Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (7 page)

As we walked to our balls, I learned a little about Michael and Grant's backgrounds. Michael, who shared a coach with Colin Montgomerie, split his time between the UK and Australia and funded his tournament play by selling Astroturf putting greens. Grant, meanwhile, had just quit his job as an assistant pro in order to play full time, but seemed vague on the subject of funding.

They also learned a little about me – namely that the starter on the first tee had said, ‘On the tee, representing England … Tom Cox!' not because I represented England in any official capacity, but because I didn't really represent anywhere else.

Having located my ball – a Titleist number two – in the fairway, ten yards behind those of Grant and Michael, I proceeded to flump a wedge shot fifty yards short of the green – and about five yards short of the accompanying divot – thus learning my first lesson as a pro golfer: Don't Get too Heavily Involved in a Conversation Just Before You Hit Your Shot.

My second, slightly more severe, lesson came about ten minutes later.

When the man with the silly deep voice tells you on the advert that Titleist is ‘the number one ball in golf' he's not just being a man with a silly deep voice talking crap. There are other balls that crop up on the pro circuit – the odd Srixon, the occasional Nike, the lesser-spotted Maxfli – but the chances are, if you're watching three pros in action, you'll be seeing three pros playing with the same ball: either a Titleist Pro-V1 or the slightly lower-flying Titleist Pro-V1X. Back in my junior golfing days, a soft, high performance ball – which the Pro-Vs are intended to be – also meant a ball that, in the aftermath of a shot struck anything less than delectably, could very quickly take on the shape and texture of a Satsuma. It was an understatement to say that, in the intervening years, golf ball technology had come on. Despite the fact that they cost almost £4 each, I couldn't help being seduced by the Pro-Vs – their smooth enamel texture, the way they were somehow simultaneously soft and
robust
– and, if you ignored the time a couple of years ago when I'd won a pack of twelve Nikes in a local long-drive competition, I'd become a little bit of a purist about them.

One byproduct of the culture of everyone choosing the same ball is that it becomes all the more important to find a way of distinguishing yours from those of your playing partners.

Each Titleist is stamped with a single digit number, usually between one and four, to help with differentiation, but it is a cast-iron rule that, in addition to this, each player must mark his ball individually. Some pros will use their own stamp or, as was the case with the Titleists of Michael and Grant, clandestine squiggle. My plan had been to draw a small Cox's apple on mine, but since that would have proved time-consuming, and my shaking first-tee hands probably would have made it look more like a pear, I'd gone for the more reliable – and somewhat old-school – ‘three green dot' formation in permanent marker pen: one above the Titleist logo, and one on either side of it.

The problem with permanent marker ink, of course, is that, like life, or good golf, its permanence is only an illusion. On a dew-sodden morning it can sometimes rub off as a ball makes its journey through fairway, rough and – quite possibly, in my case – shrubbery. And so it was that, as I marked my ball before putting for my par on the second hole, I noticed that it no longer had three dots on it, only two. Consumed by the task of stabbing my ten-foot par putt wide of the hole, I dismissed the matter from my mind. After all, it had happened before, plenty of times. If my Titleist shed more of its ink, then
I'd
attend to the situation, but for now the important thing was that it was still distinguished from Grant's and Michael's. I didn't really think about the matter again until I reached my approach shot on the third hole, marked my ball and began to clean it.

I noted, once again, that the ball bore just two green dots.

I also now noted that these dots were in a slightly different place on the ball, about an eighth of a centimetre below where they'd originally resided.

Additionally, I noted that they were very slightly bigger than the ones I had made with my pen.

I called Grant and Michael over from the opposite side of the fairway, showed them the ball, and explained. Their faces turned grave: maybe not ‘someone has died' grave, but certainly ‘something has died' grave.

Is there another game with rules as multifarious and intricate as golf? It's doubtful. I find it remarkable that professional golfers' brains don't short-circuit from trying to keep all those carefully worded provisos and stipulations in there. Every so often on your golfing travels you'll meet some little bloke, possibly with a moustache and a bit of an issue about the fact that he's only five foot two, who doesn't appear to have a hell of a lot going on in the rest of his life, who'll claim to know it all; but one day, say when his ball lands in a soft drink bottle that also happens to be resting in a rabbit scrape, even his encyclopaedic disciplinary knowledge will fail him. Nobody can possibly know the correct course of action in every situation in a game played in as many different topographical habitats, with as many permutations, as golf. That said, when it comes to playing the wrong ball,
most
good players are pretty savvy – largely because playing the wrong ball is one of the most senseless and crushing of golfing mistakes. As Michael would generously say to me half an hour later, ‘It happens to nearly all of us once, but it very rarely happens twice.'

I've never been one to hunker cackling under the duvet with a pen torch and a copy of that year's updated R&A Rules of Golf, but even I knew that playing a ball other than your own means a two-stroke penalty. But here's the real kicker: if you fail to identify and declare that alien ball on the hole where you first played it, the penalty is outright disqualification. No second serve. No ‘Go back, have another go.' The end. Goodbye.

There was no doubt in my mind that the lethal switchover had happened on the second hole, not the third – I'd just been too dopey, or too neglectful, or too inexperienced, to realise it. Now, as Grant recalled that he'd seen another ball a couple of inches off the fairway on the second hole, not far from his ball and the one I'd thought was mine, it became clear that the crucial moment had occurred just before my second shot. Possibly because of nerves, possibly because I'd been yammering, I had neglected to clean my ball and check its identity before playing it, other than noting that it was a Titleist Pro-V1X, marked with a number two. But we'd hit three good shots off the tee into the sun, all of which had seemed to go straight. Then we'd arrived to find three balls in the fairway. Why would we have imagined – particularly when the adjacent holes were both a fair distance away – that any of those balls was not ours? More to the point, what were the odds – even in a Titleist-dominated world – that someone else had
been
playing a green-dotted Titleist with the exact same specification and number as mine, and left it in this particular fairway? And who was this wasteful, struggling pro who could afford to discard perfectly good £4 missiles in a tournament that cost £325 to enter and – if you ignored Qualifying School Stage Two – only carried a £1000 prize fund? I wanted to meet him. Maybe we could strike a deal: if he apologised nicely and kept me in Titleists for the rest of the season, I'd agree not to steal his driver and throw it into the lake next to the first tee.

There had, of course, been another option open to me when I'd noticed that I had the wrong ball: I could have kept quiet about it and played on. It is doubtful that Michael or Grant would have noticed, and I could always have changed the ball for a fresh one on the next hole. Quite a few non-golfers subsequently asked me why I didn't do this (‘It wouldn't have really hurt anyone, would it?'). As cheating went, it probably seemed a fairly mild example to them – the equivalent of a slightly theatrical dive in a football match, perhaps, or keeping quiet about an incorrect line call that works to your advantage in tennis. They had clearly never heard the one about the bloke who comes into the clubhouse and announces that the bloke who sneakily kicked his ball out of the rough in last month's Saturday Medal has just been sentenced to thirty years in prison after being convicted on multiple counts of rape, GBH and arson (‘He kicked his ball out of the rough?' responds the Greens Committee Chairman. ‘Right! He can think again if he thinks he's playing here again in the next decade!').

Golf's indiscriminate abhorrence of all cheaters had
been
ingrained in my psyche since I had taken the game up.

‘You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank,' Bobby Jones, the thirteen-time major championship winner, famously said when he was congratulated for calling a two-stroke penalty on himself in a tournament.

I wasn't quite going to go that far – unless we were talking about a small, unusually depleted bank – but had I carried on and not admitted my mistake, I would have been in for a world of self-loathing and a lot of sleepless nights.

The following six holes resembled that period where a love affair has ended but neither party is quite able to admit it. Michael, Grant and I couldn't really see how my situation could be rectified, but since this was professional golf, we needed to find a man in one of those red car-dealer's jackets driving a buggy, who needed to radio another man in a red car-dealer's jacket to make my fate official. In the meantime, I played on, somewhat desultorily and, it must be said, shockingly poorly.

‘It's probably for the best,' I said to Michael. ‘I haven't been feeling very well for the last few days anyway.'

‘Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm stuffed with antibiotics myself.'

I watched, a moment later, as he pummelled a drive thirty yards beyond mine. How far, I wondered, did he hit it when he was healthy?

‘It's a tough tour,' said Grant. ‘Everyone's scrabbling for survival, it's expensive and there's hardly any prize money. But that will probably work out well for you, because it means everyone's dosh runs out later in the
year
. I wouldn't worry. You'll still get some invites to tournaments.'

As we reached the ninth green, a buggy pulled up, and from it emerged a Europro Tour official. He said his name was Steve Cox. I wondered if he drew little apples on his golf balls, but, from looking at his stern demeanour, decided he would deem such an activity far too frivolous. After I'd explained the exact course of events, he reiterated what the three of us already knew, and offered me a lift back to the clubhouse. I weighed up my options. On the one hand, I would have quite liked to have continued watching Grant and Michael – who were at that point standing respectively at level par and one under – serenely going about their fairway-splitting, flag-peppering business. On the other hand, there was nothing to play for, and I hadn't been in a golf buggy since 1991.

I loaded my clubs into the back. As we motored back past the first green, I replayed a dewy-eyed, dewy-fairwayed montage of my one
bona fide
completed hole as a pro: the duck-hooked drive, the scruffy wedge that clawed its way up onto the green, the almost-birdie-putt, the frankly quite dull tap-in that followed. I smiled to myself: the first hole was supposed to be the hardest, and at least I could give myself a pat on the back for completing that. As if on cue, my clubs fell off the back of the buggy.

Five minutes later, in the car – I'd avoided the clubhouse and locker room, unable to face my beloved leaderboard, with its ‘DISQ' alongside my name – I thought of the four hundred or so hopeful young Euro-pros, here in Essex and at the other three Stage One
Qualifying
School venues, in Bedfordshire, County Durham and Cumbria. Most of them still had two rounds to go – five, if they were lucky enough to be one of the 240 players who made it to Stage Two of qualifying, at Frilford Heath in Oxfordshire. But for me it was all over already. On the other hand, my contemporaries were on a cold golf course, battling with their minds, whereas I was in a warm car, the most pressing thing in my immediate future the question of whether I would spend an unexpectedly free half-day reading the new John Irving novel, catching up on sleep or rewatching a couple of Will Ferrell fil … Crapping hell! What in God's name
was
that smell?

I'd first noticed it when I was loading my clubs into the boot. In fact, now I came to think about it, maybe it had infiltrated my nostrils quite a while before that, when I'd been too busy with more pressing matters to properly take it on board. Edie had been suggesting I change my golf shoes for a few months now, but I was pretty sure it wasn't them. Not quite damp enough. It had a slightly oaky quality to it … yet it was sort of … acidic, too. You might almost have mistaken it for cat piss. I leaned around the headrest and put my nose a little closer to the canvas of my flimsy Maxfli bag – the one I had bought from Bluewater shopping centre in a half-price sale two years ago, and which I still thought of as ‘brand new' – and gagged slightly.

Replaying the moments before I'd left the house this morning, I began to put two and two together. In fact, I began to put three and two together. The way Bootsy's tail looked unusually
upright
when she came into the entrance hall. The subsequent, sniffing arrival of her cretin brother,
Pablo
, and finally of my oldest cat, The Bear, aka Colostomog, never a big advocate of change in any form. It was entirely possible I could be dealing with more than one brand of urine here. Maybe if I'd been equipped with a stronger sense of smell, or hadn't been so focused on my golf, I would have detected the transgression earlier, but perhaps it was for the best that I hadn't. After all, I could have taken it for a negative sign, and as everyone knows, that kind of thing can really mess up a person's round.