by Tom Cox
Disciplinary harangues took place in the little white scorer’s room, to the rear of the men-only bar. As Bob Boffinger and Hell’s Trucker used phrases like ‘absolutely imperative’, ‘correct colour slacks’, and ‘local rules’, Robin and I nodded obediently, promised to be more civilized young men, and tried not to break out in hysterics at Bob’s constantly gurgling stomach. Bob probably saw through Hell’s Trucker’s bullshit just as clearly as we did. He never told us as much but it was clear to us that, forty years earlier, Bob had been the kind of teenager who liked nothing better than leaning out of slow-moving cars and making constipated sheep noises at passers-by. With Bob on our side, these bollockings were something to be weathered with good grace. ‘Yes, we will wear collars under our jumpers next time.’ ‘No, snapping your seven-iron across your knee is not a good example to set younger members.’ ‘No. Hiding the greenkeeper’s Flymo is not big or clever.’ Two minutes after being let back out into the fresh air, Robin and I would be over at the pro shop, throwing full, frothed-up cans of Fanta at one another – assured in the knowledge that we were in the one place to which Hell’s Trucker’s doomwatch didn’t extend.
Just once in the Trucker’s reign did we get caught for doing something truly horrible.
A lot of people have taken credit for the act over the years – Jamie, Ashley, Mousey – but I would like to say, for the record, that it was me who put the mouse in Rick Sweeney’s shoe. It was just too tempting. The Sweeney was a speccy weed who looked like a ginger version of the Milky Bar Kid – one of the few private-school sprats who’d come through Mike Shalcross’s junior lessons and maintained enough enthusiasm to join the club itself – and it was our avowed mission to heap misery onto his nervous, paranoid existence until he left the junior section for eternity. It certainly wasn’t that we were threatened by his ability: he was consistently last in every competition he played in, and his swing had all the elegance of a giraffe getting its neck trapped in a filing cabinet. In fact, I cannot quite remember our precise reasons for the incessant bullying, but I seem to recall it was something to do with his dad having a beard.
The previous week, the Sweeney had withdrawn from the Waldman Carr trophy at Bullwell Forest Golf Club, clearly rattled by hearing seven people simultaneously whistling the theme to a well-loved seventies TV cop show as he began to unwind his first backswing of the day. After that, you might have expected him to be on his guard, but on this particular day he had been downright negligent: leaving your brand-new Adidas shoes sitting out in the open, in the locker room, while your auntie treats you to teacakes in the clubhouse was never going to be a good move with Ashley, Jamie and me in the vicinity. As for the mouse, it hardly looked dignified, sitting there in the cellar of the pro shop, its forehead glued to a seven-year-old Kit Kat. I surmised it was the least I could do to honour it with a proper burial. The prank was an act of common sense more than anything else, and when it resulted in no immediate outcome – the Sweeney was far too cowardly to report us, we assumed – none of us were particularly surprised.
Three weeks later my mum arrived in my bedroom, wearing a look on her face I was well acquainted with. I’d seen it on the local news, on the faces of parents of teenage drug-dealer rapists. ‘I’m ashamed of you, Tom,’ she said.
I racked my brain for recent transgressions. Dirty socks left under living-room sofa? Grade E in Business Studies coursework? British Home Stores glass lampshade smashed with three-iron? ‘What now?’
‘What do you think? Putting that poor bird in that poor boy’s shoe. I can’t believe you could do such a thing! Bob Boffinger’s just been on the phone, and he’s horrified. He says he wants to see you and Robin in the competition room tomorrow at four o’clock. And take that ridiculous smirk off your face.’
I couldn’t help smiling. It had been three sodding weeks. I’d assumed, quite logically, that I’d got away with it. What had the Sweeney been doing? I knew for sure he’d played at least three rounds of golf since the mouse’s interment. Had he been walking around the course, wondering why his left shoe seemed to fit just that bit more snugly than the right one? Did he mistake that slightly moist, decomposing smell for that of his own socks? And what was all this bird nonsense?
At school, I had a foolproof method for seeing myself through punishment with a straight face. I thought about the back of Beau O’Dowd’s head. Beau O’Dowd was the boy who sat in front of me in Maths, and treated me to a view that was a miracle of vapidity and uncomplicatedness, even in the notoriously vapid and uncomplicated arena of backs of heads. If I focused on it intensely enough, I could remain poker-faced under even the most extreme didactic pressure. I can picture it now: its lacklustre yet neat arrangement of hairs, its overwhelmingly underwhelming sense of sheer headness. I’ve even been known to call on it in more recent times of real crisis – when I’m in danger of losing an argument, say, or finding Mark Lamarr funny by mistake.
I’m ashamed to say, however, that that time in the white room with Bob Boffinger, Robin and Hell’s Trucker, even Beau let me down.
‘This is really unforgggivabbble,’ stressed Bob, who had an endearing habit of reverberating on his ‘b’s and ‘g’s upon becoming riled. Not quite a stutter – something more guttural and impressive.
‘May I ask if either of you boys know who’s responsible for this blatant victimization?’ said Hell’s Trucker.
‘Haven’t got a clue,’ I said, shaking my head in horror.
‘I really don’t know, Mr Captain,’ pleaded Robin, somehow making the note of sarcasm in his voice audible only to me.
‘Gruuurgggle,’ said Bob’s stomach.
‘I mean, a dead bird in a boy’s shoe!’ said Hell’s Trucker. I felt a nudge from Robin. ‘Rick Sweeney might not quite fit in with the other juniors, but he’s got as much right to play golf, peacefully and undisturbed, as anyone else.’
‘This is really unforgggivabbble,’ stressed Bob.
‘And I suppose you killed the bird as well?’ asked Hell’s Trucker.
Another nudge from Robin, followed by an uncomfortable silence. One of two things was going to break it.
‘Blllurgle,’ said Bob’s stomach.
Beau O’Dowd’s head, Beau O’Dowd’s head, BeauO’Dowd’sheadBeauO’Dowd …
A piece of paper had arrived on the table in front of me from the direction of Robin. I tried not to look at it. I didn’t try hard enough. It contained a rough sketch of a boy with glasses, running away from a tiny sparrow. Next to it was a speech bubble, which said, ‘Keep away from me! I don’t like toads.’ I let a grin escape.
Hell’s Trucker clocked it, and pounced.
‘This kind of thing has been going on too long,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if these boys haven’t been warned. My feeling is that they spend too much time at the golf club.’
‘But why are you blaming Tom and me?’ pleaded Robin.
‘Because you’re the ones the younger lads look up to.’
I dwelled on this for a moment. Earlier in the day I had suggested to Jamie, the ‘baby’ of the junior section, that the two of us go out and play some serious golf for a change instead of what we were doing, which was hanging around in the pro shop, using the Yellow Pages and the shop phone to order a random selection of dog trainers, landscape gardeners and thatched-roof specialists for people we didn’t like at our schools. Jamie had duly outlined to me that he ‘couldn’t be arsed’.
‘If these boys realized there was a bit more to life than golf,’ said Hell’s Trucker, ‘and weren’t permitted to come up here seven days a week, then perhaps they’d have a bit more respect.’
Hold on a minute, I thought. We – well, our parents – were paying membership fees here. Not as much as the adults, true, but not exactly a matter of a couple of groats, either. We were supposed to have unlimited access to the golf club. It was the middle of the summer holidays. We were young. We were enthusiastic, which, from what I could gather from Bob, was more than any of the Cripsley junio
r sections of the past had been. We were also getting good.
‘These boys think they own the course …’
Er, excuse me, Mr Sevenball.
‘… and unless we show some discipline I can only see this getting more and more out of hand …’
Christ. Had this guy no idea whatsoever what it was like to dream?
‘… so the only option seems to be a two-week suspension.’
What!?
‘Clllurrrrble,’ said Bob’s stomach.
‘Gordon, I think that’s a bit extreme,’ said Robin beseechingly.
‘Under the circum—’ began Hell’s Trucker.
‘No,’ interrupted Bob, ‘I agggree that at the most a suspension should be imposed, and that at the least, it’s abbbsolutely imperative that the bbboys should be bbbanned from visiting the gggolf clubbb on Mondays and Tuesdays.’
Robin blurted out the opening consonant of a protest, then sank back into his chair. He didn’t want to be suspended. He was also well aware that Bob wouldn’t dream of doing anything to jeopardize our golfing futures. Hell’s Trucker had a notoriously short memory, as evinced by the astonishing amount of junior tournaments he forgot to attend as organizer, and Bob and Robin were perhaps postulating that this would be the kind of ban that would stand as Big News only until HT’s next social function as captain.
I, on the other hand, silently wondered how the hell I was expected to operate on only five days’ golf per week.
It didn’t make sense. For years Cripsley’s elder statesmen had yearned for a junior section that would venture forth and make the club famous with its crashing drives, metronomic irons and honeyed putting strokes. Now they’d got them, they seemed to be overwhelmed with feelings of ambivalence. We didn’t misbehave any more or less than we had before we became accomplished players, but we were certainly reprimanded miles more frequently. You couldn’t help wondering what was really going on. Was Graeme Finch, for example, genuinely upset when he reported me to the committee for failing to repair that pitchmark on the seventh hole? Or was he simply pissed off that two days before, during my six and five defeat of him in the club’s matchplay championship, I’d been routinely out-hitting him by ninety yards? Was Gerry Cummings truly bothered that Jamie had played his shot out of turn in his league match against him, or was he jealous at the height and backspin that Jamie got on his pitch shots?
Whatever the case, Robin’s conjecture about the ban was right. Three Tuesdays after its instigation, we were tying Mousey’s shoelaces together in the pro shop. Two Mondays after that, we were sneaking out to the fifth hole and dropping a bag of practice balls in one of the greenside bunkers.
We were on our guard, however, and feelings of victimization – ours – did our golf no end of good. Rarely a week went by without Ashley, Jamie, Robin, Bushy, Mousey or me reserving a spot at the prize table. The more oppressed we felt, the more we won, the more our actions fell under the spotlight, and the more risqué and enjoyable our games of Ching! and Eight-iron Tennis became.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I won the club championship by five shots from an elusive adult member named Terry Titterton. This made me abruptly, immensely popular – more popular, perhaps, than you’d have any right to expect to be having just beaten the best players in a modestly ranking East Midlands golf club. Titterton had held the championship for the previous five years, the members greeting his victories with an increasingly bilious stoicism. He was a ‘country member’ of Cripsley – which, in this case, meant he came to the club once a year, won its most prestigious event, then vanished back to his ‘proper’ club in leafy Surrey, leaving Cripsley’s shell-shocked league team sitting around with steam coming out of their ears. Hell’s Trucker probably had fantasies about driving over Titterton’s golf bag in one of his juggernauts.
Titterton seemed like a nice enough bloke to me, but for the captain and many of the other low handicap players, his ability annually to bring their course to its knees in just two rounds mocked their failure to do the same thing over the course of a year, and his easy temperament and Home Counties charm while he was doing it seemed to undermine everything from their swings to their sex drive. Obviously, I wasn’t their ideal choice to do the dethroning (I suspect they would have preferred someone with a few more Pringle jumpers – or even one, for that matter), but, in the absence of any other candidates, I would have to suffice.
Moments after I’d signed my winning scorecard, the clubhouse grapevine began to whirr. Titterton had ‘left in disgust’, ‘couldn’t even be bothered to stay for the prize-giving’. By the time I had made my way from the clubhouse to the locker room to change into my blazer, my back felt raw. If you had removed the polo shirt I’d borrowed from my dad, you would have found a patchwork of bright red hand marks.
‘Well done, Tom. You sure socked it to him,’ said the man with the glasses who once told me off for looking for balls in some gorse near the seventh green.
‘You scared him off, kiddo,’ offered the camp man with the long putter whom Jamie had christened ‘Puff Legs’.
Who the fuck were these people?
As I wrestled my way towards the prize table, there, waiting – grinning – was the tournament chairman, poised to shake the winner’s hand and present the trophy. Earlier in the year when I had been triumphant, he had been sure to undermine my victories with backhanded compliments, such as, ‘Enjoy it while it lasts, Tom,’ and, ‘I see by your dress sense that your mum makes good use of her old curtains,’ whispered beneath the shelter of applause. This time, though, he just glowed: ‘You’ve done us proud, Tom.’ It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been the one to break Titterton’s stranglehold; what mattered was that it had happened in his year as captain.
Finally, at long last, the two of us were poised to be united. Here was my chance to initiate a future of peaceful adult–junior relations, maybe opening up some career opportunities in the transport industry in the process. I have gone back over the scene countless times over the years, and there are a lot of things I would have liked to say as Hell’s Trucker passed me the trophy and I stared, dry-throated, into all those eager faces who pretended to know me, and wondered whose victory it was. But, in the end, the two I used – the only two that I could find at the time – probably did the job as well as any.
‘Thanks, Gordon,’ I said.
IF SOMEONE TELLS you that golf isn’t a dangerous game, the chances are they’ve never been hit on the arm by a three-wood shot that hasn’t bounced.
Don’t be suckered in by TV golfing injuries. Those spectators you see grinning and rubbing their ankles after John Daly’s ball has clattered into the gallery are putting on a brave face for their heroes. Two minutes later, with the TV cameras elsewhere, they’ll be reverting to their baby voice and pleading for a hot-water bottle, a comfort blanket and an ambulance. Golf balls sting. I found this out in 1990 during the annual Notts county juniors v. county police match, when Sergeant John Trevanean propelled me into a bunker with his hooked fairway wood shot. One second I was standing thirty yards in front of him, forty-five degrees to his left, in what I assumed was a safe position. The next I was prostrate in forty feet of sand, with a tangerine-sized lump trying to work its way out of my arm.
The first sensation, upon getting hit by a golf ball, is a mixture of dizziness and extreme pain. Then comes the easy part: a prolonged, malevolent throbbing. Finally, you feel like something is growing inside you, directly beneath the point of impact – a spherical thing, yes, but at least twice the size of the missile that hit you, and fitted with rotating teeth. I’m still thankful that I put my arm up in time. The ball had been heading directly for my temple.
But golf is a man’s game. Trevanean’s apologies were sincere, but businesslike – I was disappointed; I’d hoped I’d be offered at least a free guided tour round the local CID for my misfortune – and we moved quickly onto the next hole. First aid? First schmaid. We had a match to play.
Don’t let the long
johns and umbrellas fool you; golfers are tough. The balls are the least of it (although the legendary club player who had to have his legs amputated after licking the poison from the inside of one might beg to differ). Additionally, there are unruly, flailing swings, loose clubheads, water hazards and – in the case of the Cripsley juniors – flying killer apples and Mars Bars to think about. By the time I was sixteen, I’d been stabbed with the jagged metal shaft of a five-iron, almost decapitated by a low-flying Braeburn thrown by Jamie, pushed into a pond, subjected to witchcraft by a manual labourer, intimidated by a red-neck trucker, buried to my neck in leaves, and tripped over by an errant flagstick. At the 1991 British Open at Royal Birkdale I had stood two hundred yards up the fairway, listening helplessly to the terrible snapping sound as a tour professional – England’s Richard Boxall – broke his leg just by swinging. I knew the risks, but I carried on regardless.
What I hadn’t bargained for, however, was just how much damage a wooden tee peg could inflict.
This particular tee peg had been dozing innocently in my golf trousers, a remnant of my round earlier that day. Like most of its breed, it was about an inch and a half long, with a less than threatening appearance. Sure, it had a pointy end, but if you wanted to use it to commit an act of violence, you’d have to go to extreme and fairly pointless lengths, such as attaching a chain-saw to it.