Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  The first encouraging thing I noticed, upon arriving at Stoke-by-Nayland at half past seven, was that the bad weather had passed, replaced by a light breeze and a low, hazy sun. The second was that it now looked like something approximating the venue for a proper golf tournament. Here, in the clubhouse foyer, was that leaderboard I’d been fantasising about. OK, maybe it wasn’t quite as big or as colourful as the ones on TV, but I still had to catch my breath as I saw my name a few columns down, in the first row, alongside those of Michael Freake from Australia and Grant Willard from Farnham, Surrey. One of my playing partners had come all the way from Australia to play in this? Wow. For the first time, it hit me: there was no going back; this was it. Dazed, I announced my presence to a middle-aged man sitting at a desk in a bright red car-dealer’s jacket with ‘PGA’ written on the back and signed in, bought two little ball tokens from the apple-cheeked blonde lady at the clubhouse reception desk, then made my way over to the practice ground. It was only when I arrived there that I realised I was clutching a small black-and-white course planner, full of scribbled lines, endless numbers and tiny esoteric symbols. I had no recollection of buying it from the man in the tournament office, nor of being charged the outrageous sum of £12 for the privilege (a full £9.50 more than the price I typically paid for the more colourful, aesthetically pleasing planners that are sold as standard in most pro shops).

  The first tee shot of your first professional golf tournament is a nerve-racking experience, but I would argue that visiting the practice ground can be infinitely more so. Everyone knows you’re supposed to be nervous on the first tee. If you send the ball scuttling along ahead of you in a worm-worrying manner, or curving off into a lake eighty yards from your intended target, the chances are that those witnessing the travesty will sympathise and chalk it off to nerves. But the practice ground is supposed to be the easy bit: nobody expects you to fluff a shot there, because it’s the place where the pressure’s off, where it’s most easy to stay within your own blasé cocoon, unconcerned with exterior influences. It’s been said that if every pro hit the ball the way they hit it on the range, they’d all be Tiger Woods, but that’s not true. What they would really all be is golfing cyborgs, able to shape and flight the ball at will in any given situation. In other words, the range is a place where, if you mess up, you’re going to be noticed.

  Me? I kept my eyes to the floor and walked along the line of well-oiled swings and polo shirts and took my place as far to the right as possible, mindful of the range scene in Tin Cup where Kevin Costner sends a series of ninety-degree hosel shots – or shanks – whizzing past the noses of his more accomplished peers. Even if I hit my most violently left-veering shot, I wasn’t going to trouble the players next to me. The right-hand side was more of a worry: I’d always been liable to the ‘shank’ – the most violent stroke in golf, the one where the ball is squeezed into the join between clubhead and shaft – and I’ve been particularly liable to it at times when the word ‘shank’ is skipping around my head like a dainty fork-tailed parasite. Times like now, in other words. However, I reasoned that as long as the area immediately in front of my eyes remained clear of human activity, I could avert a crisis.

  I’m sure if I’d seen the small man with the jet black hair and the surprisingly ungolfy clothes approaching in good time, I would have made a deft manoeuvre around him, even further towards the trees in front of me, doing my best to mould my features into a ‘Golly! I could do with some shade!’ expression. As it was, he caught me off-guard, sneaking up and taking his position next to me as I was admiring one of my drives – my first really pure shot of the day – tracking a distant pylon.

  I watched him set up, noting that he was the first pro I’d seen so far that morning who didn’t seem to be wearing one of those big-buckled belts that said ‘JL’ on them. Playing for time, I began to pretend to clean some dried mud out of the grooves of my four-iron with a tee peg.3

  He removed a club from his bag, and began to make a jerky, pushing motion with it. I suppose it might have looked a bit like swinging, in a certain light. Equally, though, if there had been a sooty chimney just above his right shoulder, he wouldn’t have seemed out of place.

  I watched, fascinated, as he proceeded to use the same action to dispatch four or five balls into the middle distance.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘What time are you off?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with a French lilt. ‘English, no. Erm.’ He shrugged exaggeratedly and stuck out his bottom lip.

  ‘Time. Teeing off? You?’ I persevered, pointing at my wrist and thinking that maybe I should have paid a bit more attention in those secondary school French lessons – maybe even attended a few of them – but he just continued to shrug apologetically. He looked behind him and beckoned to a tall, chic-looking blonde woman in checked trousers holding a lead attached to a small, hairy dog. She made her way over, and I waited, expecting her to act as some kind of interpreter. Instead, the two of them began a conversation of their own. This went on for a couple of minutes, after which they looked at me – or maybe at my woolly hat – and smiled, then continued talking. I may have imagined it, but I thought I saw a sly grin playing around the lips of the Pomeranian, too.

  When I’d looked forward to my first bit of behind-the-scenes pro golf banter, this hadn’t been quite what I’d envisaged.

  Now I had a dilemma. About twenty balls remained in my basket. Ideally, I would like to hit these. Also, it would appear a bit odd if I abruptly packed up and left. I didn’t want my new friend and his entourage to feel that I had something against French golfers. Or hirsute dogs. Or blonde women who looked as if they’d stepped freshly out of a Chanel advert. Nonetheless, that ‘shank’ demon was still there.

  The traditional pre-tournament warm-up routine of a pro begins with the shortest clubs in the bag – a few finesse shots with the wedges, for example – and gradually moves through the bag in order of power, before finally reaching the big-headed, long-flying metal clubs still confusingly referred to as ‘woods’. But I’d been impatient, keen to move quickly onto the macho clubs, all of which have less of a curve at the join between head and shaft and are thus less easy to hit destructively to the right. Now I knew that, to feel properly prepared for my day, I really needed to test out my lob wedge and gap wedge. In other words, the two most shank-happy clubs in the bag.

  As I addressed the ball and took a nervous waggle, the headlines flashed before my eyes.

  THREE-TIME DORDOGNE INVITATIONAL CHAMP DECAPITATED!

  ‘FORE!’: SERGIO GARCIA COPYIST GOES ON RAMPAGE. WITNESSES SAY: ‘WE COULD TELL HE DIDN’T BELONG HERE AS SOON AS WE SAW HIS PUFFY SWING.’

  ‘I WAS ONLY DOING WHAT KEVIN COSTNER DID,’ CLAIMS GOLFING SLAYER OF THREE!

  I waggled once more. In my peripheral vision, my neighbour took another jerky backswing. I looked at the ball again, and had two simultaneous revelations.

  I was a proper golf pro.

  I was not the golf pro with the worst swing at the tournament.

  Steadily, confidently, I swiped at the ball. I watched as it hissed through the air, about twenty yards lower than intended, then landed about thirty yards past the flag at which I’d been aiming. As wedge shots went, it was a freak of nature, a true runt of Satan. It was also definitely, definitely not a shank. I was elated.

  After that, my opening drive of the competition was a mere trifle. Well, actually, that’s not true: it was still one of the hardest shots I’ve hit in my life. As drives go, it was no oil painting – it only travelled about 220 yards and landed in some scruffy wet grass to the left of the fairway, but it did the crucial thing, which was get airborne. Ten minutes later, I was grazing the hole with my attempt at a dream opening birdie three, then tapping in for par from the kind of inconsequential distance that Beaker from The Muppets wouldn’t have got in a flap about.

  Here’s a tip. If you’re ever feeling stressed whilst watching the first round of a golf tournament, and need to soak up some r
elaxing vibes, try standing next to the second tee. Providing, of course, that there have been no major disasters on the first hole, it is quite possibly the most mellow sporting environment in the universe. On the first hole, I and my playing partners, Grant and Michael, had been three bunched fists disguised as men, but now, having secured two pars and a birdie and passed beyond the physical and metaphorical thicket that separated the first green from the tee of the short par-four second hole, we all but let out a harmonious sigh. The three tee shots that followed – each of them gently tracking the right-to-left dogleg of the fairway – might have been hit by those cyborgs I was talking about, but only if said automatons had been smoking vast quantities of weed beforehand. If we bent down to pick up our tee pegs before we’d established the destination of our shots, it was not just the gesture of men with a piercing sun in their eyes, it was also the gesture of men with a Zen understanding that their balls would be in, or close to, the ideal part of the fairway, leaving only elementary shots to the green.

  As we walked to our balls, I learned a little about Michael and Grant’s backgrounds. Michael, who shared a coach with Colin Montgomerie, split his time between the UK and Australia and funded his tournament play by selling Astroturf putting greens. Grant, meanwhile, had just quit his job as an assistant pro in order to play full time, but seemed vague on the subject of funding.

  They also learned a little about me – namely that the starter on the first tee had said, ‘On the tee, representing England … Tom Cox!’ not because I represented England in any official capacity, but because I didn’t really represent anywhere else.

  Having located my ball – a Titleist number two – in the fairway, ten yards behind those of Grant and Michael, I proceeded to flump a wedge shot fifty yards short of the green – and about five yards short of the accompanying divot – thus learning my first lesson as a pro golfer: Don’t Get too Heavily Involved in a Conversation Just Before You Hit Your Shot.

  My second, slightly more severe, lesson came about ten minutes later.

  When the man with the silly deep voice tells you on the advert that Titleist is ‘the number one ball in golf’ he’s not just being a man with a silly deep voice talking crap. There are other balls that crop up on the pro circuit – the odd Srixon, the occasional Nike, the lesser-spotted Maxfli – but the chances are, if you’re watching three pros in action, you’ll be seeing three pros playing with the same ball: either a Titleist Pro-V1 or the slightly lower-flying Titleist Pro-V1X. Back in my junior golfing days, a soft, high performance ball – which the Pro-Vs are intended to be – also meant a ball that, in the aftermath of a shot struck anything less than delectably, could very quickly take on the shape and texture of a Satsuma. It was an understatement to say that, in the intervening years, golf ball technology had come on. Despite the fact that they cost almost £4 each, I couldn’t help being seduced by the Pro-Vs – their smooth enamel texture, the way they were somehow simultaneously soft and robust – and, if you ignored the time a couple of years ago when I’d won a pack of twelve Nikes in a local long-drive competition, I’d become a little bit of a purist about them.

  One byproduct of the culture of everyone choosing the same ball is that it becomes all the more important to find a way of distinguishing yours from those of your playing partners.

  Each Titleist is stamped with a single digit number, usually between one and four, to help with differentiation, but it is a cast-iron rule that, in addition to this, each player must mark his ball individually. Some pros will use their own stamp or, as was the case with the Titleists of Michael and Grant, clandestine squiggle. My plan had been to draw a small Cox’s apple on mine, but since that would have proved time-consuming, and my shaking first-tee hands probably would have made it look more like a pear, I’d gone for the more reliable – and somewhat old-school – ‘three green dot’ formation in permanent marker pen: one above the Titleist logo, and one on either side of it.

  The problem with permanent marker ink, of course, is that, like life, or good golf, its permanence is only an illusion. On a dew-sodden morning it can sometimes rub off as a ball makes its journey through fairway, rough and – quite possibly, in my case – shrubbery. And so it was that, as I marked my ball before putting for my par on the second hole, I noticed that it no longer had three dots on it, only two. Consumed by the task of stabbing my ten-foot par putt wide of the hole, I dismissed the matter from my mind. After all, it had happened before, plenty of times. If my Titleist shed more of its ink, then I’d attend to the situation, but for now the important thing was that it was still distinguished from Grant’s and Michael’s. I didn’t really think about the matter again until I reached my approach shot on the third hole, marked my ball and began to clean it.

  I noted, once again, that the ball bore just two green dots.

  I also now noted that these dots were in a slightly different place on the ball, about an eighth of a centimetre below where they’d originally resided.

  Additionally, I noted that they were very slightly bigger than the ones I had made with my pen.

  I called Grant and Michael over from the opposite side of the fairway, showed them the ball, and explained. Their faces turned grave: maybe not ‘someone has died’ grave, but certainly ‘something has died’ grave.

  Is there another game with rules as multifarious and intricate as golf? It’s doubtful. I find it remarkable that professional golfers’ brains don’t short-circuit from trying to keep all those carefully worded provisos and stipulations in there. Every so often on your golfing travels you’ll meet some little bloke, possibly with a moustache and a bit of an issue about the fact that he’s only five foot two, who doesn’t appear to have a hell of a lot going on in the rest of his life, who’ll claim to know it all; but one day, say when his ball lands in a soft drink bottle that also happens to be resting in a rabbit scrape, even his encyclopaedic disciplinary knowledge will fail him. Nobody can possibly know the correct course of action in every situation in a game played in as many different topographical habitats, with as many permutations, as golf. That said, when it comes to playing the wrong ball, most good players are pretty savvy – largely because playing the wrong ball is one of the most senseless and crushing of golfing mistakes. As Michael would generously say to me half an hour later, ‘It happens to nearly all of us once, but it very rarely happens twice.’

  I’ve never been one to hunker cackling under the duvet with a pen torch and a copy of that year’s updated R&A Rules of Golf, but even I knew that playing a ball other than your own means a two-stroke penalty. But here’s the real kicker: if you fail to identify and declare that alien ball on the hole where you first played it, the penalty is outright disqualification. No second serve. No ‘Go back, have another go.’ The end. Goodbye.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the lethal switchover had happened on the second hole, not the third – I’d just been too dopey, or too neglectful, or too inexperienced, to realise it. Now, as Grant recalled that he’d seen another ball a couple of inches off the fairway on the second hole, not far from his ball and the one I’d thought was mine, it became clear that the crucial moment had occurred just before my second shot. Possibly because of nerves, possibly because I’d been yammering, I had neglected to clean my ball and check its identity before playing it, other than noting that it was a Titleist Pro-V1X, marked with a number two. But we’d hit three good shots off the tee into the sun, all of which had seemed to go straight. Then we’d arrived to find three balls in the fairway. Why would we have imagined – particularly when the adjacent holes were both a fair distance away – that any of those balls was not ours? More to the point, what were the odds – even in a Titleist-dominated world – that someone else had been playing a green-dotted Titleist with the exact same specification and number as mine, and left it in this particular fairway? And who was this wasteful, struggling pro who could afford to discard perfectly good £4 missiles in a tournament that cost £325 to enter and – if you ignore
d Qualifying School Stage Two – only carried a £1000 prize fund? I wanted to meet him. Maybe we could strike a deal: if he apologised nicely and kept me in Titleists for the rest of the season, I’d agree not to steal his driver and throw it into the lake next to the first tee.

  There had, of course, been another option open to me when I’d noticed that I had the wrong ball: I could have kept quiet about it and played on. It is doubtful that Michael or Grant would have noticed, and I could always have changed the ball for a fresh one on the next hole. Quite a few non-golfers subsequently asked me why I didn’t do this (‘It wouldn’t have really hurt anyone, would it?’). As cheating went, it probably seemed a fairly mild example to them – the equivalent of a slightly theatrical dive in a football match, perhaps, or keeping quiet about an incorrect line call that works to your advantage in tennis. They had clearly never heard the one about the bloke who comes into the clubhouse and announces that the bloke who sneakily kicked his ball out of the rough in last month’s Saturday Medal has just been sentenced to thirty years in prison after being convicted on multiple counts of rape, GBH and arson (‘He kicked his ball out of the rough?’ responds the Greens Committee Chairman. ‘Right! He can think again if he thinks he’s playing here again in the next decade!’).

  Golf’s indiscriminate abhorrence of all cheaters had been ingrained in my psyche since I had taken the game up.

  ‘You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank,’ Bobby Jones, the thirteen-time major championship winner, famously said when he was congratulated for calling a two-stroke penalty on himself in a tournament.

  I wasn’t quite going to go that far – unless we were talking about a small, unusually depleted bank – but had I carried on and not admitted my mistake, I would have been in for a world of self-loathing and a lot of sleepless nights.