Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (32 page)

1
Barrington joked that one of his problems in tournament play was that ‘My putts sometimes go as far as my drives'.

2
In order to achieve the stillness of head required to swing well, Nicklaus had his head gripped by an assistant pro during practice for an hour every day for a whole year.

3
The great game is not only a major exercise in military strategy and tactics,' wrote Cooke, ‘but also a minor rehearsal of the Ten Commandments.' I could see what he was getting at, but I hadn't spotted any oxen on the Europro Tour. And if I had, I doubt I would have had time to covet them. That said, some cud-chewing skills might have come in useful after my second shot on the eighteenth at Bovey Castle.

4
Mousey's real name is Ross Jones.

5
These were, by contrast, three times as big as they had been when I last saw him.

6
Well, burning Urethane Elastomer, to be exact.

7
Which was saying something, since my writing office was at home in the first place.

8
As of July 2006, Karl Morris remained unfamiliar with the working methods of Gavin Christie.

9
That clicking in my hip told me that my dozen or so swimming sessions and two aborted attempts at yoga just weren't cutting it.

‘RIGHT,' SAID LIAM
White, producing a fistful of £20 notes from his pocket and licking a finger, ‘let's see how we did, Tom, cos I haven't got a flippin' clue.'

A little baffled about where ‘we' came into this, I watched as he counted the money and looked around the clubhouse of Wollaton Park Golf Club in Nottingham, wondering what he intended to do with it. There appeared to be quite a lot of it, and with the exception of a fruit machine and a menu offering some teacakes and a small selection of hot beverages, very little potential in the nearby vicinity for disposing of it.

‘Not bad,' he said, with a nod. ‘I'll get this.' He gestured to the pot of coffee on the table in front of us.

By his own admission, Liam was a little hungover this morning. In the five minutes we'd been sitting in the lounge of Wollaton, three people had approached him and said the same thing: ‘Hello, Liam. You look … well!' In truth, he looked a little grey-green around the gills. As he poured a second cup of coffee, and then, quickly, a third, his hand shook. He had been to
the
casino last night, he said, and it had ‘turned into a heavy one'.

I'd last seen Liam fifteen years previously, when he'd been Nottinghamshire's best golfer. Back then I'd watched with my friend Ollie as he'd flashed and lashed his way around Coxmoor Golf Club in an important county match, one of his last games as an amateur. He'd seemed oddly outgoing for a good player, and had taken time out from his tussle with Lincolnshire's Jim Payne – another soon-to-be-pro, but an altogether more serene golfing being – to chat with us and ask us about our handicaps. Watching his quick, wristy swing and his chirpy manner with the crowds, Ollie and I had been convinced we were seeing a future star: a kind of blond Seve on permanent fast-forward, or maybe more appropriately, with the benefit of hindsight, a British council-estate Sergio Garcia.

That autumn, he'd been selected for the Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup team to play against America at Portmarnock, and alongside Ireland's Paul McGinley had defeated Bob May and the mighty Phil Mickelson in the foursomes. Chubby Chandler from International Sports Management had been waiting on the final green, contract in hand, and Liam had immediately turned pro, going on to win the 1994 Danish Open with an astonishing final round of 63. Rumours followed about his sleeping on the beach the night after the tournament and spending a vast chunk of his prize money on a handbag for his girlfriend. But then … nothing. His name vanished from the money list. When I asked, ‘What happened to Liam White?' most of my Nottingham friends just shrugged. There was talk of a very public
disagreement
with a veteran European Tour player, and a subsequent social blackballing. When I'd brought Liam's name up with fellow pros this year, I'd drawn a blank. After much research and a lot of help from Bob Boffinger, I'd finally tracked him down to the Chesterfield branch of JJB Sports, where he was the manager of the Bike, Golf and Fitness department.

‘Is this a wind-up?' he asked, when I told him I wanted to talk to him.

He'd suggested we meet at Wollaton, a gently captivating parkland course three miles from the city centre, where I'd once narrowly missed decapitating a deer with a skulled seven-iron, and where Liam had been playing the majority of his golf since his mid-teens (Liam had been a late starter, as well as an early finisher). That had surprised me slightly. One of the Liam rumours I'd heard involved him being banned from Wollaton's clubhouse for putting his cigar out in a committee member's drink. ‘Oh yeah,' he said, ‘I've been barred twice. Once was for fighting at the men's Christmas dinner. I can't remember what the other was for. The worst thing about it was that I weren't allowed to come in and see me cabinet. That hurt. One day I played with three committee members and I couldn't even come in and look at my stuff.'

Liam's cabinet, which he also referred to as ‘The Shrine', still stood intact in Wollaton's foyer. Packed with clubs, trophies, newspaper and magazine articles and other memorabilia from Liam's glory years, it must have served as a constant reminder of how much he had lost. It was also evidence that Liam had once been on a fast track to the big time: not just another former scratch
player
scraping a living, but a player so promising that
GQ
magazine had awarded him with a five-page profile (‘They must have taken 2,000 photographs of me, but they only used three').

Liam had been late for our meeting, and while I waited for him my brain had gone into overdrive hypothesising about what he might look like. My image of him was a little fuzzy, and it always gives you cause for fertile thought when someone says, ‘I'll meet you outside the pro shop – I'll be the one with the Mohican.' By the time I saw a bright yellow souped-up Fiat Punto hurtle into the car park, I'd got a bit carried away and was starting to picture an ageing version of the synth-pop star Howard Jones in an Argyle sweater.

The Punto scouted around for a space then, seeing none free, pulled flamboyantly into a no-parking area in front of the clubhouse delineated with orange stripes.
¹
The figure that emerged from the driver's seat was instantly familiar, but that owed more to his John Wayne walk than his frightened-cat's spike of hair. He did not look a bit like Howard Jones.

In their 1992 profile,
GQ
had said that Liam looked more like a rugby player than a golfer. Now he looked more like an ex-rugby player with a job in retail management. He had an old-fashioned way with slang and a smoky, cardigany scent that reminded me of a bygone working-class Nottingham: the Nottingham of my granddad, the Nottingham of Alan Sillitoe's
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
His upside down traffic cone of a body seemed kind of old-fashioned too. It was too
short
and stout to be a modern golfer's physique. Going down from his huge, jutting shoulders, everything tapered. His forearms were enormous, but his wrists were, as he pointed out, ‘tiny'.

‘That was what finished me, really,' he explained. ‘I got tendonitis in my wrist. I kept going to tournaments, and I'd just end up in agony, hitting these 150-yard shots to the right off the tee. Even when I play now, it throbs for a couple of days afterwards.' At the end of 1994 he applied for a medical exemption from the European Tour, but his application arrived too late. For a few months, he'd continued to receive invites and to practise hard. ‘Then,' he said, ‘all of a sudden a year had passed and I'd only played a bit of golf, and I didn't miss it. Easy as that.'

Liam's last round of golf before speaking to me, which had taken place the previous Friday, had been only his ninth in two years. ‘It's still so easy. Even now, people say to me, How can you just pitch up and shoot the scores that you do? The thing is, I've never thought about the game. I'm lucky, you see. It's easy to me. There are very few people who are pros – Lee included – who can't play without having some kind of thought.'

It was his first mention of Lee – and I guessed he meant Westwood. Did he ever watch his Nottinghamshire peer and find himself thinking, ‘That could have been me!'?

‘Loads of people ask that,' he said. ‘I tell you what, I've lost more money on that silly prat than anything, and that's the only time I get pissed off with him. I just love seeing him do well. People don't realise – outsiders, especially – that there's no bitchiness or jealousy, because
when
you're at a certain level, you know your day's gonna come. You're always pleased for other people, and when your day does come, they're always pleased for you.'

Had Westwood usurped White's place at the top of the pecking order in east Midlands golf? It seemed that way. But the truth was that, aside from the fact that they had both been paid for hitting a ball, shared the same management team, initials and home county, the pair had very little in common. Their swings alone were as different as fire and ice. Where Lee appeared to talk to people through the layers of a protective shell, Liam had no such psychic protection, and it was hard to imagine he ever had done. Wollaton's clubhouse was scantly populated this morning, but every person who entered it made a beeline for Liam, and he had time for all of them. There was nothing guarded about him as he talked of his friends, all of whom seemed to have nicknames like ‘Village' or ‘Trigger'
²
and were either gravely ill or a ‘brilliant laugh' or permanently drunk or mucking up their life by going out with an ‘ugly bird'.

He had plenty of brilliant memories from his life as a contender. There was the time in the Walker Cup that he watched Phil Mickelson split a wooden tee-peg down the middle with his fingers (‘I don't know if you've ever tried that, but it's really hard'), then, standing several yards from his bag, flip his driver dispassionately in the air by its butt and land it in the precise compartment where it belonged (‘I was shaking like a leaf!'). And the time when Ian Woosnam was playing in front of him in the Irish Open and picked up one of the fake Guinness
glass
tee-markers and pretended to drink out of it (‘I was thinking, “I wish I was that cool”!'). Liam obviously enjoyed recounting these incidents, and while he did not do so without the odd hint of longing and regret, I got the impression that he was still somewhat overawed that he'd ever got the chance to compete on the European Tour in the first place. If I had not had to leave for lunch at my nan's house, I sensed he might have happily continued for several more hours. I couldn't help but wonder aloud if he had been too gregarious for the life of the touring pro.

‘Well, yeah, I am, aren't I? I always have been. You know that, Tom. When I first went out there I was a bit cocksure, but you need that cockiness, and when I had it, that was when I seemed to do well. Pros are quite shy people, loners really. I did get lonely out there, and that was a big part of the problem. I'd get up at four on a Tuesday, drive down to Heathrow and fly out wherever. Then I'd get home at anywhere between eleven and one in the morning, Sunday night, get up Monday, and come down here, and then obviously every man and his dog would be asking, over and over again, “What happened on sixteen?” or whatever.
³
But I'd go out and
have
a game with the lads, and that was like my release. Sometimes a lot of the players would stay out in Spain for three weeks on the bounce and stuff, but I could never do it. Coming home was harder, but just being here for that one day made me feel so much better. Even though I could have saved myself a lot of money, bearing in mind it was costing me twelve hundred quid a week to play.'

Liam called Monday ‘wash day', and I wasn't quite sure if this was a reference to Monday being the day when you cleansed yourself of the psychological dirt of the previous week's tournament, or simply another old-fashioned Nottinghamism (my paternal grandparents had called Monday ‘wash day' too). Whatever, he did not strike me as the kind of person who would just wash and go. Obviously it must have been irritating to repeatedly field questions from his fellow members at Wollaton regarding exactly why he wasn't following his Danish Open victory up with more rounds of 63, but if he
had
shot 63, or even 68, he probably would have gleefully talked you through every nuance of it – in much the same way I'd been warned against by James and numerous others.

Had Liam ever had that essential cold-minded, determined belief in his right to be on Tour? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in the days when professional tournament golf been less crowded – both inside and outside the ropes – and lucrative, it had not been quite such a vital part of the golfer's psychological make-up. He had been cocky for a while, as he said, but I wondered if that cockiness had manifested itself in a different way to the way it has in Westwood:
a
less controlled, noisier, more vulnerable, lovable way.

‘You can't turn it on and off.' If I had received a pound for every time I had dwelled on that comment this year, I'd probably have at least one less bank loan than I did. But why
couldn't
you turn it on and off? Why couldn't you stand over the ball and be frosty and calculating and convinced of your own brilliance, then walk away and be a self-deprecating, jocular, lovable human? It was because when the pressure was on, you could not let it become apparent to you that there were an infinite number of bad permutations, and only one good one, to the shot you were about to play. And to do that, you had to be solid and leave no room for cracks. Such solidity didn't just mean standing over the ball and being unswerving about your goal. It also meant not going into the clubhouse and making jokes about your Panicked Squid swing, or how you couldn't close the deal on a downhill six-footer even if the hole was twice the size and had an ‘Enter! Good will to all comers!' sign above it. You could not afford to give a millimetre's thought to the dark places.