Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (24 page)

James and I had met on the first tee, where I was warming up and he was squinting into the distance, trying to work out the identity of the player up by the green, 360 yards in the distance. He thought it was Jason Dransfield, the Liverpool-based pro he'd arranged to practise with. I thought it was Sergio Garcia. As it turned
out
, we were both wrong. But then, this was a day when I was turning out to be wrong about a lot of things.

Another one was that little yardage book. ‘Why is it that you have to pay so much more for these, when they're nowhere near as good as the colour ones you can normally get from the pro shop?' I asked James, flapping the little yellow-covered chart in his direction, though not at such close proximity that he would see the remnants of the mosquito I'd squished with it the night before.

‘Oh, I think these are lots better,' he said. ‘These are put together by Dion Stevens.'

His manner suggested that this explained everything. It was the same way he might have said, ‘These are put together by Gary Player,' or ‘These were put together by Madonna, in some spare time shortly after her
Like a Prayer
album.' I feigned knowledge, replied with an ‘Oh, right!' and resolved to find out exactly what this Stevens guy was famous for.
⁸
Whatever it was, I suspected it wasn't art – at least not if his drawings of the trees at the side of the second fairway were anything to go by.

While I might have stepped fully into the cauldron of tournament play at Hollinwell, my four days at Mollington gave me a proper chance to swim around in it, take its temperature, become accustomed to the bittersweet taste of its contents. By speaking to James Holmes, James Conteh, Tim Stevens and Ian Keenan – a pro from Hoylake who, just three days before the
comedown
of practising with me at Mollington, had been awarded the privilege of playing as a non-competing marker in the final round of The Open – and others, a picture of the average Europro Nearly Man began to emerge. He tended to be around twenty-seven
(the
make-or-break age for a pro golfer, it seemed). His hair was shortish, geometric at the back and gelled (though not as heavily gelled as that of his younger peers) on top in that popular ‘bedhead' style that bore only the politest resemblance to hair genuinely ruffled by sleep. He supported himself with part-time bar work, part-time pro-shop work, familial assistance or a sponsorship from a wealthy member at his local club with a gardening-equipment or tool-hire company (sometimes this would involve said member getting a share of his prize money, sometimes it would be what Karl Morris called ‘one of those sponsorships that's another way of saying “handout”'). He drove a BMW or one of the sportier Volkswagens, on whose back seats he had slept on at least one occasion during his pro life. While at a golf tournament, he very rarely went out into the nearby city. He didn't drink, though sometimes, if he was one of the more sociable and prosperous players on Tour, he split the weekly rent for a holiday cottage with some of his peers and relaxed there by watching DVDs. He had at some point ‘lost his swing' or ‘got too technical', and was now desperately trying to regain form, with the nagging knowledge that, if golf didn't work out, he had no significant qualification to fall back on. He was a man of few words. When he did talk, the conversation always seemed to flow towards one of the following areas:

1. Michelle Wie

In the summer of 2006, the sixteen year-old, six-foot-one-inch Wie had become one of the hottest topics in the game: a child prodigy whose amateur achievements outshone even those of Tiger Woods, and who could hit the ball further than many of her male counterparts. She had also had the temerity to take a break from her Ladies PGA Tour schedule and enter a couple of PGA Tour events. This did not seem to have gone down well with the lower male pro ranks. Even the cuddly Andrew Seibert had surprised me by telling me about refusing to wear a free badge inscribed with the words ‘Go Michelle!' at a Nationwide Tour event.
⁹
I'd overheard a couple of similar conversations at Hollinwell, and Conteh and Stevens seemed keen to air their opinions on the subject during the fallow periods in our round.

Stevens: ‘If they [women] can play in our events, I don't see why we can't play in their events too.'

Conteh: ‘There should be one big Tour with men and women, then they'd see. It would destroy women's golf.'

Stevens: ‘Poulter reckons that if he played in women's events, he'd win 80 per cent of them.'

Conteh: ‘It doesn't matter. She [Wie] will play again and she'll miss the cut again. It just means someone like us who's struggling to make a living is missing out on a place. It is equality, but it's
their
kind of equality.'

Stevens: ‘Yeah, it's bullshit.'

2. How Things are a Lot Harder than they Used to be in Every Way

All the Europro Tour players I spoke to seemed to agree on this. There were always more players pushing up from the junior ranks – players off plus six and plus seven who were fitter, sharper, who had started playing earlier. It was also harder to find the sponsorship and the equipment perks that made life easier. When James Holmes finished fourth on the Europro Tour order of merit in 2004 (total earnings: £24,565), Titleist agreed to give him a set of clubs, a hundred gloves, thirty-four dozen balls and two sets of shoes for the following year. Now they had stopped doing so. He also added that Taylor Made used to give every Europro Tour player who played with a Taylor Made driver £100 per event, but didn't any more (‘Because they don't need to'). Other players talked about the old days, when the Tour would give the pros good-quality Titleist balls to use on the range, ‘but they stopped when people started sneaking them into their bags'.

3. Quality of the Course

Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Course is good, isn't it?'

Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘Yeah, brilliant. Not a shithole at all. Honest.'

4. Boys' Toys and Speed

Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘What did you shoot last week?'

Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Fucking shanked it round. ‘Mare, mate. Didn't drive home very fast after that. Honest.'

Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘You still got that Peugeot?'

Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Yeah. What of it?'

Player on Driving Range with Diamond-Patterned Jumper: ‘Time you traded it in, innit?

Player on Driving Range with Lolling Tongue and Hedgehog Hair: ‘Fuck off! I can get that bastard up to 140 on the M6. Toll bit, mind.'

Stevens to Conteh on thirteenth hole of second round: ‘How long does it take you to get back?'

Conteh: ‘About two hours.'

Stevens: ‘Uh.'

Conteh: ‘Be quicker than that after this round, though, cos I'll be driving at about 150.'

Stevens to Conteh, four holes later, upon spotting an unusually large aeroplane in the sky: ‘Wonder how fast that fucker goes?'

Conteh: ‘Dunno.'

5. Clichéd Exclamatory Banter

In-vogue examples included:

‘Taxi!' (Translation: ‘My putt has gone past the hole by quite some distance! It's like when a vehicle you are trying to hail doesn't bother stopping for you, but with a ball and grass instead of a car and a road!')

‘Grow … Some … Fucking … Bollocks!' (‘My putt has come up some way short of the hole, and as a result I am now quite understandably questioning my masculinity!')

‘It's on the dancefloor!' (‘My ball is not particularly close to the hole, but it has arrived on the green safely.') ‘H
₂
O!' (‘I have put the ball into the water. I am sad!') ‘Luckier than a queer with two arseholes!' (‘I did not hit a very good shot there, but, unexpectedly, it has worked out well!')

‘About as much use as a chocolate fireman!' (‘I did not hit a very good shot there, and it has not worked out well!')

I tried my best to join in on all of these topics, but it was obvious that I was lacking the requisite social skills. I'd never been a great connoisseur of the Bruce Forsyth brand of golf banter; I tried to keep in the spirit of things, wheeling out a few old aphorisms, but it quickly became apparent that ‘over the cellophane bridge' was just, like,
so
1992. Sometimes, to keep myself amused, I would invent entirely new, and utterly meaningless, golfing phrases – e.g. ‘Straight off the lunchbox!' or ‘Damn! That's the third Tarbuck I've hit today!' – but these didn't seem to catch on either.

The car topic was a dead loss, right from the get-go. Nobody calls a Toyota Yaris a ‘baby' or a ‘mutha', or talks about ‘gunning' a one-litre engine, and I felt that if I really stretched myself to do the whole manly ‘What are you driving?' thing, I'd only end up offending somebody by asking why, when their winnings totalled £343 for the year, they chose to drive a car worth more than
£20,000
. It was an area of pro life that flummoxed me, right from the boasting about speeding to Jamie Daniel's obvious embarrassment that he ‘only' drove a ten-year-old (sporty, sleek, retro classic) Mazda.

When I suggested to Conteh and Stevens that perhaps it's only right that Wie and her LPGA Tour compatriots get the chance to compete in male events, considering all the ways the male golfing establishment has tried to suppress women over the years, I was met with only awkward silence.

Golf might not have been the best social sport in the world, but I'd always felt it had the potential to be. My view on the long spaces between shots was that they were excellent opportunities for conversation: a gift that golf, almost alone among sports, could offer you. Naturally I refrained from opening my mouth whilst my partners were swinging, addressing the ball or contemplating their shots, but it was obvious that my habit of theorising about the game and constructing sentences longer than three words was viewed as something that made me ‘a bit quirky'. Throughout all this, I tried to keep my backstory brief and to the point – I'd given up golf for a few years, but decided to give it another go – but sometimes, faced with an unusually inquisitive pro, I would mention that I'd written a couple of books, too. Without exception, they all asked the same question.

‘How much does that pay, exactly?'

‘I read a book not long ago,' Steve Lewton had said at Woburn, during the second or third version of this conversation. ‘I forget what it was called now. Fucking brilliant! Shit, what was it? Ah … that's it.
The Da Vinci Code!
'

I was used to feeling out of place on golf courses – at one time, in my late teens, I'd even gone out of my way to play up to it. But now I was actually trying my best to fit in, to dress innocuously, to not talk about books or films or TV or any of the things that I talked about normally, or if I did, to not be too challenging or distracting – and it amazed me how easy it was to stand out. At one point on the range in the prelude to round two, I'd heard my name mentioned, and while I didn't get the context, the conversation definitely included the word ‘character'. Was it so odd that I was the only person who didn't think it remotely weird to want to wear his shirt untucked in the middle of a heatwave? Was my equipment so outdated that every third person needed to inspect it and pull a confused face?
¹⁰
Was my straw boater so eccentric that Michael Welch, the former ‘next Sandy Lyle' and eleventh-place finisher on the 2005 Euro Pro Tour order of merit, was justified in pointing and laughing at it as I walked past the putting green?
¹¹
It seemed so.

I could spot my fellow GMS Classic competitors at a considerable distance, both at my hotel and at the petrol station down the road where I bought my bottles of water
in
preparation for my round. It wasn't just the ubiquitous sleepy hedgehog hair and J. Lindeberg belts and fluorescent tops and shaving rashes; it was their quiet, watchful eyes and a certain dipped-head doggedness about their manner. They had their own way of walking, their own way of talking. It was unacknowledged, but it was a code that united them.

In his domain, the archetypal pro golfer was like a nerdy version of a cowboy hero: he swaggered around slowly and chewed over his surroundings indifferently and didn't say much, and what he did say didn't give much away. But outside of it, he was Bambi in spiked shoes. When he was on the non-golf planet he was so sleepy and innocent, he tended not to run into too much trouble. But when the non-golf planet crossed the boundary and came to
him
, difficulties could arise. A good example of these difficulties would be the conversation that occurred between Stevens and three teenage spectators sitting by the seventeenth tee during our second round.

‘Is there any trouble over the back?' Stevens asked the oldest of the three – a kid of about sixteen, with a crewcut and a Manchester United T-shirt.

By ‘trouble', Stevens meant ‘bunkers' or ‘water' – an extension of the pond that surrounded the front of the green – and by ‘over the back' he meant ‘to the rear of the green', but it was obvious that the teenager did not know this, or at least was unsure. He could have replied with, ‘I'm not sure.' Instead, eager to be of assistance, he said, ‘The hole used to be in a different place.' Stevens simply stared at him blankly, then teed off.

‘The hole used to be in a different place' was quite
simply
not what you said during a golf tournament, when everyone who knew anything about golf took it for granted that the greenkeepers moved the hole placements from day to day. If anything, you said, ‘Pin's back right – about thirteen yards from where it was yesterday.' Stevens didn't mean to be rude; his refined golfing brain simply could not process a statement of such guilelessness.