by Tom Cox
After we’d finished the ninth hole – our final one of the day – Gary, Gordon and Nathaniel decided it would be logical to play the tenth, since it was clear of other players, and it led to the clubhouse anyway, but I bowed out. It was obvious that, with a total of 58 points, nothing short of a miracle would put us in the running for a prize. I knew I’d feel slightly guilty about my escape later, but the guilt of not having gone for a sociable drink with my Zentex Fabrics teammates was easily conquered by the same urge that I’d had after my Europro Qualifying School mishap. It was that old instinct to flee from golf – from all it represented, from all it inflicted – overriding everything again. I thanked my teammates and shook their hands, wondering just how miserable I might have felt if I hadn’t been playing with three admirable, easy-going human beings. Nathaniel kindly offered to hand our scorecard in on my behalf. I deliberated, for a split second, over giving him that tip I’d been intending to about aiming not quite so far right, to help cure his violent hook. Then I thought better of it, and headed for the car. On the way there, I noted, as well as my humming wrist and a slight twinge in my lower back, my right hip had begun to ache and make a clicking sound when I walked, not unlike the one my dishwasher made when I blocked its cleaning arm with inconveniently tall crockery.
Six hours later I arrived home and opened a letter informing me that, in a few weeks’ time, I would be competing in the world’s most illustrious major golf championship.
1 Not only is Harrington an accountant-like player, he actually trained as one, not long before turning pro and joining the European Tour.
2 I like to think this isn’t just down to a swift-fingered research team and an extensive database.
3 This might go some way to explaining why he has not yet been awarded his own fake middle name in inverted commas.
4 Involves the player putting into a small gap between his or her partner or spouse’s feet. Every time he or she ‘holes’ five putts in a row, the gap gets smaller. Simple, but surprisingly effective.
5 Like normal sand-iron keepie-uppies, a la Tiger Woods in the Nike ad, but with the addition of a low-lying glass coffee table beneath the player, and a steaming mug of freshly-ground in their non-club hand. Generally recommended only to those of a nine handicap or better.
6 A classic. Can be played on a normal Astroturf putting mat with a gentle upward curve, but for proper authenticity if’s best played on the mouldy, dog-eared one bought for me by my parents for Christmas 1991. Extra points go to those who can successfully negotiate the bit of dried yoghurt stuck to the surface about a foot from the hole.
7 This landmark of Supernintendo gaming might not be as sophisticated as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007. It does, however, let you pretend to be a dragon while playing a course with cactuses taller than your house. Metal Mario, the most advanced of the competitors on offer, hits the ball over three hundred yards: a remarkable achievement for a man wearing dungarees.
8 It wasn’t that I was embarrassed to do this in front of the members of the actual club, who, being golfers, and eternally in search of The Secret, were probably as likely to imitate me as take the piss. My trepidation came more from the fact that the practice green was a matter of a few feet away from one of the town’s main roads. A road used frequently by gangs of young people in souped-up, brightly coloured Peugeots, some of whom had, only a few days ago, complimented me on my bucket hat in a manner that I wouldn’t want to repeat in front of an elderly relative.
9 A steal, this, from Simon, who during our last game at Richmond had found great poise and fluidity from imagining a brand of golf perfume while in his address position. Even my speculation about what Eau de Golf would smell like in reality – a mixture of teacakes, damp inner soles, sweat and pipe smoke – had not detracted from his fantasy.
10 I might not have been too interested in conforming to golf’s prevailing fashions, but since I was already wearing ripped trousers, I didn’t want to look completely as if I’d just come from a part-time job at the waste disposal centre. Besides, unless you’ve got a caddy, umbrellas only make your hands wetter when you’re playing golf.
11 Not so much an alternative golfing scoring system as an alternative golfing language, created half out of a mission to speed up play and half out of boredom. In truth, stableford is just like normal strokeplay in disguise (one point for a bogey, two for a par, three for a birdie, etc.), the only difference being that double bogey or worse doesn’t score, allowing the more unfortunate player to pick up his ball and move on. Often confused, in my youth, with Stapleford, a suburb of Nottingham where I drank my first bottle of Thunderbird and stole some milk bottles – possibly for the reason that its existence is very nearly as pointless.
Five
Banality Check
THE DOCUMENTATION CERTAINLY looked authentic enough. If this was a cruel ruse concocted by Scott and Simon, I had to admire their professionalism. There was the unmistakable Open logo – the silhouette of the sacred claret jug – and a letter from Peter Dawson, Chief Executive of the R&A, wishing me ‘a very enjoyable and successful championship’, followed by the obligatory sheaf of rules, in migraine-inducing point-size, that tends to accompany any golf tournament of substance. I could be found a couple of pages further on, listed in the thirty-fourth group of the Hollinwell branch of regional qualifying, with a 1.18 tee time: ‘Tom Cox, representing Diss,’1 paired with John Ronson from Tydd St Giles and Michael Hempstock from Doncaster. Possibly such information might not have seemed quite so overwhelming if I hadn’t received it whilst still feeling like the survivor of a minor shipwreck, but I would still have needed a lengthy horizontal moment to digest it. Me. Playing in. The Open. Very soon. Maybe if I rearranged these facts, they would make more sense? The Open. Very soon. Playing in. Me. Nope: it still sounded implausible.
Obviously, competing in the regional qualifying stages of The Open is not quite the same as competing in The Open itself. To play in The Open as recognised by armchair golf fans the world over – the seventy-two-hole part, in mid-July, due to take place at Hoylake, near Liverpool, for the first time in thirty-nine years – I would need to pass through the regional qualifying stage by occupying one of the top nineteen places at my allotted course, then travel to Merseyside, play a further thirty-six holes in the local2 qualifying stage, and defeat my fellow Stage One qualifiers and hundreds of their international equivalents to grab one of twelve coveted spots. But does the unfancied reserve for the Bulgarian national football squad, called up out of the blue for a World Cup pre-qualifying clash, ring up his mates and say, ‘I’ve just been called up to play in a World Cup pre-qualifying match!’? Of course he doesn’t! He says, ‘I’m playing in the bloomin’ World Cup!’ By the same logic, I was playing in The Open. I had sent my qualifying form off to the R&A two months ago, and it had been smoothly processed, along with several thousand others from around the globe.
So who, or what, was responsible for this administrative cock-up? Famously, in 1976 an out-and-out hacker called Maurice Flitcroft had attempted to qualify for The Open, ticking the box on the entry form that said ‘professional’, and gone on to shoot 121 – the worst round in Open history, and, alongside a couple of particularly bellicose streakers, one of the most humiliating moments in the R&A’s history. Flitcroft had returned under a variety of pseudonyms in later years – e.g. Gerald Hoppy, Gene Pacecki (pronounced ‘Pay-chequey’) – only to be rumbled by officials and pulled off the course. I’d imagined that security might have tightened up since then. But no. Here I was, without a professional top-ten finish – without a professional finish – to my name, and golf’s governing body was only too happy to take my £110 entry fee. Could my seventy-six-year-old non-golfing nan have done the same thing, if she too had agreed to relinquish her amateur status?
As a veteran, bemused observer of unnecessarily long-winded golf paperwork,3 I’d been surprised by how simple filling out my Open entry form had been. I’d pictured the most long-winded job application
form imaginable, asking for all manner of information about my golfing background, from ‘best round’ to ‘biggest divot’, along with references from my last three Handicap Chairmen, my school PE teacher and the Secretary of the Norfolk County Golf Union, but in reality it had just been a matter of submitting a modicum of banal personal details, stating which tour I played on, which one of the sixteen regional qualifying venues around the country I would ideally like to compete at, and my debit card number. Somehow unable to convince myself that I’d done enough, I added ‘PLEASE!’ next to the box where I nominated Hollinwell in Nottinghamshire as my preferred course.
The reasons why I wanted to qualify at Hollinwell were threefold. Firstly, it was only half an hour’s drive from my parents’ house, meaning convenient, free accommodation. Secondly, it was possibly my favourite golf course of all time: a heather-speckled paradise bowl ringed by Forestry Commission land, from whose heavily guarded fairways one could easily convince oneself that one was entirely removed from twenty-first-century life. Finally, and most crucially, it and I had a little bit of unfinished business to settle. When I was sixteen, I’d had an unsuccessful trial for membership there. I’d never found out what I’d done wrong, but since I’d beaten my handicap in my test round, I suspected the reasons for my fruitless application were not golfing ones. To qualify for The Open at the same course, fifteen years later, in my first visit back, would constitute a fairytale bit of score-settling.
The Hollinwell debacle had been a fork in the road of my adolescence, coming at a time when my deferred rebel years were catching up with me and I needed to decide whether I was going to get serious about my golf, or loaf away my days in the back of the pro shop, drinking too much Coke and serving an apprenticeship in low-grade pyromania. Moving from my soft, slack south Nottinghamshire base to a club in north Nottinghamshire, where the fairways and the juniors were made of flintier stuff, had seemed an obvious way to take my game to the next level. I’d often wondered what might have happened if I’d handled myself differently that day in 1991. What if the man from the committee hadn’t seen my dad’s ancient car with its CND sticker and moss growing up the wheel arches? What if I’d had headcovers without rips in them, had cleaned that big mud stain off my bag, and not stolen the honour from my playing partner on the thirteenth? Would I now be Lee Westwood?
As a boy, Westwood played his golf at Worksop, a neighbouring course to Hollinwell, not dissimilar in character. For a short time in the early nineties the two of us had been teammates on the Nottinghamshire junior side, but I’d always been a bit too intimidated to get to know him. The grim, gritty spirit of north Nottinghamshire mining country ran through his sporting veins. Like most good north Nottinghamshire players, he was big and immoveable-looking, particularly in the posterior and head, and had an odd way of nodding at the ball, as if in dogged self-encouragement, upon initiating his downswing. He always looked, even at his most crestfallen, like the kind of dependable competitor who’d happily sell his teeth for a birdie.4
There would be no regional or local qualifying for Lee this year. As a member of the world rankings top fifty, his place at Hoylake was already assured. Naturally I hoped that the two of us might get paired together in the third round when, as we vied for a place in the hallowed final group with Tiger on Sunday, we’d josh about old times and compare experiences as former winners of the Lindrick Junior Open. Just in case that didn’t happen, though, I needed a back-up plan, as I felt it was an important part of my rookie year to compare notes with a man who in many ways was a grown-up, parallel-universe version of Teenage Golf Me. Pro-am day at the British Masters – a tournament that’s never quite been as prestigious as it’s promised to be, but nonetheless remains an important part of the European Tour calendar – seemed to be the perfect opportunity. Lee, I was informed, would be in a relaxed frame of mind. Maybe, I speculated, I might even be able to tap him up for a lesson.
‘You’ll get ten minutes, and that’s all,’ said David Brooks when I called him from my mobile upon my arrival at the Belfry, the British Masters venue.
I was beginning to doubt whether I’d chosen the right route to Westwood. Because Brooks had extended the invite to the Morson event to me, and also happened to be Westwood’s manager, I’d decided to arrange our meeting through him. Yet a simple call to Bob Boffinger, my old club’s former junior organiser, who still shared many mutual acquaintances with Westwood, might have resulted in a less potentially fraught encounter. Nonetheless, I couldn’t complain. I was at a tournament that featured nearly all the stars of European golf (my nemesis Sergio was the one distinguished absence), I had an access-all-areas badge, and the sun was out. I got out of the car, stretched my legs and let out a satisfying yawn. Immediately, I spotted a grey-haired man. He was scratching his head, and his eyes, while notable for their deep unshakeable wisdom, looked disorientated. I recognised him as Dave Musgrove, one of the legends of the caddying world.
I’d never met Dave before, but I’d spent the first decade of my life living two miles from him, and had watched him countless times on TV, bent double beneath sporting luggage almost as big as him. Now retired, he’d been one of the most sought-after caddies in the business, having won major championships with Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle and Lee Janzen. When I was having a revelatory near out-of-body experience watching my first US Masters in 1988, Dave was there at Augusta, giving Lyle the perfect yardage for the unforgettable seventy-second-hole bunker shot that set up his winning birdie. I’d been told by golfing peers that there was no man alive with better insights into the pro game.
I introduced myself. Dave said he was looking for a friend’s car, where he was supposed to deposit some books that he planned to sell later.
‘I’m damned if I can find it,’ he muttered. ‘They all look the bloomin’ same.’
I looked around. If someone (other than me) had decided to stray from the norm and not drive a BMW 7 Series, they had obviously parked it at least two hundred rows away from where we stood. My miniature, dented Toyota was used to hanging out in car parks where every other vehicle cost more than itself; a car park where every other vehicle’s hubcaps cost more than it, though? That was a new one.
After caddying for very nearly the whole of his walking life, Dave hadn’t quite grasped the idea of retirement. He was here this week, a day early, to scout out the course for his employer, Gary Evans. Was he going to The Open? ‘All depends if my man makes it.’ Evans, a player whose up-and-down form had established him over the years at a level just above ‘journeyman’, had come spectacularly close to winning the 2002 Open at Muirfield, but this year he would have to battle it out with the baseball-capped masses in the qualifying rounds. I told Dave that I was scheduled to play at Hollinwell.
‘That’s where I started when I was a kid, me’oad,’ he said. ‘When I was ten. Used to get paid a shilling a round. Still bloomin’ love it. Always will.’
We compared notes on growing up in the north-east Midlands. Did I live near the pit when I lived in Brinsley, Dave wanted to know. Yes, I built a den in the woods next to it, just before they closed it down. He said he’d built a den in the exact same place, three decades earlier. Few regions do hard-faced taciturnity quite as well as the one stretching from D.H. Lawrence’s birthplace to the Yorkshire border, but Dave was the most accommodating person I’d met on the pro scene, if not on the golf scene as a whole. He was also the first person I’d met for sixteen years who used the phrase ‘me’oad’ in the place of ‘mate’.
He invited me over to the range, where we sat behind five teenage boys, all in matching J. Lindeberg belts and hats, and tried to get a view of the long-hitting, lazy-swinging Argentinian Angel Cabrera. Dave said that although he had a pass to go behind the ropes, he preferred to take a back seat unless he needed to be with his player.
‘All this has changed so much in the last twenty years, me’oad,’ he said. ‘You get all these cling-ons now. In the old days it just used to be a player, a caddy and
maybe his coach. Now you can’t turn up unless you’ve got your sports psychologist, your physical trainer, your dietician and your bloomin’ hairdresser.’
It was true: the practice ground was thick with bodies. As players arrived with baskets of gleaming Titleists, many of them had to spend several minutes trying to find a spot between caddies, swing technicians and numerous other red-faced men in polo shirts, none of whom seemed to be doing anything directly related to golf, but all of whom succeeded in making the process of text messaging and eating burgers appear of extreme consequence. There were probably three hundred people in our eyeline, and it seemed that almost every one of them – including the players – was frantically speaking or typing into a small piece of technology. Off to the left, in the logo-spattered trucks now ubiquitous at European Tour events, other, bigger bits of technology waited to do miraculous things to some of these men’s backs and shoulders. And straight ahead, a magical tractor, fitted with a protective cage, waited to pick up their balls. Dave told me how different this was from even the most sumptuously catered European Tour events of the seventies and early eighties. In those days it had been his duty to stand at the opposite end of the practice ground collecting his player’s missiles, in slight fear for his life. He’d just gone on to talk about his favourite experience in golf, the 1986 Masters, when he and Lyle had been paired with the resurgent, victorious Jack Nicklaus – the noises that greeted Nicklaus’s birdie putts on the back nine were ‘the loudest I’d ever heard on a golf course’ – when he was interrupted by another, possibly even louder noise: a booming voice, coming from our left, steamrollering the low buzz of conversation around us.