Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  I’d arranged to play two more rounds before the biggest golfing day of my life, and despite my baggy-eyed state, I was looking forward to them both enormously. The second of these was to be a practice round at Hollinwell itself, but the week before that I drove to Woburn, near Milton Keynes, to meet Stephen Lewton and his dad, Mike – something I’d been promising to do for several months.

  If the 1988 US Masters had been the first intoxicating snifter of my golfing life, then the British Masters, played at Woburn’s Duke’s Course a few weeks later, had been the invigorating chaser that sealed the deal. The British Masters had long since moved on to pastures new – or rather, pastures a little bit bland but long enough to stand up to the increasingly powerful equipment used on the European Tour – but the Duke’s still seemed like a Valhalla of a course. Cut through a pine forest on the private estate of the Marquess of Tavistock, it was green, mean, walled by trees, and an ideal way to ease myself towards the longer, more penal Hollinwell. This was where Lewton, a plus-four handicapper on the cusp of turning pro, played a lot of his golf, although, as the recipient of an American college golf scholarship, for nine months of the year he was based in North Carolina. Our mutual friend Peter Gorse, who ran the Golf Refugees clothing label,8 had been trying to get us together for almost a year, and I’d finally stopped using the fact that I ‘needed a bit of time to hit my best form’ as an excuse to put it off. I also thought it would be interesting to meet a golfer who was taking a very different route into the pro game to those I’d already seen first hand – a route whose (then admittedly scant) existence I hadn’t even been aware of in my youth.

  Lewton was lucky: his scholarship was of the 100 per cent variety, worth £30,000. His main living expenses were in the form of his airfares to and from America. The owner of no fewer than six high-spec golf bags, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to pay for any of his equipment. ‘They throw all sorts of stuff at me,’ he said, pointing to his latest pair of £200 golf shoes. ‘The coaches out there tend to have deals with all the big manufacturers, on top of their salaries.’ He made a beeline for my bag and began to finger my clubs suspiciously. ‘What do you think of these Taylor Made RACs?’

  I frowned and pretended to consider the question for a second, then said, ‘I like them!’ This was a stock answer that I’d had the chance to perfect during the fourteen or fifteen times, since the end of winter, that James had asked me the same question. The truth was, since I’d got my new irons, I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to their ‘performance’. The way it seemed to me was that they were golf clubs and, like most other golf clubs, if you swung them well, they would help the ball go more or less where you wanted it.

  ‘Driver’s nice. Maybe put a bit of lead on the shaft? Putter looks kind of offset.’

  Four years ago, Lewton had played as an amateur in a couple of Europro Tour events (amateurs of two handicap and better can enter tournaments, although, not being able to win any money, the incentive is low), and had also missed out on qualifying for the European Tour by a shot. He hadn’t enjoyed the former much (‘I didn’t find it very friendly – people seemed to keep themselves to themselves’), and the latter had proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it allowed him to take up his scholarship at North Carolina State University.

  ‘I love it out there,’ he said. ‘The courses are in out-of-this-world condition and the practice facilities are like nothing in the UK. The greens are about 13 or 14 on the stimpmeter. They’re so fast that sometimes the ball will roll away if you don’t press it into the grass when you mark it.’ Being on a scholarship (the academic part of his degree was in Business Management) meant that Steve would have to wait longer than many to start earning money as a golfer, but one only had to look at the career of Luke Donald – a former American college golf number one, and now one of the top ten players in the world – to see the benefits of this kind of golfing apprenticeship.

  When Steve was at school in the UK, he’d known it wasn’t wise to admit that he liked golf – particularly to girls. In America, he said, it was very different. ‘When you say you’re on the golf team, the women out there are like, “Cool.”’ They love my accent as well. But it’s not quite like being one of the American football guys. They can have virtually any girl they want. And they’ve got the biggest gym you’ve ever seen all to themselves. We have to share ours with the basketball team.’ He said he worked out five times a week on average – three times under supervision, twice on his own.

  I knew that the notion that golf wasn’t an athletic sport was one that had become outmoded somewhere between Tiger Woods’s first green jacket and Craig ‘The Walrus’ Stadler’s final season as a PGA Tour regular, but Steve’s intrinsic sportiness still surprised me. It wasn’t just that he had all-round talent – he’d considered becoming a professional footballer too, and had only chosen golf after sustaining a knee injury whilst skiing – but that he was a completely alien golfing being to the ones I’d been taught to idolise while growing up. I’d already noticed that the world’s best golfers were fitter and taller and more positive than they had been when I was in my youth, but my game with Steve was the first time I’d been up close to someone with the whole package: pure-bred confirmation that the days when a belly was OK providing it didn’t impede your swing and the ideal golfer’s height was just under six foot and long hitting wasn’t necessarily an advantage and it was considered ‘bigheaded’ to talk about your inherent greatness were long gone.

  Steve was six foot three, he hit his drives well over three hundred yards with an ease bordering on the comical, he talked frankly about how ‘Every time I stand up to the ball, I just know I’m going to hit a good shot … and it was obvious that every one of these things worked hugely in his favour. If I didn’t add anything to my post-Belfry golfing to-do list after meeting him, it was because doing so would have been too depressing: achieving that Lee Westwood glow was a mere enigma; growing three and a quarter inches was a biological impossibility.

  I played poorly at Woburn. It was one of those days – with which I was becoming worryingly familiar – when I had so little sense where my hands were at the top of my swing that, for all the good they were doing, they might as well have been back at home, twiddling the keypad on my Nintendo. Only minutes after my round, though, I looked back at it and found that, oddly, I couldn’t remember much about it at all – not even the destructive bits. Had I scored 76? 78? 81? There was the pleasing moment on the eighteenth when Steve had told me to widen my stance, and I’d promptly belted my drive three hundred yards (only about forty yards behind his, that time). And then the moment before that when his dad, Mike, showed me a famous bit of tree trunk that looked like male genitalia. And … that was about it. Had I actually been on the course, or just haunting it from the sidelines, an appreciative ghostly spectator to Lewton’s languorous birdie-making and Mike’s fond tales of his son’s endless childhood brilliance?9 I couldn’t be sure. Whatever the case, I’d had a great day.

  There should have been something terrifying, mortifying about playing with Lewton. And, on some level, I knew the facts. I knew that he was bigger than me, stronger than me, more technically adept than me, seven years younger than me. I knew that, although I’d had rounds under 70, and (two) rounds with seven birdies in them, I had never had a round under 70 with seven birdies where I had been able to say, in all truth, that I could easily have had seven more. I knew that he had a dad who believed in him so much that he’d never made him do a day’s work in his life. I knew that, for Steve, golf made everything else go out of focus, in a way it didn’t for me. I had first-hand experience of appendicitis, and I knew that suffering from it and still managing to shoot two rounds of 75 in a tournament, as Steve had done, was an achievement of mind-boggling stamina. I knew that he was that good – so good that, just last year, he’d been tussling with the new star of the PGA Tour, Camillo Villegas; so good that he was in line for a Walker Cup call-up next year; so good that he
’d been given a scholarship that thousands of other young British golfers would have killed for – and he still wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to make a career in golf pay. And I knew that all of that really should have been telling me something, and that it was enough to cancel – no, not cancel, STOMP – out all those moments when I’d played with a pro and beat him or hit the ball more sweetly, and thought, ‘I could do this!’ And, finally, I knew that the most worrying thing of all was that none of this dampened my spirits or detracted from the fact that it was perfect golfing weather and it wasn’t often you got to see ball-striking of that quality for free and I was lucky to be playing Woburn.

  But, like I said, I really did have ever such a nice day.

  It’s only later that you’re able to take a balanced look at what happened. Only later that you think about statements like ‘I really did have ever such a nice day’ and ‘I felt lucky to be playing Woburn.’ Only later that you ask yourself, ‘Do these honestly sound like the statements of a man who is about to show no mercy, wrestle the rest of the Open qualifying field to the floor and beat his chest in victory?’ That’s where before and after are like two separate camera angles: the close-up, showing the man walking into the cave, which he thinks is a little bit scary and stalactitey and damp but sort of cosy too; and the long shot, which reveals the cave to be not a cave at all, but the mouth of a gargantuan extra-terrestrial, ready for its supper.

  1 Of course, I didn’t actually represent Diss in any official capacity. I did not even represent Zentex Fabrics. I represented me. Whatever the case, since my Europro Tour debut, I had clearly been demoted from representing ‘England’. Perhaps England had complained.

  2 Local, in this instance, meaning ‘local to the course where The Open is held’, as opposed to ‘local to the player.

  3 e.g. ‘Minutes of the Thetford Golf Club AGM, 2004’, aka ‘How We can Solve the Badger Problem on the Tenth Fairway: A Ten-Page Treatise’.

  4 Not that teeth were necessarily thought of as a major asset in north Nottinghamshire. My own grandma, who was from that neck of the woods, had got rid of hers when she was in her early twenties. ‘There wasn’t anything wrong with them,’ she once told me. ‘It just seemed more convenient to be done with them. And I knew a nice man who could do it on the cheap.’

  5 The notable exceptions were Ian Poulter, who gets his clothes tailor-made, and the spectator in his early fifties standing just to our left modelling the ‘Golf Hipster in Mid-Life Crisis’ look: fluorescent bri-nylon orange shirt, jeans and golf shoes. You could put the combination of the first two items down to mere male menopausal disarray, but not the footwear. Why on earth was he wearing them? Was he hoping for a spot in the tournament?

  6 Fact: all county-funded junior golf meals consist of sausage, egg, chips and beans.

  7 Holder of the record for the Most Frequent Use of the Phrase ‘Y’know’ in a five-minute period (see US Masters, third round, 1991, BBC archives).

  8 Sample product: ‘Cheat golf pants, replete with a hole in their pocket, to enable players to drop new balls in the rough when their partners aren’t looking.

  9 e.g. The time when Steve was twelve and he won a junior tournament at Wentworth and Ryder Cup captain Bernard Gallagher, who was announcing the final European line-up on TV from the club’s putting green that day, pretended that Steve was one of his two captain’s picks.

  Six

  Welcome to Par-adise

  THERE ARE SOME great golf courses – St Andrews, for example – that announce themselves matter-of-factly to the world. Others demand a grand entrance. Hollinwell, like Augusta and Wentworth, is among the latter. It is reached by driving almost a mile down a private lane, through a five-hundred-yard wall of pines so opaque it formed a convenient hiding place for one of Nottinghamshire’s most infamous modern-day murderers. However, you don’t ever really just ‘reach’ Hollinwell; you always arrive. The trees clear dramatically, and from an elevated vantage point you look down a hill to a characterful, if slightly spooky-looking, clubhouse built in the 1930s (the underacknowledged heyday of nineteenth-hole architecture). To your left and right, enough of the cascading third and eighteenth holes are visible to offer an immediate assurance that this is true golfing terrain – if not built by the gods, then considerably nudged along by them.

  I’d had numerous dreams about that moment at the top of the hill, and had spent considerable time mentally preparing myself for it. It was no surprise that, when it finally arrived, it gave me a cold feeling in my throat, as if I’d just gone for a jog after eating a packet of Fox’s Glacier Mints. What I wasn’t prepared for was the realisation that over the years, the vista had not shrunk. Hollinwell still seemed vast, important, not the kind of course that squeezed its holes parsimoniously into the smallest possible amount of space. It might have had attitude, but unlike most other restricted golfing hideaways, you could sort of see its point. Much as it pained me to admit it, I had to face up to the fact that if I was a golf course like this, I probably wouldn’t want some south Nottinghamshire ne’er-do-well sullying my environs with his stinky golf bag and his dad’s rotting car either.

  I used to imagine that a day would come when I’d feel a sense of bold belonging upon arriving in the car park of a golf club, but it has yet to transpire. Time has taught me that, in the same way that most car accidents happen within a mile of home, most golf bollockings happen within a minute of parking your car. At times like this I am unable to distinguish between pre-tournament nerves and pre-authoritarian nerves – it is all one heady, terrifying cocktail. It is, however, one of golf’s many contradictions that the more prestigious the tournament, the less suspicious that tournament’s venue is of outsiders. Had Hollinwell merely been playing host to the Captain’s Greensome Stableford, I’m sure that as I drove past the pro shop the man standing outside it with the blazer badge and comb-over would have already been on the phone to the local constabulary about my breach of headgear regulations or contravention of Local Rule 136.13: Minimum Permissible Visiting Vehicle Engine Size. As it was, he barely twitched a buttery jowl in my direction.

  In fact, on practice day for The Open Championship Regional Qualifying, Hollinwell took on a reposeful, almost welcoming quality. As I drove vigilantly past the clubhouse entrance, careful not to run over the golf bags of any immediate past captains, a couple of youths cleaning the grooves on their irons with tee-pegs outside the shop even smiled at me. I smiled back and, seeing that one of them was my old friend Jamie Daniel, waved.

  Jamie gave me a ‘Who the fuck do you think you’re waving at, you bum onion?’ kind of look, and returned to his grooves.

  I then noticed that he wasn’t Jamie at all, but a facsimile of a younger Jamie, only with louder trousers and soggier hair.

  It seemed appropriate that in considering what my old golfing adversary would look like, I had not factored in the ageing process. Youth, after all, had once been his Thing – in the same way that smoking a cigar or being sarcastic might be other people’s Things. He’d honed it, become renowned for it.

  Jamie Daniel and I had begun playing golf properly on the same day. Sure, we’d both had the odd knockaround on Bramcote Hills, the local pitch-and-putt – we’d later note that we had both ricocheted off the same tree on the first hole and, in lieu of knowing what ‘out of bounds’ was, played our second shots from the car park – but our first serious shots had been struck side by side at the Saturday junior lessons at Cripsley Edge Golf Cub. For the next four years we’d stayed more or less neck and neck, me managing to get my handicap a shot or two lower than his, Jamie winning the Notts County Boys’ Championship, me pipping him to become the first of our band of juniors to win the Cripsley Edge Club Championship. But, being born in August 1977, he always had a two-year head start on me – sometimes more, if the local newspaper was to be believed. When I’d walked away from golf, he’d persevered, reducing his handicap to scratch where I hadn’t, then turning pro and attempting to work his way u
p to the top level of the game via satellite tours and Midland PGA tournaments. When I pictured him, it was not as a twenty-eight-year-old, but as a forever young prodigy: the same one I’d only seen once since the day, aged eighteen, that I had explained to him that I was never going to pick up a golf club again.

  ‘Yeah, right, Cox,’ he’d said, back in 1993 as we sat on the steps outside Cripsley’s clubhouse, watching our friend Mousey retain the under-eighteens’ hold on the club’s Scratch Cup. ‘I believe you. Honest.’ It was a scene encapsulating a relationship in which it had long been Jamie’s role to look on in a cool, collected and slightly sceptical manner as I made yet another hyperbolic statement about my latest seen-the-light drive or triple-bogey calamity.

  I was a little apprehensive about meeting up with Jamie. In my first book, Nice Jumper, I wrote about the distance I had often felt between the two of us. I had also been – I thought in retrospect – a little bit unfair about the competitive role his parents had played in his golfing life. I knew he’d read Nice Jumper, but when I phoned him to tell him I’d turned pro and to see if he’d like to meet up for a game, I found him instantly congenial – much more so, in fact, than I remembered.

  It had been seven years since I’d last seen him, leaping around a dancefloor with his mum at his twenty-first-birthday party, and that had been only briefly. My image of the evening had been blurry enough at the time, and had since become considerably blurrier, so now, as I made my way over to the practice net, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A few minutes later I noticed a broad-shouldered, loping figure with thinning hair making his way in my direction. I decided not to risk a wave this time until he was two feet away at the most.