Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  ‘I TOLD YOU I WAS ON MY FUCKING PHONE. DON’T YOU DARE TALK TO ME WHEN I’M ON MY FUCKING PHONE!’

  ‘Oh, right, here we go,’ said Dave, as we watched a famous, formidably built British golf pro storm into our eyeline, pursued apologetically by a man in his seventies with a look of The Wind in the Willows about him.

  ‘What do you think happened there?’ I asked Dave. ‘Do you think that bloke was hassling him when he shouldn’t have?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he said. ‘Probably not. He’s usually having a go at someone or other.’

  For a couple of minutes, our end of the range became muffled and chilly and muted, and people moved more slowly than they had done before – as if a fog had descended on us, carrying all the implicit elements of fog, apart from the fog itself – but not many people looked very surprised at the big pro’s outburst. Pretty soon, normal service was resumed. The exciting Swedish player Henrik Stenson continued perfecting his Boeing 747 ball flight. The cavalier Argentinians Eduardo Romero and Ricardo Gonzalez continued to share a joke (why did the Latin players always look as if they were having the biggest laugh?). Ian Poulter sent another text message. Some teenage boys behind him dressed in bright pink trousers pointed at his bright pink trousers. Some rotund men in front of them ordered some more burgers, and received a couple more text messages (from Ian Poulter?). To all intents and purposes, I had never been more ‘inside’ as a golfer than at this moment. Here I was, a professional, sitting with a living legend, at a club that had staged four Ryder Cups, within putting distance of some of my favourite players, about to meet one of Britain’s best ever players, having just got a rare insight into another’s social skills, yet I’d never felt more like a bemused outsider. I sensed that I wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Do you think of yourself as a golfy kind of person, Dave?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. My wife doesn’t like it, for one thing. She can’t stand the clothes.’

  For the first time I noticed Dave’s outfit, which was casually stylish, well fitting, and helped to make him look about a decade younger than he was (i.e. about fifty-three). You wouldn’t exactly have called it a statement against typical golfing attire, but it definitely didn’t look as if it been bought entirely from a pro shop – which was more than you could say for almost every other person in our eyeline.5 It was an unending source of mystery to me that the vast majority of golfers chose to stick to golf brand clothing when a) 95 per cent of the time it was still hideous, and b) unlike uniforms for most other sports, it was no more athletically advantageous than outfits that could be purchased more cheaply from any number of high street stores. I hoped, when I took my game to the next level and qualified for The Open, that I might finally get a handle on this.

  ‘So I suppose a lot of stuff associated with the game gets on your nerves?’ I continued.

  ‘Yeah, quite a bit.’

  ‘But you love it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And you’d never not want it in your life?’

  ‘No way, me’oad. I’ll always love it.’

  ‘Me too. It’s weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you think of the course this week?’ I asked him.

  He took a thoughtful look out into the bright green yonder and paused, as if weighing up the much-improved Belfry of today against its previous incarnations: in 1985 it had been dismissed by some as ‘a glorified potato field’.

  ‘Well, it’s a shithole, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Having met a few full-time bag carriers over the years, and read Four-Iron in the Soul, Lawrence Donegan’s terrific book about being a European Tour bagman, I’d already suspected that nobody in pro golf told it straighter than the caddies. Even with this in mind, though, meeting Dave had been unexpectedly refreshing. I wasn’t expecting any such candour from Lee Westwood, who, being a top Tour pro, would no doubt have an inbuilt mechanism enabling him to answer even the most probing question with a statement that was a cliché wrapped in a platitude.

  I don’t wish to denigrate the higher plateaux of the golfing profession here. I understand that in a sporting environment not without its history of blackballing, where you’re rubbing shoulders with the same people week in and week out, there is little social sense in making a controversial statement about your contemporaries. I also understand that the mindset that comes up with choice bon mots is not necessarily one that is able to roll forty-foot putts stone dead under pressure. All the same, would it be such a tragedy if someone said something interesting in an interview sometime? It wouldn’t even have to be about golf. It could be about go-karting, or kettles, or iceberg lettuce. During the periods I’d spent watching televised golf in 2006, I’d sometimes questioned my motives for turning pro. Maybe I did want to put my golfing ability to the ultimate test. But perhaps I really just wanted to put myself in a position where I could subvert the post-round interview custom of answering every question with one of – or a slight variation of one of – the following three statements:

  a. ‘Well, you know, it’s all just about making a few putts. And today I didn’t make any putts.’

  b. ‘Well, it’s all just about hitting the greens. And today I didn’t hit any greens.’

  c. ‘We’ll just see how it goes. I’ve just got to take every shot as it comes, and not really think about tomorrow.’

  People think politicians do the ultimate line in interrogative stonewalling, but they have nothing on golfers. If you listen carefully, there’s actually a great skill to it. It’s as if, at some point on their road to stardom – possibly shortly after perfecting their standardised ‘I’d like to thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course’ amateur victory speeches – the whole lot of them have been sent to secret seminars with titles like The Use of the Phrase ‘Y’Know’ as a Delaying Tactic, Appearing to Evaluate Your Disaster on the Back Nine When Really You’re Just Spouting Hot Air that Could Apply to Any Round of Golf, and (a favourite of Colin Montgomerie, this) The Merits of ‘As it Were’: How it Can Make You Look Articulate, When You’re Saying Something Quite Obvious and Dull. Long were the hours I’d spent dreaming about bringing my own brand of answers to the mix:

  ‘So, Tom – 67 today. That puts you just three shots behind Paul Casey, tied with Woody Austin. Still hope for tomorrow, then? And I suppose it could have been better still had you not had that bit of bad luck in the Road Bunker?’

  ‘Well, Julian, you could call it bad luck, but the truth is, I bollocksed it up! Totally my fault! Should have knocked it on the green, but I got distracted. The problem was that I’d sort of drifted off and started thinking about how much I wanted a packet of Monster Munch.’

  ‘Er … right. Were you thinking about the roast beef or pickled onion flavour?’

  ‘Oh, pickled onion, naturally.’

  ‘Well – remarkable! So, a birdie barrage on Sunday?’

  ‘I’m buggered if I know. Probably not, I suppose, if I keep swinging like something halfway between Lee Trevino and that mushroom-headed creature you get on Supermario Golf. Also, I’m not that pleased about being paired with Woody Austin. He looks like a right bad-tempered git. Did you see him beating the crap out of himself with his club that time he missed that two-footer? I’m just looking forward to the next interview with you, to be honest. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask: are Dougie Donnelly and Colin Montgomerie actually the same person, and if so, how do you get them in the same camera shot together?’

  To be fair to Westwood, there were far less effusive pros out there, and I’d probably have done better if I’d caught him outside office hours (even if a pro-am is a kind of ‘wear your flip-flops to the office day’ in the working week of a pro golfer). My main problem was that he’d obviously been briefed for our encounter in an ‘A golf journalist wants to interview you’ kind of way – with the possible addendum ‘He says you’ve met before’ – rather than ‘A fellow pro who’s a bit lame but who used to play on the Nottinghamshire county team with you would like
to talk to you’ kind of way. Again, I reminded myself that I must remember to keep my journalism out of my pro life. One mention of the ‘j’ word and, to Lee, I probably instantly became part of the amorphous, untrustworthy, badge-wearing creature top pros refer to through gritted teeth as ‘the press’.

  I’d not expected Lee to recognise or remember me. I’d only ever spoken to him once when we were kids – well, more like mumbled, actually – and although we’d eaten sausage, egg, chips and beans6 at the same post-county-match table a couple of times and I’d watched him thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course in a dozen wooden junior winner’s speeches, I knew that the first rule of talking to famous sportsmen is Assume They Don’t Know Who the Hell You Are. What was surprising, though, was that he didn’t seem to remember our mutual Nottinghamshire acquaintances either.

  ‘So you used to hang about with Pete Langford?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was pals with Robin Walters. He once played in the same Notts Boys vs Notts Police match as us, I think. But I doubt you’d remember him.’

  ‘No, I can’t say I do. Sorry.’

  ‘Ooh, but of course you know Jamie Daniel. I was mates with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  That Lee didn’t recall my old golfing rival Jamie, whom I’d actually witnessed partnering him in at least three events, and sharing a laugh with him in a couple of Midlands clubhouses, was a surprise. ‘How could you not remember the former Next You!?’ I wanted to shout. But then I thought about just how many people Lee must have met over the course of the last decade. A few minutes previously we’d walked from the range to the putting green, and throughout the hundred-yard journey his hands had not been without an autograph pen for more than a second (‘That would have been on eBay tonight,’ he said to me after refusing to autograph a photograph of himself and Colin Montgomerie at the 2004 Ryder Cup, thrust at him by a woman he was certain he’d already signed for. ‘Does your fuckin’ ’ead in’). Before that, I’d watched a man of roughly forty-nine years of age stand next to the gate to the practice chipping green and say, ‘How are you, Ian?’ to Ian Woosnam,7 then, having got his answer (‘Ah, y’know, I’m all right’), thank him, and go literally skipping off to report the good news to his wife, who was waiting on the other side of the barrier, looking slightly uncomfortable (‘Ian is all right! YEsssss!’). When you play the kind of golf Westwood and Woosnam do, everyone wants a piece of you – whether that piece is in the shape of a photo sanctified with your handwriting, or one of your broken tee pegs, or the more transient confirmation that you’re all right or that you’ll take every shot as it comes and see what happens and that it’s all about holing some putts, in the end.

  When Lee and I passed beyond the ropes to the restricted-access area beside the putting green, the wanting didn’t stop, it merely took on a slightly more dignified form. As Lee stood there, and I tried to find some conversational space, endless well-wishers arrived from all angles. Of these, only the golf-mad pop singer Ronan Keating acknowledged my presence – or rather, my minidisc recorder’s presence – and said, ‘Ooh you’re doing an interview. I’ll come back and have a chat later.’ Others arrived and Lee spoke to them about his tournament schedule and his new, wispy sideburns (‘I’m taking tips,’ he said, pointing to my bushier ones), and how he’d sent ‘the wife off shopping for the day’. It was not, perhaps, the chat you’d expect of a man whose manager had said he could only spare ten minutes for an interview, but maybe it was the chat of a man who needed that manager. Going on this evidence, a Westwood who took care of his own diary would never make it to the tee on time.

  When the area finally cleared, I wasted no time in getting straight to my most important question: what did Lee think was the single most important attribute that a fledgling pro could take with him on Tour? But as soon as he’d given me the answer – ‘You need a complete belief that you fit in and that you’re good enough’ – I knew that my real important question was coming next.

  ‘But if you’ve got that belief, surely it needs to be so strong and all-pervading that it will take over the rest of your life?’ I asked.

  He gave me a frank sort of look, and half a shrug. ‘Yeah, totally. You can’t turn it on and off.’

  His answer, I suppose, was not unexpected. After all, this was the man who, when asked what he wanted most out of his golfing life, had responded without hesitation, even at the age of sixteen, with six simple words: ‘I want to be the best.’ Nonetheless, it troubled me slightly. Obviously, there was no point in going out on a golf course and telling yourself you were rubbish, but if you acted as if you thought you were the best away from the golf course too, what kind of person would that make you? I had a feeling that this was a question that might be troubling me a lot more once I’d had time to ponder it properly.

  We talked for a few more minutes (to be fair, the total was more like seventeen than ten). I asked him what he remembered about winning the Lindrick Junior Open (not much), and told him I’d won it with the precise same score the following year (‘Hmmmph’). I asked him if he thought there was such a thing as a ‘Nottingham swing’ (he didn’t). I wondered if he could apologise to Mark Foster – another Worksop junior who’d gone on to success on the European Tour, and a good friend of Westwood’s – on my behalf for keeping him waiting on the tee at the 1991 Midlands Boys’ Championship (a nervous I’m-not-quite-sure-if-you’re-serious laugh in response to this). I asked whether he remembered a fork in his adolescence where he’d had to choose between messing about with his mates and long, lonely hours on the practice ground (he looked at me as if I’d asked him if he dropped an E before all his tee shots, or just some of them). Focusing on my technical obsession of the current month, ‘light hands’, I asked him to hold my hands as if they were a golf club and demonstrate what he thought was the ideal grip pressure for a golfer (he was really starting to give me a ‘Jesus – Dougie Donnelly never asked me to do this!’ stare now). He asked, slightly brusquely, ‘Is that it? Are we done?’ I wished him luck on his round, and he went off to hit some putts, watched by his loyal dad, who had once taught at the same school as my uncle (I at least had the restraint not to bring this up).

  When I was fifteen and Westwood was seventeen, I’d been in awe of him. I’d had plenty of chances to start a conversation with him but hadn’t, for fear of distracting him from more important business, like cleaning the mud off his golf shoes or eating his sausage, egg, chips and beans. Now I’d finally done so, and probably irritated him slightly in the process, but I felt strangely unconcerned about it. In fact, in a way I felt as if I had been talking to his seventeen-year-old self – or at least someone much younger than me.

  Certainly, he was a great golfer, and he had that Ready Brek glow about him that all great golfers had, but on another level he was just a very ordinary bloke who liked a good bit of meat, hadn’t read a book since school, and felt the Sun fulfilled all his daily news-based needs. What made him different from other ordinary blokes, perhaps, was that he’d been smoothed into a wondrous half-adulthood by courtesy cars and prize money and luxury hotels and a management company which (as one of its representatives had explained to me earlier) would gladly take care of the fiddly business of household bills and accounts if it meant he could concentrate on the thing he was best at: hitting a small white ball into a hole. The result of our meeting for me – and seventeen minutes is hardly ample time for a full character assessment – was that I felt pretty much the same about him as I had done before: he seemed nice enough, and I knew I’d continue to root for him when I saw him on TV. But as I left the Belfry later that day, I could not ignore the fact that a few voices in that little choir in the back of my head singing ‘What could have been?’ had piped down.

  That night in bed, I made a list in my golf diary of my immediate priorities, as informed by my trip to the Belfry. I was very tired from the drive back to Norfolk from Birmingham, and from the two hundred balls I’d hit at the range on the wa
y, trying to groove in that ‘light hands at address’ technique, so I fell asleep before I’d completed it, but I think I got the main points down.

  Before every round, repeat this mantra: ‘I belong here. I belong here. I belong here.’

  Remember to take suntan lotion to tournaments to avoid ‘golf skin’.

  Perfect that Henrik Stenson 747 trajectory.

  When meeting top pros for the first time, don’t get too ‘forward’. Keep touching to a minimum and try not to freak them out by concocting weird theories about geographical swing trends.

  Achieve Ready Brek glow (but not, preferably, from the more extreme symptoms of ‘golf skin’).

  During my adolescence, June had always been a frustrating golfing month: a time when good weather had usually arrived, but the junior tournament season hadn’t quite kicked in in earnest. I was used to spending large chunks of it on the practice ground, and that’s what I attempted to do now. As a kid, I would skip school and college to spend periods of four or five hours ensconced in the repetitive task of hitting thousands of wedge shots at my umbrella. I didn’t have an umbrella any more, of course, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what was making my attention wander while I was on the practice ground. I loved hitting balls, but I could no longer lose myself quite so completely in the process. Bagger Vance would not have been impressed: I couldn’t stop thinking, and I sometimes came dangerously close to falling asleep. All too often I’d manage thirty wedge shots and find myself wandering over to Diss’s ninth tee, abandoning practice for a distinctly less beneficial match between ‘Garcia’ (Titleist 3) and ‘Couples’ (ancient Pinnacle 5). Even when I was alone, swallowed up in the peace of an early-summer evening at Diss, I would get jittery just thinking about my next professional tournament. This was The Big One. More than likely, after I had played in it, I would have a fair idea of whether I had any remote chance of pulling this pro thing off. In two weeks I would be playing in The Open, and, lying awake in bed, I had already rehearsed the opening tee shot roughly five hundred times. And when I’d got it safely away, I usually rehearsed the shot after it, and the shot after that. By mid-June I had been round Hollinwell in 65, 67, 64 and driven the green of its par-four sixteenth twice. I had been suffering from sporting insomnia all year, but now I had taken it to new levels.