by Tom Cox
And that’s the fact that somewhere, somehow, I know I kind of miss it.
‘IF YOU COULD just drop me here, that would be perfect.’
‘Don’t be silly. You don’t want to be lugging that great big bag all the way up the hill.’
‘No, honestly, I could do with the walk. My head feels a bit stuffy, actually.’
It’s September 1988, and I’m in my dad’s car, trying to break it to him as tactfully as possible that I would prefer it if, from this point on, we weren’t related. It’s nothing personal, he has to understand. In fact, some people might say that his corroding 1975 Toyota Corona is quite a tasteful automobile. But not me. And certainly not the people I’m about to mix with. I’m praying that I won’t have to resort to a ‘tough love’ strategy here, hoping that the grinding of my teeth and the sight of my hand hovering anxiously over the door handle will subtly yet vehemently transmit the message that if he doesn’t stop the car within the next thirteen seconds he is going to render the rest of my life an abject nightmare.
‘Are you sure? I mean, I don’t see why I can’t just take you up to the top of the road and drop you there.’
‘I’m sure. Please.’ The vehicle is still moving, but I am now inching the door open.
Two weeks ago, I was somehow granted membership at Cripsley Edge, one of the East Midlands’ more exclusive golf clubs. My dad tells me he is glad about this, but knows nothing about golf – has never played or wanted to play. The game is probably as alien to him as an expenses-paid weekend at a Rotary Club convention. For two months, drawing on all my reserves of patience, I’ve just about managed to deal with these fundamental character flaws. He has unquestioningly taxied me up to my new Utopia for my weekly practice sessions, parked the main family car, a 1986 Vauxhall Astra, surreptitiously on the gravel behind the professional’s shop, avoiding the members’ car park and clubhouse, and kept interference into my golf life down to an acceptable minimum. But today is different. I can sense a change in him, a new curiosity. What’s more, in a singularly unfortunate bit of timing, my mum has taken the Astra to the local garden centre, and we are travelling in the family’s very own emergency vehicle, a tin-can-on-wheels known to anyone who has ever been intimately associated with it as the Sphincter – a car which, if driven at over 21 miles per hour, makes a noise suggestive of a giant, senile mechanical pig struggling to free a knot in its colostomy bag. All this would have been tricky enough on its own, but since today is the very day I am scheduled to play my first competitive round – the culmination of three months of coaching, three months of waiting and fantasizing from the vantage point of the course’s practice ground – it is downright unacceptable.
‘I mean it,’ I say, unhooking my seat belt. ‘I’m getting out now. Now. You may as well stop, because if you don’t stop, I’m going to jump out anyway.’
‘Well, if you insist. But I don’t understand why. I was hoping that maybe I could stand outside the clubhouse and watch you tee off.’
‘What?’
‘You know – just quickly, and then go. I wouldn’t try to talk to anyone or anything.’
‘No. No chance. Please, please, please, could you stop the car now, and let me out.’
‘Well, all right, but—’
‘Now!’
Slamming the car door a little more forcefully than intended, I turn to check on my artillery.
One 1979 Slazenger golf bag, gut pink, passed on from friend of friend of grandfather.
One thirties seven-iron, custom-made – for a Smurf, judging by the length of its shaft.
One half-set of scuffed, randomly orphaned irons, on loan from junior coach.
One seventh-hand putter, closely resembling a boulder on a stick.
Sixteen and a quarter wooden tee pegs.
Two cartons of Happy Shopper orange ‘drink’.
One ‘Hollyhocks of the British Isles’ tea towel, ’borrowed’ from kitchen drawer.
Five second-hand two-piece golf balls, procured from undergrowth beside second green.
I appear to be all set …
The short ad in the local paper boasted ‘Free Golf Lessons for the Under-fifteens’, and nobody ever seems able to agree upon who spotted it. My mum claims I did, but I’m pretty sure the likelihood of me at thirteen reading a newspaper would have been about as high as the likelihood of me today putting on a pair of muddy jogging bottoms and nipping across the road with a football under my arm to ask if my 84-year-old neighbour, Clara Woodbridge, is ‘playing’. My grandad claims that he placed the ad himself, but tends to undermine the authority of this statement by shortly afterwards claiming that he single-handedly overthrew Hitler’s Germany. My dad, whose memory is the best out of the three, recalls the ad being pushed under the front door one morning by an anonymous source. It’s the last explanation that seems most appropriate, but my own guess is that my parents spotted the ad together.
They needn’t feel ashamed about this. They weren’t to know that golf would be the One. I forgive them, and can totally understand their thought processes. It probably appeared to them that, between the ages of nine and thirteen, I’d worked my way through every sport in the average teenage boy’s lexicon. I was good at everything, brilliant at nothing, and brilliant was the only thing I cared about being. The positive aspect of having an athletic kid, from my parents’ point of view, was that it kept me away from the Village Gang. The Village Gang was something I drifted in and out of, depending upon whether I was just getting into, or just getting out of, a new sport. It was led by Sean Ryder, who not only had nearly the same name as Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Manchester indie dance group Happy Mondays, but nearly the same face as well. Several years after I stopped hanging around with Sean Ryder, I saw Shaun Ryder performing on Top of the Pops and was stunned to discover that my old friend had opted for a cooler way of spelling his name and made something of his life, but then I checked the chronology and realized that at the exact time Happy Mondays were mastering their 1988 album Bummed, Sean Ryder would have been engaged in dangling Mark Spittal off the Swingate bridge by his ankles in an attempt to bribe him into lending out his maths homework.
I imagine that around the time my parents saw the ad, I was going through one of my dejected stages – I seem to remember it was the same summer I failed in my attempt to secure a place on the county table-tennis team – and spending a little too much time in Ryder’s company for their liking. Golf probably seemed like a potentially effective distraction: a conveniently antithetical pastime that might keep me sidetracked while the rest of the gang were doing the Garden Fence Grand National or setting fire to one another’s farts. I’m sure they didn’t expect me to take it up with any real sense of purpose – even when I arrived back from the first lesson at Cripsley pledging to win my first British Open before my seventeenth birthday.
I, however, knew I was serious, right from the first nine-iron shot I hoisted above daisy-scaring level. There were several reasons why golf kept me hooked where other sports had failed to. It was the first outdoor sport I’d played that allowed me to dress appropriately for the elements. Unlike other sports, it didn’t just have its own stadium or court; it had its own kingdom. Even better than that, it had lots of different kingdoms, featuring an infinite number of architectural permutations and an infinite amount of words to describe them. None of the rigid oppression of the basketball court or the football pitch here. There seemed so much to learn, a baffling number of options requiring a mind-boggling amount of mental discipline. Unlike the times that I’d played other sports, I didn’t get a discouraging inkling of what kind of an experience golf would be when I began to master it. I didn’t know what it would be like. I just knew it would be mysterious and complicated and stimulating.
Suddenly, I was watching the 1988 US Open – surely one of the least remarkable major championships in golfing history, slogged out between two of the game’s least punk-rock players, Nick Faldo and Curtis Strange – and seeing the future.
At fourteen, I would become British Amateur Champion; at fifteen, the youngest ever European Tour professional, finishing in ninth place on the end-of-year money list. At seventeen, I would win the first of my seventeen US Masters titles, at the Augusta National Course in Georgia, and the first of my twelve British Open Championships, also at Augusta. The British Open has never been played at Augusta in Georgia, but I knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble persuading the tournament organizers to change the venue, having done so much for the game at such a callow age.
I began to spend six days a week in a birdie trance – all my thoughts and energy turned towards my Saturday morning lesson. I stole copies of Golf World magazine from the waiting room of my dentist’s surgery. I broke the greenhouse belonging to the lazy-eyed witchy woman next door with a sand-iron lob. I planned. I schemed. I visualized. Every week I improved. Every week Cripsley’s assistant teaching professional, Mike Shalcross, dropped weightier hints about putting me forward for membership of the club. The fact that I hadn’t played the course yet – I’d been settling for midweek games at the local pitch and putt – only made it twice as exciting. From the practice fairway, I gazed out towards the fifth and third fairways, memorizing the contours, projecting my own make-believe iron shots: the kind that would shoot up high over the flagstick, then attach themselves to the putting surface like Velcro. Right here, I saw the rest of my life roll out ahead of me like one infinite, luxuriant, green carpet.
After six weeks of dreaming, I was given a date for my trial for membership. At last I was about to find out what verdant delights Cripsley Edge held beyond the gigantic hedge separating the fairways belonging to the fifth and sixth holes. The trial was held by Bob Boffinger, Cripsley’s junior organizer, and consisted of me hitting fifty seven-iron shots, being shown around the men-only bar, and nodding solemnly when Bob said things like ‘absolutely imperative’ and ‘dress restriction’. I breezed it, offering what I still look upon as a favourable impression of ‘Tom Cox, future Young Conservative sired by local textile magnate and county bridge champion’, and betraying little trace of Tom Cox, future hippy slacker sired by inner-city primary schoolteacher and inner-city supply teacher.
‘Does your dad play golf, Tom?’ asked Bob.
‘No. Only my uncle Rex. He took me up for a quick eighteen the last time we were at his place in the Cotswolds.’ I’d learned phrases like ‘a quick eighteen’ from reading the biography of the golf commentator Peter Alliss.
‘And what does Rex do for a living?’
‘Oh. Er. He’s a … barrister.’
Now, my thirteen-year-old powers of deception amaze me. I was an artist. Stage by stage, I was reinventing myself, and my family were starting to pick up on the signs.
First, my mum, as I arrived home from my fourth lesson at Cripsley.
‘Tom, what’s that?’
‘What?’
‘That thing hanging out of your pocket.’
‘It’s a glove.’
‘Looks like a dead bat.’
‘Well, it’s not. It’s a glove.’
‘Why do you only have one?’
‘For grip, of course. Nearly all proper golfers wear them. You wouldn’t understand. It would be like me trying to explain to you what “the honour” is.’
‘The what?’
‘The honour. It’s what you get when you have the best score on the previous hole. You get the honour of going first. It’s to do with etiquette. See? I knew you wouldn’t understand.’
Then my dad, as he greeted me behind Cripsley’s pro shop two weeks later.
‘How’s it going, man?’
‘You’re wearing jeans. Quick, get in the car. You’re not supposed to wear jeans here. It’s against the rules. And for your information I’m not “man”, I’m Tom. People don’t call each other “man” at a golf club.’
And lastly my grandad, as I arrived at his house for Sunday lunch, dressed in my first item of bona fide golfwear: a lilac shirt with meatcutter collars and embroidered ‘golf bloke in midswing’ design.
‘Blimey! You could go flying with collars like that. Is that what you wear when you go down the school disco and pull all those hot bits of stuff?’
‘Actually, I don’t go down the school disco any more. And I don’t “pull” – that’s something that people in the sixties did. This shirt is what everyone at Cripsley Edge wears, so that shows just how out of touch you are.’
I began to speak in a whole new way, applying the terms I’d learned at Cripsley to everyday situations. ‘Pushed it,’ I observed, as my mum threw a balled-up piece of paper at the waste-paper bin and missed it on the right.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You pushed it. Got your hands ahead of the shot.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
‘You know – blocked it. That’s why it pitched to the right.’
‘“Pitched”? What the hell are you on about?’
‘God. It means landed. Don’t you know anything?’
For me, serving an apprenticeship as a proper rebel would have come a bit too easily. On the occasions I’d dipped my toe into it, with Ryder and his gang, it hadn’t felt much like rebellion at all. My parents might have tried to distract me from it, but they seemed to understand me a little too well. My dad didn’t listen to Val Doonican and Andy Williams; he listened to the Ramones and the Rolling Stones. And while I’m proud to say I was the first person at my school to wear Doc Martens, I’m slightly less proud to say they were chosen for me by my mum, after half an hour’s dispute during which she strived to persuade me to ‘loosen up and get with it’ in front of a bystanding posse of four giggling fourteen-year-old girls. By my thirteenth birthday, I found myself somewhat anaesthetized to the effects of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, maybe not the drugs, but certainly the other two. My whole life I’d had unlimited access to music that mud-wrestled with Satan, yelped about fellatio and exulted in the benefits of free love. Although I hadn’t had sex, I felt like I knew enough about it. My mum had relayed the facts of life to me shortly before my sixth birthday, after which I’d promptly taken them to school and made little Jimmy McGuire burst into tears. By my tenth birthday, I could recite entire subsections of The Joy of Sex word for word to wide-eyed schoolfriends.
By my third year of secondary school, 92.5 per cent of the girls in my Geography class claimed to have ‘done it’ (the other 7.5 per cent having been decreed ‘rough’ via an unofficial class vote). Being the kind of thirteen-year-old boy whom girls intermittently tickle and tell all about their sex lives but never actually go on a date with, I certainly finished my school day feeling like I’d ‘done it’, then arrived home to a house in which few walls were free of black and white posters of naked existential German women leaning pensively over sinks.
For the moment, I could quite happily put delinquent teenage sex on the back burner.
Now – manners, sportsmanship, technospeak, repression: these I could use.
My dad might have been able to recite Monty Python sketches word for word, but did he know how to shake hands properly, or that sweatshirts should never be worn without shirt collars underneath? My mum might have dug Johnny Marr’s guitar-playing on Smiths albums, but did she know not to keep her glass raised from the table for unduly long periods in the presence of the club captain, and that it was considered custom not to stand in the eyeline of your playing partner as he was taking his shot? I’d finally hit upon the only form of adolescent mutiny I could muster, the one thing that might leave my shockproof parents shaking their heads and pronouncing: ‘I can’t believe he’s our son. I hope he gets over it; it’s probably just a phase.’ The sensation of power was overwhelming. I was James Dean in plus fours. And, most worrying of all for my mum and dad, I hadn’t even had a proper game of golf yet.
… I turn back towards the Sphincter one last time and check my reflection. Black trousers, bright pink polo shirt from factory reject shop, slightly misshapen l
ilac jumper. I’m essentially wearing a bastardized version of my school uniform, but I figure that no one will really notice and, besides, today, if all goes to plan, I’ll probably be winning myself some proper golf clothes. Through the window my confused, resigned dad waves goodbye and mouths, ‘Be brilliant,’ but my pang of errant guilt is drowned out by a mounting excitement in my gut. I watch anxiously as the car makes use of the full width of the club’s private drive to perform a U-turn, then begins to void its way back to Nocton, the village we call home. Then, breathing out my relief, I look beyond Cripsley’s imperial gates, past judgemental pines and garden sheds that could be mistaken for luxury dwellings, to the future: the birdies, the blazer badges, the social functions, the soaring, drawing drives. This is it! I marvel. The thing I’ve been living for for three months – a veritable lifetime. I wonder what it will feel like: the opening divot, the début sidehill putt, the first crashing drive. The adrenalin surging through my bloodstream makes me feel like I could fly, but only when the Sphincter is out of earshot do I begin the march to my destiny.
Tee off? I think, as I stride obstinately up the hill. Tee off? Of course he can’t watch me tee off. Not even by telescope from a safely distanced asteroid.
THERE’S SOMETHING UNIQUELY liberating about running across a golf course. Everything you’ve been taught about dignity, grace and deportment tells you it’s wrong, yet it feels so deliciously right.
Witnessing a running golfer is a bit like witnessing the class geek trying to chat up the prom queen. The humane part of you that wants to crumple up and hide battles it out with the diseased part of you that wants to keep watching. In the same way that a Mini Cooper isn’t designed to be driven around a Formula One racetrack in second gear, a golfer isn’t designed to gallop; he’s designed to amble and ponder, stopping to sniff the heather and discuss the stock market along the way. Not only does the act of moving one’s legs slightly faster than normal on a golf course seem to bring all the game’s decorum and principles into disrepute, it has a way of making the runner look violently camp. Take the most macho, dynamic, one-hundred-metre sprint champion and put him at the mercy of the stopwatch on a dogleg par five, and he’ll inexplicably mutate into Kenneth Williams.