Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  When reading the contours of a green, it’s important to get down as close to the putting surface as possible. Normally, this dictates a squatting position, since to flatten one’s body against the green is considered uncouth. But this was an exceptional situation. As Scott took a couple of tentative practice strokes, I pressed my stomach to the grass and eyed every nuance of the slope.

  ‘Get the fuck up off the grass, Coxy, you hairy twat,’ shouted one of the crowd.

  I turned to Scott. ‘Left lip. Firm,’ I said.

  I walked away and rejoined Simon at the side of the green. Twenty yards away I spotted Andrew Seibert, who like the other two pros in the field had taken a back seat in the day’s action. I tried to acknowledge him, but he was too wrapped up in the moment – all Hooters-related thoughts momentarily forgotten.

  Scott crouched over the ball, took one practice stroke, then set it on its way. It started left, and stayed left, blowing a kiss at the hole on its journey past. As a dozen Leeds supporters charged onto the green and held their man aloft, Simon and I watched as ours turned to the heavens with a familiar expression. It was the same expression we’d seen not long ago, hovering above my deceased cafetière. The kind of expression that a million middle-aged mums would want to take home and bake something for.

  Afterwards, we returned to ‘the tented village’ (i.e. the canopy covering the DJ booth and the area stretching four or five feet beyond it), where I was immediately accosted by Jim, a friend of a friend, and one of the more boisterous members of the crowd. When I’d first met him three years ago he’d been a bit dismissive about golf, but now, he told me, he was blowing £100 a week on proper lessons and it was his new favourite sport. ‘All my footie mates are playing it,’ he’d told me earlier.

  ‘But what about you?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were supposed to be good. Shouldn’t you have won this thing easily?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not that simple when people have high handicaps and you’re p …’

  ‘Sounds like a crap excuse to me!’ he interrupted. A bit of drool had escaped from his mouth, and was working its way down his chin. Within a matter of seconds, it would land on one of his old school Adidas trainers. ‘What did you score?’

  ‘I think I was seven over par altogether.’

  ‘That’s bloody shit, innit!’

  Before I could answer, he turned and lurched in the direction of the barbecue, where there were some more interesting people to talk to – many of whom were beginning a singalong of the popular football-themed hit, ‘Here We Go’.

  By this point in my golfing life, I was accustomed to having vaguely unpleasant experiences in the aftermath of a disappointing round. Over the years I’d been told to tuck my shirt in, informed that my ‘training footwear’ (i.e. a pair of undramatic brown leather Velcro-strapped shoes from the Next sale) was not welcome in the Men Only Bar; I’d even had a man take me aside for ‘a quiet word’ and tell me that the Handicap Chairman at my old club believed the ‘disgusting’ golf book I had written about my misspent adolescence ‘shouldn’t have been allowed’ – but never once had I been told that the round I had just played had been ‘bloody shit’.

  That’s the thing about golf, at its most conventional level: it might dress like a complete tool and possess the political and social outlook of a 1982 Daily Express headline, but it always respects a man’s sporting dignity. Maybe today I was seeing the new face of the game: not so picky when it came to dress codes and staying quiet while the other bloke took his address, but a real, boorish stickler when it came to competing like a man.

  Did I like it? I thought so, but I wasn’t completely sure. What I did know was that the SSG was sliding away from my initial vision of a quiet get-together with an emphasis on sexual equality,6 lawless attire and competitive high jinks. But then, perhaps I’d felt that from the moment I’d founded it. Every anti-establishment golfer had their own ideas about what constitutes a satisfactory break from the staid golfing norm and, as a median of those ideas, the first alternative Masters could be judged a success.

  As Renton Laidlaw says in The Best Shots of the Masters, ‘From small beginnings, great things are born.’ It’s a fairly vacuous statement, when you think about it – from small beginnings a lot of completely inane small things are born too. On a brighter note, though, you have to ask yourself just how many of those small, inane things allow you to play golf with your shirt untucked, shout a lot, and change your shoes in the course car park without fear of getting a bollocking.

  1 What exactly is a ‘swing incubator’?

  2 Used to acknowledge a putt that miraculously goes straight over the hole without dropping. Or, in the case of my former playing partner, Ernie ‘The Luck’s Not With Me Today’ Wilton, a putt that misses the hole by seven feet, never remotely looking as if it might drop.

  3 The Hooters Tour’s similarly sized rival tour – presumably for the more serious-minded struggling pro.

  4 It would be interesting to find out exactly how many pitch-and-putt holes in Britain played between two hills are called ‘Dolly Parton’ – I’d be willing to bet the number is in triple figures.

  5 The possible exception being the eighteen-hole kind used to decide the US Open, which always seems blighted by the special kind of downbeat atmosphere only otherwise experienced after a social gaffe at an inter-village bowls match.

  6 Despite several beseeching emails and phone calls, and a plea in the Independent newspaper, the Cabbage Patch Masters included only two female competitors.

  Four

  Wind of Change

  ‘IT’S NOT HOW, it’s how many,’ is one of golf’s most commonly used phrases. The point being that you can play sophisticated three-A-level golf from tee to green, make it look as fetching as possible, but what ultimately counts is the score, and nothing else. An ugly birdie is still, in the end, a birdie.

  My feelings on this issue have always been: fair point, but as a sportsman, does one not have at least some duty to crowd-please? As long as I’ve loved golf, I’ve always loved the players who take a stadium-rock attitude out onto the course. The sporting accountants who grind out their scores with dollar signs for eyes – the Bernhard Langers, the Nick Faldos, the Padraig Harringtons,1 the Tom Kites – have always held negligible interest for me. I’m not all that fussed about the plodding classicists either: the Luke Donalds, the Jack Nicklauses, the Jeff Maggerts. What I want out of my pro golfers are very specific requirements:

  The ability to play miraculous escape shots (yet not in a way that could fall under the unattractive heading ‘Scrambling’).

  A classic swing (but one that works in a natural, flowing way, rather than a join-the-dots way).

  The capacity to hit the ball vast distances and to be always close to, if not at, the top of the driving stats (but always with an ultimate sense of having more firepower in reserve).

  The power to make vast numbers of birdies and eagles in a row (but without ever looking as if putting could be described as one of your strong points).

  A constant, lingering feeling of unfulfilled promise (but with the odd, heroic, against-all-odds victory thrown in).

  Am I asking too much? Maybe. Does all this make me the golfing equivalent of an aesthetic fascist? Perhaps. It also makes for frequent heartbreak as an armchair golf fan, and probably goes some way to explaining why my favourite five golfers ever – Angel Cabrera, Eduardo Romero, Fred Couples, John Daly and Sergio Garcia – have amassed, at the time of writing, the piddling total of four major championships between them.

  So, now I was a pro, was I really expecting the same swashbuckling standards of myself? Well, sort of. In all my dreams about playing professional golf, I’d always been less interested in the victories and the scores I would shoot to secure them, and more interested in the artful shots I would perform along the way. Since my life as a pro so far only amounted to two and a half holes of tournament play and an eighteen-hole pitch-and-putt tournament, it was probably too ear
ly for an attitude autopsy, but I had already noticed a significant difference in my approach to that of the pros I had met – something about it that was a little less … mathematical. I had imagined that ‘It’s not how, it’s how many’ was something I would leave behind upon leaving amateur golf, along with rants about extended tee times on Ladies’ Day and snide comments about my untucked shirt. It was an ugly, mustn’t-grumble kind of phrase that I associated mainly with Roy-ish types who liked to kid themselves that their manifold golfing failings – e.g. inability to hit the ball more than 198 yards, propensity to swing their sand wedge as if involved in major garden-clearing project – did not matter in the grand scheme of things. But, slightly surprisingly, pros said it too.

  In the professional golf world, though, the INHIHM mantra takes on a much more serious meaning. Here, in a kill-or-go-broke environment, one could not afford to put style first. The priority was doing whatever it took to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Pros were very interested in ‘how many’. I, on the other hand, remained a great advocate of ‘how’. When I’d come away from the Cabbage Patch Masters, what stuck with me and pleased me was not the birdie I’d made on the twelfth hole (reasonably struck wedge to fifteen feet, pretty good putt) but the sumptuously struck tee shot on the following hole: the one that felt like liquid velvet and flew the green by twenty yards. Similarly, if I hadn’t quite revelled in my drive so much on the second hole at Stoke-by-Nayland, maybe I would have been able to get on with the more important business that followed: hitting the green, two-putting for a bread-and-butter par, playing the right ball … that kind of thing. Even in the better practice rounds I’d played at Diss, my memory of my scores had quickly drifted away (a 71 here, a 74 there, or was it a 73?) as I’d stewed happily in the shots that had felt nicest. I rarely worried that these shots were often the ones that had left me in the most difficult predicament.

  When I related all this to James, he shook his head even more gravely than he had done the first time I’d showed him my twenty-five-year-old Ping putter with the bent shaft. He explained that in order properly to survive on Tour, I needed to put all this out of my head.

  ‘What you have to realise,’ he explained, ‘is that, in pro golf, nobody is really interested in the details of your round, how many birdies you made or what massive drives you hit. All they want to know is whether or not you’ve beaten them. You need to be the man who can walk into the clubhouse and be able to answer the question “What did you shoot?” with the words “Sixty” and “eight”. Nothing more. That’s it.’

  There was no doubting James’s wisdom, but he was, after all, only twenty-five. Additionally, I knew that if he was being totally honest, he wasn’t averse to a few ‘It’s not how many, it’s how’ moments himself. What I felt I needed was a bit of time with one of the steady men of pro golf: someone who had seen it all, someone who wasn’t going to let wedge shots that felt like liquid velvet and went twenty yards over the green distract him from the important business of plotting his way calmly around the course. Someone a bit like Ken Brown.

  I had never met Ken, but a friend of a golf friend knew him, suggested that he might be amenable to giving me a pep talk about pro life, and gave me his number. A couple of weeks after playing in the Cabbage Patch Masters, I built up the courage to give him a call, and he cheerfully invited me down to his home club, in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. To say this was an unexpected boon would be an understatement: not every Europro Tour rookie in his early thirties got the chance to get free advice from a five-time Ryder Cup player. With the exception of Fred Couples, I couldn’t think of anyone whose easy-going golfing demeanour I would want rubbing off on me more than Ken’s. Always the most patient of players, he had quit tournament golf when he was only thirty-four, owing to a wrist injury and ‘pushing myself incredibly hard for fifteen years before losing the desire’. Before that, he’d been one of the most astute golfing strategists of the seventies and eighties, a willowy swinger – ‘Without,’ he said, ‘a lot of weight behind the punches’ – who made up for the weaknesses in his long game with Zen concentration skills and a demon touch around the greens. The good points about his game, in other words, probably doubled as an easy-to-use guide to the bad points about mine.

  When I suggested to Ken that some players must go out there with the intention of thrilling the crowd first and thinking about the score later, he shook his head and looked at me as if I’d just told him that I enjoyed composing action paintings in the middle of the eighteenth green.

  ‘Nobody goes out there with a mission to entertain,’ he said.

  I searched my brain, sure I could think of at least one player who was the exception to the rule: to be specific, one gambling, long-hitting, guitar-playing, chainsmoking, cheeseburger-gobbling player.

  ‘Not even Long John Daly?’ I asked.

  ‘Not even Long John Daly,’ Ken said.

  It seemed far-fetched, but I had to take his word for it. He tends to be right about most things, after all. In his role as BBC golf’s resident trivia nerd, Ken is always being asked questions like ‘Who got defecated on by a pigeon in the 1986 World Matchplay?’ and ‘What is the name of Darren Clarke’s thirteenth-favourite sports car?’ by his colleagues, and is alarmingly quick at coming up with the answers.2

  Perhaps it is the combination of little Britain (the concept, not the TV comedy) ambience, spongy grass verges, perfectly maintained windowboxes and abundant 4x4s, but Harpenden is the kind of place that would seem downright odd without a golf course – a bit like an old-fashioned stockbroker who’d lost his bowler hat. In fact it has three courses, all within an easy three-wood of one another – as I found out, to my cost, on my way to meet Ken.

  Harpenden Golf Club was like a lot of exclusive commuter-belt golfing hideaways: security keypads that rendered entering the clubhouse and exiting the car park complex military procedures; a disapproving, square-jawed man in the car park, eyeing the Led Zeppelin sun visor in my car with distaste; architecture that you knew you’d be hard-pressed to remember three minutes after you last saw it. It was something of a relief to find out that this was not where Ken played his golf. ‘Ken Brown?’ the moist-headed youth in the pro shop had said, scanning his computer printout of the club membership. ‘Nope. Can’t see him.’ After a couple of minutes we got our wires untangled (‘Oh – Ken Brown!’) and I was directed to the neighbouring Harpenden Common Golf Club. This was an altogether more welcoming enclave down a leafy, Camberwick Green-ish lane, with open doors, an overfed resident cat and a period clubhouse full of smiling, chattering grey-haired women, all of whom I immediately wished were my grandma.

  There was something very Ken Brown about all this, and not just because the course at Harpenden Common is only 6200 yards long – a length that seems commensurate with the reputation for ‘placid’ driving that Ken developed during his playing days. In the commentary box, Ken might not have the endearing non-sequiturs of Peter ‘Voice of Golf’ Alliss, or the sarcasm of Mark ‘Jessie’ James,3 but there is something perennially warm and welcoming about him. He is neither old guard (‘I don’t see any harm in someone playing golf in a pair of jeans,’ he told me) nor new, simply a man whose passion for the game runs so deep and pure that he can’t help but calmly radiate knowledge about it. It seemed appropriate that, unlike most other members of his generation of the ex-pro British golfing establishment, his home club was not a semi-fortress in deepest Surrey.

  He was quick to dismiss my suggestion that he was uniquely unflappable as a player. ‘You’ll find that most pro golfers are surprisingly calm people,’ he explained. ‘That’s why you don’t tend to see them going off the rails in the way you might other sportsmen. You have to be on a pretty even keel because you have to concentrate for forty seconds, seventy times a day, over the course of four hours, for four days running. That existence doesn’t allow for instant adrenalin rushes or terrible depressions. I suppose Ian Woosnam gets a bit wsssh wsssh sometimes, but that’
s about it.’

  ‘Wsssh wsssh’ – which I took to mean ‘overexcitable’ – was, I was beginning to realise, about as near as Ken Brown got to slagging off his peers.

  After our interview, we headed out onto the eighteenth green – clearly the old ‘no practising on the course’ rule didn’t apply to former Irish Open champions – so he could have a look at my putting and chipping strokes. Strangely, he didn’t seem to think either was a total travesty. I told him that I struggled on both. He asked me if I thought I was being honest about my game.

  ‘Are you blaming your putting for other faults in your game? Do you tell yourself you’re hitting the ball to the right, when the real fault is that you’re hitting it to the left? It’s easy to con yourself. You’ve got to be brutal in your analysis. The way that you’re not deluding yourself is by consistently having rounds of 69 or 68.’

  I decided not to tell him that the previous week I’d only just scored better than that at a pitch’n’putt venue barely more than a quarter the length of a normal golf course.

  ‘When I joined the Tour [in the mid-seventies], there weren’t more than ten people making a living of any description,’ he continued. ‘But because there are now two hundred or more people in Europe in a position to do that, it has got harder to get there. There are more people than ever trying to rush up and give it a go. Players come through with better role models, better advice on fitness and psychology. That and the new technology has made everyone that much more tightly packed. Giving yourself an edge, no matter how small, is that much more important.’

  I hit another bunker shot, being sure to take a lot of sand, so as not to send the ball bulleting over the green in a way that might decapitate my temporary mentor. I wondered if Reminding Yourself to Hit the Sand Before the Ball so as Not to Kill Anyone counted as the kind of ‘edge’ he was referring to. Probably not.