by Tom Cox
I had a suspicion, though, that at some point soon my attitude was going to come back and bite me. With the weather still distinctly wintry, I was happy to go to the Cabbage Patch Masters and be taken aside and told by the editor of Golf Monthly in reverential tones that I had ‘a really lovely swing’. I liked visiting Urban Golf and being informed by Owen, one of James’s co-workers, that my action resembled that of Ian Baker-Finch, the 1991 Open champion. Better still, I liked being told that ‘It’s not a golf writer’s swing, that’s for sure.’ Nonetheless, pretty soon I was going to have to start putting a caption to the picture. A caption, preferably, that read, ‘Cox currently stands at a fluent six under par, yet he barely seems to have got into second gear.’
After a few enquiries, I had had no luck finding sponsorship (‘Er … we’re trying to move away from our image as a golf label, so I think it’s unlikely,’ said a lady in the marketing department of Penguin Clothing, awkwardly), and the leads that James had pursued (did strip clubs really sponsor golfers?) hadn’t come to anything either. I’d put my writing career temporarily on the back burner, but there was only so long I would be able to keep turning down offers of paid journalism and using the term ‘work’ to refer to driving a mile down the road and standing in a glorified field pretending to be Sergio Garcia. One day, very soon, it was suddenly going to be summer, and when it was, I was going to find out exactly what Ken Brown meant about ‘being brutally honest about your game’. I’d had word from the Europro Tour that an invite to the GMS Classic at Mollington, near Chester – one of the less heavily subscribed events on the Tour – would soon be forthcoming. Competing in the greatest championship of all, The Open, was still also a possibility – albeit a possibility that I couldn’t even think of without my stomach dropping somewhere south of my knees. Still, I was sure that it was only a matter of time before I received a letter from golf’s governing body thanking me politely for my interest but explaining exactly why they didn’t let dirty hippies/former five-handicappers/ pissy golf-bag owners like me into their hallowed institution. But in front of me more immediately – and perhaps even more improbably – was another tournament: my first pro-am.
I have to make a small confession here. As a writer who every so often got to compose newspaper and magazine articles on his favourite sport, I had been able to build up a list of (fairly paltry) contacts in and around pro golf. I knew these would do little to help my playing career, even if I utilised them. If anything, my golf-writing background would probably be more of a drawback than an advantage – after all, most pros viewed journalists with the utmost suspicion – and I’d vowed that I would try not to mention it to my fellow competitors during tournament play. This wasn’t just because I didn’t want their attitude towards me to change; it was also because I felt it would be a distraction from my own game. Obviously, the fact that I wrote about golf wasn’t going to be something I would be able to hide from the Europro Tour, but I had decided to play the fact down whenever possible. That said, things weren’t going too well so far in my rookie year, and when I received a call from my editor at the Daily Telegraph, asking if I would like to compete in the Morson International Pro-Am Challenge, a European Challenge Tour event just outside Manchester, and write about the experience, I was faced with a dilemma. With its far-flung locations and considerably sexier winners’ cheques, the European Challenge Tour was a level up from the Europro Tour. It was owned by the European Tour, populated by many regular European Tour players – sometimes people even called it the European Tour. Unless my Europro Tour fortunes took a dramatic turn for the better over the summer, it was unlikely I’d get another opportunity like this.
Did I decline, explaining that I wanted to stay ‘authentic’ in my pro mission? Or did I take the view that this was my one Get Out of Jail Free card? By accepting an invite to the Morson event, I reasoned, wouldn’t I just be using my status as a writer to make up for the decade or so of golf that I’d lost – the same decade that other pros my age might have been using to do their own networking and build up sponsors’ invites? It was a fairly shaky argument, but I decided that, just this once, I would take the easy option.
As it happened, ‘the easy option’ didn’t turn out to be quite as easy as expected. First of all, I had to track down David Brooks, who worked for International Sports Management, the company organising the event. Brooks was one of the elusive movers and shakers of corporate golf, the kind of administrational whirlwind who had clearly sat down at some point and – without any unnecessary dawdling, naturally – worked out that he could do monumental, productive things with the 22.8 hours of extra lifespan he would have if he cut out such pointless platitudes as ‘Goodbye’ and ‘How are you?’ from his everyday existence (he still had time for ‘Hello,’ but I had a feeling it could happily get the push in a more frantic week).
‘Of course,’ said Brooks, when I finally got to speak to him, ‘because we’re extending this privilege to you, you’ll have to wear the clothes we give you, with Morson’s logo on them – hat, trousers, shirt, jumper, golf bag. I assume this won’t be a problem with your sponsors?’
‘I would have thought I’ll be able to square it with them,’ I said.
I knew that I shouldn’t have been feeling too pleased with myself, since none of this was down to my playing merits, but I was elated. Here I was, one of the casualties of the Europro Tour Q School, getting to play a pro-am, followed by at least two full rounds in a proper European Tour-affiliated event … and one which didn’t require an aeroplane journey, at that. Surely there had been some mistake? Well … yes. It turned out there had. It could have been something to do with the brief conversation I’d had about my amateur record with Brooks (‘Dammit,’ I thought, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned my final-hole blowup in the 1990 Breadsall Priory Junior Open!’), or perhaps he’d taken time out from his busy schedule to do some research on me, or maybe we’d just got our wires crossed, but three days before the competition started, I found out exactly what function I’d be performing during my weekend in the north-west, via a phone call from his PA.
‘I’m just ringing to confirm that you’ll be teeing off at 8.11 in the pro-am,’ she explained.
‘That’s great,’ I said excitedly. ‘And do you have the times for the tournament itself? Or will I receive them when I arrive at the course?’
‘I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean.’
‘Well, obviously there’s the pro-am, but that’s just practice, really, isn’t it? A bit of fun, and a warm-up. Not that that won’t be great, and there won’t be some prizes, but I just wondered about the stuff that comes afterwards.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid Mr Brooks only has you down to play in the pro-am, not the tournament.’
The Morson International Pro-Am Challenge might have made a big deal about the pro-am in its name, but in truth the pro-am bit was strictly a sideshow to the main attraction. Like most pro-ams, it took place a couple of days before the real competition, and involved each pro accompanying three amateurs, to form about a hundred four-man teams. The news that this would be the full extent of my Challenge Tour debut was deflating, but I soon realised that my appearance at Worsley Park, inconsequential as it was to my overall pro record, would come with its own unique pressures. In the event proper, after all, I would have been playing just for myself, but here, in the preamble, I’d be beholden to others – a position in which the pro golfing loner rarely finds himself, outside of Ryder Cups. Most amateurs paid a pretty penny to compete in pro-ams, on the basis that they would be spending a day with the golfing elite, picking up handy technical hints, and getting supplied with an even handier stash of anecdotes about How the Other Half Golfs to take back to their local nineteenth hole and impress their mates. Whether I liked it or not, I was going to be the star here.
Thankfully, there were signs of winter finally coming to an end as I drove up the M62 to Worsley Park the evening prior to my first round, and I had little dif
ficulty getting into a relaxed frame of mind. After a laid-back stroll around the periphery of Worsley’s accompanying hotel under a low, toasty sun, I managed to squeeze in fifty laps of its swimming pool, changed my clothes while listening to a couple of dawdlingly naked men discussing what separated Great Sportsmen from Good Sportsmen (‘But that’s the thing, Colin: it’s not about doing one thing 50 per cent better than everyone else, it’s about doing everything 1 per cent better than everyone else …’), then settled down in my room to watch a documentary about the Argentinian national football squad which, to my delight, featured plenty of footage from their 1978 victory against Holland’s classic ‘total football’ team, one of the prettiest sporting units of all time. Before going to bed I dwelled on the changing-room blokes’ conversation and what their (rather dreary) ‘1 per cent’ rule might say about my approach to golf, but got off to sleep with no trouble, satisfying images of orange-kitted, rippling-maned sporting flamboyance playing behind my closed eyes – the kind of sporting flamboyance that might not actually have gone into its chosen profession with a primary mission to entertain, but certainly looked as if it did.
I woke about five and a half hours later, with a feeling of trepidation – a feeling that only got more extreme when I peered out of the window.
Contrary to popular belief, spending the most pliant period of your life – i.e. your teens – inhaling and exhaling golf doesn’t just tend to make you good at golf. It also tends to give you an uncanny ability to act as a talking weather vane. To someone who had never breathed pure golf, the early morning scene outside the Worsley Park Marriott Hotel might have looked accommodating enough: a light breeze flicking the top of the copper beech outside my window, a grey-blue sky getting lighter by the second. I, on the other hand, knew better. Call it groundhog-like climatic sensitivity, call it a certain unmistakable, irritable clarity to the air, or call it rank pessimism … Whatever the case, I could sense something nasty on the horizon.
‘It’s going to lash it down,’ I told Edie an hour later over the phone as I unloaded my clubs from the car. ‘And when it’s not lashing down, there’s going to be a gale.’
‘Is it raining now?’
‘No, it’s quite nice.’
‘So how do you know?’
‘I just do.’ (Couldn’t she remember that she was talking to a person who could judge the median wind strength of the coming fortnight just by taking a passing glance at a conifer? Had she forgotten that day last summer when we’d been on the way to the coast for fish and chips and, despite a clear blue sky, I’d been able to predict with almost perfect accuracy that an hour later we’d experience approximately three quarters of an hour of showers, but that they’d clear up and make way for an evening of soft, heavy stillness of the kind that makes you think you can smell freshly mown grass, even when there’s none in the vicinity? Did she not know me at all?)
‘Well, that’s OK, isn’t it? Maybe the bad weather will take the pressure off you a bit. Anyway, you can wear your waterproofs. You have got your waterproofs, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, they’re right here, in my bag.’ (I didn’t own any waterproofs. In fact, I hadn’t since 1992, on the grounds that they rustled a lot and restricted my swing.)
‘What about your umbrella?’
‘Yep, it’s just here, next to me, in the car.’ (This was not, at face value, a lie. At that moment, the pocket-sized umbrella with ‘PURINA ONE’ emblazoned across it which I had got free with some cat food a couple of weeks previously was sitting in the footwell next to me. And that was exactly where it was still going to be sitting in forty-five minutes’ time, when I teed off.10)
Sure enough, in the twenty minutes that I spent on the range, an air quality that the man who’d given me my scorecard dismissed as ‘Just a draught’ mutated into the kind of ‘draught’ that, in May, I’d only normally expect to feel if I was standing next to an angry dragon who’d got bored and traded in his fire for ice. Just to get the comic timing right, whatever cruel meteorological god was watching my golfing ordeals chose to wait until I reached the opening tee of the day before pelting me with his first fat, disdainful beads of rain. I clung to the small consolation that, somewhere in their administrative process, ISM had forgotten that they’d wanted me to wear their sponsor’s clothes, and that this was all still better than a proper job, but when I added up all the little factors of the morning – the weather; the old wrist injury that had recurred on my final few shots on the range; the fact that, unlike the other pros playing today, I wouldn’t be competing in the main event; the unaccountable dirty look I’d received from Sam Torrance’s son in the clubhouse while eating my breakfast – I had to admit that, for the first time in my pro career, I was feeling a mite pissed off. Nonetheless, I did my best impression of a cheerful host as I met the amateur members of my team. These turned out to be three chunkily built Welshmen called Gary, Gordon and Nathaniel, who did something called ‘financial structuring’ for a company that made umbrellas.
‘So,’ said Gary, unleashing an enormous fart, ‘looks like you’ll be putting up with us for the day.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m going through a bit of a bad patch at the moment. I think you’ll be the ones putting up with me!’ I replied lamely.
‘Well,’ said Gordon, ‘just don’t let Gary’s arse put you off. He ate a bit too much Chinese last night.’
I was obviously going to need a bit of practice before I got the hang of the whole pro-am banter thing.
Over the years, I’d heard plenty of pros discussing pro-ams. They talked about them in the way computer-software salesmen talked about dull yet necessary oral presentations. From what I could work out, it was all about doing your bit for civilian golfers – turning up, smiling, adjusting their grips, saying ‘UNLUCKY!’ as if you really meant it when they missed an easy putt … that kind of thing. A bit of a drag, but ultimately a day of rest from the cut and thrust of tournament play – which was probably all very well, if your experience of the cut and thrust of tournament play amounted to more than two and a bit holes in total. As I squelched my way through the front nine at Worsley Park, I began to suspect I hadn’t been prepped with the full pro-am picture. Nobody, for example, had told me that one of the traditional obligations of being the pro in a pro-am fourball is marking the card for yourself and each of your playing partners, then subtracting their handicaps, then converting them into stableford points,11 then working out which of those two scores are the best, and adding them to the team aggregate.
I was so busy doing sums, attempting to keep the sole collective scorecard from turning to papier mâché, worrying about the shooting white-hot pain in my wrist that was getting more extreme with every shot, and keeping up with Gary, Gordon and Nathaniel’s banter, that it wasn’t until I reached hole seven or eight that I began to look up and properly notice the course. When I did so, I couldn’t say I was massively impressed. I probably should have known Worsley Park would not exactly be Pebble Beach, from the concise conversation I’d had about it with David Brooks (when a tournament organiser describes the venue for their tournament as ‘not bad’ you’ve got to be a bit sceptical), and it turned out to be the kind of place that, if you’d been dropped on one of its fairways after a blindfolded secret car journey, you could have mistaken for any one of several hundred newish, tidily arranged, unimaginative parkland courses in Britain. It was also extremely long, particularly when you were playing off the pro tees, set twenty to fifty yards behind your playing partners’, to fairways so wet that anything other than a skulled long iron was likely to embed in them upon landing.
The idea of a pro-am is that the professional is the rock of the team. The amateurs may weigh in with the occasional birdie or better, aided by their handicaps, mixed in with a few disasters, but the pro will always be steadfastly not far away from par. By the back nine, I’d contributed to the team score on only three holes. The best thing I could say about my performance was that there were some tru
ly great shots in there – about four in total. Concerned as I was as to whether my playing partners would think they’d got their money’s worth, on a purely personal level my poor form didn’t bother me. I’d long since decided that today was not about scoring well: it was about managing to stick out eighteen holes of dripping, snivelling and shivering without making too many whimpering noises.
On the second hole (our eleventh of the day, owing to the ‘shotgun start’ – each team had teed off simultaneously, utilising all eighteen holes), after a particularly muddy bunker shot, I cracked slightly, admitting to a probing Gary (‘Is this all you do, then, play golf?’) that this whole pro thing was new to me, and that only a few months ago I’d been playing off five handicap. That, at least, took some pressure off. Gary and I had a stress-free conversation about the social differences between golf and rugby, which he’d once played professionally for Cardiff (‘They’re a bit solitary and, what do you call it, introspective, aren’t they, pro golfers? Us rugby lads like to have a drink and a laugh’). I then had three slightly less stress-free conversations, where I found myself having to explain separately to Gary, Nathaniel and Gordon exactly why I didn’t wear waterproofs. Each dressed in high-quality virtual wetsuits, they listened thoughtfully to an argument that no doubt would have stood up better if: a) they hadn’t been experts in raingear, and b) I hadn’t made it whilst wearing a synthetic 1970s jumper from C&A and a sodden REO Speedwagon trucker’s cap that was dripping water onto my nose like a burst pipe. I then borrowed some of Gary’s Titleists, after losing the last of the half-dozen I’d bought from the pro shop (‘Did you not get one of the goodie bags from the clubhouse with the free ones in?’ he asked), Gordon offered to mark the card for the last three holes, and Nathaniel loaned me his umbrella. By this point the score was the last thing on our minds, as I’m sure would be obvious if you’d seen the picture of us smiling through dripping, gritted teeth taken by the Morson International Pro-Am Challenge’s corporate photographer (‘Tom, can you just pretend to be pointing at that flagstick and laughing at a joke Gary’s just told you?’) two thirds of the way through the round.