by Tom Cox
I would have to remember to use it – possibly some other time, when my soul wasn’t slowly dying.
For five minutes, Adam and Paul and I – helped first by a couple of spectators and then, finally, also by a rules official – searched frantically. For five minutes, we found every long-forgotten sunken, misshapen ball imaginable. Mine, though, had vanished. I was long beyond caring about my score now. All I could think about was that ever-growing queue on the tee behind as.
The rules official was speaking into his walkie-talkie by this point, just out of earshot. They did that a lot, these Europro Tour officials, and I sometimes wondered if they quite liked it, and how many of their discussions involved anything more vital than that night’s dinner. But now paranoia struck. What could the official possibly be saying?
‘It’s that Cox again, holding play up. Yes, that’s right, the one with the REO Speedwagon hat. What’s he want to advertise his love for REO Speedwagon for anyway? They were shit. Although I suppose “Keep on Lovin’ You” is all right to sing along to, if you’ve had enough to drink. Over.’
‘Yes, I know. He’s a pain, that one. I already had to come away from my sudoku to give him a ruling on the fifteenth when he put that ball in the stream, then make him retake his drop because his hand was in the wrong place. Bit of a puffy swing, too, I noticed. Over.’
He turned back in my direction.
‘I think your five-minute time limit is up,’ he said. ‘Come on. I’ll buggy you back.’
In a professional golf tournament, players are prohibited from using buggies,7 but in ‘special circumstances’ – for example now, when play needed speeding up – a member of the tournament staff may be permitted to give them a lift. It is impossible to say quite how grateful I was for this ruling, as we zipped back through the rough, and I think I can safely say that Paul and Adam, who were now putting up on the green, felt the same.
I stood, once again, in the fairway of the first hole, just a few feet from the divot mark my wedge had made at the beginning of the round. I was now playing my fourth shot on the eighteenth. After another drop – for which I tried to strike a balance between ‘raising my hand high enough to stay within the rules’ and ‘not raising my hand so high that it looked as if I was taking the piss’ – I selected a four-iron. As I waggled, I told myself, ‘Just a safe shot, back into the fairway, then let’s wedge up onto the green.’ Maybe I could still salvage a bogey six out of this.
I knew the shot was going to be sweet, six inches into the downswing. I looked up, confidently …
To see the ball heading into the exact same deadly copse where I had hit my previous shot.
As I hauled my clanking joints back into the buggy, I probably shouldn’t have allowed myself a sneaky peek back to the tee. We’d called one group through, but now three more were congregating there, watching all this unfold – fatigued, frustrated men, desperate to get back to their hotels and B&Bs to rest, eat and re-gel their hair. Even the stern demeanour of my rules official friend had cracked now, and as he looked across at me he pressed his lips together in sympathy. I wondered what was the worst that could be happen if I bailed out of the buggy and began to run, not stopping until I reached the summit of Dartmoor, then, using sticks, animal excrement and sheep’s wool, built myself a shack where I could hide from the rest of the professional golf community for the next decade or two. Obviously I’d miss Edie terribly, and I’d take time to adjust to the new diet and the lack of satellite TV, but it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
This time, after another frenetic search, we located the ball, but it was a close-run thing. Four hurried slashes of my wedge later, I stepped over a thirty-foot putt, and confidently curled it in for a nine, and a sixteen-over-par round of 86.
To their credit, Adam and Paul still seemed to be on speaking terms with me. I imagine, even in the creakingly slow environment of tournament pro golf, neither of them had ever spent fifty-seven minutes on one hole before.
‘Well done for finishing,’ said Paul, patting me on the back. ‘A lot of people would have just given up.’
It was a nice thing to say. But I wondered if I could detect a silent ‘sensible’ before the ‘people’ bit.
And, just like that, it was all gone: the free-flowing limbs, the confidence, the temporary hint of a competitive edge.
In the middle of that night, an exterior door in Emma’s farmhouse that had been locked on the inside flew inexplicably open. It unsettled me, but probably not as much as the events of the final hole. In my fitful dreams, I played a par-five eighteenth which felt as if it would never end, then, when I finally reached the green, a big, gothic door swung violently open, leading me back to the tee. By the following day, my swing had once again become an ungainly mystery. That ‘It’s not how, it’s how many’ mantra was annoyingly apposite once again, and not in a good way. My score – 88 – was in the same gruesome-verging-on-humiliating ballpark as its predecessor, but that was where the similarities ended. Yesterday, I’d built a nice boat that had unaccountably sprung a steady leak that had turned into a flood. Today, I was in the water before I even began, clinging to whatever driftwood I could find. My standards had never been lower. Once, my hope had been to match my best ever amateur score of 67 in a pro tournament, possibly even better it. That had been modified to ‘I hope I break 80.’ Now, I quite simply didn’t want to come last.
I was not the only one struggling as the wind got up, and the two-round cut came at six over par. Paul, one of the easiest-going men I’d met on Tour, who’d seemed so unflappable throughout the woes of a 77 yesterday, began well, but finally cracked after a misjudged iron on the par-four fifteenth, his scream of ‘FUUUUCC-CKKKING CUNTTTTT!’ causing a crow to fly out of a nearby tree in terror in a way that might have been comic under less painful circumstances. Adam, who had a touch of Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers about him, bemoaned the lack of prize funding from the Europro Tour. ‘I’m OK, because I own my house outright and I know I can make twenty-five grand a year playing in pro-ams,’ he said. ‘But not everyone’s in that position. We’re coming out here every week and paying nearly three hundred quid, before expenses. If we’re breaking even, we’re doing well.’ He rested his foot on a slightly shabby tee marker bedecked with the Europro Tour logo, as if to illustrate his point. ‘It sometimes seems a bit of a con. The Tour doesn’t pay for the courses that host the tournaments, the courses pay them for the publicity. And they’ve got all this sponsorship, and 160 or more players giving them 275 quid every week. If they’re not going to raise the prize fund from £40,000, they could at least make the money stretch further back into the field.’
Adam did not quite fit in with the inexpressive, wet-look image I’d come to associate with the up-and-coming pro ranks. He had a piledriver swing, a background in the navy, and a haircut and manner to match. I liked him immediately. He had travelled to the tournament with a friend in a camper van, and this morning had given a young boy-racer pro a talking to for cutting him up on the club driveway. When a fellow pro annoyed him – like David Fisher, the 1993 English Amateur Champion, who Adam claimed had blanked him recently when he’d said good morning to him – he had no reservations about talking about it. ‘You can tell he’s a twat, just by the way he dresses,’ he said of Fisher, who had a reputation for wearing the most outrageous outfits on Tour.8
I’d seen Fisher on the practice ground earlier that day. He’d stuck in my memory partly because he had the longest hair and only proper beard I’d seen on a golfer all year, and partly because, when a cow had let out a moo in a nearby pasture, he’d called over to a fellow pro, ‘Oi! Jezza! Listen! It’s that bird you pulled last night!’ A week later I saw him again, this time on Sky Sports, as the main subject of a report on snappy dressing on the Europro Tour, forming part of the Bovey Castle Championship programme.
I’d just about started to rationalise my Bovey disaster by that point. I took some comfort from the fact that I had not only achieved my goal of
not coming last, but had beaten the former Arsenal footballer-turned-pro golfer Lee Dixon (84–94) into thirteenth-from-last place by four shots. Nonetheless, that sixteenth-hole cock-up in the first round in front of the cameras was proving hard to erase from my memory, and it had been with a slight sense of trepidation that I’d switched on the Sky Plus to watch the Bovey show.
The coverage unfolded at its usual drowsy pace, not particularly enhanced by an interview with the England cricket international Andrew Flintoff, who was holidaying at Bovey Castle, and explained that he ‘didn’t know a great deal about the Europe [sic] Tour’. I was beginning to think I’d made a lucky escape as the first two rounds drew to a close and the presenter, Matt Dawson, began to address the more important business of the final day’s play. But as Fisher – whose clothes were clearly a lot snappier than Sky’s editing skills – spoke repetitively of the joys of ‘jazzing up his gear’ I looked up from my cup of tea and noticed a flash of something familiar and hairy. I hit rewind, and watched, for all of two seconds, as my dejected form appeared on the screen, squeezed in between footage of a serious-looking man in a diamond sweater and bright-blue trousers and what appeared to be a random shot of one of the greenkeepers. On the voiceover, Fisher talked about the number of pros who were ‘trying something different’ with their clothing. The only thing I’d been trying to do differently at the time was not to shank my chip shot. But if the producers at Sky wanted to categorise some cheap H&M trousers, a French Connection polo shirt that had shrunk slightly in the wash and an REO Speedwagon trucker cap as part of the vanguard of golfing fashion, that was fine by me – particularly if it meant Sky viewers didn’t get to see my chyips at their worst. I was pleased to note, also, that if you looked at the screen quickly, you might not even have noticed the stain from the milk that I’d splashed down my front that morning while rushing my cornflakes.
1 My entry for my rock musician friend Chris Sheehan, for example, read thus: ‘Strength: quick walker. Flaw: could get distracted by worrying about hair in rainstorm.’
2 Not a statement I recommend anyone to make in formal company.
3 Well, two. Although I had replaced the blackened London Golf Show glove with a new leather Titleist model, the former had been experiencing a revival in recent weeks, owing to Karl Morris. Morris had given me a trigger in which I used green as my ‘switch on’ colour. I was supposed to rehearse my best shots whilst thinking of it, and look at it just before I started my pre-shot routine. I’d chosen green myself (Morris had told me to pick any colour I wanted) on the basis that on a golf course it would be everywhere. But I needed something more specific. The green label on the old glove seemed to do the trick. And besides, the Titleist glove had a hole in it now, in the exact place where my thumb was blistered.
4 ‘Featuring,’ as I learned from the promotional literature on the website, ‘tea, coffee and bacon rolls … followed by a Sportsman’s Dinner hosted by snooker legend Steve Davies.’ I assumed that, by ‘Steve Davies’, they were referring to the six-time world snooker champion who normally spelled his surname without the ‘e’, often with the unfortunate addition of ‘Interesting’ before it. Or maybe it was another Steve Davies altogether? Steve Davies from the Europro Pot Black Tour, perhaps? Whatever the case, it was doubtful that, in the minds of struggling Europro Tourers not selected for the pro-am, his presence compensated for the irritation of having to fork out an extra night of accommodation expenses in order to play a practice round.
5 Just to compound the misery, a day later I found out that the fairway wasn’t out of bounds, and the scorer on the fourth tee had given me incorrect information.
6 Even the redoubtable Jamie, once a man who could nonchalantly nip a sand wedge off a bare lie and stop it on a sixpence, admitted that an attack of the chyips had taken its toll on his game. He now preferred to use the straighter-faced, less risky seven-iron when around the green.
7 Probably a good thing. In my experience, where a golf buggy goes, trouble follows not far behind it. The last time I took the wheel of a buggy, I got a little overzealous and crashed it into a ball-washer pod. And while I was slightly jealous of the members at my last club but one who drove around the course, I was slightly less jealous of the fact that, every time they got close to the road that ran parallel to the course, a Subaru Impreza driver would inevitably materialise, wind down his window, and shout ‘Wanker!’ at them.
8 The word ‘outrageous’ is used here in a strictly relative sense. Most of the outfits I saw Fisher in – thick-rimmed performance sunglasses, Farah-style slacks, liberally buttoned polo shirts with a crucifix necklace dangling underneath – brought to mind nothing quite so much as the casual wear of a somewhat reserved, retired disco dancer.
Ten
Mighty Mouse
BEN WITTER WANTED to show me a new trick. Its execution was not as complex as that of many of his others, such as the one where he hit drives while kneeling on a giant inflatable fitness ball, or the one where he used a special club twice as long as his body. Its charm was all in the element of surprise. Most importantly, it was original. ‘You’ve got to keep on your toes here,’ he said, gesturing at the rest of the World Golf Trick-Shot Championship competitors warming up a few yards to our left. ‘Everyone’s always looking for a new idea.’ The trick involved placing a tiny firecracker behind his ball when he teed it up. As his driver made contact with it, there would be a small bang and a puff of smoke, leaving the spectator momentarily unsure where to look: at the explosion, or at the ball, drilling into the distant sky.
There were some, however, who might have said that in Witter’s case such firepower was superfluous.
Witter was long off the tee. Not Stephen Lewton long, either: a whole different kind of long that seemed to hint at a childhood plunge into a cauldron of magic potion. A moment before he showed me the firecracker trick I’d watched, eyes goggling, as he smashed three wind-hampered drives over a lake and three of Hanbury Manor’s fairways and into a hedge. At least, I thought it was a hedge. Who knows? It could have been the tree-line a few miles down the road, bordering the M25. I’m a touch short-sighted, but to follow Writer’s shots you would have needed not just laser surgery, but laser vision too.
‘You should have seen me before I got ill,’ he said. ‘I’m only operating on about 80 per cent of my old power these days.’
A Giant Redwood of a man from Pennsylvania, Witter had an almost Schwarzenegger-esque, superhero-ish bearing, and a backstory begging for a biopic. As a promising young pro, he’d been diagnosed with a rare form of salivary gland cancer – a large portion of his jaw had been removed. Despite this, he had recovered sufficiently to twice win his country’s National Long Drive Championship. More health problems arrived in 2000 – a car crash left him with a detached retina. Only last November he’d been diagnosed with cancer for a second time, and had two thirds of his left lung removed. This made turning his body incredibly difficult, although you would never have known it from watching him swing.
‘That never gets old!’ he said, turning to me with an enormous grin after another gargantuan hit.
How far did that one go?
‘Oh I’d guess about 340,’ he said. ‘Not massive. My personal best in competition is 409.’
I chuckled internally, thinking back to those times when I’d hit drives at Thetford and Diss and my playing partners had called my hitting ‘monstrous’. My drive on the first hole at Bovey Castle had been a long hit, but I’d had an assisting breeze, and it had been a bit of a one-off. Most of my driving seemed pathetic now. I felt like an Action Man doll coming face-to-face with a full-sized member of the SAS.
I’d come to the World Trick-Shot Championships after receiving an invite from its organiser, Jeremy Dale. At one time Dale had been a playing pro, but over the last twelve years he had found more success on the trick-shot circuit, perfecting such routines as ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (a trick of patted-head-stroked-tummy co-ordinative complexity that involved walking
forward and hitting a row of balls at high speed by swinging two clubs, one-handed, in opposite directions) and ‘Magic Chair’ (which involved Dale hitting 200-yard drives while sitting on some patio furniture). The World Trick-Shot Championship was a relatively new project of his – an attempt to bring together golf-trick mavericks from around the globe. Featuring all manner of golfing paraphernalia, from club shafts made of garden hoses to six-foot-high tees to clubs whose faces were bigger than those of the men wielding them, its jovial, experimental atmosphere could not have been more different from that of the tournaments in which I’d been competing. For me, it was a chance to see where a failed pro might go, if he wanted to continue to hit balls for a living.
I had another, possibly more pressing, reason for coming to Hanbury Manor. Since Bovey Castle, two weeks before, something worrying had happened to me: I’d lost all desire to hit a golf ball. I’d waited for the buzzing sensation in my hands, the irresistible mental pictures of wedge shots landing on slick, well-watered greens and spinning back, the sudden urge to form my fingers into a Vardon grip around the vacuum cleaner tube – classic symptoms of golf fever that had been present even on my darkest amateur days – but they had not arrived. I had reached a curious state of acceptance about my game, a state that, ironically, was as phlegmatic as the one I had tried and failed to achieve on the course. I knew that the low-level, introverted misery I had witnessed at Bovey Castle and Mollington and Hollinwell and Stoke-by-Nayland was just the everyday stuff of a tough sportsman’s life, but it was a million miles away from what my everyday life had been until 2006, and I had let it get to me. There had been low points on golf courses when I’d been a kid, too, but at least they had been offset by the promise of larking around in the club snooker room or burying your mate’s sun visor in a bunker afterwards. It was not just that I had realised I was not made to compete in this environment. I was having doubts, too, about continuing to watch others compete in it. ‘The thing you’ll notice out here is that every single person can hit it,’ I’d been told on numerous occasions by people on and surrounding the Europro Tour, Challenge Tour and Open Qualifying. And there was something heartbreaking about seeing people do exactly that – hit it, in a way almost identical to the players at the very top of the game – yet, unfathomably, fail to live up to their potential. There was such an inherent injustice to this that hot-headed outsiders might have wondered how the players of the Europro Tour confined themselves to a miniature kick at a tee marker or a quick profanity – why weren’t they running amok across the greens with their sand wedges? But a good player could not allow his anger to triumph; he had to let it out in short, sharp, controlled bursts, as if opening the valve on a tyre.