by Tom Cox
One could say that the Trick-Shot Championship was another part of the same sad enigma – another illustration of the difference between scoring and striking. How could someone be able to curve the ball at will whilst using a club that was only nine inches long, or send a ball 250 yards from his knees, yet have failed to succeed at the comparatively straightforward business of hitting fairways and greens and holing a few putts? But the trick-shot ghetto also provided a much-needed reminder of a more playful side to my favourite game, that it wasn’t always about sombre, teeth-grinding endurance, that it could be whooped over and laughed at. Essentially, the World Trick-Shot Championship was a grown-up, controlled version of the kind of larking around that I’d done with my Cripsley Edge mates in shiftless moments as a teenager. Had I decided to extend my golf gimmick repertoire beyond sand wedge keepieuppies and putter wanging, I might have been here as a competitor too.
All the action at Hanbury was a welcome relief – particularly the bits involving fitting protective jockstraps to members of the crowd, then hitting balls off their crotches – but I found myself gravitating, again and again, towards the competitors who had made power-hitting their trick-shot forte. Of all the things that had changed about golf since the late nineties, nothing had changed quite so drastically as the tee shot, and nothing had impressed me more. In 1993, when John Daly led the PGA Tour’s driving statistics, he averaged 288.9 yards. By contrast, the leader at the close of 2006, Bubba Watson, averaged 332.0. Even the most curmudgeonly nineteenth-hole bore could no longer make the claim ‘Distance isn’t an advantage’ with eight of the top ten spots in golf’s world rankings occupied by men who, in windless conditions, had no problem carrying a golf ball 295 yards or more. Golf was troubled by this. With every major championship that arrived, the debate about how the power game was humiliating the world’s best courses raged that bit more fiercely. Gavin Christie wouldn’t have liked to hear me say it, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with the new muscularity. In my experience, golf has always been a much more macho sport than it has been given credit for, and the fact that its missiles go further than those of any other ball game is one of its obvious plus points.
Driving technology had come on so much in the last decade that even its lingo had become more hi-tech. Pros no longer talked about ‘lashing’ or ‘nailing’ their tee shots; they were ‘bombing’ or ‘nuking’ them. As of 2006, the World Long Drive Championship carried a total purse of $500,000, in contrast to the £100,000 up for grabs in the Europro Tour’s most lucrative event, the Azores Tour Championship. It was not surprising that the likes of Witter, and fellow Hanbury big-hitters Paul Barrington and Ron Lampman, had started to eschew conventional eighteen-hole play for full-time monster hitting.1 ‘The nickname helps,’ said Barrington, pointing to a badge on his arm which said ‘The Striked’. ‘I’m doing an event almost every week in the summer now.’ He admitted, though, that at thirty-six he was ‘getting on a bit’ and couldn’t ‘get anywhere near some of the guys out there’ – guys like Jason Zuback, who once hit a ball 511 yards.
What quickly became apparent, upon speaking to long-hitting experts, is that there is no one failsafe way to biff a ball over 320 yards. Barrington and Lampman both had surprisingly short swings, and to a casual connoisseur of golfing physics, Lampman’s in particular seemed too shallow in its angle of attack to send the ball any great distance. Writer’s, by contrast, was a thing of great fluidity and twang, which rubbished the old ‘left arm straight at the top for maximum power’ rule. Working on the basis that the lower the loft, the further the club hit, I was surprised to see that both Witter and Lampman had 10-degree lofts on their drivers: John Daly was well known to have 6.5 on his. But then, in their universe, John Daly was no longer the grip-it-and-rip-it benchmark.
‘In 2002, the sponsors of the World Long Drive Championship offered a $100,000 prize for any player who could outdrive Daly,’ explained Witter. ‘Nine out of the twelve guys who tried pulled it off.’
‘I think I’m probably comfortably past John,’ Lampman told me. ‘But most of the guys are, these days. There was a big balloon towards the 400-yard mark at the World Championships the other year, and a lot of the guys were hitting it. The drive was downwind, though.’
I tried to picture exactly how far 400 yards was. What immediately sprang to mind was the second hole at Cripsley Edge. I remembered the day I’d first managed to hit the green with only a nine-iron for my second shot, and how I’d boasted about my feat to Jamie and our friend Mousey. Even back then, I’d been obsessed with distance. This year, despite being twenty yards behind most of my playing partners off the tee for much of the year, the obsession had reignited. When I made a list in my golf diary of the ten shots that had given me most pleasure, eight of them were drives – and this was in a year when my driving had been ailing as much as the rest of my game. Even in my despairing state on the journey back from Bovey Castle, I’d taken an irrational amount of satisfaction in the fact that my performance had been bookended by two of the finest 300-and-something-yarders I’d ever hit.
‘It’s weird,’ I remembered a mid-handicap playing partner saying to me, looking at a score of mine in the high seventies shortly after my long golfing lay-off. ‘You seemed to play a lot better than that.’
‘I suppose so,’ I’d replied. ‘I try not to let my score bother me. I hit a few good long drives, and that’s what really hits the spot for me these days.’
What had happened to that relaxed weekend player who was happy just to ‘hit a few good long drives’? How had he been gradually sucked back into golf’s competitive vortex, with its illusion of life-or-death importance? He’d been lost for a while, but now I could sense him re-emerging from his thirty-something crisis.
On the surface, I’d been very realistic when I’d decided to turn pro. I’d known I’d be an outsider, I’d known my age and lack of play would put me at a disadvantage, and I’d known it would be extremely tiring. But I’d also been quite naïve. When I’d imagined professional life, I’d imagined, at least partially, an extension of my junior golfing life: a life of calling ‘How you scoring?’ to friends on adjacent fairways, of analysing one another’s rounds over a drink afterwards. I’d underestimated the seriousness of a profession where only the most devoted of the devoted survive. I’d also, quite preposterously, thought that I could splice 1992 to 2006, putting the excess years to one side for possible later use. In the summer of 1992, golf had been the summation of my aims in life. I may have reached my full physical height, but that aside, I was barely grown. I may have thought I was an unlikely golfer, but I was just another golf kid who had substituted a fairway life for a life.
These days, however, I had a life and a career outside of golf that I loved, and I must have been insane to have believed that the cultural and personal components of it would not affect my sporting brain. Stephen King once pointed out that ‘A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.’ A golfer, by contrast, was someone who worked his hardest to teach his mind not to. I liked my unruly psyche, and wasn’t sure if I wanted to change it. I’d given it a go at Mollington in those first few holes of my first round, and I’d (very briefly) seen that it could bring results. It had made me think, ‘Gosh – I’m really staying focused here and playing solid golf!’ but it had simultaneously made me think, ‘This is sort of boring, isn’t it?’ For all the trouble the Evil Brain Worm gave me, I could not bring myself to be mad at it. If I had been able to, I’m sure I would have scored better. Despite what Ken Brown had told me about the evenness of temperament needed to play great golf, you needed a certain fire in the belly as well, and I had discovered I did not have it. Certainly, I called myself a crapweasel sometimes and growled a bit under my breath, but when my frustration valve opened, it did not hiss violently; what came out was no more urgent than the gust of air from a half-inflated party-balloon. And while I could have pretended that my reluctance to flip my lid in the throes of golfing misfortune was a mark of
my maturity, it was probably just a mark of the fact that I could always rationalise any situation with the words, ‘It’s only golf, isn’t it?’
In the end, those three words – ‘It’s only golf’ – were the difference between me and every other pro I met. They were words that, before he walked off the course at the Beau Desert Stag in 1992, my teenage self would rather have snapped his five-iron than uttered. They were words that marked me out as an impostor who, when all was said and done, had realised he was happy to ‘just go out and hit a few long drives’.
By September 2006, my golfing travels had put more than 20,000 miles on my car. During my journeys I would frequently tire of my iPod, and turn to audio-books for amusement. One of my favourites was a collection of the golf-loving journalist Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America broadcasts from the 1960s and seventies. There was a gentle, ghostly pull to Cooke’s moist-throated mid-Atlantic delivery that transported me far away from traffic jams and roundabouts into pre-Watergate America, but not so far that I stopped watching the road altogether. An added bonus was that Cooke often talked about golf. He had some great stories about the unusual practice routines of the eight-year-old Jack Nicklaus,2 and of being invited to the San Francisco Golf Club to discuss plans for the Soviet Union’s first ever golf course with the Russian Consul General and Bobby Jones’s son (‘like being invited by a rabbi to lunch with the Pope to discuss stud poker’).3
Away from the topic of golf, Cooke said something else that hit home: ‘I have nothing against clichés. Most of them are true, though you have to live through the denial of them to know it.’ The previous summer, I’d written off all the hoopla that friends had associated with turning thirty, then promptly succumbed. I was now reappraising another cliché: the one about ‘never being able to go back’. When I’d heard that saying in the past, I’d always shut my ears, taking it for so much hot air; now it was starting to take on a new resonance. Golf still mattered. But I could never go back to a time when it mattered more than anything.
You can never go back in friendships, either, although sometimes you find that both parties have moved forward to places that, though distant from one another, have surprisingly good lines of communication. I’d enjoyed reuniting with Jamie at Hollinwell and I was looking forward to my next round with him, at Cripsley Edge. But what excited me even more was that the trip to Nottingham would also give me the opportunity to catch up with Mousey, who back in the early nineties had been the telltale heart and mischievous soul of the Cripsley Junior Section, and had probably spent even more time hanging out in the club’s unofficial pro-shop common room than us.
I’d been hearing some intriguing rumours about Mousey over the past two or three years. He was always the smallest and squeakiest of the Cripsley boys, and his position as our resident tearaway had been preordained by his size and by the flak the rest of us gave him for his short hitting. Traces of a new, more muscular Mousey had already been evident back in 1993, when I’d last seen him, but now, when Pete Boffinger and Jamie updated me on his fortunes, they used words like ‘monster’ and ‘animal’. Reports of his long-hitting feats had even got as far as the Europro Tour. ‘Oh, you used to be a member at Cripsley Edge?’ a pro had said to me at Mollington. ‘I guess you know RJ?4 Man, can that guy tonk it.’ Despite playing off scratch and having the power to turn all but the longest par-fives into elementary par-fours, Mousey had never even considered turning pro as an adult, yet as a kid he’d talked about the prospect every day.
‘You never really know with Mousey,’ said Jamie, as we waited on the first tee for our friend. ‘Sometimes he can be bothered to play, sometimes he can’t. Sometimes he turns up, sometimes he doesn’t. But when he does, something interesting usually happens.’
We’d been joined for the round by Jamie’s dad, George – never a golfer when we were kids, but now an astute single-figure handicapper who had put his engineer’s brain to use on the kind of military on-course strategies Alistair Cooke had talked about on my CD. To make the reunion even sweeter, between his duties at two important Midlands junior matches, Bob Boffinger had also come to watch us tee off. A flair for timekeeping – he was still the only person I’d ever met who talked in half-minutes when giving ETAs – a strong constitution and his newly retired status meant that Bob had no problem flitting between under-eighteen events. At seventy-four, he still had Richard Widmark good looks and walked somewhere in the region of forty miles a week in the cause of his duties with the English Golf Union and the Nottinghamshire Boys’ Team. He’d seen better, more dedicated golfers since Jamie, Mousey and I had passed through the junior ranks. But I got the impression that he still regarded us as a schoolteacher would regard a favourite, unruly set of pupils from his past. ‘I better be off now,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to be on the other side of Nottingham in twelve minutes, and it can sometimes take up to thirteen and a quarter minutes to cover it when the lights are against me. Be good!’
It was now half an hour after our supposed tee time, and there was still no sign of Mousey. We killed some time in the shop, speaking to the veteran pro, Steve Kimbolton. I’d been a bit worried about seeing Steve, since I’d once compared him to a squirrel in print. However, he wasn’t visibly concerned, and obviously had more pressing matters to worry about, like a garbled message from his assistant that had cost him a free round at the sumptuous Loch Lomond course (the assistant had got the Scottish Open venue mixed up with Trent Lock, a rudimentary municipal course six miles to the west of Nottingham). Mousey wasn’t answering his mobile phone, so we decided to tee off without him.
Our friend finally joined us on the sixth tee. Or rather, some enormous bloke who had eaten him joined us. It takes a special kind of ingenuity to make a rock-and-roll entrance on a golf course, but this came close. After a quick shake of my hand and an ‘All right, chief?’ the longest hitter of a golf ball in south Nottinghamshire flicked his cigarette onto the grass beside him, tossed a headcover over his shoulder and, without so much as half a practice swing, cannoned a tee shot somewhere roughly in the region of Ashby de la Zouch. If an amateur dramatics society had been asked to reinterpret a two-fingered punk-rock up yours through the medium of golf, they would have been hard pushed to come up with something better than this.
‘Bit past Seve Wood, that one, chief,’ he said. ‘How you been keeping?’
Despite the fact that he was approximately twice as big as he had been when I last saw him in every part of his body apart from his hands,5 there was a lot about Mousey that hadn’t changed. Although his voice had deepened significantly, it still had a hint of squeak about it. He still called his clubs ‘me spanners’ and his two-iron ‘me jack-knife’ and talked about forgotten Cripsley junior concepts like ‘Seve Wood’ – the nickname we’d once given to the small copse 220 yards from the sixth tee, from which we would often play extraordinary escape shots – as if it had only been a week or two ago that he’d holed the winning putt in the Nottinghamshire Junior Team Matchplay Trophy. He still had the body language of the rebel, and talked about practice in the way the cool kids at school talked about homework. He had always been fascinated by power golf, and I wondered how much of his prodigious strength and size was down to sheer force of will.
As we progressed to the back nine, his swing became roomier, his drives even longer. On the twelfth, all four of us struck beautiful tee shots, and our balls finished in the middle of the fairway, directly in line with each other but spanning a full hundred yards in length. We could have been looking at a diagram intended to illustrate the many guises of the long hit. There was the long hit of the mid-handicapper who knows he can hit it a bit further than most people of his ability (George’s); the long hit of the bloke who once thought he was a long-hitter until he woke up and smelt the burning rubber6 of his professional betters (mine), there was the long hit of the bloke who knows he’s a long-hitter and doesn’t think it’s anything remarkable (Jamie’s); and there was the long hit of the out-and-out
extra-terrestrial (Mousey’s).
Since I was now thinking outside the box regarding my working life in golf, I began to plan a little career guidance talk with him. He said he was happy in his job as a builder, and he undoubtedly had the hands for it, but I wondered if he had ever considered the long-driving circuit. I could see it all now in Technicolor: the ‘Mighty Mouse’ logo on the baseball cap and tour van, the theme tune, the nonchalant swagger as he emerged onto the floodlit range. With his brawn and my map-reading skills, it could just work.
‘Sounds like a laugh, chief,’ he said noncommittally when I told him about Ben Witter, Paul Barrington and Ron Lampman, and asked him if he would consider doing the same thing.