Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

by Tom Cox

  He had plenty of brilliant memories from his life as a contender. There was the time in the Walker Cup that he watched Phil Mickelson split a wooden tee-peg down the middle with his fingers (‘I don’t know if you’ve ever tried that, but it’s really hard’), then, standing several yards from his bag, flip his driver dispassionately in the air by its butt and land it in the precise compartment where it belonged (‘I was shaking like a leaf!’). And the time when Ian Woosnam was playing in front of him in the Irish Open and picked up one of the fake Guinness glass tee-markers and pretended to drink out of it (‘I was thinking, “I wish I was that cool”!’). Liam obviously enjoyed recounting these incidents, and while he did not do so without the odd hint of longing and regret, I got the impression that he was still somewhat overawed that he’d ever got the chance to compete on the European Tour in the first place. If I had not had to leave for lunch at my nan’s house, I sensed he might have happily continued for several more hours. I couldn’t help but wonder aloud if he had been too gregarious for the life of the touring pro.

  ‘Well, yeah, I am, aren’t I? I always have been. You know that, Tom. When I first went out there I was a bit cocksure, but you need that cockiness, and when I had it, that was when I seemed to do well. Pros are quite shy people, loners really. I did get lonely out there, and that was a big part of the problem. I’d get up at four on a Tuesday, drive down to Heathrow and fly out wherever. Then I’d get home at anywhere between eleven and one in the morning, Sunday night, get up Monday, and come down here, and then obviously every man and his dog would be asking, over and over again, “What happened on sixteen?” or whatever.3 But I’d go out and have a game with the lads, and that was like my release. Sometimes a lot of the players would stay out in Spain for three weeks on the bounce and stuff, but I could never do it. Coming home was harder, but just being here for that one day made me feel so much better. Even though I could have saved myself a lot of money, bearing in mind it was costing me twelve hundred quid a week to play.’

  Liam called Monday ‘wash day’, and I wasn’t quite sure if this was a reference to Monday being the day when you cleansed yourself of the psychological dirt of the previous week’s tournament, or simply another old-fashioned Nottinghamism (my paternal grandparents had called Monday ‘wash day’ too). Whatever, he did not strike me as the kind of person who would just wash and go. Obviously it must have been irritating to repeatedly field questions from his fellow members at Wollaton regarding exactly why he wasn’t following his Danish Open victory up with more rounds of 63, but if he had shot 63, or even 68, he probably would have gleefully talked you through every nuance of it – in much the same way I’d been warned against by James and numerous others.

  Had Liam ever had that essential cold-minded, determined belief in his right to be on Tour? Perhaps not. Perhaps, in the days when professional tournament golf been less crowded – both inside and outside the ropes – and lucrative, it had not been quite such a vital part of the golfer’s psychological make-up. He had been cocky for a while, as he said, but I wondered if that cockiness had manifested itself in a different way to the way it has in Westwood: a less controlled, noisier, more vulnerable, lovable way.

  ‘You can’t turn it on and off.’ If I had received a pound for every time I had dwelled on that comment this year, I’d probably have at least one less bank loan than I did. But why couldn’t you turn it on and off? Why couldn’t you stand over the ball and be frosty and calculating and convinced of your own brilliance, then walk away and be a self-deprecating, jocular, lovable human? It was because when the pressure was on, you could not let it become apparent to you that there were an infinite number of bad permutations, and only one good one, to the shot you were about to play. And to do that, you had to be solid and leave no room for cracks. Such solidity didn’t just mean standing over the ball and being unswerving about your goal. It also meant not going into the clubhouse and making jokes about your Panicked Squid swing, or how you couldn’t close the deal on a downhill six-footer even if the hole was twice the size and had an ‘Enter! Good will to all comers!’ sign above it. You could not afford to give a millimetre’s thought to the dark places.

  I’d seen a good example of that solidity at Bovey Castle. It had occurred in the second round, on the sixteenth, a hole that, after my televised chip fiasco of the previous day, I’d already begun to think of as my bête noire. With Adam Hawkins, Paul Coburn and me all destined to miss the cut, a perfunctory, desultory fug had settled over us, and we couldn’t have displayed more eagerness to get home if we’d been tossing our car keys nervously from hand to hand. And things didn’t get any better when it became obvious that James4 Ruebotham, a player in the group ahead of us, had lost a ball, preventing us from teeing off.

  Having waited several minutes – me assuming that the group in front would call us through – we watched as Ruebotham, the travelling companion of Coburn and a winner on the Tour two weeks ago at Mollington, trudged back towards us to play the dreaded ‘three off the tee’. Then we watched – me still assuming that Ruebotham would call us through, or allow us to play our shots up with him, or at least acknowledge Coburn with a smile or a ‘How you doing?’ – as Ruebotham silently teed up, then strolled, in no particular rush, back up the fairway. I felt almost certain at this point that Coburn or Hawkins would comment on Ruebotham’s rudeness (or obliviousness, as it may have been), but both remained silent, apart from a brief appraisal of his tee shot (‘When he shanks it, he shanks it straight’).5

  Ruebotham’s attitude to our threeball brought to mind a scene from The Bogeyman, George Plimpton’s book about competing in 1960s PGA pro-ams, where Plimpton, playing in the group ahead of Arnold Palmer’s, is caught in the rough within range of Palmer’s tee shot. Plimpton describes Palmer as looking ‘like a man sitting at his desk who has just noticed something moving in his wastepaper basket’.

  After my round, I thought a lot about the ironclad lengths one would have had to go to – on and off the course – to get into Ruebotham’s state of mind, and I speculated about what I would have done in his situation. I find that, on the whole, when I lose a ball on the golf course, I tend to have an instinct to sink into a deep depression or drink myself into a mild coma, but this is always overridden by a stronger instinct to sweep myself up out of the way of better-faring players. Seeing Ruebotham deal with his crisis was not just like watching a different attitude in action, it was like watching a whole different species. And this is a player in the dress-rehearsal environment of the Europro Tour we’re talking about – a man whose 2006 winnings, at the time, stood at just over £12,000. If he needed to be so tight-lipped and robotic, what did it take to be a US Open winner?

  I’d already made some decisions pertaining to my unsuitability for the pro life by the time of the Ruebotham incident, but it served to firmly underline them. By the time I’d come away from my encounter with Liam White, I’d moved still further away from my ideals about playing high-level competitive golf. Liam’s story – and his talent – further confirmed that I’d done the right thing by qutting when I had. Undoubtedly, I was sad that I’d failed so comprehensively to make an impact on the Europro Tour and The Open, but I was glad that I had found out what I’d been missing for all these years. I was also starting to see another future for myself as a golfer. It needn’t have to be as intense as a typical playing-pro existence, but neither did it have to be an admission of defeat.

  When I’d asked Liam White what was the most valuable thing he’d learned about being a pro, he passed on some advice that the former Portuguese Open champion Peter Mitchell had given him. ‘Whatever you do at home, Liam, replicate it here,’ Mitchell said. ‘Some people come out here and say, “I’ve got to drink orange juice,” “I’ve got to eat salads,” “I’ve got to go to bed early,” and that’s fine, but only if that’s what you did before. You shouldn’t change your routine. If you go out and have a few pints and a greasy kebab when you’re at home, do it here as well.’
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  The advice might have been dated – in this new, more athletic age, it was doubtful that anyone on the Europro Tour had two pints the night before a tournament, never mind ‘a few’ – but I could hear some wisdom at the core of it, and I could apply it to myself, too. In turning pro, I’d not had the confidence to move forward with the game I already had. Instead, I had spent a year reaching for something extra. I’d been convinced that I needed to hit more balls, alter my swing, find a magic thought. The irony was that if I’d stuck to the game that had given me my pro delusions in the first place – haphazard as that game was – I would have scored better. Maybe not well enough to win any money, or make a cut, but better.

  Now I knew all this, I was keen to begin the rest of my golfing life. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the player who’d had that hole-in-one all those months ago, the player who did things his own ramshackle way, the player who stepped onto the tee with his puffy swing and couldn’t predict whether his tee shot was going to go 240 yards or 340 yards. He would be wiser and happier within himself now, I felt, and – who could tell? – perhaps all that sporting excellence and the wisdom of Gavin Christie and Karl Morris had been absorbed, somewhere in his unsporty mind.

  In the weeks following my trip to Nottingham, I began what I thought of as a belated Phase Two to my pro career. I made a tentative foray into teaching, preaching my own rudimentary version of ‘the Christie Flail’ to my golf virgin brothers-in-law, Jack and Sam, with surprisingly powerful results. I made a guest appearance at the British Pitch-and-Putt Championship, playing alongside a lady in her sixties called Doreen with a golf bag made of guttering, and against numerous rowdy men from Dagenham in tracksuit bottoms, all of whom were determined to beat the pro who had made the mistake of thinking he could waltz, willy-nilly, into their breakaway faction from the ‘long golf’ world.6 Simon, Scott and I staged the inaugural Pneumonia Invitational over a windy, rainy couple of days at the delightful Thorpeness and Aldeburgh courses on the Suffolk coast, losing an unprecedented total of twenty-seven balls between us. I felt like a car that had thought it was for the scrap heap, only to realise it just needed its oil changing. On the other hand, my back still ached, and – despite what I told myself about my terminal wetness as a competitive being – I was surprised to find myself niggled by my lack of results for the 2006 season. Surely I could find more to show for all my effort than that thirteenth-from-last-place finish at Bovey Castle?

  With winter fast approaching, I had one last chance to shine.

  It is doubtful that anyone who has ever had a casual kick-around in a cul-de-sac has believed that, by doing so, they are spearheading a revolutionary sporting movement. Similarly, when, on a quiet day in 1986, in our home street in suburban Nottingham, my friend Ben and I began to re-enact the previous year’s Ashes using a lamppost for a wicket, we did not think for a moment that we were doing anything that would surprise or offend Richie Benaud or David Gower. But it is a testament to golf’s uniquely non-urban, and non-urbane, nature – or possibly to its unique capacity to offend and be offended – that when an architect called Jeremy Feakes started whacking a few golf balls through the streets surrounding his east London office in the early noughties, people sat up and took notice. In the two years since he’d founded it, Feakes’s Shoreditch Urban Open had acquired a subversive reputation that had done much to confuse the golfing establishment.

  The argument regarding how far back you could trace the roots of urban golf – or street golf, or cross golf, as it was also called – was a fuzzy one. Feakes, along with an enormous dreadlocked friend of his known only as ‘Chewie’, had been playing it illegally in the two or three square miles surrounding Old Street tube station since the turn of the decade, but the game’s historians claimed that it went back as far as 1992, when a German office worker called Torsten Schilling got a little overzealous during a golfing house party. I could even see a rudimentary form of street golf in some of the more experimental late-eighties rounds Jamie, Mousey and I had played, when we’d agreed to temporarily waive the out-of-bounds rule regarding the greenkeeper’s sheds and clubhouse car park.

  Like its indoor namesake, urban golf was proof that golf had come to the city. But unlike James Day’s soothing, simulator-filled havens, this was an altogether more anarchic kind of metropolitan hacking. Taking part felt as much like involving oneself in an elaborate bit of street theatre as helping forge the ground rules for a new mini-sport. Like the conventional game, traditional clubs were used, and a par system remained in place, but the unruliness of the crowd, the unpredictability of the balls – which were stuffed with feathers, covered with leather, and had seams that could lead to some unpredictable bounces – and the severity of the course meant it represented an entirely foreign test of skill for the more pastorally inclined competitor.

  Astroturf greens were laid down in the middle of the road, and players were permitted to carry a mat on which they could place their ball in order to keep from scuffing their clubs on the tarmac, but buildings, kerbs and lamp posts all counted as integral parts of the course. Where players were used to avoiding bunkers, now they had to avoid Audi TTs and Chelsea tractors. When they finally stroked their glorified hacky-sack into the hole – and by hole I mean ‘an opened up fire hydrant in the middle of the street’ – they could breathe a sigh of relief that they hadn’t been run over by a motorcycle courier, lost their ball in an underground car park or been berated by a local wino or Shoreditch poser. However, even then there was always the chance, were the fire hydrant a particularly deep one, that their ball might vanish in the hole itself, making its way down to the mysterious subterranean London of rats, disused tube stations and that bloke in the horror film who keeps foetuses in jars. It was advised, at times like that, not to reach your arm down too far into the abyss, for fear of what might bite into it. Far better to move on to the next tee and ask a nearby marshal for a replacement.7

  So far, the pro fraternity was yet to make its mark on the Shoreditch Urban Open. In the inaugural 2004 event, a rather bewildered-looking Ronan Rafferty – winner of the 1989 European Tour order of merit – had teed it up near Old Street only to finish in a disappointing fourth place, behind a total unknown called Tuna. Choosing your own golfing nickname was an important part of Urban Open culture, and it was my hope that the Panicked Squid (career highlight: 2003 Thetford Golf Club Scratch Cup; current world ranking: unspecified) could improve on Rafferty’s performance, not to mention his own showing as an amateur two years previously when, lying in third place, at eight over par after nine holes, he’d been forced to abandon his round in order to file a news report about the event for the Daily Telegraph.

  As I signed in at the clubhouse (i.e. a local pub called the Tarbernacle) and began my practice routine (i.e. blasting a ball at the wall of a nearby solicitor’s office), I scouted the area for my peers from the Tour. James Conteh, perhaps, who’d kicked the tee marker over at Mollington? Michael Freake, the smooth swinger who’d commiserated so generously with me at Stoke-by-Nayland? I recognised nobody. To my left, a man in plus fours and a cloth cap furiously tried to flatten down a bit of the kerb outside the Tabernacle (on closer inspection, I realised he was just having a practice swing). It was one of the contradictions of the SUO that, although it had been set up as an alternative to the diamond-patterned exclusivity of most golf clubs, most of its participants delighted in playing up to the game’s most ceremonial sartorial image. The majority of the people around me had the clothes of golfers, but that was as far as their play-acting went. Some swigged from tumblers of whisky, others chatted amiably with one another or shouted ‘You da man!’ as their friends ricocheted warm-up shots off BMWs, others gyrated to the sound of the PA system installed outside the Tabernacle. And what were these fair, lush-haired creatures I saw amongst them? It seemed, if my eyes did not deceive me quite as much as they had when trying to line up my three-wood shot on the eighteenth at Bovey Castle, that they were … women. And while some of these w
omen were employed by a firm called Eye Candy Caddies (slogan: ‘Golf Made Gorgeous’)8 which had some kind of corporate deal with the event’s sponsors, it was clear that others were here of their own volition. Not as wives or girlfriends, but as spectators and – surely it couldn’t be true – competitors. Perhaps more bizarrely still, not one of them was Michelle Wie.

  I had walked back into 2006.

  Just as I was reeling from this realisation, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun round, and stood face to face with Paul Creasey, the former pro who had caddied for my explosive playing partner at Hollinwell, John Ronson.

  ‘I had a feeling I’d see you here,’ he said. He was wearing a T-shirt upon which was emblazoned the logo for ‘Autogenic Golf’. I asked him what it was.

  ‘Oh, that’s my website,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of for people who think of golf more as an art form, and it’s based around urban golf. Me and my mates have been playing it at night in Spalding, where we live. For me, it puts the creativity back into golf. We have to be careful, though, cos we’ve been given a couple of warnings by the police. Of course, we play with real balls, not these softer leather ones.’

  Back at Hollinwell, Paul had murmured something about being interested in ‘this urban golf craze’, and about his disillusionment with life as a tournament pro, but I hadn’t realised how serious he was. After playing on the Europro Tour and getting quickly disillusioned – ‘Everyone looks at each other in a way that says, “I’m better than you are”’ – he’d abandoned his playing ambitions, and started working in a whole new area. ‘Shotmaking is fun. Acting like a Tour player isn’t fun. This right here is so much more creative,’ he said, gesturing towards a bloke in a fedora chipping over a Nissan Micra. ‘As a teaching platform, it’s untapped ground.’

  I had reckoned on being the only pro at Shoreditch, but now it was plain that I would have some serious competition from Paul – or ‘Lucky Hands’, as he would be known for today’s purposes. The intimidation factor went up dramatically when I realised he had brought along not only his own caddy, but his own cameraman, in the form of two of his junior pupils from Spalding Golf Club. Once again, I had found myself without a bagman in an important tournament. A string of pleading last-minute text messages to friends had yielded only one offer, from my folk songwriter friend Chris Sheehan. But Chris, who like most musicians saw it as against his religion to get up before eleven o’clock on a Sunday, said he would only be able to join me for the back nine.