by Tom Cox
‘Why have sex?’ Christie asked me, as I made sumptuously gluey contact with another six-iron shot, and it bored 190 yards through a left-to-right crosswind, landing next to my target flag. I waited for the punchline, but there wasn’t one. What he meant was: What’s the point of intercourse, when you can get a better feeling from striking a golf ball?
Being given a lesson from Christie was like a golfing version of the classic Nice Cop–Nasty Cop police-room interrogation routine. Nice Guru stayed out of it most of the time, though his meagre input was crucial to the mix. ‘But that’s too simple, isn’t it?’ he would say, watching the ball admiringly. However, as soon as Nice Guru had told me that if I was an amateur and I stuck with him as my teacher, I could be ‘playing off plus figures, easy’, Nasty Guru stepped in. ‘How old are you?’ he asked me. I told him I’d just turned thirty-one. ‘Och, no, you’re finished,’ he said. ‘You may as well order your coffin.’ He asked me if I was married, and I told him I was. ‘Och, no, Tom. Och, dear,’ he replied. When I confessed that I didn’t play golf every day, his reaction – a single grave shake of the head – made me wonder if he’d misheard me, or perhaps thought that by ‘play golf’ I’d actually meant ‘stay off crystal methamphetamine’.
He probably knew he couldn’t dampen my spirits. With that turn of my right hand, my good mood had become irrepressible. I felt as if I could have walked out from under the range’s roof through the deluge, umbrellaless, and arrived at the car park 300 yards away with not a drop of moisture on me. Here was a bright beam of confirmation that my instincts about the golf swing were correct after all. I had been right to abandon my lessons at Knightsbridge – I only wished I’d been to see Gavin sooner after doing so. Steve Gould’s methods had worked wonders for other, more technically minded players, but I preferred Christie’s reasoning. It seemed to go along with P.G. Wodehouse’s Oldest Member’s assertion that ‘In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth.’ A golf swing was an imprint of your soul. It wasn’t something you built, nor was it something you styled, like a haircut; it was something pre-existing, that you just had to tap into. And that, in the end, was what was so great about Christie: what he told you didn’t feel like a new idea to go haring after, it felt like something you’d known all along, that you might now be able to use to find peace.
‘Donnae tell me anyone out there hits it better than that,’ he said, as another six-iron was nonchalantly dispatched.
So why wasn’t Christie better known? Because, as he continued to point out at approximate ten-minute intervals, he was ‘nae innnnterrested in all that bollocks’. And also because, in his own words, he was ‘a loose cannon. I’ve always done what I want, and I always will.’ These days, your local dustman is Googleable, but the infallible Internet search engine only brought up three results for Gavin when I typed his name into it – all passing mentions, in connection with Mark James or his Euro Challenge Tour pupil Stuart Davies, with no biographical detail. He seemed to have exempted himself from the modern age – which was probably convenient, since he didn’t appear too fond of it. He said he had never been on TV and never would be, no matter how much remuneration he was offered (‘I’m nae innnnterrested’ etc.), because he would see it as a betrayal of his pupils (‘If I was on there and someone asked me how one of my players was putting and I said “Not well” then forever more he’d be seen as a bad putter, when that’s not even what I’d said’). ‘I’m nae giving away my secrets in a golf magazine, either.’3 To him, the answers to the riddles of the golf swing were as sacred as the Magician’s Code: it was a point of honour not to reveal them.
After I’d finished hitting my basket of balls, we headed into the King’s Acre clubhouse. ‘What’s cheap?’ Christie asked the barmaid. I bought a panini for him and some chips for myself (‘Och, Tom, they’ll nae do you any good’), and he talked about the overcomplication of modern golf. ‘I would concede you have to eat well, but all this physio and dietician stuff – it’s all bullshit.’
‘You need a degree in hieroglyphics to teach golf,’ he said. ‘You can see what you’re doing with all this video technology they’ve brought in, but what you don’t get is a sense of how it feels. That’s the important thing. It’s like if I say to you the word ‘dough’. I could mean one of three things,4 and you wouldn’t know which.’5
So did he not think the standard of teaching, and of golf in general, had improved in recent years?
‘Och, Tom, you cannae compare it to the old days. There’s no one to match the guys from the past.’
‘But surely the modern players hit it longer and straighter?’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me people hit the ball better nowadays than they did before. It’s all in the equipment. Answer me this: What’s easier? Hitting a four-iron into a par-four, or a nine-iron? My granny could hit a nine-iron onto the green of a par-four, and she’s dead. But nobody has to hit a long iron any more, hardly ever. The R&A have made it too easy. They should at least have their own ball in The Open that doesn’t go too far.’
Before our meeting, Gavin had told me that he would not go on the record with any negative comments about his fellow pros. Nonetheless, he had plenty to say about them. At one point, one of the employees at King’s Acre mentioned an ageing former Ryder Cup player, to which Gavin responded simply by making a triangle over his crotch with his hands.6 He seemed to have an opinion on pretty much everything, whether it was the demise of British boy wonders due to ‘overloading their game’, or the social and intellectual shortcomings of supposedly irreproachable British golfing figureheads. Did he ever upset people with his straight talking, I wondered.
‘No doubt I do. I’m nae here to keep you happy, I’m here to get you right. If you’re wanting a subtle bedside manner, donnae come to me. I’m nae fucking pussyfooting around. My players know that I’m on their side and I’m not down on them for the sake of it. You’ve got to be realistic in this game. I’m nae innnnterrested in working with bad players. There’s nothing in it for me.’
I took the plunge and asked him if he’d got pleasure out of the ninety minutes he’d spent watching me on the range. I had a feeling I was going to get an honest answer.
‘Yeah, you see, because you got it, just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘But let’s see you playing at international level, then we’ll see if you’ve got it.’
Gavin had taught some of the best of the previous generation of European pros – Howard Clark, Ian Woosnam, Mark James, Richard Boxall – but while he spoke highly of Luke Donald, he couldn’t think of any of their modern descendants he was keen to work with. ‘It’s kids I’m interested in, but when you say that these days you’re a paedophile.’ Ideally, he said he’d like to take a junior under his wing from the age of ten and carry it all the way through, without them getting distracted by other coaches. ‘But that’s too pure, isn’t it? You can only hope for it.’
This led him back to James, whom he’d first met when he’d been the pro at Burghley Park in the mid-sixties and the future Ryder Cup captain had been a promising junior. ‘When you work with a player like that, you get feedback. He’s teaching you.’ For three and a half decades, Christie had not just followed James around the world from practice ground to practice ground, he’d also walked thousands of rounds with him – ‘Some coaches think the work stops on the range, but it doesn’t; you need to see how a player performs on the course, because what he thinks he’s doing might not be what he’s really doing’ – but for the past six years they had not exchanged a word. Their rift had occurred when James had pulled out of the Seve Trophy in 2000. ‘I was probably a bit rash getting mad at him,’ he said, ‘but it was Seve, for God’s sake. You’ve got tae play for Seve!’7
Now, as we drove back into Edinburgh, he rhapsodised about James’s formidable intellect and the uniquely symbiotic nature of their relationship, and I saw a watery redness materialise around his eyes.8 We had almost arrived back at the train station now, and I felt I was s
tarting to see that the soft underbelly of the Rhino had been bruised by a faddish golfing age. I wondered if, given a bit more time, Gavin might have admitted that he wished he’d had a bit more recognition. But perhaps he had just been lulling me into a false sense of security before mounting one last charge.
‘So, Tom, what shall we call it?’ he said, as he pulled the car to a halt. ‘Two hundred and fifty?’
Two hundred and fifty what, I wondered. Balls? Shots? It took me a full twenty seconds to realise he was negotiating his fee.
‘Now come on, Tom, this doesn’t come for free.’
I had never paid more than £20 for a golf lesson in the past. Admittedly, that figure had been for a session a third of the length of the one I’d just received from Gavin, but I was stunned. The previous day I had arranged the second bank loan of my pro golf career and the trip to Edinburgh alone had cost me well over £100. It was yet another expense that had been easy to overlook, back when I’d been estimating the costs of my pro life. And I had seen Gavin just once. A committed pro was expected to see his teacher at least once a fortnight. It was outrageous! How was a Europro Tour player supposed to survive?
But there was another part of me that reasoned that today should not come cheap. In the none-more-materialistic sport of golf, £150 – the fee that I eventually settled on with Gavin – wouldn’t even have bought me a top-of-the-range driver or a round at one of Britain’s top courses. What Gavin had given me was more precious than either of those things. I had witnessed a glimpse of rare genius: not the kind of genius that popped up on Sky Sports in the spare time during an American network ad break and analysed David Toms’ swing, but the kind that comes out of the mist on a winter’s night in 1990, blows your mind, vanishes for sixteen years, only to return, just as obstinately as you had hoped, to blow your mind more extensively still, and turn powerless effort into effortless power. I might not see its like again.
Not only that, I got a little after-care service to boot.
The afternoon after I arrived back from Edinburgh, I was burning some garden waste when Edie came out of the back door clutching my mobile phone. For much of the morning I’d been blasting balls up the driving range in freewheeling fashion. I’d tired myself out and made my thumb stream with blood again. My intention had been to come home and rest, but I’d found that I had nervous energy (and a dead tree) to burn.
‘Someone’s left you a message,’ she said. ‘It’s quite a frightening one. They didn’t say hello or goodbye or who they were, but whoever it is sounds a bit like that Scottish bloke from Dad’s Army.’
I dialled my voicemail and listened to Gavin say, ‘I’m just checking to see if you’re praaactising.’
When you hear something like that, you don’t ask questions or make excuses. Within twenty minutes, I was back at the range.
1 A sure sign that my ‘mind golf had become ‘losing my mind golf was the moment when I’d dropped my book in the bath by mistake at my hotel near Mollington and begun to analyse how the error related to my on-course strategy. It is an inevitable part of golfing life to question yourself, but when that questioning extends to ‘What does it say about me, as a golfer, that I knew the side of the bath was slippy, but I went ahead and rested my paperback on it regardless?’ it is a sorry state of affairs.
2 Over the course of the next three hours, I would hear the liver story three more times.
3 He later confessed that he’d once almost considered writing for Golf Monthly, but ‘only if they paid me as much as David Leadbetter’.
4 I supposed he meant a female deer, money, or the stuff you use for baking.
5 I refrained from telling him that, going on his reputation and nickname, I’d automatically think ‘dough’ in the financial sense.
6 I hadn’t seen this gesture before. I can’t say I knew what it meant for sure, but I have my suspicions. What I am certain it didn’t mean was: ‘That ageing former Ryder Cup player that you mention has a triangle on his crotch, which he sometimes plays, when in need of musical relief.’
7 A couple of weeks after our meeting, Christie and James put their differences aside and began working together again.
8 All year, I’d been developing a theory that the best golfers were either highly intelligent or a bit on the simple side. You either took a straightforward brain out onto the course, which meant you never had to overcomplicate matters, or you had an in-built acumen that allowed you to simplify your thought processes at will. When I told Christie this, he agreed, and became as animated as I’d seen him all day. ‘That’s right! The thing about the great ones who’ve got that intelligence, like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, is that they can condense it.’
Nine
Shut that Door
ONE OF THE best things about deciding to be a pro golfer is the inevitable moment, not long into your career, when your friends offer to caddy for you. Back in January, I’d received all kinds of unexpected offers from would-be bagmen. My subsequent analysis of their potential for the job had been enormous fun, and had prompted me to think of the flaws and strengths of long-term acquaintances in whole new ways.1 But by August most of these offers had dried up, as friends in regular nine-to-five employment realised the impracticality of travelling halfway across the country to spend two or three unglamorous days helping me look for my ball in heavy shrubbery, and friends out of regular nine-to-five employment did the maths on a 10 per cent cut of nothing.
Casual slave-driving had always been a fundamental part of my golf fantasy life. I liked picturing myself strolling the fairway, twirling my club, with some affable hunchback at my side eagerly humping the tools of my trade. A character of indeterminate age, he would have a nickname like ‘Croaky Joe’ or ‘Ankles McGill’, and would stare off wisely towards the flag and say things like, ‘There’s a lot of wind up there you can’t see, sir.’ After a remunerative week in a faraway place, I would send him off to explore the local nightlife with a wad of £20-notes in his fist, and he would not be seen until the following week’s tournament, where he would be waiting for me faithfully on the range, a devilish flicker in his one remaining eye and a gnarly hand resting on a set of irons buffed to a face-reflecting shine.
It was painful to have to abandon this fantasy, but as a self-sufficient club carrier, I was far from alone on the Europro Tour. Only about a third of the players used caddies, and most of these were strictly part-timers: either elderly patrons from their home clubs, dads, or bored-looking girlfriends or wives. The remaining two thirds carried lightweight canvas bags or attached more formidable waterproof carrying devices to battery-powered trolleys.
There was a time when owning an electric golf trolley was tantamount to confessing that you liked nothing better of an evening than coming back from the allotment, popping your false teeth in the nearest drinking receptacle and putting your varicose veins up in front of an episode of Last of the Summer Wine. As I remember, during my time as a member, only three people at Cripsley Edge Golf Club had owned one. Two of them, it was rumoured, had artificial hips. The other was a man of at least 140 who had eerily jet-black hair and a way of walking with his arms stretched out in front of him that made him look like an extra from a George A. Romero film, and was known to the junior section by the affectionate nickname ‘The Living Dead’. These days, though, it seemed that anyone over the age of sixteen with a quarter of an eye or more on a pro career owned a Powakaddy or Motocaddy or one of their cheaper rivals. This, I was ashamed to say, included me – although since I’d got my Powakaddy back in late spring I’d only taken it for a couple of tentative, quickly curtailed test runs.
By the time I set off for the Bovey Castle Championship in Devon, my sixth tournament of the year, my back pain had reached new heights. Barely a day would go by without at least a two-hour period when I was beset by the sensation of an invisible leather band crushing my internal organs. In view of this, and my stubborn reluctance to see a chiropractor, I probably shouldn’t have been bashful about usi
ng an electric trolley, but I could still hear a little teenage voice in my head mocking me – the same voice that ordered me to ignore the supportive double-strap formation on my bag and choose to carry it in the old-school, low-slung single-strap style. I had also encountered a small technical problem: my bag was not big enough to fit comfortably within the trolley’s holding compartment, and kept tumbling off – often with comically terrible timing. For the Bovey event, however, I had been blessed with a new, larger, snugger-fitting bag, courtesy of my well-connected ex-manager. It seemed only right to transport it in style.
A first glimpse of Bovey Castle served to validate my decision to use my trolley. On the whole, I’d been a little bit disappointed by the insights offered by the websites of Europro Tour venues. Looking at, say, Stonebridge Golf Club in the Forest of Arden, in the hope of getting a reserve spot in the Sweeneys Environmental Classic, I’d been left pretty much in the dark about the nature of the course, but had gleaned plenty of information about an upcoming Tina Turner Tribute Night. Bovey’s site had been much more generously designed, and in the flesh it didn’t disappoint. It was also the most undulating course I’d played all year. Set on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, it was cut through a steep valley, with two small rivers snaking in and out of play on the majority of its holes. You could have piled fifty versions of its manor-ish clubhouse hotel on top of each other and still not covered the airspace between the course’s lowest and highest points.
As I traversed the first few holes, I was soothed by the buzz of my new battery-powered friend.2 It was another of those moments that had become an increasingly-frequent feature of my golfing existence, when the words ‘bolted’, ‘door’, ‘stable’, ‘horse’ and ‘shut’ couldn’t help but rattle around my mind. Why had I not done this earlier? What kind of hassle could I have saved myself? Had I not learned anything from the havoc vertebrae problems had wreaked on the careers of my heroes Seve Ballesteros and Fred Couples? My mum had always suffered from spine problems and she had been told that the cause had been the heavy schoolbooks she’d been made to carry in her rucksack as a child. I couldn’t help but ponder the damage my generation of junior golfers had done to themselves by transporting much heavier objects. Was it any surprise that when I’d taken a fledgling-golfer friend to the 2005 London Golf Show, he remarked that he’d ‘never seen so many people in one place with such bad posture’?