by Tom Cox
– George Plimpton
One
You Wanna be Startin’
Somethin’?
‘I SAW YOU hitting some shots out there the other day,’ said the man behind the counter, handing me two little silver tokens for the ball-dispenser. ‘You looked like you were bombing it. What do you play off?’
‘Oh, I don’t have a handicap. I’m a pro. Just turned, in fact,’ I said.
I was lying, actually. It was the tail end of winter, 2006, and I had two weeks left until I officially lost my status as an amateur golfer – possibly forever, and almost certainly for at least two years – but I figured it couldn’t hurt to take my new profession for a trial run. ‘I’m a pro,’ was something I was going to have to get used to saying over the coming months. Much as I’d been looking forward to speaking the words, though, I found that they tasted sticky and odd in my mouth. I wasn’t completely convinced that the assistant pro at Hemingford Abbots Driving Range in Cambridgeshire wasn’t going to unmask me, or at the very least call his co-worker over and play piggy-in-the-middle with my ailing, all-weather ‘London Golf Show 2005’ golf glove. As I did my best to look collected and pretend that an expression like ‘bombing it’ was a part of my everyday golfing vocabulary, I found myself studying him unusually closely. Was that the first sign of a smirk in the curve of his upper lip? Was he looking at my Gap jumper and thinking, ‘Yeah, right. Like a serious player would be seen dead in that.’
‘Congratulations!’ he said. ‘So, are you playing the circuit?’
‘Yep. Going to give it a go. See what happens.’
‘Where are you attached?’
‘Oh, I’m kind of out on my own.’
There’s a lot of guff talked about how hard it is to become a golf professional. People will tell you that, in order to play golf for a living, you have to learn byzantine things about the inner mass of the head of a three-wood, that you have to spend a large chunk of your life in retail limbo, selling tee-pegs and mending the shafts of the clubs that irate ten-handicappers have broken over their knee in the previous month’s Clive Wilkins Salver or Ron Davies Bowl. They’ll tell you that you need to be playing to a handicap of four, at worst, and that if you are seriously thinking about playing the game for a living, you’d be wise not to consider doing so until you’re at least six digits better than that. But this is untrue. Becoming a pro is really a lot easier than you might imagine.
When 80 per cent of golf professionals say ‘I’m a pro,’ what they mean is that they have joined the PGA, aka the Professional Golfer’s Association, professional golf’s governing body. To do this, they have to gain their card by serving a three-year apprenticeship working for a qualified teaching professional in a pro shop, learning about equipment and the fundamentals of the swing, sometimes – if their boss is a lenient, unselfish type – squeezing in five or six holes before nightfall, and taking a training course and exams at the PGA headquarters at the Belfry, near Birmingham. But mostly just spending an awful lot of time giving advice to old men about clubs they don’t really need. At the end of this period – at which point they must have a handicap of four or better – the budding PGA pro may, if he has not had it beaten out of him, still nurture a dream of making a living from his playing skills, but, if this doesn’t come to fruition, at least he has the fallback option of one day overseeing his own mini retail empire and driving a VW Golf with really big spoilers.
In days gone by, it was not uncommon for a feisty young ’un from the wrong side of the golfing tracks (e.g. Lee Trevino) to fight his way out of a low-paid assistant’s job and onto one of the main tours, where he would rub up against his more affluent, conventionally primed peers with incendiary results. But thanks to an increasingly well-structured and carefully monitored amateur circuit, and the rise of American golf scholarships, such occurrences are now about as common as openly bisexual Ryder Cup players. When you look at the top hundred of golf’s world rankings these days, you are by and large looking at a list of the former heroes of international amateur golf.
Have Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia ever soldered the head of a five-iron back onto its shaft, or been paid £18 for taking a septuagenarian member of the Ladies’ Bridge Club up to the practice ground for half an hour in an attempt to help her get her three-wood shots flying above shoulder level? Of course they haven’t. This is because, for them, the life of the PGA-qualified pro has never been a practical option. Instead, like most of their contemporaries, they have risen inexorably through the junior and amateur (and, in Donald’s case, American college circuit) ranks. Then, one day, when continuing to play for pride alone would be futile, they have arrived at a professional tournament and said, ‘I’m a pro. Should I perform to the best of my ability in this event, I would like to be paid some prize money. And while you’re at it, could you get someone to ferry me to the driving range in one of those cool newfangled buggies over there?’ It really is that simple. Sort of.
Since making my final decision to turn pro, last June, I had found the life surprisingly fuss-free. There had been no forms to fill in, no maths tests to take, no apprenticeships. The main significant difference really was that now, when I left the house for the golf club, I was able to tell Edie, ‘I’m off to work!’ According to the man I spoke to on the phone at the Royal & Ancient, which is the ruling authority of golf everywhere except the United States and Mexico, turning pro is defined as ‘breaching amateur status by agreeing to accept prize money for playing’.1 In other words, anyone can do it. The tricky part is the immediate aftermath. You might be able to call yourself a pro, but whether you will receive the tournament invites that allow you to attempt to function as one is another matter entirely. Moreover, as the man from the R&A told me, ‘It could take anywhere between a year and two years for you to get your amateur status back.’
No more Monthly Medals with Roy and Ron? I figured I could live with that. I could also quite happily live without the handicap system. What are handicaps anyway, if not a really good, legal way of cheating, for people who happen to be a bit rubbish? You don’t see football teams going out onto the field, assessing another team’s ability, and giving them ‘free’ goals, do you? (Well, not unless you’re watching England, you don’t.) As a pro, the playing field would be levelled – just me and my fellow competitors, battling against par.
All right, so I could see there were some downsides to no longer being an amateur golfer. I would have to turn down a place on the British team in the annual GB vs US golf writers’ event, which would be a bit of a bind. When I went to play my monthly games at Richmond Golf Club in Surrey, with my best golfing friends Simon and Scott, I would be giving them gargantuan respective twelve- and twenty-three-shot head starts. And I wouldn’t be regaining my Scratch Cup Championship from two years ago. But … I WAS TURNING PROFESSIONAL! That fact in itself was more than enough to compensate. The additional fact that I had contacted the Europro Tour and found out that I was eligible to officially turn pro at their Qualifying School event, at Stoke-by-Nayland Golf Club in Essex, seemed close to a miracle. If, as a seventeen-year-old, I’d known the pro system worked like this, might I currently have been mounting a campaign for my third successive Ryder Cup appearance?
Having made my decision, I was a little slow to investigate the nuts and bolts of the process itself. Instead, with the spectral voices of old junior organisers and coaches echoing in my head, I’d fixated on that magic number four, supposing that since this was the requisite handicap for a PGA pro, it would be the requisite one for a playing pro as well. My handicap had been going up steadily for a while now – in fact, its rise coincided almost perfectly with the first time I’d mooted the pro idea. I was now 5.1 – a whole 1.5 worse than my adult-period best – and climbing. One of the reasons I’d put off my enquiries with the Europro Tour and the R&A was that I was worried that, by not shooting down to four, as per my plan, I’d scuppered my chances. Now I knew differently, the relief was immense. When I thought about all
the rounds and entry fees and Roys and Rons and nerve-jangling three-foot putts and horrible cut glass it would have taken to reduce my handicap even back down to its all-time low of two, I couldn’t help-sitting back and admiring the ease of all this: ‘I think I am a golf professional, therefore I am a golf professional.’ Perhaps more astonishingly, other golf professionals seemed to believe me.
Well, an assistant golf professional at an obscure driving range in Cambridgeshire seemed to believe me, anyway. Whether the playing pros on the Europro Tour would too … I’d find out soon enough.
From what I’d heard about the Europro Tour in my months of preparation for my new golfing life, it was at the bottom of the pecking order, as far as full-time pro golf circuits went. This became obvious merely from comparing its financial rewards with those of its competitors. On the PGA Tour, golf’s untouchable premier circuit, based in America, the twentieth-placed player on the 2005 money list, Chad Campbell, won close to $2.5 million. By contrast, the twentieth-placed player on the 2005 Europro Tour order of merit won just over £9000. When I mentioned my intention of playing the tour to my more knowledgeable golfing friends, many of them gave me the kind of look more readily associated with root-canal surgery than the dawn of a glamorous sporting career. ‘Just don’t expect to be signing any autographs,’ warned a fellow golf scribe who had recently covered the Europro Tour’s climactic, season-closing event. Nonetheless, perusing a list of Europro regulars, I was impressed. Mark Davies? Was that the same long-hitting Mark Davies whom I’d frequently watched on my visits to the PGA Championship at Wentworth in the late eighties and early nineties? The one who twice won the Austrian Open, and whose swing Seve Ballesteros once called ‘the best in Europe’? It was. Could that really be the same Michael Welch who’d been coached by the father of 1988 US Masters Champion Sandy Lyle and who, when I’d watched him at the Brabazon Trophy in 1991, had been the subject of expectations not hugely dissimilar to those shouldered by the teenage Tiger Woods? It could. It was hard to suppress some butterflies when I realised that this was the company I’d be keeping. Perhaps more exciting still was the fact that if you said ‘Europro Tour’ really quickly, it sounded a bit like ‘European Tour’.
Judging by the entrance fees, the Europro Tour couldn’t be that low-rent. To be permitted to enter one of its regular tournaments, I had to cough up the not inconsiderable sum of £275, for which I would get two rounds of golf – four, if I made the thirty-six-hole cut – and a free pitchfork, with which to repair the marks my ball made when it landed on the green. The Qualifying School itself, meanwhile, would cost £325. On top of that, I would have to consider the extra expense of my equipment, accommodation and travel. This presented a problem that I perhaps should have foreseen: I needed to take time off from writing in order to give my golf a proper chance, but the more writing I did, the less of a struggle I would have supporting my new golfing life. Either that, or I would have to get friendly with a couple of local oil barons with a passion for supporting maverick, late-blossoming sporting talent in its early thirties.
In January, I’d visited the opulent Essex mansion that doubled up as the headquarters of the Europro Tour and the home of the Tour’s MD, Eddie Hearn, son of the legendary boxing promoter, Barry. I’d wanted to meet Hearn, partly because I’d heard that it was not unknown for him to personally sponsor some of the more promising players on his own tour; but despite my frequent references to my victory in the 1991 Kedleston Junior Open, he didn’t seem to be taking the bait. I was clearly going to have to give the matter of sponsorship some serious thought. l also needed to consider my 2006 schedule. If I made it through Stage One of the Qualifying School, then finished in the top hundred or so out of 240 in the final stage, I would be an official member of the Tour, with dozens of events to choose from in the coming months. What, however, if I didn’t? I wouldn’t be eligible to play in smaller, non-Tour-affiliated, regional pro tournaments, as these were only for PGA-qualified club pros. Sure, there were other tours out there, but the Challenge Tour – the far-flung ‘little brother’ of the European Tour – was generally only for people who’d already done very well on, or bypassed, the Europro Tour. Entering the Qualifying School for the mighty European Tour itself, meanwhile, cost almost £2000, and required a letter of reference from a golfing official, testifying to one’s ability. When I’d asked the man at the R&A if five-handicappers who’d turned pro were permitted to enter The Open, he said, ‘Probably not.’ And while I hadn’t actually approached Augusta National for confirmation, I was guessing that an invite to The Masters was out. But there was no point trying to cross a bridge at which I had yet to arrive … particularly if it happened to be erected over a shark-infested lateral water hazard, with no drop zone. For now, I was revelling in the sheer novelty of my new status as a professional sportsman, and the reactions it would provoke as I dropped it nonchalantly into conversations.
‘You’re going to be a golf pro? Wow. What did you have to do to be able to do that? I bet you’re really good.’
‘Will you give me a lesson some time? I love golf.’
‘God, I am so jealous. I would love to do that. I bet it’s the best job in the world!’
Somewhere deep in my brain, I was still conditioned to think that there was something embarrassingly bourgeois about being a golfer, but now, having fully embraced the golf world for the first time since my late teens, I was feeling the force of the mini-revolution that had occurred while I’d been away. This revolution wasn’t about the golf-themed fashion show I’d seen earlier in the year, with models in plus fours strutting along a catwalk to the sound of gangsta rap, waving their extra-large umbrellas around. It wasn’t about Sky Sports using popular indie rock hits to funk up their US Open coverage. Who cared if golf was ‘cool’? The important thing was that in the early Tiger Woods years – the years when golf had been but a blip on my radar – it had gained cultural acceptance. As a result, before I had even struck my first pro shot, people in the most unlikely places seemed impressed with my career choice.
It was probably just as well, all things considered, that I had Steve Gould to help me keep my feet on the ground.
‘Hand action’s better,’ said Steve. ‘Cleaner. The problem is, you’re still going through the ball like a complete puff.’
I’d met Steve the previous spring, after an on-form golfing friend had recommended his services. Over the years, he, his colleague Dave Wilkinson and their late, legendarily thorny guru, Lesley King (a man described by Steve as ‘golf’s answer to Brian Clough’), had built up an impressive list of pupils at their underground golf school, on a quiet, regal street just behind Harvey Nichols, in London’s swanky Knightsbridge district. Amidst the signed photographic testimonies on the wall from Christopher Lee, Des Lynam, Hugh Grant, Bryan Ferry and Geri Halliwell, I definitely recognised a picture of a bloke I remembered finishing quite high up in the Portuguese Open a few years ago – for the time being, I just couldn’t quite remember his name. To be fair, Steve and Dave had taught quite a few future golfing stars in their earlier days – it was rumoured, for example, that the swing philosophy that had brought Nick Faldo’s old coach, David Leadbetter, to prominence in the eighties had its roots in Knightsbridge – but, having been left bruised by a couple of incidents of heartless abandonment, they now preferred to teach within the amateur ranks. That these amateur ranks also happened to look not unlike the guest list at an Elton John housewarming party had nothing to do with a policy of exclusivity; it was simply a measure of how adept celebrities are at keeping a good thing to themselves. Still, Knightsbridge Golf School couldn’t stay a secret from the outside world forever, and my presence in itself suggested there’d been a wrong turn somewhere along the grapevine.
‘We had [then Chelsea midfielder] Gianfranco Zola in here not long ago,’ said Steve. ‘He’s a total hero of mine, but he had one of the worst swings I’ve ever seen. Took the club so far around his body that he smashed that mirror behind him – even wor
se than you, Tom. We put him right, though.’
Over the nine months I’d known him, I’d found that my mentor was far more interested in talking about the fortunes of Chelsea FC and the recent albums of Neil Young than golf, or the ever-increasing number of rich and famous people who played it. In fact, from what I could gather, Steve no longer bothered playing the game, in its conventional outdoor incarnation, at all (‘Full of stuffy retired colonels, isn’t it?’). That did not mean, however, that he wasn’t on a mission to scientifically perfect its execution, here in his underground lab. If, indeed, you could apply the term ‘lab’ to a shabby former squash court equipped with an ageing video camera and recorder, four Astroturf mats and a couple of nets that looked as if they’d played host to the leisure pursuits of an overzealous panther cub.
‘Ninety-five per cent of golfers suffer from the same faults,’ Steve would explain repeatedly to me. ‘We tend to teach people the same things here. It’s like a conveyor belt. Why do you think people call us the swing factory? Tell him why they call us the swing factory, Dave.’
‘Because we’re like a conveyor belt, Steve,’ Dave would say.
‘That’s right, Dave. Come over here and tell me what you think of Tom’s backswing. Cleaned up nicely, hasn’t it, Dave?’