Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (8 page)

1
The idea being to blank out interfering thoughts and instil rhythm by counting ‘One' on the backswing and ‘Two' on the downswing … and to keep your voice low enough so the person in the adjacent bay doesn't hear you and mistake you for a simpleton.

2
One wonders, sometimes, how the pro golf world would react if anyone said anything
genuinely
controversial, or if it would actually just have a collective embolism and cease to exist.

3
A ridiculous activity, not just because cleaning the grooves of a club is usually intended to promote backspin and what I needed from my four-iron, at the present time, was topspin, but also because the grooves didn't actually contain any dirt.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your enquiry.

I've had a look at our database and there is no such record as ‘Shortest Ever Pro Golf Tournament Debut'. I've also discussed the idea with our record management team and they feel the idea is too specific and more of a unique occurrence rather than a record.

I hope this information is of your help.

Thanks,

Amarilis Espinoza

Communications Officer

Guinness World Records

184–192 Drummond Street, London, NW1 3HP

IF MY FIRST
performance as a pro golfer had been something of a let-down, I at least felt I had made an impact. Obviously, being known as That Bloke Whose Golf Bag Smelled of Wee or That Bloke Who Played the Wrong Ball – or, more probably, both – wasn't quite the sort of notoriety I'd envisaged the previous summer, but it was important not to be picky at this early stage. And while I'd hoped that my thirty-one minutes of legal play might have been commemorated by more than the ‘D/Q' alongside my name on the Euro Pro Tour website, it wasn't my fault if the people at Guinness were a touch on the fickle side (I wasn't quite sure what made ‘Shortest Ever Pro Golf Tournament Debut' any less of a record than, say, the officially recognised ‘Shortest Computer Instruction Manual' category).

I had been the subject of a freak sporting occurrence. I couldn't blame myself for that, could I? OK, well maybe I could blame myself a little bit, but in the days that followed I found myself in a surprisingly positive state of mind. As Michael and Grant had told me, even as a non-qualifier I was still likely to get invited to other Europro Tour events. The hope of The Open remained, too. I would have a nervous wait to hear about all that, but I think I'd known, ever since I embarked on my golfing quest, that it was always going to be a matter of playing it slightly by ear. That was OK: I could ‘do' flexible, as anyone who had watched my still somewhat undisciplined practice routines would testify. Besides, it was April – a golfing month when, even in the face of an uncertain future, it's hard not to be optimistic.

Not only is April the time when the golf season begins in earnest, it's also when The Masters, the game's most
sumptuous
tournament, is played, with its greener than green fairways and concordantly coloured winner's jacket. The truth is that an archetypal April in British golf is a time of winter greens, muddy tees and hip flasks. But it takes only one look at Augusta National, where the US Masters is played – one snatch of its ever-present birdsong, one glimpse of its blooming azaleas or its legendary water hazard, Rae's Creek – to give the most pessimistic, soggy golfer the deep-seated conviction that summer is here, and from now on everything is going to be OK. Even in my lost golfing years, the tournament had still excited me. My
Best Shots of the Masters
video had been one of the few survivors of my Great Golf Video Purge of 1996, and ten years on, as I fished it out of a box of other arcane golfing paraphernalia
¹
in my loft, I gave silent thanks to my former self for his foresight.

At the time of writing, it is not possible to buy a new copy of
Best Shots of the Masters
on the Internet, but you can get a used one on
amazon.co.uk
for £1.23. It is, all told, not the most sought-after golf video of all time, and I for one am not holding my breath for the lavishly packaged DVD reissue. Released in 1988 – the year I was first seduced by The Masters – and presented by the veteran golf pundit Renton Laidlaw, who could ooze more respect for Augusta only if he got down on his hands and knees and began to slurp gently from Rae's Creek, it is peppered with such ‘Did-he-really-say-that?' type statements as: ‘It was in 1983 that the club first allowed the professional players in The Masters to use
their
own tour caddies [cue shot of former Masters champion George Archer's wife, Elizabeth, in a white boiler suit], even if,
ahem
, she happened to be a
woman
.' In fact, let's not beat around the bush here: it's appalling. Fawning, muzaky, creakingly edited. My own copy is even worse, in that it's so worn that it now features coverage of a rarely reported snowstorm that interrupted Seve Ballesteros's victory in 1983.

My illogical love of
Best Shots of
… sums up the relationship that I, and countless other golfers who grew up watching the tournament in the eighties and nineties, have with The Masters. Most of us know Augusta is intrinsically a pretty despicable place: a club full of self-important George Bush supporters with outdated, unswerving notions of manners and decorum; an enclave so closed-minded it didn't agree to admit its first black member until 1990, and still outlaws women. Nonetheless, starved from a winter of golfing frustration, we allow ourselves to be seduced. We permit ourselves to imagine driving up Magnolia Lane to the bright white clubhouse, then taking a juicy, blasphemous divot out of the sixteenth tee and watching as our seven-iron shot takes the right-to-left slope of the marble green and drops into the hole, just like Tiger Woods' miracle chip did the year he almost lost to Chris ‘fascinating' Di Marco. Never once do we question the wisdom of expending all this energy fantasising about a tournament whose ultimate prize is an item of clothing so irredeemably naff that our grandparents wouldn't have looked twice at it had it been on the ‘60% off!' rack at Littlewoods in 1986.

A few months previously I'd been comparing notes
on
Masters madness with James Day and David Ford, from the hi-tech Urban Golf facility in London, and the golf writer Dan Davies. The four of us had grown up in vastly different parts of the country and our birth dates spanned almost a decade, yet our adolescent memories of the fervour surrounding Masters week were almost identical. We remembered those Saturday afternoons after the televised highlights of the first two rounds had been shown on
Grandstand
, and how, unleashed onto our home courses with these pictures still fresh in our heads, we would hit more stylish, spectacular shots than we'd believed possible. Did we feel any different now, as adults? No. Our Masters adrenalin was still there. It was just that we no longer had a proper outlet for it.

With this in mind, the four of us came up with a plan. What, we wondered, if we inaugurated our own tournament, that tried to recapture the lawless enthusiasm and instinctive creativity of those junior golfing days? What if we held it on the Saturday of The Masters? What if it combined all the short-game-orientated magic of Augusta with none of its elitism? Shortly afterwards, the Cabbage Patch Masters was born.

The inaugural Cabbage Patch Masters arrived at a perfect time for me. Not only would it fill a gap in my pro schedule, while I was waiting to find out whether I'd get admitted to the British Open qualifiers and further Europro Tour events, it also promised a relatively pressure-free environment in which I could give my ailing chipping and pitching a much-needed MoT. It was to be held at Biddenden, a pitch-and-putt course deep in the Kent countryside that had played host to the 2005 British Pitch-and-Putt Championship, and it marked an
amalgamation
of the Society of Secret Golfers, which I had founded the previous year with James, and the Cabbage Patch Open, the cult, anarchic pitch-and-putt event that Dan and David had been holding on a rough patch of ground in Devon since the turn of the decade.

Maybe it was something to do with watching those guffawing gaggles of men who'd turned up at my home clubs in the past, reserving the tee under some dull-yet-exotic corporate banner, loudly monopolising the course and seeming to have so much more fun than mere club golfers, but I'd always wanted to be a member of a golf society. Since it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to work for a major exporter of chemicals or sell photocopier toner for a living, starting my own society had seemed the easiest way to solve the problem. There was nothing all that clandestine about the Society of Secret Golfers, really. The name simply came from my conviction that there was an ever-growing group of people out there like James and me: people who didn't quite fit the archetypal image of a golfer, who didn't give a hoot whether golf was credible or not, who loved the game, who even loved many of its traditions, but still felt alienated by its perverted dress codes and cliquey customs.

To date, the SSG had been a rather hit-and-miss, ramshackle endeavour. We'd only managed to hold one event, at Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire (best known as the venue for James Bond's golf scene in
Goldfinger)
, at which 30 per cent of the competitors had played the front nine without being informed of the day's scoring format, and whose official shirts had shrunk in the wash.

During the SSG launch, the chasm between the characters of its creators had quickly become obvious. As I
worried
whether people had the right directions to the club, forgot where I'd stored the prizes, lost my clubs and got my ball stolen by a fellow competitor's dog, James played the solid esplanade to my flapping organisational seagull. Over the ensuing months, our relationship continued in a similar fashion. When he was just twenty-three, James had founded his own underground golf centre: a state-of-the-art, subterranean clubhouse, where it was possible to play three dozen of the world's top courses without the hassle of going to America, walking several miles with a bag on your back, or hacking about under trees looking for your ball. In the sport of Urban Golf, a player swatted his or her ball – and, oddly for a golfing environment, there usually
were
plenty of hers here – off delectable Astroturf into a soft screen, then watched as it became computerised and soared away on a frighteningly authentic virtual vista. If he or she was feeling really extravagant, they might order a Budweiser, and perhaps some olives to munch on as they watched their playing partners smack the ball over the cliff edge on the eighteenth at Pebble Beach.

James might have had a similar, disorderly golfing upbringing to me, and have felt ashamed about confessing his love of the game to his schoolmates, but at almost six years my junior he was a product of a different age: the age that I had popped out for a cup of tea and missed, which also happened to be the age when, technically and socially, golf had gone through its most dramatic changes ever. I'd imagined that, with the knowledge of shaft flexes and ball compressions that I retained from long-gone afternoons in the back of the pro shop of Cripsley Edge, coupled with the odd phrase
like
‘over the cellophane bridge',
²
I could get by as a jargon-speaker in the Brave New Golf World. However, an hour spent with James in front of one of Urban Golf's infra-red ball scanners soon gave me my doubts. These doubts became even more extreme in February, when the two of us travelled to Birmingham for my official club-fitting at the Taylor Made Matt headquarters – a sort of robot's version of a clothes shop changing room, only with clubs, not garments – and James got into a technological conversation with my fitter, Anthony.

Since my golfing rebirth I'd plodded along with an armoury consisting of a mid-nineties Callaway driver, a 1970s persimmon Hogan three-wood that I'd had ‘on loan' from my mate Ollie since February 1992, a 1980s Ping Anser putter, of the kind once favoured by Seve Ballesteros, and the Ping irons I'd purchased, in the first flush of my reunion with golf, without regard to loft, lie or shaft, from the Piccadilly Circus branch of Lillywhites. I'd been a bit bashful about showing these to James, who from what I could work out had already updated his clubs four times since the beginning of the year. Upon first inspecting my weaponry, he had made a couple of clucking noises in the back of his throat, of the sort you might hear from a mechanic at an Aston Martin dealership if you asked him to service your rusting Morris Marina. These days, he argued, a good golfer
would
rather hit a ball around his local municipal dirt track with a walking stick than use a set of clubs that hadn't been custom-fitted to his exact height, weight, stance and swing path. That sounded fair enough, but I hadn't realised being ‘custom-fitted' would mean wearing knee and shoulder pads and a helmet, and having numerous little pins stuck to my body.

It was bewildering enough having to stand with my arms spread like the old
World in Action
logo as a computer learned intimate information about my physical make-up. It was more bewildering still to watch as the computer at Taylor Made took this information, then used it to create a sphere-heavy parody of my swing and body, and compared it with that of Ian Poulter (it turned out my computer man had a swing speed 6 mph slower than Ian's, but his computer man seemed to have much more hideous trousers). Most baffling, though, was the discussion taking place a few feet to my rear as all this was going on.

‘What system is that you use? Zonar?'

‘No, we're just on basic infra-red.'

‘What about those 560s, though?'

‘I know, well cool, aren't they? I've heard Nike might be incorporating them.'