Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (2 page)

And, when golf and I got back together, it was always going to be a struggle. Some people – me, mostly – were inevitably going to ask, ‘Is this really any
use?
' There was also the likelihood that, before I'd had a chance to work out the answer, I would get a little carried away.

But isn't that the nature of unfinished business? That it's always going to be tough?

Otherwise, you probably would have finished it earlier, wouldn't you?

1
The same competition whose prizegiving I had failed to attend due to ‘other commitments' – a rerun of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, probably – and whose third place prize of some hideous cut glass I had been accidentally on purpose forgetting to collect from the club secretary's office for the past fourteen months.

‘The only way to find out a man's true character is to play golf with him.' – P.G. Wodehouse

‘Golf is an antechamber to death.' – John Peel

Sometimes I think none of this would have happened if I hadn't met Jerry. At other times I think it was all down to the most perfect eight-iron of my life, struck one idyllic summer evening on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. At other times I just blame it all on Sergio Garcia.

Sergio Garcia is a Spanish man with strong wrists, a hyperactive manner and dubious shaving habits. He is also periodically my favourite golfer, but it would perhaps be better for my health if he wasn't. When, after a long lay-off, I began to get an urge to play golf again, Garcia had just exploded onto the pro scene, and he was largely responsible for reigniting my interest in the game. Often, I think he is the most exciting player who ever lived. Equally often, for the very same reasons, I think I hate him. Over the last few years he has played with my emotions like no other pro. There is not another modern European player who seems more capable of winning multiple major championships, yet nobody has so frequently got in the running, only to make a cow's
arse
of things. You never know what you're going to get with Garcia from one round to the next. He could reel off five birdies in a row and hit an impossible shot from behind a tree and go charging off up the fairway in pursuit of it like a hyperactive child. Alternatively, he could make a double bogey, then take his shoe off for no apparent reason and throw it in a bunker. When Garcia gets angry, he does so in a wholly original manner; in the early noughties, he even invented his own golfing affliction, when he suddenly became unable to stop waggling the club whilst addressing the ball. I like that kind of irrational behaviour in my golfers. That's another reason I am drawn to Garcia: he reminds me of me.

It's probably important that I qualify that statement. In many ways, I am nothing like Garcia. I do not have a penchant for lurid, buttock-gripping man-made fibres that make me look like the Studio 54 answer to Bananaman. And, while I do have some Spanish in my blood, from my mum's side of the family, my Latin temperament is more likely to come out when I'm being kept in a call waiting queue than when I've just missed a downhill six-footer for par.

More importantly, I am nowhere near as good as Sergio Garcia at golf. But, when it comes to a general tee-to-green mission statement of ‘Crap One Day, Dead Good the next', Sergio and I have a lot in common. The difference, perhaps, is that one can almost believe Sergio's erraticism is a deliberate gesture in the name of entertainment – a stand against conveyor-belt robopros, and those big-chinned men who sit in the commentary booth muttering about there being ‘no
pictures
on the scorecard'
¹
– whereas, with me, it seems a little more like a disease.

Of course, you'll find lots of golfers who will tell you that this is the nature of the game: one day you've got it, one day you haven't. It's just that, for me, the essence of each of those days happens to be exaggerated. I'm not talking about the bigger picture here: we've covered that. Chaotic my wider golfing life might be, but there is at least a predictability to the chaos. What I'm referring to here is the meat of the equation – the striking of the ball itself – and the frustration that comes from not knowing whether your seven-iron will fly 130 yards or 170 yards, of not knowing whether you will hit your driver like Greg Norman or Norman Wisdom. It is the same frustration that makes you feel, sometimes, as if you are living a golfing lie. But just occasionally, it can make you feel like God.

As luck would have it, these ‘God' days tend to occur most frequently when I'm on my own – those late-summer evenings when the birds are singing, there isn't a Ron or a Roy in sight, and, for once, the imaginary game between the two scuffed, regenerated lake balls that you bought from the pro shop (i.e. ‘Mickelson' and ‘Garcia') doesn't seem quite as much of an exercise in childish fantasy. But, every so often, they have occurred when I've been with Jerry.

I wouldn't exactly call Jerry a close friend, but in the months leading up to May 2005 I had come to look upon him as a benevolent golfing presence. Maybe if the two of us bumped into one another at the local supermarket we would have said a quick hello and been on our way, but within the confines of our golf club, we were allies: if not crusaders against the tucked-shirt masses, then kindred outsiders looking in, perplexed, at the fishbowl that contained the Sunday fourball elite. Since my return to golf, I'd noticed that a lot more men like Jerry played the game: fiercely competitive, football-loving, straightforward blokes in their late thirties whose love of golf had nothing to do with cheaply engraved cut glass or reserved parking spots or blazer badges. To Jerry, golf was like any other sport, only better, and he had decided that waiting until the age of thirty-three to start wasn't going to stand in his way of being bloody good at it.

Jerry said it was depressing, being him, and playing with me. There he was, hitting the practice ground four times a week, chipping slowly away at his fifteen handicap, while this scruffy, fly-by-night, once-a-fortnight chancer pulled into the car park three minutes before his tee time and proceeded to nonchalantly accumulate birdies. What Jerry didn't know was that he was my lucky charm. Somehow, with him at my side, the Tom that I flattered myself was the ‘real Tom' would come effortlessly to the fore, easing into his drives like an only slightly more ungainly Fred Couples.

Being a competitive sort, with a manner as austere as his grade-one haircut, Jerry would very rarely comment on my good play, but I could tell that he was monitoring me. If I told him about a monumental drive I'd hit the previous week, he would mysteriously have heard about it on the club grapevine. ‘Yeah. 320 yards. Nine-iron into
the
green. I know,' he'd say. Seemingly unimpressed, he'd quickly deflect the conversation back to his attempts to cure his violently hooking long irons. But one day, in May 2005, his equilibrium cracked.

On the long par-four fourteenth, a new ‘freewheel through the ball' swing thought helped send my drive hurtling into a realm that it was assumed only John ‘Smasher' Briggs, the club's ex-assistant pro, could reach. I charged off the tee in overexcitable, somewhat disbelieving pursuit, but Jerry stopped behind me.

He was leaning on the tee marker, and he had a tiny crooked smile playing about the corner of his mouth. ‘So, have you ever really thought about it?'

‘Thought of what?' I asked.

‘Turning pro. Making a go of it. Living the life.'

‘I did once, but it's sort of too late now. Anyway, I'm not good enough.'

‘But you only play once or twice every two weeks, and you play like this. What if you came up to the course more? Do you realise how many people would love to hit the ball that well? I tell you, Tom, I've been to The Open twice now, and I've seen those guys hit it, and I've seen you hit it. It makes the same
sound
.'

‘But that's only part of it, isn't it, the sound? What about the putting, and the chipping?'

‘I'm telling you, mate, big hairy balls to the putting. Arse to the chipping. You'll sort that. I reckon there's a handsome living out there for you. I know what I'd be doing, if it was me. I wouldn't be fucking around here, writing for the
Eastern Daily Press
.'

‘But I don't write for the
Eastern Dai
…'

‘Potaytoe, potahtoe. Who wants to be pissing around
slaving
over a typewriter for a living, or one of them laptop thingies or whatever it is you use, when they could be hanging out with Tiger Woods? I'm telling you, mate, now's the time. You're still young. If you've been given something great in life, you should do something with it, that's what I always say.'

Plenty of people had told me, since my golfing reincarnation, that I ‘should be on Tour'. I knew that was sheer misguided flattery, and I knew about the huge gap between a four-handicap amateur like me and even the worst touring pro. Coming from someone like Jerry, however, the enthusiasm seemed to mean so much more. Clearly he wasn't the kind of bloke who gave away compliments lightly. But what really affected me was his indignation. To him, my lack of interest in my golfing talent seemed scandalous, an insult to those who struggled along, barely getting the ball 200 yards off the tee. Maybe it was because I was on the verge of my thirtieth birthday, but in the weeks that followed I found myself marinating in his comments.

Everyone tells you that reaching thirty is a big deal, but nothing can prepare you for the event itself. I used to think that twenty-seven sounded old, and that after that landmark ages would all be much of a muchness, but thirty is an eloquent slap in the face. Suddenly, a considerable portion of the endless unfurling ‘future' that you've been talking about for much of your twenties has already passed. I had been determined not to let it bother me. I'd even grown my first full beard especially for the occasion. After all, what was there to worry about? I was happily married, I had friends I could count on (even if most of them thought I was a bit weird for
playing
golf), I had a writing job that I loved, and I had a mortgage on a house that, two years after I had bought it, could still make me go ‘Wow!' Still, when the big day itself hits, it's impossible for even the happiest person not to do a bit of evaluating, ask themselves a ‘What if?' or two. And, for me, the big ‘What if?' was always golf.

Seventeen is an awfully young age to make any major decision about your life. But that was how old I'd been when I'd walked off a golf course as a budding pro golfer for what I believed, with all my broken heart, would be the last time. The scene of my exit has stuck with me – probably more like a memory of a memory now, but no less clear for that. The place: a forest in Staffordshire. The tournament: The Beau Desert Stag. My ball: abandoned (by hand and not, for once, by club) in some heather 400 yards behind me. My hands: sticky and callused. The smell: hot pine needles. My hat hair: not much of a hairstyle in the first place but now, if anything, looking more like two separate non-hairstyles. My golfing dreams: gone up in smoke. It had been one of those occasions when you can almost hear the click as your life changes direction. That night I would attend a rock concert – not a very cool rock concert, or even a very great one, but one loud and energetic and different enough to suggest that there might be another life out there for me that didn't involve spiked shoes and winner's speeches. In the days following, golf would never seem quite as important. Soon, as I stopped playing altogether, it would seem like an aberration at best, a dirty secret at worst. I remembered it like a brief schizoid episode: something that had nothing to do with the real me.

But now here I was – a fully-grown man, and still
only
a half-grown golfer. I definitely felt like the real me, yet I also couldn't help feeling, just as I had at seventeen, that the secret to life itself was held in that lightning second when the body waits for the club and everything arrives at the ball in perfect sync. I'd initially told myself that my golfing rebirth was to do with getting fit and researching my golf memoir,
Nice Jumper.
And that is all it had been … for about a month or two. But in 2003, my first full year back playing, I had won my club's Scratch Cup. Increasingly, I would arrive home from the course and explain to my bewildered wife, Edie, in the manner of a man outlining plans for his family's financial future, that I thought all I really needed was to curtail my backswing by five inches and we'd be just about there. Maybe I was not playing golf with quite the obsessive fervour with which I'd played it as a teenager, but it would not have have taken a genius to see that this was about more than fresh air and a bit of gentle, competitive fun, and that something long-submerged was pressing to the surface. In short, I had begun to ask myself a little question.

Who really knows who they are at seventeen? Had I really given golf a proper go back then? It wasn't as if I'd started playing as soon as I'd learned to walk, like many kids I'd known back on the Nottinghamshire golf scene. I'd actually come to the game quite late, and left it quite early. I'd been pretty good for those four and half years, too, hadn't I? Within a couple of years, I'd become Club Champion at my home course, Cripsley Edge, the winner of a dozen junior competitions and one of the very best young golfers in Nottinghamshire, if not quite in the Midlands. But by the time I'd reached
my
seventeenth birthday, it had become abundantly clear that I wasn't good enough: that two handicap of mine just wasn't getting any lower, and, as I struggled to combine late nights in a minimum-wage job with early mornings on the tee, I could see the interest dying in the eyes of the men in the bile-coloured suits who patrolled the fairways looking for young talent. I'd only ever been a half golden boy in the first place, but now I was an ex-half golden boy. I was also one with some appalling GCSE results and two very anxious parents.