Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (6 page)

After another night of fitful sleep, I hauled my wobbly bones out of bed, carried out my customary check of the pampas grass in my back garden in order to gauge wind strength (estimate: 38 mph), gave my clubs a quick going over with an old nailbrush, and set off on the ninety-minute drive to Essex, stopping for a warm-up – albeit one more in the tradition of Montgomerie than Singh – at a driving range in Suffolk. Having unpacked my clubs and chased my woolly hat across
Stoke-by-Nayland
Golf Club car park, I then stifled the desire to drive back home, pull my bedcovers over my head and not remove them until the following morning. Instead, I headed for the pro shop. Here, a damp-haired, listless assistant pro, clearly unhappy to be distracted from his mid-afternoon Mars Bar, directed me towards the first tee. As I walked past the putting green, I scanned my surroundings in the vague hope of spotting some sign of touring pro life – a giant leaderboard, perhaps, or a passing Ian Woosnam, here to weigh up young talent, his mind already on wild-card picks for his debut as European Ryder Cup captain that autumn – but all I could see were a couple of pros in a practice net to my right, stroking one another's three-woods. At least, I assumed they were pros, since they had those fluorescent shirts and ‘drenched hedgehog' hairstyles – wetter versions of the one David Beckham had in about 1999 – that all supertalented male golfers under twenty-five seem to have these days. Either that, or they were Carphone Warehouse employees who'd got lost on their way to a cycling meet.

It's not a bad golfing layout, the Constable Course at Stoke-by-Nayland, if alarmingly on the hilly side for East Anglia, and, in late March, a tad marshy underfoot. But, sadly, on practice day at the Europro Tour Qualifying School, I didn't have the pleasure of playing it. It was only when I reached the fifth green that it occurred to me that I was playing Stoke-by-Nayland's other, somewhat inferior, course, the Gainsborough. Maybe I might have realised this earlier, had I been in a less drowsy state of mind. Little signs may have alerted me to my mistake: the fact that several of the tee-markers seemed
to
have gone missing, the profusion of worm-casts growing out of the greens, or the regularity of the shouts of ‘Fore!' emitted by the four overweight men in bobbled hats playing ahead of me.

Spotting two more pink-shirted, hedgehoggy heads on an elevated tee a couple of hundred yards away, I picked up my bag and ball and began to head in their direction. I'd walked about fifty yards towards what I now gathered was the eighth tee of the course I
should
have been playing – I still had no idea where the first tee was – when the heavens opened.

They opened in the kind of way I thought they only opened in disaster movies. What came out of them was a bit like rain but more serrated, and that in turn became something a bit like hail, but heavier (and still just as serrated). I forget at which point during this meteorological marvel it was that my bag fell off its metal stand and rolled down a mountainside, but I know that somewhere in the process of retrieving it from a puddle, peeling off my sodden new leather Titleist glove, rummaging about for its redoubtable all-weather predecessor and realising that neither it, nor any form of waterproofs, was present, it became clear that a practice round was no longer top of my list of Life Priorities. What was top of my list of Life Priorities was my car heater. As I trudged back to the clubhouse, still ignorant of the delights of the Constable Course, I felt that special kind of calmness that comes from the knowledge that nothing can possibly get any worse.

At 9.09 a.m. the following day, things got quite a lot worse.

It is well known that a professional golfer has no control over his tee time or grouping. A few years ago, Sergio Garcia made some sarcastic, harrumpty noises about Tiger Woods getting preferential treatment in this area, but an uproar soon followed, and Garcia was coerced into a public apology for daring to be so facetious.
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But while the frequency with which crowd-pulling threeballs turn up at commercial, viewer-friendly times of the day in golf's four major championships can seem a tad suspicious, it's all a lottery at the lower level of the sport. As tee times went, the one of 8.38 that I'd been allocated by the Europro Tour officials seemed reasonably serviceable: not quite early enough to be stiff-limbed and unsociable, yet not late enough to be prey to the spike marks made by the shoes of the other hundred or so players in the field. Most importantly, perhaps, it would not allow me to spend half a day chewing my nails over that all-important opening shot.

The first encouraging thing I noticed, upon arriving at Stoke-by-Nayland at half past seven, was that the bad weather had passed, replaced by a light breeze and a low, hazy sun. The second was that it now looked like something approximating the venue for a proper golf tournament. Here, in the clubhouse foyer, was that leaderboard I'd been fantasising about. OK, maybe it wasn't quite as big or as colourful as the ones on TV, but I still had to catch my breath as I saw my name a few columns down, in the first row, alongside those of
Michael
Freake from Australia and Grant Willard from Farnham, Surrey.
One of my playing partners had come all the way from Australia to play in this?
Wow. For the first time, it hit me: there was no going back; this was it. Dazed, I announced my presence to a middle-aged man sitting at a desk in a bright red car-dealer's jacket with ‘PGA' written on the back and signed in, bought two little ball tokens from the apple-cheeked blonde lady at the clubhouse reception desk, then made my way over to the practice ground. It was only when I arrived there that I realised I was clutching a small black-and-white course planner, full of scribbled lines, endless numbers and tiny esoteric symbols. I had no recollection of buying it from the man in the tournament office, nor of being charged the outrageous sum of £12 for the privilege (a full £9.50 more than the price I typically paid for the more colourful, aesthetically pleasing planners that are sold as standard in most pro shops).

The first tee shot of your first professional golf tournament is a nerve-racking experience, but I would argue that visiting the practice ground can be infinitely more so. Everyone knows you're supposed to be nervous on the first tee. If you send the ball scuttling along ahead of you in a worm-worrying manner, or curving off into a lake eighty yards from your intended target, the chances are that those witnessing the travesty will sympathise and chalk it off to nerves. But the practice ground is supposed to be the easy bit: nobody expects you to fluff a shot there, because it's the place where the pressure's off, where it's most easy to stay within your own blasé cocoon, unconcerned with exterior influences. It's been said that if every pro hit the ball the way they hit it on the range,
they
'd all be Tiger Woods, but that's not true. What they would really all be is golfing cyborgs, able to shape and flight the ball at will in any given situation. In other words, the range is a place where, if you mess up, you're going to be noticed.

Me? I kept my eyes to the floor and walked along the line of well-oiled swings and polo shirts and took my place as far to the right as possible, mindful of the range scene in
Tin Cup
where Kevin Costner sends a series of ninety-degree hosel shots – or shanks – whizzing past the noses of his more accomplished peers. Even if I hit my most violently left-veering shot, I wasn't going to trouble the players next to me. The right-hand side was more of a worry: I'd always been liable to the ‘shank' – the most violent stroke in golf, the one where the ball is squeezed into the join between clubhead and shaft – and I've been particularly liable to it at times when the word ‘shank' is skipping around my head like a dainty fork-tailed parasite. Times like now, in other words. However, I reasoned that as long as the area immediately in front of my eyes remained clear of human activity, I could avert a crisis.

I'm sure if I'd seen the small man with the jet black hair and the surprisingly ungolfy clothes approaching in good time, I would have made a deft manoeuvre around him, even further towards the trees in front of me, doing my best to mould my features into a ‘Golly! I could do with some shade!' expression. As it was, he caught me off-guard, sneaking up and taking his position next to me as I was admiring one of my drives – my first really pure shot of the day – tracking a distant pylon.

I watched him set up, noting that he was the first pro I'd seen so far that morning who didn't seem to be wearing one of those big-buckled belts that said ‘JL' on them. Playing for time, I began to pretend to clean some dried mud out of the grooves of my four-iron with a tee peg.
³

He removed a club from his bag, and began to make a jerky, pushing motion with it. I suppose it might have looked a bit like swinging, in a certain light. Equally, though, if there had been a sooty chimney just above his right shoulder, he wouldn't have seemed out of place.

I watched, fascinated, as he proceeded to use the same action to dispatch four or five balls into the middle distance.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘What time are you off?'

‘I'm sorry,' he said, with a French lilt. ‘English, no. Erm.' He shrugged exaggeratedly and stuck out his bottom lip.

‘Time. Teeing off? You?' I persevered, pointing at my wrist and thinking that maybe I should have paid a bit more attention in those secondary school French lessons – maybe even attended a few of them – but he just continued to shrug apologetically. He looked behind him and beckoned to a tall, chic-looking blonde woman in checked trousers holding a lead attached to a small, hairy dog. She made her way over, and I waited, expecting her
to
act as some kind of interpreter. Instead, the two of them began a conversation of their own. This went on for a couple of minutes, after which they looked at me – or maybe at my woolly hat – and smiled, then continued talking. I may have imagined it, but I thought I saw a sly grin playing around the lips of the Pomeranian, too.

When I'd looked forward to my first bit of behind-the-scenes pro golf banter, this hadn't been quite what I'd envisaged.

Now I had a dilemma. About twenty balls remained in my basket. Ideally, I would like to hit these. Also, it would appear a bit odd if I abruptly packed up and left. I didn't want my new friend and his entourage to feel that I had something against French golfers. Or hirsute dogs. Or blonde women who looked as if they'd stepped freshly out of a Chanel advert. Nonetheless, that ‘shank' demon was still there.

The traditional pre-tournament warm-up routine of a pro begins with the shortest clubs in the bag – a few finesse shots with the wedges, for example – and gradually moves through the bag in order of power, before finally reaching the big-headed, long-flying metal clubs still confusingly referred to as ‘woods'. But I'd been impatient, keen to move quickly onto the macho clubs, all of which have less of a curve at the join between head and shaft and are thus less easy to hit destructively to the right. Now I knew that, to feel properly prepared for my day, I really needed to test out my lob wedge and gap wedge. In other words, the two most shank-happy clubs in the bag.

As I addressed the ball and took a nervous waggle, the headlines flashed before my eyes.

I waggled once more. In my peripheral vision, my neighbour took another jerky backswing. I looked at the ball again, and had two simultaneous revelations.

1. I was a proper golf pro.
   
2. I was not the golf pro with the worst swing at the tournament.
   

Steadily, confidently, I swiped at the ball. I watched as it hissed through the air, about twenty yards lower than intended, then landed about thirty yards past the flag at which I'd been aiming. As wedge shots went, it was a freak of nature, a true runt of Satan. It was also definitely, definitely not a shank. I was elated.

After that, my opening drive of the competition was a mere trifle. Well, actually, that's not true: it was still one of the hardest shots I've hit in my life. As drives go, it was no oil painting – it only travelled about 220 yards and landed in some scruffy wet grass to the left of the fairway, but it did the crucial thing, which was get airborne. Ten minutes later, I was grazing the hole with my attempt at a dream opening birdie three, then tapping in for par from the kind of inconsequential
distance
that Beaker from
The Muppets
wouldn't have got in a flap about.

Here's a tip. If you're ever feeling stressed whilst watching the first round of a golf tournament, and need to soak up some relaxing vibes, try standing next to the second tee. Providing, of course, that there have been no major disasters on the first hole, it is quite possibly the most mellow sporting environment in the universe. On the first hole, I and my playing partners, Grant and Michael, had been three bunched fists disguised as men, but now, having secured two pars and a birdie and passed beyond the physical and metaphorical thicket that separated the first green from the tee of the short par-four second hole, we all but let out a harmonious sigh. The three tee shots that followed – each of them gently tracking the right-to-left dogleg of the fairway – might have been hit by those cyborgs I was talking about, but only if said automatons had been smoking vast quantities of weed beforehand. If we bent down to pick up our tee pegs before we'd established the destination of our shots, it was not just the gesture of men with a piercing sun in their eyes, it was also the gesture of men with a Zen understanding that their balls would be in, or close to, the ideal part of the fairway, leaving only elementary shots to the green.