Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (15 page)

As a boy, Westwood played his golf at Worksop, a neighbouring course to Hollinwell, not dissimilar in character. For a short time in the early nineties the two of us had been teammates on the Nottinghamshire junior side, but I'd always been a bit too intimidated to get to know him. The grim, gritty spirit of north Nottinghamshire mining country ran through his sporting veins. Like most good north Nottinghamshire players, he was big and immoveable-looking, particularly in the posterior and head, and had an odd way of nodding at the ball, as if in dogged self-encouragement, upon initiating his downswing. He always looked, even at his most crestfallen, like the kind of dependable competitor who'd happily sell his teeth for a birdie.
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There would be no regional or local qualifying for Lee this year. As a member of the world rankings top fifty, his
place
at Hoylake was already assured. Naturally I hoped that the two of us might get paired together in the third round when, as we vied for a place in the hallowed final group with Tiger on Sunday, we'd josh about old times and compare experiences as former winners of the Lindrick Junior Open. Just in case that didn't happen, though, I needed a back-up plan, as I felt it was an important part of my rookie year to compare notes with a man who in many ways was a grown-up, parallel-universe version of Teenage Golf Me. Pro-am day at the British Masters – a tournament that's never quite been as prestigious as it's promised to be, but nonetheless remains an important part of the European Tour calendar – seemed to be the perfect opportunity. Lee, I was informed, would be in a relaxed frame of mind. Maybe, I speculated, I might even be able to tap him up for a lesson.

‘You'll get ten minutes, and that's all,' said David Brooks when I called him from my mobile upon my arrival at the Belfry, the British Masters venue.

I was beginning to doubt whether I'd chosen the right route to Westwood. Because Brooks had extended the invite to the Morson event to me, and also happened to be Westwood's manager, I'd decided to arrange our meeting through him. Yet a simple call to Bob Boffinger, my old club's former junior organiser, who still shared many mutual acquaintances with Westwood, might have resulted in a less potentially fraught encounter. Nonetheless, I couldn't complain. I was at a tournament that featured nearly all the stars of European golf (my nemesis Sergio was the one distinguished absence), I had an access-all-areas badge, and the sun was out. I
got
out of the car, stretched my legs and let out a satisfying yawn. Immediately, I spotted a grey-haired man. He was scratching his head, and his eyes, while notable for their deep unshakeable wisdom, looked disorientated. I recognised him as Dave Musgrove, one of the legends of the caddying world.

I'd never met Dave before, but I'd spent the first decade of my life living two miles from him, and had watched him countless times on TV, bent double beneath sporting luggage almost as big as him. Now retired, he'd been one of the most sought-after caddies in the business, having won major championships with Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle and Lee Janzen. When I was having a revelatory near out-of-body experience watching my first US Masters in 1988, Dave was there at Augusta, giving Lyle the perfect yardage for the unforgettable seventy-second-hole bunker shot that set up his winning birdie. I'd been told by golfing peers that there was no man alive with better insights into the pro game.

I introduced myself. Dave said he was looking for a friend's car, where he was supposed to deposit some books that he planned to sell later.

‘I'm damned if I can find it,' he muttered. ‘They all look the bloomin' same.'

I looked around. If someone (other than me) had decided to stray from the norm and
not
drive a BMW 7 Series, they had obviously parked it at least two hundred rows away from where we stood. My miniature, dented Toyota was used to hanging out in car parks where every other vehicle cost more than itself; a car park where every other vehicle's
hubcaps
cost more than it, though? That was a new one.

After caddying for very nearly the whole of his walking life, Dave hadn't quite grasped the idea of retirement. He was here this week, a day early, to scout out the course for his employer, Gary Evans. Was he going to The Open? ‘All depends if my man makes it.' Evans, a player whose up-and-down form had established him over the years at a level just above ‘journeyman', had come spectacularly close to winning the 2002 Open at Muirfield, but this year he would have to battle it out with the baseball-capped masses in the qualifying rounds. I told Dave that I was scheduled to play at Hollinwell.

‘That's where I started when I was a kid, me'oad,' he said. ‘When I was ten. Used to get paid a shilling a round. Still bloomin' love it. Always will.'

We compared notes on growing up in the north-east Midlands. Did I live near the pit when I lived in Brinsley, Dave wanted to know. Yes, I built a den in the woods next to it, just before they closed it down. He said he'd built a den in the exact same place, three decades earlier. Few regions do hard-faced taciturnity quite as well as the one stretching from D.H. Lawrence's birthplace to the Yorkshire border, but Dave was the most accommodating person I'd met on the pro scene, if not on the golf scene as a whole. He was also the first person I'd met for sixteen years who used the phrase ‘me'oad' in the place of ‘mate'.

He invited me over to the range, where we sat behind five teenage boys, all in matching J. Lindeberg belts and hats, and tried to get a view of the long-hitting, lazy-swinging Argentinian Angel Cabrera. Dave said that although he had a pass to go behind the ropes, he
preferred
to take a back seat unless he needed to be with his player.

‘All this has changed so much in the last twenty years, me'oad,' he said. ‘You get all these cling-ons now. In the old days it just used to be a player, a caddy and maybe his coach. Now you can't turn up unless you've got your sports psychologist, your physical trainer, your dietician and your bloomin' hairdresser.'

It was true: the practice ground was thick with bodies. As players arrived with baskets of gleaming Titleists, many of them had to spend several minutes trying to find a spot between caddies, swing technicians and numerous other red-faced men in polo shirts, none of whom seemed to be doing anything directly related to golf, but all of whom succeeded in making the process of text messaging and eating burgers appear of extreme consequence. There were probably three hundred people in our eyeline, and it seemed that almost every one of them – including the players – was frantically speaking or typing into a small piece of technology. Off to the left, in the logo-spattered trucks now ubiquitous at European Tour events, other, bigger bits of technology waited to do miraculous things to some of these men's backs and shoulders. And straight ahead, a magical tractor, fitted with a protective cage, waited to pick up their balls. Dave told me how different this was from even the most sumptuously catered European Tour events of the seventies and early eighties. In those days it had been his duty to stand at the opposite end of the practice ground collecting his player's missiles, in slight fear for his life. He'd just gone on to talk about his favourite experience in golf, the 1986 Masters, when he and Lyle had been paired
with
the resurgent, victorious Jack Nicklaus – the noises that greeted Nicklaus's birdie putts on the back nine were ‘the loudest I'd ever heard on a golf course' – when he was interrupted by another, possibly even louder noise: a booming voice, coming from our left, steamrollering the low buzz of conversation around us.

‘I TOLD YOU I WAS ON MY FUCKING PHONE. DON'T YOU DARE TALK TO ME WHEN I'M ON MY FUCKING PHONE!'

‘Oh, right, here we go,' said Dave, as we watched a famous, formidably built British golf pro storm into our eyeline, pursued apologetically by a man in his seventies with a look of
The Wind in the Willows
about him.

‘What do you think happened there?' I asked Dave. ‘Do you think that bloke was hassling him when he shouldn't have?'

‘Oh, I dunno,' he said. ‘Probably not. He's usually having a go at someone or other.'

For a couple of minutes, our end of the range became muffled and chilly and muted, and people moved more slowly than they had done before – as if a fog had descended on us, carrying all the implicit elements of fog, apart from the fog itself – but not many people looked very surprised at the big pro's outburst. Pretty soon, normal service was resumed. The exciting Swedish player Henrik Stenson continued perfecting his Boeing 747 ball flight. The cavalier Argentinians Eduardo Romero and Ricardo Gonzalez continued to share a joke (why did the Latin players always look as if they were having the biggest laugh?). Ian Poulter sent another text message. Some teenage boys behind him dressed in bright pink trousers pointed at his bright
pink
trousers. Some rotund men in front of them ordered some more burgers, and received a couple more text messages (from Ian Poulter?). To all intents and purposes, I had never been more ‘inside' as a golfer than at this moment. Here I was, a professional, sitting with a living legend, at a club that had staged four Ryder Cups, within putting distance of some of my favourite players, about to meet one of Britain's best ever players, having just got a rare insight into another's social skills, yet I'd never felt more like a bemused outsider. I sensed that I wasn't the only one.

‘Do you think of yourself as a golfy kind of person, Dave?' I asked.

‘Not really. My wife doesn't like it, for one thing. She can't stand the clothes.'

For the first time I noticed Dave's outfit, which was casually stylish, well fitting, and helped to make him look about a decade younger than he was (i.e. about fifty-three). You wouldn't exactly have called it a statement against typical golfing attire, but it definitely didn't look as if it been bought entirely from a pro shop – which was more than you could say for almost every other person in our eyeline.
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It was an unending source of mystery to me that the vast majority of golfers chose to stick to golf brand clothing when a) 95 per cent of the
time
it was still hideous, and b) unlike uniforms for most other sports, it was no more athletically advantageous than outfits that could be purchased more cheaply from any number of high street stores. I hoped, when I took my game to the next level and qualified for The Open, that I might finally get a handle on this.

‘So I suppose a lot of stuff associated with the game gets on your nerves?' I continued.

‘Yeah, quite a bit.'

‘But you love it?'

‘Yep.'

‘And you'd never not want it in your life?'

‘No way, me'oad. I'll always love it.'

‘Me too. It's weird, isn't it?'

‘What do you think of the course this week?' I asked him.

He took a thoughtful look out into the bright green yonder and paused, as if weighing up the much-improved Belfry of today against its previous incarnations: in 1985 it had been dismissed by some as ‘a glorified potato field'.

‘Well, it's a shithole, isn't it?' he said.

Having met a few full-time bag carriers over the years, and read
Four-Iron in the Soul
, Lawrence Donegan's terrific book about being a European Tour bagman, I'd already suspected that nobody in pro golf told it straighter than the caddies. Even with this in mind, though, meeting Dave had been unexpectedly refreshing. I wasn't expecting any such candour from Lee Westwood, who, being a top Tour pro, would no doubt have an inbuilt mechanism enabling him to answer even the most
probing
question with a statement that was a cliché wrapped in a platitude.

I don't wish to denigrate the higher plateaux of the golfing profession here. I understand that in a sporting environment not without its history of blackballing, where you're rubbing shoulders with the same people week in and week out, there is little social sense in making a controversial statement about your contemporaries. I also understand that the mindset that comes up with choice
bon mots
is not necessarily one that is able to roll forty-foot putts stone dead under pressure. All the same, would it be such a tragedy if
someone said something interesting in an interview sometime?
It wouldn't even have to be about golf. It could be about go-karting, or kettles, or iceberg lettuce. During the periods I'd spent watching televised golf in 2006, I'd sometimes questioned my motives for turning pro. Maybe I did want to put my golfing ability to the ultimate test. But perhaps I really just wanted to put myself in a position where I could subvert the post-round interview custom of answering every question with one of – or a slight variation of one of – the following three statements:

People think politicians do the ultimate line in interrogative stonewalling, but they have nothing on golfers.
If
you listen carefully, there's actually a great skill to it. It's as if, at some point on their road to stardom – possibly shortly after perfecting their standardised ‘I'd like to thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course' amateur victory speeches – the whole lot of them have been sent to secret seminars with titles like The Use of the Phrase ‘Y'Know' as a Delaying Tactic, Appearing to Evaluate Your Disaster on the Back Nine When Really You're Just Spouting Hot Air that Could Apply to Any Round of Golf, and (a favourite of Colin Montgomerie, this) The Merits of ‘As it Were': How it Can Make You Look Articulate, When You're Saying Something Quite Obvious and Dull. Long were the hours I'd spent dreaming about bringing my own brand of answers to the mix: