane acts with inflated, gentlemanly dialogue. For example:

Edie: ‘Oh, that's nice, Tom. You've made me a cup of tea.'

Me: ‘Congratulating me for making that tea, missy, is like congratulating me for not robbing the local branch of Nat West. You call it good honest tea, but
the
truth is, I would not know how to make tea any other way.'

That said, there's a surprising amount a budding pro can learn from fairway-based cinema. I liked Will Smith's advice to Matt Damon in
Bagger Vance
about good golf being all about learning how to ‘stop thinking without falling asleep'. And while the bit in
Caddyshack
where Chevy Chase gives his caddy a lesson by blindfolding him and telling him to ‘Be the ball' is highly amusing, his advice can in fact be seriously useful, if carried out in the correct way. I didn't much fancy venturing out onto the practice putting green at Diss with a scarf over my eyes,
⁸
but I found that the technique improved my feel for mid-length living-room-carpet putts no end. That ‘Be the ball' thought, meanwhile? Dynamite. It worked like a charm for me at the driving range, anyway – although that may have had something to do with the fact that it had rained for eight days straight, keeping me off the course, and by that time my brain was so accustomed to hitting range balls that it probably
had
begun to believe that it was a small, white, dimpled object with ‘STOLEN FROM DISS DRIVING RANGE' stamped on it in big green letters.

Perhaps the moment that I fully realised I'd overdosed on the many varieties of indoor golf training, however, was when I found myself watching the Golf Channel.

In theory, the Golf Channel should have been a Godsend to someone like me, who'd once been the proud owner of more than three hundred home-taped golf videos: a twenty-four-hour channel, all about golf. But I'd always been a bit suspicious of it. There isn't an important golf tournament these days that you can't absorb via Sky Sports or Setanta or the BBC, so what could it have to offer, I wondered, other than lots of fake walnut wood-panelling, oodles of instruction, and adverts for weirdly shaped plastic things that are supposed to turn you into Phil Mickelson when you attach them to your arms? The answer turned out to be a tough yet necessary stage in my golfing development, a sort of golf viewer's boot camp.

‘Sure,' the Golf Channel said to me, ‘you think you're obsessed, but are you obsessed enough to watch thirty minutes of presenter Megan West's bright pink blouse when all you're getting in return is a slightly bland interview with the winner of the 1997 Buick Invitational?'

‘Fine,' it said to me, ‘you think you're tough, but are you tough enough to stick out the ninety-minute coverage of self-congratulatory speeches at the Golf Hall of Fame and stay calm, even though you feel that if you hear it said one more time that “Golf is now a global game” your head will explode?'

There are four stages that a mere mortal goes through
when
subjecting himself to an initial overdose of the Golf Channel. First, there's Denial. Watching the adverts, the profile of a typical Golf Channel viewer emerges. He is male, in his forties, has experienced significant sun damage, drives an Audi, and holidays in Spain and Portugal. When he sees America in his head, he sees Florida and some other indistinct bits of land surrounding it. He flies business class, uses American Express, is preternaturally impressed by gadgets, and all the women in his universe are blonde.

‘This is not me!' I fumed, as Stage Two, Rage, set in.

Then came Stage Three, Stupefaction. ‘Hmm. This Dave Pelz bloke is all right,' I found myself thinking as the short-game guru clipped yet another neat wedge shot onto one of the greens of his Colorado hideaway. As his strangely bland and scientific way of speaking hypnotised me into a false sense of security, I even began to appreciate his unusually roomy slacks.

Finally, Stage Four, Acceptance, set in. ‘Now I come to think of it, perhaps the living room
could
do with a bit more walnut,' I said to myself as I watched former Masters champion Ben Crenshaw make a speech about some new course that was going to save the world's orphans (he didn't actually mention orphans, but it was obvious from his tone that he was talking about them). ‘Perhaps a pewter figurine of a 1930s caddie, too? A couple of carriage lamps? And maybe a few framed, sexual-innuendo-based cartoons, depicting women in bunkers in a state of undress?' If I'd thought I was in the golf zone the previous July, when I'd worn a groove in the sofa from watching seven hours of The Open
without
moving, I now realised that I had been nothing but a naïve pretender.

Was any of this helping my game? I hoped so, and if not, it was at least helping me to brush up on my technobabble and prepare me for the furthest excesses of golfiness that the pro scene had to offer. I was also making some headway at the driving range, working on what James called ‘getting into a strict drill at address' (‘You need to address the ball in exactly the same way every time,' he'd said, ‘because then, when the pressure's on, your routine will stand up, and you'll go onto autopilot'), but I wasn't quite managing to imbue my practice routines with the discipline I'd promised myself. One only has to look at the entries in my golf diary for this period to see how easily I was allowing myself to be distracted.

April 19th

Two hours' practice at Diss. Swing thought for the day: ‘Maintain the Position'. Placed my practice-ball bag fifty yards ahead of me to use as a target, with the intention of working on my short pitch shots. Realised, after ten minutes, that I'd forgotten I was aiming at it, and had instead been blasting away to several entirely haphazard points 130 yards in the distance. Went to retrieve a ball from trees to left of practice ground, but did not realise club committee had recently installed barbed wire at shin level. Large purple bruise, with some bleeding. Checked trousers ripped. Will probably still wear them, though, since it's not often you find a fit like that for a tenner in the Top Man sale. Saw that dog again in the car park – the one that nobody seems
to
know who owns – and it tried to get in the car with me.

April 20th

Just an hour at Diss today. Good to see so many kids at the club – makes a change from the last place, where the ‘Junior Organiser Needed' notice stayed up in the locker room so long it had almost gone yellow. More wedge play and a few seven-irons. Worked on James's address routine. Decided to go for ‘Look at target, do a waggle, address the ball, thump it,' but got confused after ten minutes and started doing ‘Address, target, waggle, thump' instead. It worked better, somehow, but I returned to ‘Target, waggle, address, thump' on the basis that its acronym – TWAT – is more memorable. Nice juicy divots, owing to rain, but plenty of mud – and at one point a pebble – splashing up into my eye. Is that Ben Hogan ball in my practice bag that goes 40 per cent the distance of my other balls really the same one I used in the 1991 Taylor Cup at Cripsley? Surely not. Swing thought for the day: ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?'

April 21st

More rain. Stomach bug. Stayed in and rewatched my old
Seve: A Study of the Ballesteros Legend
video. Had totally forgotten it had Leroy Gomez and Santa Esmeralda's ace disco cover of ‘Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' on its soundtrack: kind of makes up for Sandy Gall's presenting skills and Tony Jacklin's use of the word ‘delish' to describe a good
shot
. Broke off after twenty minutes to dig out the album. Swing thought for the day:
‘Eau de Golf'
.
⁹

April 22nd

More rain, intermittent. Wonder if they still make those crystal pouches that warm up when you pour hot water in them and that you can put in those big furry plastic mittens between shots. Come to think of it, wonder if they still make those big furry plastic mittens. Must do some chipping practice soon. Decided to head over to the practice green but turned back after I spotted that bloke who always tries to get me to talk about cricket even though I drop lots of subtle hints about not being interested. Opted for driving range instead. Three teenagers in tracksuits stopped behind me while I was driving the ball almost over the back fence and said ‘Woi!' and ‘Fuckin' hell!' Pretended to be too professionally ensconced in my routine to notice. Couldn't decide what was more gratifying: that the word ‘Woi!' – a provincial, slightly backwards version of ‘Wow!' used by my friends and me when I was growing up – is still in circulation, or their amazement at my long hitting. Swing thought for the day: ‘Oily'.

The weather had been bad for weeks, but I had only myself to blame for my lack of discipline in practice. It was that aesthetic stubborness again. Ridiculous as it might have seemed, coming from someone who hadn't had a sub-par round in getting on for a year, I couldn't seem to shake it. An innate feature of all my loose-cannon pro fantasies had been that I would be the kind of player in whose direction pundits would make harrumphing noises with regard to his lack of practice and unfulfilled promise, yet marvel at his natural rhythm and moments of mercurial brilliance. Yes, when I came back from the Cabbage Patch Masters and shanked eight chips in a row on the practice ground, I
should
have made myself stand there until I sorted the problem out, but the thought of the driving range, with its whooping teenagers and easily impressed pensioners, was just too tempting. It also seemed, in a way, truer to the long-held idea at the heart of my pro mission: that this was only worth doing if I did it in the most flamboyant, enjoyable way possible.

I had a suspicion, though, that at some point soon my attitude was going to come back and bite me. With the weather still distinctly wintry, I was happy to go to the Cabbage Patch Masters and be taken aside and told by the editor of
Golf Monthly
in reverential tones that I had ‘a really lovely swing'. I liked visiting Urban Golf and being informed by Owen, one of James's co-workers, that my action resembled that of Ian Baker-Finch, the 1991 Open champion. Better still, I liked being told that ‘It's not a golf writer's swing, that's for sure.' Nonetheless, pretty soon I was going to have to start putting a caption to the picture. A caption, preferably, that read, ‘Cox
currently
stands at a fluent six under par, yet he barely seems to have got into second gear.'