Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (27 page)

7
A couple of weeks after our meeting, Christie and James put their differences aside and began working together again.

8
All year, I'd been developing a theory that the best golfers were either highly intelligent or a bit on the simple side. You either took a straightforward brain out onto the course, which meant you never had to overcomplicate matters, or you had an in-built acumen that allowed you to simplify your thought processes at will. When I told Christie this, he agreed, and became as animated as I'd seen him all day. ‘That's right! The thing about the great ones who've got that intelligence, like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, is that they can
condense
it.'

ONE OF THE
best things about deciding to be a pro golfer is the inevitable moment, not long into your career, when your friends offer to caddy for you. Back in January, I'd received all kinds of unexpected offers from would-be bagmen. My subsequent analysis of their potential for the job had been enormous fun, and had prompted me to think of the flaws and strengths of long-term acquaintances in whole new ways.
¹
But by August most of these offers had dried up, as friends in regular nine-to-five employment realised the impracticality of travelling halfway across the country to spend two or three unglamorous days helping me look for my ball in heavy shrubbery, and friends out of regular nine-to-five employment did the maths on a 10 per cent cut of nothing.

Casual slave-driving had always been a fundamental part of my golf fantasy life. I liked picturing myself
strolling
the fairway, twirling my club, with some affable hunchback at my side eagerly humping the tools of my trade. A character of indeterminate age, he would have a nickname like ‘Croaky Joe' or ‘Ankles McGill', and would stare off wisely towards the flag and say things like, ‘There's a lot of wind up there you can't see, sir.' After a remunerative week in a faraway place, I would send him off to explore the local nightlife with a wad of £20-notes in his fist, and he would not be seen until the following week's tournament, where he would be waiting for me faithfully on the range, a devilish flicker in his one remaining eye and a gnarly hand resting on a set of irons buffed to a face-reflecting shine.

It was painful to have to abandon this fantasy, but as a self-sufficient club carrier, I was far from alone on the Europro Tour. Only about a third of the players used caddies, and most of these were strictly part-timers: either elderly patrons from their home clubs, dads, or bored-looking girlfriends or wives. The remaining two thirds carried lightweight canvas bags or attached more formidable waterproof carrying devices to battery-powered trolleys.

There was a time when owning an electric golf trolley was tantamount to confessing that you liked nothing better of an evening than coming back from the allotment, popping your false teeth in the nearest drinking receptacle and putting your varicose veins up in front of an episode of
Last of the Summer Wine.
As I remember, during my time as a member, only three people at Cripsley Edge Golf Club had owned one. Two of them, it was rumoured, had artificial hips. The other was a man of at least 140 who had eerily jet-black hair and a way of walking with his arms stretched out in front of him that
made
him look like an extra from a George A. Romero film, and was known to the junior section by the affectionate nickname ‘The Living Dead'. These days, though, it seemed that anyone over the age of sixteen with a quarter of an eye or more on a pro career owned a Powakaddy or Motocaddy or one of their cheaper rivals. This, I was ashamed to say, included me – although since I'd got my Powakaddy back in late spring I'd only taken it for a couple of tentative, quickly curtailed test runs.

By the time I set off for the Bovey Castle Championship in Devon, my sixth tournament of the year, my back pain had reached new heights. Barely a day would go by without at least a two-hour period when I was beset by the sensation of an invisible leather band crushing my internal organs. In view of this, and my stubborn reluctance to see a chiropractor, I probably shouldn't have been bashful about using an electric trolley, but I could still hear a little teenage voice in my head mocking me – the same voice that ordered me to ignore the supportive double-strap formation on my bag and choose to carry it in the old-school, low-slung single-strap style. I had also encountered a small technical problem: my bag was not big enough to fit comfortably within the trolley's holding compartment, and kept tumbling off – often with comically terrible timing. For the Bovey event, however, I had been blessed with a new, larger, snugger-fitting bag, courtesy of my well-connected ex-manager. It seemed only right to transport it in style.

A first glimpse of Bovey Castle served to validate my decision to use my trolley. On the whole, I'd been a little bit disappointed by the insights offered by the websites of Europro Tour venues. Looking at, say, Stonebridge Golf Club in the Forest of Arden, in the hope of getting a reserve
spot
in the Sweeneys Environmental Classic, I'd been left pretty much in the dark about the nature of the course, but had gleaned plenty of information about an upcoming Tina Turner Tribute Night. Bovey's site had been much more generously designed, and in the flesh it didn't disappoint. It was also the most undulating course I'd played all year. Set on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, it was cut through a steep valley, with two small rivers snaking in and out of play on the majority of its holes. You could have piled fifty versions of its manor-ish clubhouse hotel on top of each other and still not covered the airspace between the course's lowest and highest points.

As I traversed the first few holes, I was soothed by the buzz of my new battery-powered friend.
²
It was another of those moments that had become an increasingly-frequent feature of my golfing existence, when the words ‘bolted', ‘door', ‘stable', ‘horse' and ‘shut' couldn't help but rattle around my mind. Why had I not done this earlier? What kind of hassle could I have saved myself? Had I not learned anything from the havoc vertebrae problems had wreaked on the careers of my heroes Seve Ballesteros and Fred Couples? My mum had always suffered from spine problems and she had been told that the cause had been the heavy schoolbooks she'd been made to carry in her rucksack as a child. I couldn't help but ponder the damage my generation of junior golfers had done to themselves by transporting much heavier objects. Was it any surprise that when I'd taken a fledgling-golfer friend to the 2005 London Golf Show, he remarked that he'd ‘never seen so many people in one place with such bad posture'?

At previous events I'd watched, with a doomed sense of underpreparation, as fellow players delved into bags big enough in which to grow cherry trees and unveiled obscure power drinks, energy bars, reserve baseball caps, towels, brand-new leather gloves and laser rangefinders. So at Bovey, with new golfing luggage and no compunction about overfilling it, I packed for peace of mind. As well as the usual balls and tees and pitchmark repairers and bottles of water and gloves
³
and crumpled local rules sheets and suntan lotion and permanent marker and pencil and car keys and mobile phone, I added a notebook, a packet of Nurofen, some plasters, a spare headcover, a bath towel, three bananas, a spare shirt, and my REO Speedwagon baseball cap (in case I tired of the straw boater). For the final touch, I included my secret weapon: a child-sized, circular-grooved, hickory-shafted seven-iron from the 1930s that I'd been given by a friend of my granddad's just before my first ever game of golf. With all this preparation, I was hoping to banish the feeling that my pro golf train had left without me. Bovey could be where everything finally came together: the place where the confidence that had been
planted
at Karl Morris's house and grown in the presence of Gavin Christie started to bloom.

My confidence was further enhanced by the knowledge that, in contrast to Mollington, this week I would not be fighting for sleep on a hard hotel bed in a room without air conditioning or fully opening windows. I was lucky enough to have the use of my friend Emma's eighteenth-century farmhouse, a rambling idyll down a track on the edge of the moor with swifts darting out of its eaves and a stream trickling beneath its foundations. It seemed only logical that Edie should join me. Given the state of our bank account, it was going to be the nearest we got to a vacation in 2006.

If there was one drawback to my pre-tournament groundwork, it was that, for the second time in the season, I missed out on a practice round. The drive from Norfolk to Devon had taken an unprecedented, jam-blighted eight and a half hours, and we'd arrived just as the light was fading on Monday evening. On Tuesday, the course was closed for the pre-tournament pro-am
⁴
and some last-minute greenkeeping, so I had to make
do
with walking the fairways and feeling the terrain out with my feet. But I couldn't complain. Here I was, in one of my favourite parts of the country, on a still, sunny day, feeling the peace that only a great golf course on a still, sunny day can provide – a peace that, for some bizarre reason, I'd once chosen to eliminate from my life.

Earlier, I'd marched boldly to the centre of the line on the practice ground – all fear of the dreaded shank gone. My sense of well-being had been buoyed further when a couple of players I vaguely recognised from Mollington said ‘Hello, Tom' to me. I was even approached by a man in his sixties with a baseball cap who asked me if I was looking forward to tomorrow. I was dressed in cords, a long-sleeved collarless T-shirt and trainers, my hair wild and scruffy, and I was without golfing paraphernalia, yet there seemed to be no doubt in this stranger's mind that I was a competitor.

‘I come here every year with my family,' he said. ‘When I found out this event was on as well, I thought, “All the better!” I think you boys are amazing. I can't see any difference between the way you hit the ball and the way Phil Mickelson and wassisname, that old Ernie Els, do.'

For much of the year I'd been forced to see myself through the pro golf world's eyes as an out-of-place, outdated anomaly. It wasn't just the way that Jamie had looked at my swing at Hollinwell and evaluated it so curiously – like an antique dealer appraising a novelty lamp – or the similarly toned admission from Paul Creasey, John Ronson's caddy, that his first impressions of me were ‘torn between hacker and one-off talent'.
When
Gavin Christie had got onto the obligatory topic of Michelle Wie, he'd asked me not what I felt about her taking the place of me or one of my pro colleagues in a men's tournament, but what I would have felt if I'd had a ‘son' who was a pro golfer and she had stolen his place in a tournament.

But now, suddenly, I was one of ‘the boys'? I suppose I should have been happy. But I wasn't sure if I was entirely comfortable with the concept. What I was sure of was that the prospect of teeing off was not accompanied by the sensations of dread and incongruity that had followed me all year. There was still dread, but it wasn't the kind that sucker-punched you in the kidneys and rendered you a human blancmange. It was a different kind, that kept its distance but gave you a nasty little pinch from time to time. It was the dread of wasting a good thing.

In the other sports I've enjoyed – badminton, table tennis, tennis, football – I've had the occasional day when a feeling of rightness has rushed through me. In those cases, the results have rarely varied: I have played to the best of my ability, immersed in the fast-spin cycle of competition. In the more ponderous sport of golf, though, days like these are no guarantee of success. There is always time to talk yourself out of something, no matter how good your biorhythms, no matter how good the conditions.

My first round at Bovey Castle started, however, with one of the greatest shots I have ever hit.

The first hole at Bovey – which is actually the eleventh during non-tournament play – is a long par-four of 460 yards. The tee shot is not as narrow as some on the
course
, but executing it well is vital. With a steep slope in front of the green leading down into a pond, any second shot that doesn't fly all the way to the putting surface is a terrible mistake, and not just because it will almost certainly prompt someone in the vicinity to make some clichéd crack about ‘getting your wetsuit on'. The important thing is to drive powerfully, rendering the second shot as short as possible so it can be easily controlled, missing the water and stopping quickly enough to avoid the thick, goading foliage a few feet beyond the green.

I'd pondered this second shot for several moments the previous day, and I didn't particularly relish pondering it any more, so I'd tried – overambitiously, as it turned out – to time the long walk from the practice putting green to the tee to leave just enough time for a few practice swings, the ritual of swapping cards with my playing partners, and the standard local rules briefing from the starter. Not only did I arrive to find the official frantically calling out my name and radioing through to the tournament office to find out where I was, I also found that the threeball directly in front of mine had barely left the tee. There was going to be a wait of ten minutes or so, and it would be all I could do not to think about that pond.

It's at periods like this that it's the starter at a golf tournament's unofficial job to break the tension by making banter with the players. In this regard, today's volunteer – a silver-haired man with a Moretonhampstead Golf Club jumper and an air just a little too patrician for him to fall into the Ron or Roy category – was a little more garrulous than most.

‘We've had some humorous moments here on the tee already,' he explained, with a slight guffaw. ‘Just a little while ago a bevy of beauties went by in a golf buggy. And – this really was very funny – there were six pros on the tee at the time and they all simultaneously said, “Sod this! I'm off!” and threw their drivers into that bush.' He pointed over to some foliage just to the left of the tee.