Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (31 page)

‘You never really know with Mousey,' said Jamie, as we waited on the first tee for our friend. ‘Sometimes he can be bothered to play, sometimes he can't. Sometimes he turns up, sometimes he doesn't. But when he does, something interesting usually happens.'

We'd been joined for the round by Jamie's dad, George – never a golfer when we were kids, but now an astute single-figure handicapper who had put his engineer's brain to use on the kind of military on-course strategies Alistair Cooke had talked about on my CD. To make the reunion even sweeter, between his duties at two important Midlands junior matches, Bob Boffinger had also come to watch us tee off. A flair for timekeeping – he was still the only person I'd ever met who talked in half-minutes when giving ETAs – a strong constitution and his newly retired status meant that Bob had no problem flitting between under-eighteen events. At seventy-four, he still had Richard Widmark good looks and walked somewhere in the region of forty miles a week in the cause of his duties with the English Golf Union and the Nottinghamshire Boys' Team. He'd seen better, more dedicated golfers since Jamie, Mousey and I had passed through the junior ranks. But I got the impression that he still regarded us as a schoolteacher would regard a favourite, unruly set of pupils from his past. ‘I better be off now,' he said, looking at his watch.
‘I've
got to be on the other side of Nottingham in twelve minutes, and it can sometimes take up to thirteen and a quarter minutes to cover it when the lights are against me. Be good!'

It was now half an hour after our supposed tee time, and there was still no sign of Mousey. We killed some time in the shop, speaking to the veteran pro, Steve Kimbolton. I'd been a bit worried about seeing Steve, since I'd once compared him to a squirrel in print. However, he wasn't visibly concerned, and obviously had more pressing matters to worry about, like a garbled message from his assistant that had cost him a free round at the sumptuous Loch Lomond course (the assistant had got the Scottish Open venue mixed up with Trent Lock, a rudimentary municipal course six miles to the west of Nottingham). Mousey wasn't answering his mobile phone, so we decided to tee off without him.

Our friend finally joined us on the sixth tee. Or rather, some enormous bloke who had eaten him joined us. It takes a special kind of ingenuity to make a rock-and-roll entrance on a golf course, but this came close. After a quick shake of my hand and an ‘All right, chief?' the longest hitter of a golf ball in south Nottinghamshire flicked his cigarette onto the grass beside him, tossed a headcover over his shoulder and, without so much as half a practice swing, cannoned a tee shot somewhere roughly in the region of Ashby de la Zouch. If an amateur dramatics society had been asked to reinterpret a two-fingered punk-rock up yours through the medium of golf, they would have been hard pushed to come up with something better than this.

‘Bit past Seve Wood, that one, chief,' he said. ‘How you been keeping?'

Despite the fact that he was approximately twice as big as he had been when I last saw him in every part of his body apart from his hands,
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there was a lot about Mousey that hadn't changed. Although his voice had deepened significantly, it still had a hint of squeak about it. He still called his clubs ‘me spanners' and his two-iron ‘me jack-knife' and talked about forgotten Cripsley junior concepts like ‘Seve Wood' – the nickname we'd once given to the small copse 220 yards from the sixth tee, from which we would often play extraordinary escape shots – as if it had only been a week or two ago that he'd holed the winning putt in the Nottinghamshire Junior Team Matchplay Trophy. He still had the body language of the rebel, and talked about practice in the way the cool kids at school talked about homework. He had always been fascinated by power golf, and I wondered how much of his prodigious strength and size was down to sheer force of will.

As we progressed to the back nine, his swing became roomier, his drives even longer. On the twelfth, all four of us struck beautiful tee shots, and our balls finished in the middle of the fairway, directly in line with each other but spanning a full hundred yards in length. We could have been looking at a diagram intended to illustrate the many guises of the long hit. There was the long hit of the mid-handicapper who knows he can hit it a bit further than most people of his ability (George's);
the
long hit of the bloke who once thought he was a long-hitter until he woke up and smelt the burning rubber
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of his professional betters (mine), there was the long hit of the bloke who knows he's a long-hitter and doesn't think it's anything remarkable (Jamie's); and there was the long hit of the out-and-out extra-terrestrial (Mousey's).

Since I was now thinking outside the box regarding my working life in golf, I began to plan a little career guidance talk with him. He said he was happy in his job as a builder, and he undoubtedly had the hands for it, but I wondered if he had ever considered the long-driving circuit. I could see it all now in Technicolor: the ‘Mighty Mouse' logo on the baseball cap and tour van, the theme tune, the nonchalant swagger as he emerged onto the floodlit range. With his brawn and my map-reading skills, it could just work.

‘Sounds like a laugh, chief,' he said noncommittally when I told him about Ben Witter, Paul Barrington and Ron Lampman, and asked him if he would consider doing the same thing.

We talked some more, telling stories of our former junior cohorts. Most unfathomable among these was Ben Wolfe, Cripsley's resident entrepreneur and ‘energy waves' enthusiast, whose twin obsessions of hubcap-collecting and befriending clothing designers had led him away from the fairway into the world of fashion, and who had, for mysterious reasons, changed his first name to Ricardo by deed poll. But Mousey had his own unusual story – one that may
have
gone some way to explaining his newfound insouciance.

In the mid-nineties, not long after I lost touch with him, he'd started a new job in the stockroom of a department store, and had been having a bad time, not getting on with his co-workers. One night he went out to the Black Orchid, a nightclub in a retail park just outside Nottingham, and began seeing shadows in front of his face. ‘The next morning, I lost it,' he said. ‘I started thinking all sorts of weird stuff, like that my dad was going to kill me and shit. I was telling strangers that I'd won the lottery.' Jamie remembered taking nonsensical calls from Mousey from the hospital, asking ‘When are you picking me up? You were supposed to be here ages ago!' Mousey was put on several kinds of medication, and spent the next few months in hospital. On his birthday, he received a card signed by several of the members at Cripsley. ‘I don't remember any of it now, but I punched this nurse and escaped and came up here and ordered some food from the bar. Steve Kimbolton had to phone my dad and get him to take me back to the hospital.'

This all rang only the slightest bell in my head: an encounter with my friend Robin when I'd learned, without specifics, that Mousey ‘hadn't been well recently'. I felt terribly guilty, suddenly aware of how completely and impetuously I'd removed myself from golf back then. Certainly, I'd needed a break, but had I really had to lose touch with my friends so drastically that when one of them had a major life crisis it completely passed me by? I said I was sorry that I hadn't been around at the time to visit him in hospital.

‘Don't worry about it, chief. I don't know why it all happened. I think I just used to let things get to me. It's a long time ago now. These days I don't let anything bother me.' The six-iron second shot that he launched onto the (once virtually unreachable) par-five fifteenth green appeared to confirm this.

Had he not thought about turning pro at all, in the years since he'd been feeling better?

‘No. Too much fucking hard work, yoof.'

He was right, of course. The difference between him and me, perhaps, was that he had never kidded himself it could be any other way.

As much as I told myself I was having fun, I
had
worked hard this year. Maybe it wasn't the kind of graft I'd experienced when I'd worked in a supermarket and a restaurant aged seventeen, or on a factory floor aged nineteen, but it had taken more out of me than any of those things. I'd lost three quarters of a stone in weight, hit around 50,000 balls, stared at thousands of miles of motorway, given my body some worrying wear and tear, and brought the office home with me like never before.
⁷
But even that wasn't the work of the real pro; it was the work of the guy who thinks he can find a shortcut, who thinks he can busk through on maverick spirit alone. I'd tried being fire, I'd tried being ice, I'd even tried being lukewarm water. None of it had worked – at least not for long. Every sensational golfing doctrine was a contradiction of another that could be equally revelatory, if you saw it in the right light, and had got bored enough
experimenting
with its antithesis. In the end, being a great golfer at the highest level wasn't primarily about attitude or methodology, it was about making a long, arduous sacrifice to your green god and doing all you could to mould yourself in his image. Chevy Chase was right: you really did have to ‘be the ball'.

I was sure other sports took plenty of dedication, but it was hard to believe that any could be quite as consuming and insular as golf, or could have so many people willing to call it a career while earning next to no money. ‘If you go for a trial at Manchester United or Everton and Alex Ferguson says you're shit, you give up and go and do something else,' Karl Morris had said to me. ‘In golf, though, there's nobody to tell you you're not good enough.
⁸
There's no cut-off point. No matter how bad it gets, there's always the belief that there's something great around the corner.'

Even now, based on the high points from Bovey Castle and Mollington, I could see a future for myself on the Europro Tour. It would involve even harder graft, more practice, more money, going to a chiropractor, getting fit,
⁹
and then, one day, in a year or so, when my biorhythms were good and there was no wind and there was no farmhouse ghost keeping me up the night before and I genuinely focused on my awareness of the shaft and didn't modify that and focus on the ball instead and I got out of my own way but didn't swing as if I was
trying
to get myself out of
the
way and didn't dwell on what I had to lose and I kept my hands light on the club, I might, just, if I was lucky, shoot a couple of rounds of one or two under par and make the cut in a tournament.
And I would still not even be verging on the kind of dedication that it takes to compete at the top level of the game.

Today was so much simpler: three old friends having a laugh, occasionally taking the piss out of one another (yes, I did remember the time I tried to get in that sauna with all my clothes on; yes, Mousey did remember when he'd claimed the definition of a links course was ‘woodland or fir'), driving the odd par-four (well, three of them, in Mousey's case) and exorcising the odd demon (my eagle on the sixteenth, a hole that had once seen what I was certain was the most unfortunate ricochet in the history of the Cripsley Club Championship: a collision with a sprinkler head that had sent my ball from greenside safety into the back garden of a minor committee member). Maybe this was what Ben Hogan, that most professional of professional golfers, had derisively termed ‘jolly golf', but it was also golf that didn't leave you gibbering on the floor, golf that brought out the best in me. Maybe this wasn't what the three of us had hoped for when we'd lain flat on the ground behind the range at Wentworth, studying every inch of Seve Ballesteros's swing through the crowd's legs, but this was adulthood. And part of adulthood was realising that getting close to perfection did not necessarily make you the happiest person, or the best person; it just made you close to perfection.

And who said golf was a game of perfect, anyway?

In the bar afterwards, over a pint of Guinness, George reminisced about one time that his wife, Maggie, had arrived here to pick Jamie up and been reprimanded by a stuffy member who explained that she had crossed the boundary into the gentlemen-only bar (‘That's funny,' responded Maggie, without missing a beat, ‘because I don't see any in here!'). We contemplated the wall of past captains' photographs, stretching back to the 1920s: waste-management executives and foremen and landlords in suits and ties, peering proudly at the camera like noble border collies on the front of old-fashioned boys' birthday cards. For all the nicknames we gave them, these men had once seemed like prime ministers to us. Back then, we'd been sure that we wanted to be pros, but how could we have been trusted to know what to do with our lives, when our world was this insular?

George talked about the moment when he realised that Jamie might not have what it takes to be a top pro. ‘It was at the British Amateur Championship, and he was five up on the kid he was playing, and he turned round to me and said, “I feel sorry for him.” You can't afford to feel sorry for anyone in this game.'

I looked across the table at Jamie, half-expecting him to bristle at this, but he had an even, accepting smile on his face. I'd never seen him more relaxed. Knowing nobody else could do it for him, he'd been brave enough to decide on his cut-off point a couple of years ago, and was happier for it. Now he could afford to feel
genuinely
sorry for his former opponents, many of whom were still in the thick of it, juggling their credit cards and trying to get out of their own way. It was up to me to
decide
on my cut-off point too, and now seemed as good a time as any, at the course where I'd started playing, a course it was highly likely I would never play again, in good company, with an eagle fresh in my mind, and my insides suffused with the warm glow that only a good inconsequential round of golf, an empty stomach and a pint of Guinness can create. The dream was almost over, but I was going to allow myself just a couple of final pit stops on the journey back to my senses.