by Tom Cox
At previous events I’d watched, with a doomed sense of underpreparation, as fellow players delved into bags big enough in which to grow cherry trees and unveiled obscure power drinks, energy bars, reserve baseball caps, towels, brand-new leather gloves and laser rangefinders. So at Bovey, with new golfing luggage and no compunction about overfilling it, I packed for peace of mind. As well as the usual balls and tees and pitchmark repairers and bottles of water and gloves3 and crumpled local rules sheets and suntan lotion and permanent marker and pencil and car keys and mobile phone, I added a notebook, a packet of Nurofen, some plasters, a spare headcover, a bath towel, three bananas, a spare shirt, and my REO Speedwagon baseball cap (in case I tired of the straw boater). For the final touch, I included my secret weapon: a child-sized, circular-grooved, hickory-shafted seven-iron from the 1930s that I’d been given by a friend of my granddad’s just before my first ever game of golf. With all this preparation, I was hoping to banish the feeling that my pro golf train had left without me. Bovey could be where everything finally came together: the place where the confidence that had been planted at Karl Morris’s house and grown in the presence of Gavin Christie started to bloom.
My confidence was further enhanced by the knowledge that, in contrast to Mollington, this week I would not be fighting for sleep on a hard hotel bed in a room without air conditioning or fully opening windows. I was lucky enough to have the use of my friend Emma’s eighteenth-century farmhouse, a rambling idyll down a track on the edge of the moor with swifts darting out of its eaves and a stream trickling beneath its foundations. It seemed only logical that Edie should join me. Given the state of our bank account, it was going to be the nearest we got to a vacation in 2006.
If there was one drawback to my pre-tournament groundwork, it was that, for the second time in the season, I missed out on a practice round. The drive from Norfolk to Devon had taken an unprecedented, jam-blighted eight and a half hours, and we’d arrived just as the light was fading on Monday evening. On Tuesday, the course was closed for the pre-tournament pro-am4 and some last-minute greenkeeping, so I had to make do with walking the fairways and feeling the terrain out with my feet. But I couldn’t complain. Here I was, in one of my favourite parts of the country, on a still, sunny day, feeling the peace that only a great golf course on a still, sunny day can provide – a peace that, for some bizarre reason, I’d once chosen to eliminate from my life.
Earlier, I’d marched boldly to the centre of the line on the practice ground – all fear of the dreaded shank gone. My sense of well-being had been buoyed further when a couple of players I vaguely recognised from Mollington said ‘Hello, Tom’ to me. I was even approached by a man in his sixties with a baseball cap who asked me if I was looking forward to tomorrow. I was dressed in cords, a long-sleeved collarless T-shirt and trainers, my hair wild and scruffy, and I was without golfing paraphernalia, yet there seemed to be no doubt in this stranger’s mind that I was a competitor.
‘I come here every year with my family,’ he said. ‘When I found out this event was on as well, I thought, “All the better!” I think you boys are amazing. I can’t see any difference between the way you hit the ball and the way Phil Mickelson and wassisname, that old Ernie Els, do.’
For much of the year I’d been forced to see myself through the pro golf world’s eyes as an out-of-place, outdated anomaly. It wasn’t just the way that Jamie had looked at my swing at Hollinwell and evaluated it so curiously – like an antique dealer appraising a novelty lamp – or the similarly toned admission from Paul Creasey, John Ronson’s caddy, that his first impressions of me were ‘torn between hacker and one-off talent’. When Gavin Christie had got onto the obligatory topic of Michelle Wie, he’d asked me not what I felt about her taking the place of me or one of my pro colleagues in a men’s tournament, but what I would have felt if I’d had a ‘son’ who was a pro golfer and she had stolen his place in a tournament.
But now, suddenly, I was one of ‘the boys’? I suppose I should have been happy. But I wasn’t sure if I was entirely comfortable with the concept. What I was sure of was that the prospect of teeing off was not accompanied by the sensations of dread and incongruity that had followed me all year. There was still dread, but it wasn’t the kind that sucker-punched you in the kidneys and rendered you a human blancmange. It was a different kind, that kept its distance but gave you a nasty little pinch from time to time. It was the dread of wasting a good thing.
In the other sports I’ve enjoyed – badminton, table tennis, tennis, football – I’ve had the occasional day when a feeling of rightness has rushed through me. In those cases, the results have rarely varied: I have played to the best of my ability, immersed in the fast-spin cycle of competition. In the more ponderous sport of golf, though, days like these are no guarantee of success. There is always time to talk yourself out of something, no matter how good your biorhythms, no matter how good the conditions.
My first round at Bovey Castle started, however, with one of the greatest shots I have ever hit.
The first hole at Bovey – which is actually the eleventh during non-tournament play – is a long par-four of 460 yards. The tee shot is not as narrow as some on the course, but executing it well is vital. With a steep slope in front of the green leading down into a pond, any second shot that doesn’t fly all the way to the putting surface is a terrible mistake, and not just because it will almost certainly prompt someone in the vicinity to make some clichéd crack about ‘getting your wetsuit on’. The important thing is to drive powerfully, rendering the second shot as short as possible so it can be easily controlled, missing the water and stopping quickly enough to avoid the thick, goading foliage a few feet beyond the green.
I’d pondered this second shot for several moments the previous day, and I didn’t particularly relish pondering it any more, so I’d tried – overambitiously, as it turned out – to time the long walk from the practice putting green to the tee to leave just enough time for a few practice swings, the ritual of swapping cards with my playing partners, and the standard local rules briefing from the starter. Not only did I arrive to find the official frantically calling out my name and radioing through to the tournament office to find out where I was, I also found that the threeball directly in front of mine had barely left the tee. There was going to be a wait of ten minutes or so, and it would be all I could do not to think about that pond.
It’s at periods like this that it’s the starter at a golf tournament’s unofficial job to break the tension by making banter with the players. In this regard, today’s volunteer – a silver-haired man with a Moretonhampstead Golf Club jumper and an air just a little too patrician for him to fall into the Ron or Roy category – was a little more garrulous than most.
‘We’ve had some humorous moments here on the tee already,’ he explained, with a slight guffaw. ‘Just a little while ago a bevy of beauties went by in a golf buggy. And – this really was very funny – there were six pros on the tee at the time and they all simultaneously said, “Sod this! I’m off!” and threw their drivers into that bush.’ He pointed over to some foliage just to the left of the tee.
His anecdote-telling skills obviously needed a little sprucing up, and it was possibly a bit of a shock for all concerned to realise that there was still someone alive in Britain who used the phrase ‘bevy of beauties’ in a non-ironic context, but the result was successful. A couple of minutes previously, my playing partners, Paul Coburn and Adam Hawkins, and I had all made tight-lipped, perfunctory introductions, then immediately retreated into our cocoons of concentration, but now we began to quiz each other merrily about our golfing fortunes over the previous eight months. And if this was only out of fear that if we let up for a moment we might be subjected to another recollection of a ‘humorous moment’ – possibly involving ‘lithe lovelies’ or some other would-be caption from a 1975 Sun newspaper pictorial – it at least passed the time. The moment to tee off was upon me quickly, and when it was, I felt loose and focused
. This was the happy kind of being caught off-guard: finding yourself wholly in the present, with no time for negative hypothesising.
What Gavin Christie preached was sometimes referred to as ‘the flail’. It was all about spring and twang: the golfing equivalent of skimming a stone. I’d managed to keep this springiness for more than a week now, but I sometimes yearned for Gavin’s gruff tones in my ear, spurring me on, reminding me of the movement’s true texture. Now, however, as I took my backswing, I could almost hear him: a granite Obi Wan Kenobi telling me to ‘use the force’ of my hands (but obviously without too much force, and with an ultimate sense of effortless power). The ball took off straight and true, just like those of Paul and Adam, but when we arrived in the fairway five minutes later, there was an unexpected ego boost: I had outdriven both of them by around twenty paces. At 340 yards from the tee, I was left with only an easy pitching wedge to the green. Devilish pond? What devilish pond?
For the next few holes that same confidence always seemed within reach, but I wasn’t quite able to touch it again. The Brain Worm did its bit, but this time its wiggle was a subtle one. My ball-striking, and my luck, were just a fraction off. Putts would eye up the hole, but fail to drop. A well-struck iron would catch an untimely draught and fall just short of the green into the maws of a deep bunker. A wayward drive would find an adjacent fairway subject to a freakish out-of-bounds rule of which I’d been unaware.5 The outcome was that, as I stood over my ball in the wiry rough to the right of the sixteenth fairway, surveying the miserable result of a tee shot that, two minutes earlier, I’d been sure had been on the short grass, I was certain that my seven-over-par aggregate represented the worst I could possibly have scored. It was a naïve conclusion at which to arrive – one that paid no heed whatsoever to what I’d learned at Hollinwell about golf’s infinite capacity for disaster – and the smothered six-iron that followed, finding a water hazard to the left of the fairway, probably served as punishment. It was just then that I saw the camera.
I’d watched a considerable chunk of Sky Sports’ Europro Tour coverage before, though it was easy enough to overlook. Presented in edited highlights form, it was usually broadcast at least a week after the tournament in question, squeezed in between a minor-league darts match or a crucial heat of intervillage amateur league curling. And by ‘highlights’, what I really mean is ‘me-diumlights’. Although the leaderboard gave evidence of plentiful birdies and eagles – it was not uncommon for Europro Tour events to be won with scores of ten or more under par – the camerawork rarely backed it up, instead lingering on unremarkable lag putting and caddieless players indifferently shoving irons back into their bags, whilst commentators outlined the ‘action’ like bored CCTV operatives, seemingly permanently on the verge of a yawn. The one obvious attempt to pep things up had been the addition of presenter Ruth Frances, a blonde model with a look of the golf-wife-in-waiting about her who was best known for her work on late-night viewer-participation quiz shows, but even she had disappeared from more recent programmes (much to the disappointment of some of the more chivalrous players on the Tour). One could only deduce that she’d died of boredom.
I’d long since found out that the Europro Tour, with its two-men-and-a-dog galleries and conspicuous lack of autograph-hunters, was not a place oozing with glamour, but it wasn’t half as unglamorous as the TV coverage made it look. Now I had the chance to witness the problem first-hand. Maybe there had been more than one camera on the course, but if so, I hadn’t seen the others. And now it was trained on me. Not Kevin Harper or Sean Whiffin, the joint leaders at four under par; not Phil Rowe, who was putting together a very nice round of 67; but Tom Cox – currently at seven over par, and poised to make a dramatic move further in the wrong direction. Quite frankly, the Evil Brain Worm found this outrageous. In view of the fact that he was facing a chip – his friend the Panic Squid’s least favourite kind of shot – he made an informed decision. If this camera crew was going to waste so much time on his pathetic servant, he would at least make an effort to put on a show for them.
Over the years, much has been made of the putting yips, the dreaded affliction where a player – through nerves or a mental block – is liable to jerk putts of six feet and under far wide of the hole. Few golfers are unaware of the cautionary tale of Germany’s Bernhard Langer, the disease’s most notorious repeat sufferer, who was once struck down so extremely that he took five putts on one green in The Open. Less has been said about the putting yips’ even more malevolent brother, the chipping yips – or chyips. If, to borrow one of my favourite non-PC Tiger Woods phrases, you ‘yip-spazz’ a three-foot putt, it does not skitter thirty yards through the green into a water hazard. It rolls past the hole. Then, once it has, and you have apprehensively dollied the five-foot return putt to the holeside, you safely tap in. A chyip, by contrast, has almost unlimited capacity for destruction.
The chyipping of the ex-European Tour player-turned-Sky Sports pundit Ross McFarlane became so terrifying during the later days of his playing career that he would aim to mishit the ball into the flagstick to stop it. Sometimes, in desperation, McFarlane would hit chip shots one-handed from as much as sixty yards from the flag. Then there was Dan ‘Jellylegs’ Davies, my fellow Cabbage Patch Masters organiser, who had been known to emerge from playing a perfunctory twenty-yard lob shot with matching grass stains on his knees.
There were remedies for chyipping out there, but nobody seemed agreed on their reliability. Back at the beginning of summer, I’d watched an outsider called Chris Coake overcome his chyipping demons by placing his left hand awkwardly below his right on the club, and go on to win the PGA Tour’s Zurich Classic of New Orleans. But the purist in me didn’t much like the look of the technique. I wasn’t exactly encouraged, either, by a search of Internet golf sites, which informed me that yipping your chips is: a) ‘an official medical condition’, b) ‘an affliction that has nothing to do with nerves and pressure’ and c) ‘an affliction that is all about nerves and pressure’. I’d been struggling with my wedge game all year, but I had enough other golfing ailments to worry about, and it always seemed easier to shove my chyips into a cupboard and deal with them later. I could find temporary ways to ignore them, using a putter from further and further off the green,6 but I probably should have anticipated that, with the pressure on, the cupboard doors would burst open and my denial would rear up and bite me.
Now, with the camera trained in my direction, I looked desperately for something to draw on – a good chip from the recent past, perhaps – but I found nothing. I searched for that 1930s seven-iron, but it had slipped so far down into my bag that I couldn’t get it out. My fingers might as well have been made out of sponge. It was an effort even to drop the club limply down into the grass two feet behind the ball and advance it onto a grassy knoll, six yards short of the green. It was an even bigger effort to subsequently skim the bastard thing ninety feet past the hole. This could have gone on indefinitely. The resulting quadruple-bogey eight shouldn’t have felt like an achievement, but it did.
Half an hour and another dropped shot later, standing on the tee of the par-five eighteenth with a driver in my hand, my small sense of achievement from earlier had turned to unadulterated self-disgust. In 2006 I’d already had embarrassing rounds, scrappy rounds, and desperate rounds, but this was different. It was a squandered round. As such, it was probably my most painful to date. My golfing objectives now boiled down to a simple need: I wanted to hit the ball, hard, and when I had, I wanted to run after it, and hit it again, even harder. A delay on the tee amped my frustration. All thoughts of yardage charts were gone now. Who cared where the ball went, as long as the little white fuckpig was out of my sight? When the fairway finally cleared, the threeball behind us were waiting with us on the tee, and the group behind them were tramping noisily up the gravel path from the seventeenth green. I should have waited for the noise to stop. I didn’t. I also realised belatedly that I hadn’t put my glove back on after taking it off t
o putt on the previous green, but what help would a glove be? Could a glove take me back to the first hole? No. My drive, on the other hand, could. And that – possibly out of a subconscious need to rewind the recent past – was precisely where I put it, hooking it so far to the left that it carried past trees, boulders and rough and found the middle of the adjacent fairway.
As a reminder of what I’d frittered away, it was too cruel. I’d stood on this fairway five hours earlier, in almost the same spot, facing in the opposite direction, as a sportsman. Now I was no better than a flailing caveman with a stick. I thrashed and watched, surprised, as my ball soared towards the spot where I thought – or rather, haphazardly hoped – the green was. Later, looking at my yardage chart, I would realise the implausibility of what I’d attempted: a 290-yard carry over a copse and rough that probably hadn’t seen a lawnmower since Harry Carpenter was the face of BBC golf. What was amazing was how close I came to pulling it off, how late in the ball’s flight it crashed against an overhanging branch.
Earlier that day on the practice ground, I’d heard a pro – possibly one who’d recently spent some time in the company of Gavin Christie – ask his friend, ‘If a man says something wrong in the woods and there’s no woman around to hear him say it, does he still make a sound?’ As jokes went, it wasn’t quite the worst I’d heard in the last two weeks. But I preferred my own, new version. It went like this: ‘If a ball falls in the woods and there’s nobody around to see it drop and those woods happen to have two-foot grass and leaf mulch within them and there are two groups waiting behind to play their shots, and it’s the last hole, and the ball’s owner is more tired than he has ever been in his adult life, and he doesn’t open his mouth, does he still make a sound? Yes. He makes the sodding sound of his fucking soul slowly dying.’