Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  ‘Ooh, yes, cleaned up nicely, Steve. Tom, is Steve bullying you? Don’t let Steve bully you.’

  ‘I’ll bully him if I like, Dave. You like being bullied, anyway, don’t you, Tom? That’s what you need, isn’t it? If you don’t have me nagging on at you, you’re never going to get any better, are you? Isn’t that right, Dave?’

  ‘No, that’s right, Steve. Listen to your uncle Steve, Tom; he’s always right, you know.’

  ‘Thank you, Dave.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure if the 1980s-sitcom nature of Steve and Dave’s relationship was a device intended to disorientate their pupils into submission, or simply the result of spending too many years in a small windowless room with one another, but they had quite a double act going. Apparently, the previous summer, the newly golf-crazed Ant and Dec had visited the school for a couple of lessons, but had never returned, and I couldn’t help wondering if the Geordie entertainers had simply got spooked by meeting their comic match.

  While Dave often chipped in with comments on my backswing – usually to the chagrin of whichever lord or soap star he was supposed to be teaching at the time – it was Steve who wore the trousers in the partnership, and it was he who had taken me, quiet flatteringly, under his wing. Like all the best golf coaches, he managed to find just the right balance between crushing insults and grudging compliments, thus keeping me on my self-critical guard, yet not quite depressed enough to give up hope. When he talked about my swing being ‘puffy’, I wasn’t quite sure whether he was talking about homosexuality or pastry, but I thought I knew what he was getting at. The Cox action had always been a loose, wristy beast, but now that I could see it before me on screen, contrasted with the smooth, wide actions of Ernie Els and Tiger Woods, it had become obvious that its flail and flick made it a critical anomaly. When Steve had complained that I was ‘living in the past’, I’d originally thought he was insulting my Led Zeppelin T-shirt, but I soon realised he was talking about something else. Nobody, according to him, swung the club like me any more.

  ‘The main problem is that your swing’s a relic,’ he had explained. ‘You’re stuck in 1989. People thought that flicky stuff was all right then, but now everyone swings the club with width. It’s all about keeping the arms away from the body these days. Of course, we’ve been telling people all this stuff for years.’

  What Steve wanted me to do, he’d said, was simple: I had to forget about my scores, spend as little time on the course, and as much on the driving range, as possible. It was imperative that I broke my swing down to its individual components, pausing halfway up my backswing, then at its apex, then, later, stunting my follow-through a microsecond after impact – continually checking the angle of the club and shaft to the ground, regarding the whole process scientifically. It would take hard work, certainly, but one day, he assured me, I would step out onto the course and everything would click into place subconsciously. It made a lot of sense at Knightsbridge, with Steve and Dave’s quickfire instructions ringing in my ears, but all too often, back in Norfolk, after a few disciplined shots I’d let temptation get to me, and I’d begin to bash away at the ball in a more random, carefree fashion. Now, here I was, at what should have been the moment of truth, and I was wondering where the last ten months had gone. Sure, I’d intended to hit the eight-hundred-balls-per-week minimum Steve had told me was required, but there had been a book to finish, a stack of extra journalism to take on in order to help fund the golf, and then it had been winter, the practice ground had been a bit muddy and, to be honest, I’ve never been that fond of those cold, thin iron shots where it feels as if iced electricity is pinging around the inside of your forearm. Without doubt, I’d probably hit more balls recently than at any point since I was a college-bunking sixteen-year-old. I also knew that I was hitting very slightly straighter and – rather worryingly – shorter than before. I was sure something about my swing had changed; I was similarly sure, though, that in Steve’s programme I was probably just reaching the stage he’d intended me to reach around July last year.

  Now, as Steve packed away the balls, I made a quick estimation: if I continued at this rate, I would complete my transformation into Fred Couples by August 2011.

  ‘We’ll put you right in no time, Tom. Won’t we, Dave?’ said Steve, producing a Polaroid and handing it to me. I studied the photo: it was a freeze frame of my somewhat cramped position at the exact point of impact with the ball. I looked quite like I was playing golf, but equally, I could easily have been mistaken for a man performing a complicated task with an extra-long electric screwdriver.

  In the background, Des Lynam – who’d recorded the outgoing message on Steve and Dave’s answering machine – took an enquiry from someone whose voice I thought I recognised from EastEnders.

  ‘We’ll put him right in no time, Steve,’ repeated Dave. ‘You’ve got to learn to trust your uncle Steve, Tom. Hasn’t he, Steve?’

  ‘That’s right, Dave. Now, when are you going to come down here again? You know what you ought to do, Tom? Get a flat above here. Then we’ll really sort you out. Ask Dave. He’ll tell you, won’t you, Dave?’

  ‘That’s right, Steve. Dead right.’

  ‘Yep, all you need is a cool million or two, and you’re there.’

  ‘A million pounds will be nothing to you soon. You just wait. You’ve got to work on that hand action, though, and not be a naughty boy. Isn’t that right, Da …’

  Sensing that this could go on indefinitely, I made my excuses and emerged, blinking, into the bustle of lunchtime Knightsbridge. It was terrific to hear Steve and Dave’s encouragement, but there was just one minor problem: I had no time. In just a week, I would be hitting my first shot as a pro. I’d promised Steve that I’d see him one more time before my debut, but I knew that in reality I probably wouldn’t. It was time to get off the conveyor belt. It was dangerous to fill your head with technical talk on the course and, as unsure as I felt about the science of my swing, I knew it was important to turn my attention to the game itself now: the simple concept of getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. And who could tell how I would react when I was under the gun? Maybe I’d beat the odds, and my doubts would fly away on the wind?

  ‘Haven’t I proved myself before?’ I reasoned, thinking back to my trial for membership at my first club, in Nottinghamshire, as a nervous thirteen year-old: the way, saddled with the pressure of not having a Lyle & Scott sweater to my name or a family member on the committee, I’d proceeded to dispatch fifty of the smoothest seven-iron shots imaginable straight down the practice fairway, to the wonder of the junior organiser. Pretty soon, I fell into a reverie: the compressed feel of ball on turf, the winning putt (always a carbon copy of Seve’s in the 1984 Open, the slightly misdirected one that seems to find the target in response to the sheer force of his will), the acceptance speech. I think I am a golf professional, therefore I am a golf professional …

  I’d walked almost all the way to Oxford Circus before I came out of the daydream, and as I did, I immediately became aware of a small, squeaky ‘hee-hoo’ noise, cutting through the rumble of frustrated traffic. Then, shortly afterwards, I also became aware of the two teenagers ten yards to my left who were making it, pointing at me, and moonwalking on the pavement.

  As I touched my left hand and the synthetic, dried-out feel of all-weather fibre confirmed my worst fears, I had an instinct to be embarrassed. However, this was quickly overridden by the impressive realisation that I’d walked two and half miles through the busiest city in Britain at the busiest time of the day wearing a single white – well, sort of off-white now, to be honest – glove before anyone had thought to hurl any abuse at me and, when they finally had, they had not hurled it because I was a golfer, they had hurled it because they had mistaken me for a Michael Jackson fan. Was this acceptance? I think it was!

  Suddenly suffused with a warm glow, I peeled off the offending item and examined it. That ‘London Golf Show’ logo was fading now, and the hole in
the index finger was getting bigger. If beef jerky had been beige, it might have looked something like this. I’d heard that Bernhard Langer used three or four gloves per round, which, if you asked me, was just downright wasteful. I’d been using this one for eleven months, and it had served me well, but I was feeling expansive – carefree, even. Maybe, just maybe, if I played well next week, I’d treat myself to a replacement.

  1 I presumed that the £3.46 I’d won in the sweep for getting a two on the fifteenth hole at Diss last September didn’t count.

  Two

  The Sweet Smell of Success

  IF YOU SPEAK to enough people within the sphere of professional golf, you’ll soon realise that there’s no hard and fast way to prepare for a tournament. Some players, like Vijay Singh, will blast balls on the range every hour that daylight allows. Others, like Colin Montgomerie, will keep their warm-up to a gentle minimum, perhaps keen to save their best shots for the course. Practice isn’t about rules. Still, it can be said that most tournament professionals will do their utmost to put themselves into a calm state of mind before teeing up the first ball of the day. They will strive to get a decent amount of sleep. Then, when they play their practice round, they will make sure that they play it on the right course – preferably the one where the tournament in question is being held.

  I’m not quite sure where I went wrong in the lead-up to my debut at the Europro Tour Qualifying School. Having left Knightsbridge, I’d surprised myself with a few days of knuckling down and reaching the levels of training regime discipline that I’d been promising, but not quite achieving, for most of the winter. My practice sessions became almost disturbingly efficient. On one visit to my local driving range I had hit two hundred eight-iron shots, using a ‘one-two’ counting routine that I’d picked up from Timothy Gallwey’s celebrated book, The Inner Game of Golf,1 and each had landed within the same ten-yard radius, roughly 160 yards from where I stood. With some encouragement from the newly golf-savvy Edie, I’d even begun to devote some time to fine-tuning my putting – a part of the game in which I’d last shown serious interest shortly after my fifteenth birthday. I’d topped off my preparatory routine with one final game as an amateur, at Richmond Golf Club with Simon and Scott, during which I’d driven to the fringe of the green on a 320-yard par four and Simon had pointed to me and shouted over to an onlooker on the adjacent practice ground, ‘He’s a pro, you know!’ Later that evening we’d returned to Simon’s Shepherd’s Bush flat to watch the Players’ Championship, golf’s all-but-official ‘fifth major’, held at the TPC course at Sawgrass, with its picturesque, alligator-guarded holes and its habit of coaxing my favourite players – long-hitting, aggressive players – to the top of the leaderboard. There could have been no tournament I would rather have watched for inspiration.

  ‘I can’t believe that’s going to be you in a couple of days,’ Simon said as we watched Sergio Garcia – who, once again, had been unfairly getting our hopes up – pull an elementary ninety-yard wedge shot into a greenside bunker. ‘Lucky fucker.’

  ‘Well, sort of,’ I said. ‘Except I’m not going to be Spanish. And I’m going to be in Essex, not Florida. Oh yeah, and my putting average is still seven worse than the average for the PGA Tour.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Scott asked.

  I was surprised to find that the answer was ‘not really’.

  That night I drove back to Norfolk feeling positive, but somewhere between then and the next day – the last day before I signed away my amateur status – something odd happened to my body.

  At first, I thought it was ’flu. I also wondered if it was exhaustion from the two thousand miles I’d driven in the previous fortnight. It could, I suppose, just have been nerves making a belated showing. Whatever the case, it was highly unusual. Performing the simplest of household tasks, I would find myself dropping things and walking into furniture. If I couldn’t keep hold of my novelty ‘Golf: Violating the Rules of Fashion for Three Hundred Years!’ coffee mug, what hope did I have of keeping hold of my wedge during a difficult chip shot off a hanging lie?

  I find that there are a surprising number of physical conditions that I can allow to get in the way of good golf, but tiredness is undoubtedly the most niggling. When I’m suffering from fatigue, I dwell morbidly from all angles on the destruction it wreaks on my swing. But in this instance I slapped myself about a bit. Did I think Retief Goosen went moaning to his peers that he needed a bit of shut-eye, after yet more golfing globetrotting? Crikey! I was only going to Stoke-by-Nayland in Essex, not Dubai. And so what if the wind was blowing at 30-plus mph? This wasn’t the Monthly Medal. That old ‘sore throat’ excuse wasn’t going to cut it. In tomorrow’s practice round, I was due to plot out the most important eighteen holes of my life. This was no competitive amateur circuit day out, where a player could take a chance and negotiate a course ‘blind’, with only the aid of a yardage map. I was a pro now, and pros did their homework. It was not uncommon to hear stories of the likes of Phil Mickelson arriving at a tournament venue a month before the action was set to begin, or indulging in eight-hour practice rounds in order to familiarise themselves with every contour of every green, every hidden hillock beneath every ostensibly irrelevant heather patch. I needed to weigh up my grassy adversary as Frank Lloyd Wright might have weighed up a proposed site for an architectural masterpiece. Or, at the very least, I needed to get an idea of which hole was which, in order to avoid a repeat of the time my friend Mousey and I got ourselves disqualfied for holing out on the wrong green in the 1990 Minchinhampton Junior Open.

  After another night of fitful sleep, I hauled my wobbly bones out of bed, carried out my customary check of the pampas grass in my back garden in order to gauge wind strength (estimate: 38 mph), gave my clubs a quick going over with an old nailbrush, and set off on the ninety-minute drive to Essex, stopping for a warm-up – albeit one more in the tradition of Montgomerie than Singh – at a driving range in Suffolk. Having unpacked my clubs and chased my woolly hat across Stoke-by-Nayland Golf Club car park, I then stifled the desire to drive back home, pull my bedcovers over my head and not remove them until the following morning. Instead, I headed for the pro shop. Here, a damp-haired, listless assistant pro, clearly unhappy to be distracted from his mid-afternoon Mars Bar, directed me towards the first tee. As I walked past the putting green, I scanned my surroundings in the vague hope of spotting some sign of touring pro life – a giant leaderboard, perhaps, or a passing Ian Woosnam, here to weigh up young talent, his mind already on wild-card picks for his debut as European Ryder Cup captain that autumn – but all I could see were a couple of pros in a practice net to my right, stroking one another’s three-woods. At least, I assumed they were pros, since they had those fluorescent shirts and ‘drenched hedgehog’ hairstyles – wetter versions of the one David Beckham had in about 1999 – that all supertalented male golfers under twenty-five seem to have these days. Either that, or they were Carphone Warehouse employees who’d got lost on their way to a cycling meet.

  It’s not a bad golfing layout, the Constable Course at Stoke-by-Nayland, if alarmingly on the hilly side for East Anglia, and, in late March, a tad marshy underfoot. But, sadly, on practice day at the Europro Tour Qualifying School, I didn’t have the pleasure of playing it. It was only when I reached the fifth green that it occurred to me that I was playing Stoke-by-Nayland’s other, somewhat inferior, course, the Gainsborough. Maybe I might have realised this earlier, had I been in a less drowsy state of mind. Little signs may have alerted me to my mistake: the fact that several of the tee-markers seemed to have gone missing, the profusion of worm-casts growing out of the greens, or the regularity of the shouts of ‘Fore!’ emitted by the four overweight men in bobbled hats playing ahead of me.

  Spotting two more pink-shirted, hedgehoggy heads on an elevated tee a couple of hundred yards away, I picked up my bag and ball and began to head in their direction. I’d walked about fifty yards towards what I now gathered was the eighth tee of the cou
rse I should have been playing – I still had no idea where the first tee was – when the heavens opened.

  They opened in the kind of way I thought they only opened in disaster movies. What came out of them was a bit like rain but more serrated, and that in turn became something a bit like hail, but heavier (and still just as serrated). I forget at which point during this meteorological marvel it was that my bag fell off its metal stand and rolled down a mountainside, but I know that somewhere in the process of retrieving it from a puddle, peeling off my sodden new leather Titleist glove, rummaging about for its redoubtable all-weather predecessor and realising that neither it, nor any form of waterproofs, was present, it became clear that a practice round was no longer top of my list of Life Priorities. What was top of my list of Life Priorities was my car heater. As I trudged back to the clubhouse, still ignorant of the delights of the Constable Course, I felt that special kind of calmness that comes from the knowledge that nothing can possibly get any worse.

  At 9.09 a.m. the following day, things got quite a lot worse.

  It is well known that a professional golfer has no control over his tee time or grouping. A few years ago, Sergio Garcia made some sarcastic, harrumpty noises about Tiger Woods getting preferential treatment in this area, but an uproar soon followed, and Garcia was coerced into a public apology for daring to be so facetious.2 But while the frequency with which crowd-pulling threeballs turn up at commercial, viewer-friendly times of the day in golf’s four major championships can seem a tad suspicious, it’s all a lottery at the lower level of the sport. As tee times went, the one of 8.38 that I’d been allocated by the Europro Tour officials seemed reasonably serviceable: not quite early enough to be stiff-limbed and unsociable, yet not late enough to be prey to the spike marks made by the shoes of the other hundred or so players in the field. Most importantly, perhaps, it would not allow me to spend half a day chewing my nails over that all-important opening shot.