by Tom Cox
‘Which? Blue dot or red dash?’
‘Blue dot. Squiggle, though, not bracket.’
‘Pretty good. I prefer the previous model. But maybe that’s because I’m a bit lateral from the top.’
By accompanying me to Birmingham, James wasn’t just playing the role of a technologically savvy friend, he was also acting in a (sort of) official capacity. The previous summer, when I’d announced my intention to turn pro, he’d offered, somewhat surprisingly, to act as my manager. ‘I’m thinking of getting a stable of up-and-coming players together,’ he’d explained, as if already picturing his first ultra-thick £20 cigar. Immediately, I’d questioned the wisdom of this move. Did he not have enough on his plate with one branch of London’s most popular indoor golf franchise to run, and another, in east London, due to open in the summer? Did it not raise any alarm bells that, in all our games on the simulators at Urban Golf, I’d beaten him just once, and even then, only at Pebble Beach, my lucky course, when he’d had a hangover and I’d snuck in a cheeky practice round beforehand? Surely he realised the lack of potential financial benefits here? But he was adamant, and, I had to admit, I was flattered. James was, after all, a PGA-qualified pro himself, who’d flirted with the tournament circuit and grown up with Luke Donald, Britain’s best young player. If neither of us was sure what exactly his role as my manager would entail, he could at least pass on his insights into the competitive mindset. Failing that, he could tell me some interesting anecdotes about Donald pretending to listen to his iPod on the practice ground to keep people from disturbing his concentration, or the nasty side of Phil Mickelson.
I asked James what he thought had been the difference between him and Luke. Both had been good junior golfers on the Home Counties scene, both had gone on to turn pro. But now one owned four houses, spent half the year in America, and was being touted as the European golfer most likely to break his major championship duck, while the other spent much of his time playing pretend versions of Spyglass Hill and St Andrews with people who thought it was perfectly OK to buy their clubs from Lillywhites.
‘Luke was always one of those people who was great at everything he tried,’ said James. ‘I have a video from primary school where he’s singing hymns, and he has the most perfect choirboy voice. You can see how amazed everyone in the room was. He’s got the perfect level kind of temperament, he’s never had a bad patch, and he doesn’t let anything worry him. But I think in the end it’s about commitment. Maybe I just didn’t want it enough.’
I pondered this for a while. I also thought about a story James had told me, in which he and a bunch of friends had posed to one another the question, ‘If you were forced to make a choice between sex and golf, which would you give up?’ and James – a man not without carnality – had answered, without hesitation, ‘Sex!’ In what earthly way, I wondered, could you be more committed than that?
One of the refreshing things about the Cabbage Patch Masters was its unlikely inclusivity. Pros and amateurs crossed paths and joined teams in pre-tournament pro-ams, but they rarely competed in singles formats for the same prizes, and particularly not in pitch-and-putt events. Here, three pros – one of whom, I had to keep reminding myself, was me – would battle it out, every man for himself, with a field of seventy players from ‘the other side of the fence’. The flaw in this idea was that some of the handicaps were of a less than official nature – ‘I think I’m about a thirty-two,’ I heard one competitor announce, immediately before slam-dunking a forty-foot practice putt, using a hockey grip – but in the end, playing in what was quickly becoming known as ‘The Real Masters’ wasn’t about the winning. In fact, it wasn’t even really about the taking part. What it was about – as became evident from the moment the participants stepped off the coach and made their way over to the canopy and DJ booth that had been set up beside the first tee – was drinking vast quantities of alcohol, shouting a lot, and messing about in a way you hadn’t done on a golf course since you were fourteen. If, in the process, you won one of the shirts or hats that had been donated by several of golf’s numerous new streetwise fashion labels, great. And if, when you got it home and tried it on, you decided you felt a little bit too much like something used to alert people to a traffic hazard, that was great too. You could always sell it on eBay.
Having tested out my event-organising skills at Stoke Park and found them wanting, I’d suggested that other members of the SSG committee take the helm at the Cabbage Patch, with me in a ‘back-room’ role as Official Champagne Pourer. This seemed a satisfactory solution for all concerned, since it meant competitors would be well lubricated, yet properly informed of the scoring format and directed to their correct starting tees. It also meant I would get time to scope out the course before my round. After being coerced into a game of football on the eighteenth green with the greenkeeper’s nine-year-old son, I sneakily threw a couple of Titleists onto the putting surface in order to test its condition. On the stimpmeter, the device used in golf to measure the speed of greens, a top-quality fast green usually runs at 9 or 10, a slow one around 7. During Masters week, Augusta’s routinely read at around 12 or 13. Biddenden’s, from what I could work out, were more in the region of 4, but I could see that, on the hard-baked patches at their edges, where the daisies weren’t so much in bloom, they could probably get up to at least 6½. I knew James and I weren’t too anxious about our professional status being undermined by a course where ‘in-built irrigation system’ probably meant ‘really big garden hose’, but I was a little concerned about Andrew Seibert, the other pro on the start sheet, who was over here on injury-provoked sabbatical from the Hooters Tour (a more lucrative American equivalent of the Europro Tour). Andrew, a fellow pupil of Steve Gould whom I’d first met at Knightsbridge Golf School the previous summer, had come all the way from Florida to play in the event. Anyone who played his most serious golf on a tour with the word ‘hooters’ in the title would need to be in possession of a sense of humour, but I didn’t want him to be too disappointed in a tournament that billed itself as a rival to the most prestigious in the sport. As he walked over to greet me, he already looked slightly pale, although that may have had something to do with the purple plus fours being sported by the man to his right.
‘How’s the pro life treating you?’ he asked as we shook hands and moved away from the DJ booth and the deafening sound of Primal Scream’s ‘Movin’ on Up’.
I gave him a brief summary of my season’s curtain-raiser, leaving out the cat wee.
‘Ah, that’s tough, dude,’ he said. ‘I remember my first year on the Hooters Tour. I was not used to the lifestyle. I probably averaged eighty shots per round for the whole season. I even ended up crying one night when I missed the cut. My mom wanted me to quit. I got my game back, but it took a while. It’s a hard life out there.’
Like virtually every tournament pro I’d spoken to, Andrew tended not to refer to being on Tour as ‘being on Tour’ or ‘playing in pro events’: he called it ‘being out there’. The phrase brought to mind some vast, untameable landscape, where one might have to kill for one’s lunch.
I mentioned that I’d been surprised, in my brief flirtation with the pressure environment of tournament play, at just how sombre the atmosphere was.
‘It’s a lot tougher out there than you think,’ he said. ‘Too many people seem to think it’s a lifestyle, but it’s a job. The fact is, most guys out there have to be pretty self-centred to get to the top. Have you heard of Charles Howell?’
‘Of course.’ Despite his possessing a frame that looks as if it could easily topple over in light winds, Howell’s drives go further than some of my more outlandish day trips. He had been one of my favourite players on the PGA Tour for a few years, but at this point hadn’t quite lived up to the early hype.
‘Well, Charles is kind of a geek, and a really nice guy, and I think he was shocked when he got out there and people didn’t talk more. They were all kind of doing their own thing. You can have a social life o
ut there, but not much of one. Nick Dougherty is a good example. He loved the Tour life, enjoyed the parties, and he started to lose his game. But after a few years he got it together. You have to realise how physically demanding being a pro is. It takes sacrifices. Remember, Tiger Woods missed out on a childhood to be where he is.’
I picked up my wedge and began to loosen up.
‘So. Let’s see it, then. The Cox action.’
Andrew and I had talked frequently over the past year, and our dialogue might, to an outsider, have sounded like that of two hardened Tour survivors. We’d reported our eagles to one another, we’d warned each other not to think too much about our games. He’d told me of two caddies he’d seen fighting in a Nationwide Tour3 event, when one wouldn’t look for the other’s player’s ball, and of the girl who wanted to marry him, whom he’d left because golf was more important. I, meanwhile, told him of my three-birdie finish in the Thetford Golf Club Scratch Cup. However, none of this disguised the one yawning cavity in our relationship: neither of us had ever seen the other hit a shot. As I stood over the ball and began to move, something happened that I was beginning to get used to in pressure situations: I stopped thinking of my swing as a swish or a carefree swat, and instead began to perceive it as a never-ending arc of infinitely complex movements involving countless tiny bones and muscles, an impossible piece of timing and co-ordination. Nonetheless, the ball took off fairly impressively, landing somewhere near its target, a hundred yards away.
‘It’s quite a retro ball flight you’ve got there,’ said Andrew. He said it was ‘kinda loopy’ but added that I shouldn’t feel bad, since a lot of Europro Tour players find it quite hard to control their trajectories in the wind. ‘Watch this.’
With a short, lazy punch of a swing, he flicked a ball in the same direction. The shots ended up in the same place, but that was all they really had in common. It was like comparing a stone dispatched by a quarter-extended catapult to one that had been thrown, somewhat shakily, underarm. It was also another moment where the enormity of what I was trying to do came into sharp focus. I was thirty years old, and happy simply to strike a wedge shot out of the middle of the clubface and get it somewhere near the flag. Andrew was twenty-six, and had been beyond that for years. Yet, in the half-decade he’d spent on America’s more minor circuits, he’d had relatively little success – one eleventh-place finish and a round of 64 in a charity event.
If he thought my ball flight was a bit dodgy, I feared the worst about his views on today’s venue. But I asked him for them anyway.
‘It looks very nice. Sort of cute. It’s not normal golf, but it’s nice to just focus on the short game sometimes. There’s too much emphasis on macho power in the modern game.’
It was true: Biddenden, in its modestly manicured way, was sort of cute. The last time I had played pitch-and-putt had been almost two decades ago. I had played it not out of choice, but because I had not been powerful enough, or well-off enough, to play any other form of golf. As soon as I’d been admitted into a proper golf club, though, I’d dropped it. Getting out onto a full-length course had felt like getting the stabilisers off my first bike. And who ever bothers putting stabilisers back on? But now I wondered if this abandonment had been an act of heartless networking, the cruel abandoning of a supportive, humble friend. As I negotiated Biddenden’s opening nine, I began to remember the feelings accompanying my nascent rounds at Bramcote Hills, a par-three course three or four miles outside Nottingham. Sure, hitting one of those bright orange balls they’d sold at the shop had been a bit like hitting an onion, and some of the holes had had very silly names,4 but hadn’t Bramcote been the place where I’d first hit upon golf’s enduring mystery? Not the mystery of blasting the ball as far as humanly possible, but the mystery of contours and hollows and the angles of a clubface. I often claimed that I wasn’t interested in the short game these days, but perhaps that was because, much of the time, I was not in an environment where I had to be interested in it. At Biddenden, a course where the longest hole was barely over a hundred yards, and there was no opportunity for show-off drives, you couldn’t really do anything but get interested in chipping and putting. As a result, my chipping and putting quickly improved.
By the time I reached the sixteenth it was obvious, both from the profusion of high handicappers and the ever-rising cheers ringing out from elsewhere around the course, that I was out of the race for the title. Nonetheless, I was enjoying myself more than I had on a golf course at any time in recent memory. This was partly because of the sequence of delectable wedge shots I’d hit over the last few holes, and the vicarious thrill that came from watching one of my partners surge to the top of the leaderboard (or, rather, the champagne-stained paperboard).
In the Cabbage Patch Masters, there was no ‘draw’ as such. Competitors played, by and large, with the people they were most suited to play with. On the official entry form, I’d been asked to submit details pertaining to my golfing life, including my favourite pro (Fred Couples), my career highlight (sixteenth tee, Nottinghamshire Boys’ County Championship, 1990: three pars needed to go into play-off with Lee Westwood), my career lowlight (eighteenth tee, Nottinghamshire Boys’ County Championship, 1990: birdie needed to come fifth, four strokes behind Lee Westwood) and my on-course motto (‘Don’t Piss Down My Back and Tell Me it’s Raining’). This data had been assessed and, as a result, I’d been put together with my Richmond friends, Scott and Simon, and a man called Ricky who kept pretending to ride his putter as if it was a horse.
One of the many enduring joys of playing with Simon and Scott is witnessing their ever-more creative line in swearing, as their rounds falter. In Scott’s case, in particular, my respectful desire to see a mild-mannered friend play well is all too often countermanded by my desire to be entertained by a tragicomic drama of profane brilliance. Watching as he gets himself into another fine mess in a bunker was, I feel, a little like witnessing my own private episode of Laurel and Hardy, with Scott as a much skinnier, curly-haired Hardy, and his sand-iron as Laurel. A few weeks ago, before the tournament, I’d seen him worry terribly after breaking a cafetière in my kitchen, and with this in mind I’d been slightly concerned about the effect the tricky back nine at the Masters might have on his nerves. Today, however, he had brought with him what an American commentary team might have called his A-game. After holing a spectacular bunker shot for birdie on the seventeenth and securing his par on the eighteenth, it was clear that, at four under par, he was somewhere close to the lead, if not in it. A tense wait followed, with Scott, Ricky, Simon and me nursing bottles of Budweiser while the scores were totted up. As, in a voice evocative of a self-deprecating Scottish woodland animal, Scott repeated the phrase, ‘I won’t have won, you know,’ you would have had to have been made out of reinforced steel not to share his excitement.
Sadly, he was right to be pessimistic. I have no idea what caused twelve players to end up on four under par in the Cabbage Patch Masters. Drunkenness? Cheating? Laziness? A practical joke? Whatever the case, at three beers past my best, and not particularly relishing the prospect of bringing my iffy maths skills out of hibernation in such a raucous environment, I wasn’t going to be the one to stand up and demand a recount. My heart, however, went out to Scott.
Everyone loves a play-off in golf.5 On the whole, ‘playoff’ – whether the five-hole kind employed to decide The Open, or the more universal sudden-death version – means the most extreme, nerve-biting thrills available to a sport fan. It means a pumped-up Greg Norman throwing away the 1989 Open by driving into a bunker he didn’t think he could reach. It means ‘We apologise to viewers expecting to see the director’s cut of Amélie, but due to extended coverage of the golf, the film has been cancelled, and will be shown at a later date.’ It means Peter Alliss almost losing it and, for the 368th time in his commentary career, talking about the prospect of ‘a cavalry charge down the first extra hole’.
Of course, you never see anything that genuinely resemble
s a cavalry charge in televised golf. That would be far too undignified. In the more crowded play-offs – the 2002 Open’s, for example, featuring Steve Elkington, Ernie Els, Thomas Levet and Stuart Appleby – the players tend to be split into two separate groups. There was no such faffing around at the Cabbage Patch Masters.
If you haven’t seen twelve inebriated men playing a golf hole at the same time, let me tell you, it’s a fearsome sight – the kind of thing that, if caught on tape and mailed surreptitiously to the R&A, could give the coronary ward of St Andrews Hospital a busy night. Here, striking out in unison, in dangerously close proximity to one another, was every swing in the book (but not, almost certainly, in the textbook). Long swings, stubby swings, exuberant swings, fearful swings, swings that looked as if they were digging for rare coins. Peering through the swaying, jeering crowd in the failing light, it was often hard to spot Scott’s signature action – an action that always seems to say, ‘There is an invisible precipice six inches ahead of me, and if I follow through properly, I may tumble into the deathly, nettle-speckled chasm beyond it’ – but it was apparent, as others fell by the wayside, that he was hanging in there. By the time the skirmish reached the fifth play-off hole, I’d offered my caddying services – I’m sure Scott didn’t need any help carrying the three clubs he’d brought out with him, but I felt I could at least offer a calming word or two and some advice on Biddenden’s trickier putts – and it had become a two-horse race. The coveted first prize (I made a note to myself: find out what the first prize was) could only go either to Scott, or to a Leeds United supporter called David with a rowdy fanbase and a swing that was beginning to show its mechanical shortcomings. With both players having executed their second shots, and Scott on the green and David ten yards left of it, the signs were good. The pressure doubled for my man, however, after David chipped to within two inches of the flag. Scott hit a poor first putt, and was faced with a three-footer which he needed to hole to keep the tournament alive.