Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (18 page)

Jamie Daniel and I had begun playing golf properly on the same day. Sure, we'd both had the odd knockaround on Bramcote Hills, the local pitch-and-putt – we'd later note that we had both ricocheted off the same tree on the first hole and, in lieu of knowing what ‘out of bounds' was, played our second shots from the car park – but our first serious shots had been struck side by side at the Saturday junior lessons at Cripsley Edge Golf Cub. For the next four years we'd stayed more
or
less neck and neck, me managing to get my handicap a shot or two lower than his, Jamie winning the Notts County Boys' Championship, me pipping him to become the first of our band of juniors to win the Cripsley Edge Club Championship. But, being born in August 1977, he always had a two-year head start on me – sometimes more, if the local newspaper was to be believed. When I'd walked away from golf, he'd persevered, reducing his handicap to scratch where I hadn't, then turning pro and attempting to work his way up to the top level of the game via satellite tours and Midland PGA tournaments. When I pictured him, it was not as a twenty-eight-year-old, but as a forever young prodigy: the same one I'd only seen once since the day, aged eighteen, that I had explained to him that I was never going to pick up a golf club again.

‘Yeah, right, Cox,' he'd said, back in 1993 as we sat on the steps outside Cripsley's clubhouse, watching our friend Mousey retain the under-eighteens' hold on the club's Scratch Cup. ‘I believe you.
Honest
.' It was a scene encapsulating a relationship in which it had long been Jamie's role to look on in a cool, collected and slightly sceptical manner as I made yet another hyperbolic statement about my latest seen-the-light drive or triple-bogey calamity.

I was a little apprehensive about meeting up with Jamie. In my first book,
Nice Jumper
, I wrote about the distance I had often felt between the two of us. I had also been – I thought in retrospect – a little bit unfair about the competitive role his parents had played in his golfing life. I knew he'd read
Nice Jumper
, but when I phoned him to tell him I'd turned pro and to see if he'd
like
to meet up for a game, I found him instantly congenial – much more so, in fact, than I remembered.

It had been seven years since I'd last seen him, leaping around a dancefloor with his mum at his twenty-first-birthday party, and that had been only briefly. My image of the evening had been blurry enough at the time, and had since become considerably blurrier, so now, as I made my way over to the practice net, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. A few minutes later I noticed a broad-shouldered, loping figure with thinning hair making his way in my direction. I decided not to risk a wave this time until he was two feet away at the most.

We shook hands and grinned at one another. ‘Ahhhhrg. Knackered,' said Jamie.

‘Ahhhhrg. Knackered' might appear an odd way to greet a friend you haven't seen properly for thirteen years. In Jamie's case, though, it worked as a more familiar version of ‘Hello,' and gave me a pleasant warm little feeling in my chest. In the old days, ‘Ahhhhrg. Knackered' had simply been what Jamie said, every time he saw you. I'm sure it didn't always mean that he
was
knackered. It just meant that he was there, in his lethargic, gladdening way, and ready to play some golf.

‘So what are you playing off now?' he asked.

‘Well, I'm not playing off anything. I don't have a handicap any more; I'm a pro, like you,' I said.

He squinted, raised one eyebrow a quarter of a millimetre, and took a moment to digest this information. He looked like a man trying out a new pair of jeans, noting that, though the leg and waist were the correct size, something was wrong with the fit – possibly a bit of bagginess around the rear. Perhaps he hadn't heard
me
properly when I said I was a pro during our phone call. Or maybe he'd thought I was using the word in a different sense – as in ‘pros and cons', or ‘I'm a real pro at making this cheesecake now.'

While I'd been waiting for him to turn up, I'd been into the pro shop to sign in for our practice round. The assistant professional there had informed me that Jamie and I would have company: ‘We have to send everyone out in fourballs, because the tee is only booked for so long and we have to make sure everyone gets round.' I wasn't quite sure if I saw the logic behind this: the course looked deserted.

‘Yeah, fuck that!' said Jamie, marching in the direction of the first tee. ‘Let's go out on our own. I've played in loads of these things, and a lot of the time you get paired with complete wankers who give it the big “I am”.'

From the age of eighteen to twenty-six, Jamie had played on the Europro Tour, the South African Sunshine Tour and the (now defunct) Hippo Tour, in pro events of all shapes and almost all sizes. He'd had success – and even one victory, in South Africa – but not enough, and he'd now put his playing career indefinitely on hold and taken a teaching-pro job at a driving range in Nottinghamshire. There were a few things he missed about being on tour, and a lot he didn't.

‘There are a lot of people out there who won't speak to you,' he said, after flipping a four-iron 250 yards up the par-four first hole, in the manner that many people might flip an omelette. ‘They think they're the best and that they're above you. But in a way that's how you've got to be when you're out there. I used to get quite lonely.
I
remember going on this massive train ride up to the top of a mountain in Switzerland and then having to play a practice round with these two complete wankers who totally blanked me, and wondering, “Why am I here?”'

‘And then there were the hotels. Formula One are the worst. They were where I stayed mostly when I was on the Sunshine Tour. The bathrooms aren't big enough to turn around in, and you have to share a bed with a complete stranger, but that's all you can do when you can only afford eight quid a night. I'd always get a snorer, too. At times like that the only way to get to sleep is to drink about eight pints, which is no good when you've got a 7.30 a.m. tee time.'

The Jamie I remembered from my childhood had had a cool, reserved competitive edge that everyone around him seemed sure would take him far, but his older incarnation was open, candid and self-deprecating. Perhaps a little too self-deprecating. ‘If you're not a cocky so-and-so, you may as well give up, really,' he said. ‘And I don't think I can be that way. I don't want to be a twat.' The ultimate dampener on his pro ambitions, however, had been financial.

‘It's hard out there when you're standing over a putt knowing that holing it's the difference between getting to play the next week or going home with nothing and having to go and put cones out on a motorway in the middle of the night. It's like my mate Stuart, who's still doing it and has God knows how many credit cards. One day he's at Gleneagles playing with Sam Torrance, the next he's working on a road crew. It gets even harder when you know that there are guys out there who have
trust
funds, or who are supported by their parents, and it doesn't matter so much to them. I know you said a bit of stuff in your book about my parents wanting me to be the best, but the truth is, I wanted to go out there on my own and support myself, and I did. It fucks you off, though, when you can hear rats under your bed and you know some of the other guys are in the Hilton.'

Jamie's last big playing year was 2002, when he made it through Regional Qualifying here at Hollinwell, then shot a 69 in the opening round of Local Qualifying at North Berwick. That year's Open, at Muirfield, had been just one good round away, and with it the probability of more prize money than he'd ever won in his life, invites to European Tour events and who knows what else. But a second-round 75 had put paid to all that. He said he'd still love to play in The Open, but even if he qualified this week, he would have mixed feelings about going to the north-west and playing Local Qualifying at one of the courses near Hoylake. ‘The way you have to look at it is that once you've factored in accommodation and travel, it's another five hundred quid. And that's more than a week's wages for me.'

Now Jamie had cut down his schedule to Midland PGA events and The Open Qualifying, he said he was playing the best golf of his life. ‘The pressure's off now, and golf's just a stroll again and a good laugh, like it used to be when we were at Cripsley.' He said that since he'd stopped pushing so hard, he'd started to get on better than ever with his wife; he'd also started to sleep without nightmares for the first time in years.

As we negotiated fairways that were not only narrow but dangerously crispy from a month of non-stop sun,
he
looked supremely relaxed. He asked me if I still listened to ‘all that weird shouty punk music', and I asked him if he still listened to smoochy R&B (the answer to both questions was no). We reminisced about the time I'd chased him around Cripsley town centre after drinking nine cans of Red Stripe (neither of us could remember why).

When I hit a bad drive on the seventh, he told me that I looked as if I was ‘desperate to get it over with'. I noticed that his swing, meanwhile, sent the ball huge distances yet gave an impression of being in slow motion. It was as though his arms were saying, ‘Look, I know we're not going to stop halfway through our downward movement and make a cup of tea, because that would be silly, but that doesn't mean we couldn't if we wanted to.' I observed, too, that it was a wider, more modern action than the one I remembered.

‘Yeah, I did some work on it five or six years ago,' he said. ‘It's weird, though – yours hasn't changed a bit. It's sort of like an old-fashioned swing, isn't it?'

I had hoped that my work with Steve Gould at Knightsbridge might have brought me a bit closer to the present day – if not right up to the beginning of July 2006, then at least, say, March 1998. Clearly not in Jamie's eyes. But then, next to him, I suppose I'd always felt like a bit of a relic.

I mumbled something about my hand action always having been ‘a bit unpredictable'.

‘That was always the thing with you,' he said. ‘You could always make a lot of birdies, but you could be all over the shop too.'

By the time we came off the course, I wasn't quite
sure
I'd lived up to Jamie's memory of me as ‘The Birdman of Cripsley Edge'. I'd made two birdies in my workingman's round of 77 to the four that he'd made in his artisan's 71. I still felt out of sync, stuck between three conflicting swing thoughts and hesitant around the greens, but it wasn't a bad display, considering my recent form and the fact that Hollinwell was probably at least three shots more difficult than any other course I'd played in the last year. In the fortnight since Woburn I'd hit even fewer practice balls than normal, having panicked slightly about mortgage payments and accepted a couple of journalism assignments. I felt that by getting these out of the way, I'd have optimum opportunity to be wholly golf-centred in the week before my Open debut. In my diary, I had meticulously blocked out each day between now and then, using a colour-coding system for each of the components of my game that required work. It had felt energising, and as I'd done it, the theme to
Rocky
had played on my internal jukebox.

When Jamie and I went into the clubhouse for a post-round drink, though, I received a nasty shock. A shock, in its own way, more disorientating than the one I'd received examining my ball on the third hole at Stoke-by-Nayland.

It came not long after the two of us had got into a conversation with Charandeep Thethy. Jamie had pointed out Thethy, a Kenyan pro, earlier in the day, as we passed him on the practice putting green. ‘I used to see that bloke everywhere,' he told me. ‘He seems to be able to spend his whole life playing golf. I think he's some kind of African prince.' Intrigued to find out more about a man who appeared to live the golfing life of Riley – not
for
him the struggle to find the next entry fee – I'd approached Thethy in the Men's Bar and asked him if he liked the course. He said he did, but he was amazed at how much the fairways had been tapered in, particularly when they were so bouncy. After a few minutes of further dialogue, in which I found out that Thethy was currently employed part-time at a driving range near Nairobi and that this week he was staying on the couch at his brother's house, down the road in Bestwood,
¹
it became clear that either Charandeep was a man who played down his exalted lineage, or Jamie's royal assumption was considerably wide of the mark.

‘Have you been playing much?' Jamie asked him.

‘No,' said Charandeep. ‘This is only my second tournament of the year. It's so hard to raise the cash. I played a full season last year, but that was only seven events. It's just not enough to get into a rhythm. There's so much riding on everything you do. It's not just another round of golf, that's the problem.'

A couple of men in dark-blue blazers arrived in the bar. Both, I thought, bore a resemblance to Bagpuss, the cloth cat from seventies children's TV. The one who looked a lot like Bagpuss, rather than just a little bit like Bagpuss, asked us what we thought of the course. We told him we thought it was wonderful, a genuine test, which is probably what we would have told him even if it had been an ill-groomed mudtrack. They departed,
chuckling
in that particular male, middle-aged, self-congratulatory way endemic only to golf club men's bars and the Radio Four quiz show
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
Jamie and Charandeep shared a couple more stories – about the island green that Vijay Singh (Charandeep's hero) owns in the sea next to one of his mansions, and the time a hard-up Jamie played with Mark Roe in The Open Qualifying and snuck back out onto the course to retrieve the barely-used Titleists Roe had thrown away in the bushes.
²
We all wished each other luck in The Open, and Jamie asked Charandeep what his tee time was.