Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (3 page)

That period had felt like a mini-lifetime while it was happening, but what was four and a bit years, from a properly adult respective? It could take four and a bit years to unpack all your possessions after moving house, to fully settle into a new job, to untangle yourself from an unsuccessful relationship … to get round to mending a garden fence.

Could it be true? Had I been a bit rash on that hot day all those years ago in Staffordshire?

I'd seen older friends go through similar epiphanies. Upon reaching thirty, it had suddenly dawned on them that,
no
, at sixteen stone, with a mortgage and a steady job in the civil service, perhaps they
weren't
going to fulfil that dream of playing on the right wing for Nottingham Forest after all. My predicament, however, was slightly different. Footballers (goalkeepers and Teddy Sheringham excepted) may be washed up at thirty, but, as of May 2005, the average age of the top fifty players in golf's world rankings was 32.06. I actually had two full years until I was due to hit my peak! Granted, most 32.06-year-olds on the PGA Tour had spent their twenties hitting three hundred balls per day and playing high-level tournament
golf
forty weeks a year, rather than hanging around with rock musicians and drinking too much, but it was important not to quibble. There was a plentiful supply of hope here.

Also, hadn't my decision to leave my pro golf ambitions behind been based, at least in part, on the awful, outdated attitudes surrounding golf, rather than on the game itself? And did those attitudes still even exist? Admitting to a love of golf might have still been tantamount to admitting to being a member of the Bruce Forsyth Fan Club in 1992, but in 2005, who
didn't
like golf? Alice Cooper played, Lou Reed played, Catherine Zeta-Jones played, even that weird buttery-faced kid from
The Sixth Sense
played. When I was a teenager, I'd felt odd for not wanting to be Gary Lineker quite as much as most of my male classmates did, but now Lineker – just one of a seemingly endless supply of Premiership and ex-Premiership footballers who seemed to regret choosing studs over spikes – was shaping up to be the new face of BBC golf. As I'd been told repeatedly, golf was hip, and while the trousers worn by my Saturday Medal partners might fairly firmly refute that claim, I could see that plenty had changed for the better in my lost decade. Dress codes had been relaxed. Owing to the rise of pay'n'play and family-oriented hotel-spa courses, the back-scratching social infrastructure of private clubs was falling apart, and the result was a game played by people who were aware of the world beyond the eighteenth green – or so I hoped. Surely the professional level of a game like this – i.e. what you would assume is the most evolved level – would be a place where I could fit in?

Two weeks after I'd played with Jerry, and two days before my thirtieth birthday, I made a list called Pros and Cons of Becoming a Golf Pro, and showed it to Edie. It read as follows:

Cons:

1. Bad back (already here, could get worse).
   
2. Financial problems (how exactly does a person break into the male-escort industry?).
   
3. Would rather leap naked into a pit of vipers than travel anywhere by plane.
   
4. How many times exactly can someone have a conversation about ‘shaft torque' before losing the will to live?
   
5. May need to dress in German businessman sports casual in order to ‘blend in'.
   
6. Flashbacks to childhood trauma.
   
7. Less time to write (1000-page East Anglian answer to Stephen King's
   The Stand
   will probably have to be put on back burner).
   
8. Potential to descend into sport anecdote hell, leading to divorce and blackballing by non-golfing friends.
   
9. Will probably have to keep clubs clean.
   

Pros:

1. Fresh air and exercise.
   
2. Closure on lingering ‘Did I take the right path?' questions.
   
3. No better non-sexual feeling in life than great golf shot.
   
4. Good excuse to finally buy that driving net for the back garden.
   
5. Get to do that thing where you pick your ball out of the hole and hold it up to the crowd and mouth ‘Thank you'.
   
6. No more handicap silliness and competitions with needlessly complex scoring formats and names like The Ralph Badger Jubilee Greensome Stableford Salver.
   
7. Get to enter The Open
   (The Open!!!!)
   
8. No grumpy retired hotelier jingling pocket change on my backswing.
   
9. Might get to play with Sergio Garcia.
   

At 9–9, I needed a tie-breaker. In the end, I got two.

The first came from Edie.

‘I think you need to get it out of your system. And who knows – you might actually win something,' she said, which I thought was very magnanimous and supportive coming from someone who: a) didn't like golf, and b) had just had three episodes of
America's Next Top Model
wiped from her Sky Plus box by extended coverage of The FedEx St Jude Classic.

The real decider, however, came from my eight-iron.

The night I'd made my list, I'd been on the Internet and checked out the 2006 schedule for the Europro Tour – a relatively new, fast-growing professional golf circuit. Although it was not as famous as the PGA or European Tours, the Europro Tour seemed to contain its fair share of former big(ish) names and touted future stars within its ranks. I already had my eye on the Qualifying School event, ten months away, as a potential curtain-opener
for
my new career. I shut my laptop unusually decisively that night, like a man with a plan. Then, for a couple of days, I completely emptied my mind of all golfing thoughts. In forty-eight hours I would have left my twenties behind, and there were other, more pressing matters to think about – charcoal briquettes and six-packs, for example.

I suppose it's possible that, had things not happened the way they did that weekend, all this ‘Should I have a go at being a pro?' might have drifted away, only to be remembered as a brief, fading-youth-related freak-out. Or maybe not. All I know is that the day following my party, after the final sleepover guests had staggered away, I had a visceral urge to hit some shots.

These are often the times that golf is most rewarding, I find: when it's an unplanned thing, something that crops up on the shuffle mechanism of life's iPod. There is no scorecard, no ‘Is it going to rain?' anxiety. Quite simply, one balmy, hungover afternoon, you feel a bit of a second wind coming on, and you realise that there's no place you'd rather be than in a patch of bastardised countryside, feeling the satisfying swish of metal against rubber. It would have been hard to have been this impulsive with other sports. As I hopped straight onto the picturesque ninth tee with only a couple of friendly dog walkers to judge me, and compiled a string of three textbook pars, I was already thinking ‘This is the life! This is me!' What came next was purely a bonus.

Over the years, I've holed many spectacular golf shots. I've had twos on par fours, threes on par fives, slam-dunked 180-yard iron shots, even brushed the hole with my tee shot on a couple of short par fours, but as I
reached
the tee of the par-three twelfth hole at Diss Golf Club in Suffolk that day, I was still yet to have a hole-in-one. Of course, as a good player, this wasn't supposed to concern me. Hole-in-ones, as anyone who
really
knows about golf will tell you, are a fluke – nothing to get too worked up about in the grand scheme of things. They are also a bit of a bind, in that the main long-term result of them is that the holer must buy everyone in the vicinity a round of drinks afterwards – a tradition that may do more to sum up the inherent masochism of golf than any other. ‘Have you had a hole-in-one?' is a question for the non-golfer to ask the golfer, but not a subject for men who know their lob wedge from their gap wedge. Nevertheless, in aesthetic terms, this one was worth waiting for. Not only did the ball come crisply off the clubhead, then drift gently in on the breeze, it found its intended target without bouncing. ‘Whumf!' Straight down the hole, like the most nimble, spatially aware rabbit you have ever almost clapped eyes on.

You expect some response after a shot like that. Applause, at the very least. Instead, the late-afternoon silence seemed even more deafening than usual. If a ball falls in a golf hole in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, does it still count? I looked around, slightly frantically, but the ailing electric trolleys of the two middle-aged women playing ahead of me had crept over the brow of the hill in the distance. Where, when I needed him, was the tracksuit-wearing man with the Rottweiler who had said ‘Nice
shot!
' after seeing my sclaffed nine-iron land thirty feet from the flag on the previous hole? One part of me was thinking, ‘So, is this
it?
' Another was admiring the purity, thinking, ‘How
can
you not take this as a sign?' And then there was the final part, which was looking at the bigger picture, taking a ‘glass is half full' view of the situation – or, more specifically, a ‘glass won't ever get filled in the first place' approach – giving the other two parts a serious talking-to: this stays between the two of you, me, and our bar tab.

1
Yes! But there are pictures on the TV screen, and isn't it important that we make them interesting?

‘There was not an athlete I had spoken to from other sports – the roughest of them: football, hockey, basketball – who did not hold the professional golfer in complete awe, with thanksgiving that golf was not
their
profession. The idea of standing over a putt with thousands of dollars in the balance was enough to make them flap their fingers as if singed. Golf was the only major sport in which the tension remained throughout – where each shot was far enough apart in time for doubt to seep in and undermine one's confidence, so that there was no way of establishing an equanimity of mood. Other sports were not similar: the tension would mount, but as soon as the first whistle blew or the contact began, that was the end of it.'

– George Plimpton

‘I SAW YOU
hitting some shots out there the other day,' said the man behind the counter, handing me two little silver tokens for the ball-dispenser. ‘You looked like you were bombing it. What do you play off?'

‘Oh, I don't have a handicap. I'm a pro. Just turned, in fact,' I said.

I was lying, actually. It was the tail end of winter, 2006, and I had two weeks left until I officially lost my status as an amateur golfer – possibly forever, and almost certainly for at least two years – but I figured it couldn't hurt to take my new profession for a trial run. ‘I'm a pro,' was something I was going to have to get used to saying over the coming months. Much as I'd been looking forward to speaking the words, though, I found that they tasted sticky and odd in my mouth. I wasn't completely convinced that the assistant pro at Hemingford Abbots Driving Range in Cambridgeshire wasn't going to unmask me, or at the very least call his co-worker over and play piggy-in-the-middle with my ailing, all-weather ‘London Golf Show 2005' golf glove. As I did my best to
look
collected and pretend that an expression like ‘bombing it' was a part of my everyday golfing vocabulary, I found myself studying him unusually closely. Was that the first sign of a smirk in the curve of his upper lip? Was he looking at my Gap jumper and thinking, ‘Yeah, right. Like a serious player would be seen dead in
that
.'

‘Congratulations!' he said. ‘So, are you playing the circuit?'

‘Yep. Going to give it a go. See what happens.'

‘Where are you attached?'

‘Oh, I'm kind of out on my own.'

There's a lot of guff talked about how hard it is to become a golf professional. People will tell you that, in order to play golf for a living, you have to learn byzantine things about the inner mass of the head of a three-wood, that you have to spend a large chunk of your life in retail limbo, selling tee-pegs and mending the shafts of the clubs that irate ten-handicappers have broken over their knee in the previous month's Clive Wilkins Salver or Ron Davies Bowl. They'll tell you that you need to be playing to a handicap of four, at worst, and that if you are seriously thinking about playing the game for a living, you'd be wise not to consider doing so until you're at least six digits better than that. But this is untrue. Becoming a pro is really a lot easier than you might imagine.

When 80 per cent of golf professionals say ‘I'm a pro,' what they mean is that they have joined the PGA, aka the Professional Golfer's Association, professional golf's governing body. To do this, they have to gain their card by serving a three-year apprenticeship working for a qualified teaching professional in a pro shop, learning about equipment and the fundamentals of the swing,
sometimes
– if their boss is a lenient, unselfish type – squeezing in five or six holes before nightfall, and taking a training course and exams at the PGA headquarters at the Belfry, near Birmingham. But mostly just spending an awful lot of time giving advice to old men about clubs they don't really need. At the end of this period – at which point they must have a handicap of four or better – the budding PGA pro may, if he has not had it beaten out of him, still nurture a dream of making a living from his playing skills, but, if this doesn't come to fruition, at least he has the fallback option of one day overseeing his own mini retail empire and driving a VW Golf with really big spoilers.

In days gone by, it was not uncommon for a feisty young 'un from the wrong side of the golfing tracks (e.g. Lee Trevino) to fight his way out of a low-paid assistant's job and onto one of the main tours, where he would rub up against his more affluent, conventionally primed peers with incendiary results. But thanks to an increasingly well-structured and carefully monitored amateur circuit, and the rise of American golf scholarships, such occurrences are now about as common as openly bisexual Ryder Cup players. When you look at the top hundred of golf's world rankings these days, you are by and large looking at a list of the former heroes of international amateur golf.