Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (23 page)

He handed me a putter, and asked me to choose one of the four focus points. I chose a point halfway up the shaft of the club. He then placed a cup on the floor five feet away, its rim facing me. I addressed the ball, and he twisted the clubhead so it was aiming some seventy degrees right of the target. He then asked me to putt four balls, not trying to hole them, and thinking about nothing but my awareness of the shaft.

Amazingly, three out of the four balls found their target.

‘It's self-correcting, you see,' he said.

I'd heard and read plenty about the crucial golfing art of ‘getting out of your own way', but nobody had yet demonstrated it in such persuasive terms. What Karl was explaining to me so eloquently was something I'd already suspected: that much of my golfing thought was carried out by an utterly superfluous part of my brain. All I had to do was find a way to shut it down. As a miracle cure, it was not just surprisingly simple. It seemed almost … boring.

‘I wish I could tell you that what I'm teaching is something new,' said Karl, ‘but there's nothing in it that wasn't said by Buddhists a thousand years ago. And then there's this …'

He took the copy of Dave Lee's
Gravity Golf
off the table beside us, opened it roughly halfway through, and pointed to a passage a third of the way down the page: a quote attributed to Gregory A. Mihaioff.

‘In learning to make a typical multi-joint movement,' I read, ‘two neurologically relevant points seem reasonably clear. First, the movement must be practised and, to be most effective, every repetition should be as true to the desired form as possible. Second, the conscious cerebral cortex control circuitry needs to be eliminated from the performance of the movements as soon as possible.'

‘That says it all right there,' Karl said. ‘And that's not from a golf coach. It's from a professor of neurobiology.'

For a member of the notoriously pushy and embroidered self-help profession, Karl was both refreshingly modest and refreshingly straight-talking. It had long ago become apparent to me that it was in the spiritual contract of every psychological guru to undermine the physical side of golf coaching, and vice versa. Karl was an exception, and seemed to have found the ideal middle ground between the two occupations: he had an immense understanding of the sporting brain, but – perhaps aided by his background as a playing pro – he kept the issue of hitting the ball central to all his teaching. He also gave me some good advice about practice. What was I aiming at? ‘A sort of random area about ten yards wide, or maybe a tree,' I said. Was it smaller or bigger than what I would be aiming at on the course? ‘Bigger, I suppose,' I said. If I was practising for a basketball game, Karl asked, would I want to make the hoop I practised with smaller or bigger than the one on the court?

‘Look at it this way,' he continued. ‘Is there any other sport apart from golf where the way it's practised bears no resemblance to the way it's played?
⁴

I said I could not think of one.

‘Exactly! You've
got
to make the hoop smaller.'

An hour later, I went to a driving range just off the M52, made the hoop smaller, and hit the most perfect two hundred shots of my life. When the last ball zipped off into the distance and I looked at the empty basket in front of me, I felt as if I had woken up from a brief, dreamless sleep, which was odd, given that I'd been unusually alert during my hitting. The blister on my thumb that had opened up and leaked blood on my shirt seemed a small price to pay.

I immediately noticed a sweaty man in a Ping baseball cap in the adjacent bay grinning a tooth-deficient grin in my direction.

‘You must be playing in the tournament – the big one – hitting it like that,' he said.

I wasn't sure if by ‘the big one' he meant The Open, in which Tiger Woods had strolled to victory the previous day, or the GMS Classic. ‘Er, yeah,' I said, slightly disorientated, and not wishing to split hairs. It was 33 degrees, and I was starting to smell something ripe. I hoped it wasn't me.

‘Well, don't you take it for granted, mate. It's not a lot of people who can hit a ball like that.'

He limped off towards the car park.

It was a gratifying moment, as near as I'd felt to having ‘arrived' all year.

Looking back, I'm glad I took a few seconds to savour it, because, little did I know, I'd already made two crucial mistakes.

The first – and possibly most telling – mistake had come before I'd even left Karl Morris's house.

As we shook hands at the front door, he'd reminded me of the importance of sticking with the brain-training rituals he'd given me, even if they didn't work at first. I promised that I would do so, then added, for good measure, ‘Even if I shoot 86 on Wednesday.'

I should have kept my mouth shut.

The nineteenth-century psychologist William James once said that his most telling finding in fifty years of research into the workings of the mind was that ‘People by and large become what they think about themselves'. In some ways, I have to doubt this. I mean, my friend Graham thinks he's Knight Rider, and has done for many years, but he's still a greying marketing consultant for a computer-software firm in the east Midlands who just happens to have a black car. But if you transpose William

James's theory to the world of golf, it's surprisingly foolproof. A good example of this would probably be my performance on the fourth tee of the first round of the GMS Classic.

I'd started well at the dust-baked Mollington course. I'd hit each of the first three greens in the regulation number of shots, leaving myself two putts for par. Even though I'd missed a four-footer on the third to slip to one over, I was feeling, perhaps for the first time in my short career as a golf pro, a lasting sense of belonging. On the tee of the short par-four fourth, however, there was a delay of ten minutes while my playing partners, Tim Stevens and James
⁵
(son of the boxing legend John) Conteh and I waited for the green to clear. During this delay I began a conversation with James about his home club, Moor Park in Hertfordshire.

‘I expect you probably played in the Carris there when you were a junior,' said James. He was talking about the Carris Trophy, one of the biggest under-eighteen amateur events in Britain, and one which I'd always hoped, as a kid, to get my handicap down low enough to enter.

‘Ooh no, I was never good enough to play the Carris,' I replied.

Now, it's possible that there was no correlation between this negative statement and the tee shot that followed. It is, however, equally possible that had I not started talking about ‘not being good enough', I might have buttered my drive 300 yards onto the green, instead of
hitting
a slappy duck-hook 190 yards onto a gravel path, three feet from the out-of-bounds posts. It is also possible that I would not have gone on, in the subsequent holes, to find five water hazards.

It was the same with that 86 comment. When I'd spoken to Karl, I'd picked the figure out of the air as a random example of a suitably horrible round, but I could just as easily have said any score between 77 and 100. That 86 happened to be exactly what I ended up scoring in the first round at Mollington may have been mere coincidence. When you think of all the permutations, though, it seems unlikely. During the last few holes of that first round, my prophecy had loomed ever larger, desperate to fulfil itself. The Evil Brain Worm had sprung up and slithered back to life, with new expert maths skills: ‘What if I make Tom birdie the sixteenth, then put his tee shot in the pond guarding the green on the seventeenth, then three-putt the last? What would that add up to? 87? OK, we need to give him one more shot back. We'll let him sink that awkward final seven-footer, but we'll send it round the rim a few times first, just to freak him out.'

Was I finding out The Secret after all these years? Was this what golf was all about, when it came down to it? Were all the wrist hinges and stances and grips and trigger-thoughts of ‘oily' and ‘smooth' and
‘eau de golf'
utterly irrelevant? Was it really just a matter of believing something would happen with enough conviction and then allowing it to play itself out? If so, I wanted my money back! This wasn't the multi-faceted, unpredictable, highly nuanced game I fell in love with!

My second-round 80 was an improvement, but there
was
a depressing inevitability to it. In my new, more realistic golfing mindset, to have one round in the 70s had become my target, and it had looked a very reachable target as I stood on the final tee, knowing that I needed a par for a 76. What was most disheartening about the quadruple bogey that followed was not the two nervy, foozled chip shots, or even the way that it demonstrated how easily I'd abandoned all that Karl Morris had told me.
⁶
What was most disheartening was that 80 was the exact score I was trying to avoid – the Evil Brain Worm had leeched onto that fact. Why couldn't it have made me shoot 86 again, or 95? How much did that slithering little tyrant know, exactly? Was it aware, for instance, that 80 was the exact score that I needed to come 128th at Mollington, in last place of all the competitors who completed two rounds?

At first glance, the GMS Classic looked like another catastrophic step on my pro expedition. It was another missed cut, another last-place finish, another fight with myself that I'd lost. But there was something to be salvaged from the wreckage. I'd had not only my first Europro
Tour
birdies, but my first Europro Tour eagle as well – in the second round, after driving the green at the par-four fourth – and even with that quadruple bogey finish, had beaten the second-round score of one of my more experienced playing partners. I'd at least had a go at cutting the Evil Brain Worm down to size, even if, like all worms, it just grew back with a vengeance. It was hard, also, not to take solace from completing two full rounds in a tournament that I'd feared I would barely start, much less finish.

To say that Mollington seemed a bit ordinary after Hollinwell is a bit like saying that having a kick-around on a school playing field seems a bit ordinary after playing in the FA Cup semi-finals. Situated just north of Chester, it had an unprepossessing, barren look to it. If not for a sign at the entrance and a few slightly shabby-looking tee boards advertising the Europro Tour sponsors Motocaddy and
Partypoker.com
, I doubt I would have guessed it was holding a pro tournament. What it looked like, from a distance, was a large, tightly-mown wasteground that just happened to have some flags stuck in it. Evaluating its yellowing terrain from afar, I thought back to a comment Jamie Daniel had made: ‘Most of the courses I'd played as an amateur were awesome, but as soon as you turn pro, you find that you're going backwards in quality. If I'd been asked to play a Junior Open on a lot of those places, I probably wouldn't have bothered.'

I was experienced enough to know that not every golf course should be judged on first impressions. I remembered the mini-break I had taken at the Stapleford Park golf resort in Leicestershire last summer. That had been
a
similarly uncharismatic course on first viewing, but it had turned out to be stimulating enough. But when I'd arrived at the driving range at Stapleford, as an amateur nobody, I'd been greeted by a perfectly formed pyramid of brand-new Srixon balls, begging me to lay into them. By contrast, when I inserted my first thirty-ball token into the ball-dispenser at the range at Mollington, it made a noise suggestive of a severe respiratory disorder, then rasped up a single weatherbeaten TopFlite. A second token prompted a colourful eruption of twenty-two of the most abstruse balls manufactured between 1984 and 1997, all of which fell into a flimsy rubber basket that, as I bent to pick it up, proceeded to split, causing them to scatter in several different directions.

I tried to stay open-minded as I signed in, spent another £12 on another one of those scrawly monochrome yardage planners, and made my way over to the first tee. But as I was passing the putting green, the Geordie man from the Europro Tour who had just happily taken my £275 entry fee called me back over to the clubhouse.

He pointed to my shorts. ‘I'm afraid that if you wear those on the course, you'll have to pay a £50 fine,' he informed me.

‘What?' I said. ‘Even for my practice round?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid it's Tour regulations.'

It's always frustrating to be told to change your clothing while you are at a golf club – mainly because the person telling you to do so will invariably be dressed like your worst sartorial nightmare. But when it so happens that your clothing is clothing that you would not wear off the golf course, clothing, in fact,
that
you have specifically bought, against your better instincts, to appease the golfing authorities, the frustration is considerably greater. Over the years I'd frequently come a cropper in the area of shorts-related golf-club dress codes – most of which defy the whole point of shorts, by striving to make them not shorts at all, but two-tone trousers that just happen to have a three-inch gap in the middle – but I'd felt that with the baggy, dark-blue legwear I'd purchased from H&M I'd got it just right for a change. It was confusing enough when I'd been a member at Thetford Golf Club in Norfolk, and been told off for not wearing white knee-length socks with my shorts, but I'd hoped that the PGA would be more open-minded. Did the Europro Tour not realise that it was 30 degrees outside? And surely, if they were going to ban an article of clothing, their disciplinary energy would have been better focused on those nipple-clinging synthetic polo shirts I kept seeing everywhere?

‘It's thought that shorts aren't gentlemanly,' said James
⁷
Holmes, a pro from Crewe who joined me for a few holes during my practice round. I hoped I detected something mocking in his tone, but couldn't be certain. He looked pretty serious.