The Club

As of a few weeks ago, I have a new golfing hero. Admittedly, his swing’s a bit on the proddy side, and, had he ever realised his dream of playing with Faldo or Seve, he probably would have been about a hundred yards behind them off the tee. As the sane voice of club golf, however, he may be unsurpassed. His name was Preston Lockwood and, sadly, he died eleven years ago, but not before becoming the star of The Club, Channel 4’s rarely seen 1994 Cutting Edge documentary about petty power trips and elitism within one of South East England’s most exclusive golfing enclaves, which was repeated in October as part of the channel’s twenty-fifth birthday celebrations.

Lockwood wielded no ostensible power at Northwood, Middlesex’s oldest golf club. He did not sit on the Greens Committee, nor did he have a reserved parking space. But when Cutting Edge’s team met him, a thrilled glance of recognition must have passed between them of the kind that passed between Lennon and McCartney when they came up with the bridge for ‘A Day In The Life’. Here was a golf-obsessed man in his eighties – a very posh golf-obsessed man in his eighties, at that – in the middle of a club beset by sexism, under the iron, apparently Masonic rule of a quasi-moblike board of directors, who could provide a rational, super-articulate voice in the middle of all the madness.

There are other pithy, reasonable commentators in The Club. I particularly liked the comment from the ex-committee member about a golf club providing “an opportunity for a disappointed man to achieve some kind of prominence.” The interview with the greenkeepers, where they explain that the people who get on their backs about the state of the course are the exact same people who fail to rake bunkers and repair pitchmarks, is another notable high point. But it’s Lockwood who provides the documentary’s moral base. As the lady’s section complain about being denied the right to vote at the AGM and a “difficult” committee member is threatened with expulsion from the club, Lockwood is always there in the background, spiritually, if not physically, raising his eyebrows. He doesn’t get involved, but he tells us like it is, and looks at the camera despairingly, like a real-life, octogenarian version of Tim from The Office. We learn from him that the average Northwood member is a man “very, very set in his ways… whose ancestors have always voted Conservative” and who “has all these rather boring habits”. It is he, too, who reveals that, until very recently, the ladies locker room wasn’t even equipped with a shower.

Another factor that makes The Club such riveting viewing is that it was shot at a pivotal moment in golf’s social history. Never again, perhaps, would it be possible to see quite so many awful sweaters in one 6514 yard area. 1994 was, in many ways, the last gasp for an old way of club golf life. In a couple of years, a new generation of players would be taking up the game, inspired by Tiger Woods, and men-only bars around the country would be taking down their barricades, but at Northwood the Old Guard are making their last stand, taking wine with one another and making jokes about their nagging wives. That their behaviour does not seem to have been modified for the camera crew only underlines its self-righteousness. “I’ve got no wish to join the Ladies Town Guild of any other women’s organisation,” says the Membership Director, when it’s put to him that women should have more rights at the club.

To anyone who was a member of a British golf club in the late 80s or early 90s, the characters at Northwood will resonate instantly. Watching it, I felt like the most prominent figures at my old golf club in the East Midlands had had their DNA sampled and put in a Petri dish with something more southern and self-satisfied, and been created afresh. I recognised The Cold Eyed Myopic Man With The Moustache Who Sets The Rules, The Ostensibly Cheery Man With The Round Face Who Likes To Pretend That Everyone At The Club Is A Lovely Person, The Over-Grateful Lady Captain Fondling The Nasty Porcelain, The Smoothie With The Car Salesman Swagger, The Chubby Man Who’s Always Having To Run To Keep Up With His Fourball Partners Cos He’s Too Busy Telling Bad Jokes, and lots more. As for the bit where the President complained to the ladies section that they hadn’t put flowers out for his wife at the ladies’ luncheon (“a slur on my Presidency’), it’s unlikely I’ll experience another terrifying icy chill of familiarity like it this decade.

I’m not going to pretend that the Cutting Edge team went to Northwood hoping to find a pleasant, fair-minded institution where everyone existed happily alongside one another. Their montage of rubbish Northwood swings is an indication of their sheer delight at how preposterously seriously their subjects take themselves. But the programme was made in an era before Channel 4 documentaries got their taste for the lurid, and it shows. In the hands of less skilled, more sensationalism-orientated editors, one feels we’d see more of the committee’s dark, cliquey mutterings and less of Lockwood and his pals enjoying golf for what it is: not a childish imitation of a political career, but the most brilliantly, devilishly taunting game imaginable. When he says that it’s time Northwood “began to live in the 20th Century” you listen all the more than you would if he was a young, working class newcomer to the club’s environment (He’s wise and well-heeled and he likes having tea in the clubhouse and he’s seen it all and he knows about golf’s traditions, and he still thinks golf’s power structures are petty and preposterous and in the habit of placing ridiculous amounts of importance on trivial matters. Crikey!)

I thought of The Club again recently when I read the newspaper reports stemming from the recent newsletter from Golf Club Secretary magazine claiming that senior members are “leeches” on their golf clubs. This has sparked all sorts of debate in the media about whether retired players are ruining and dominating their home courses and should have their playing privileges restricted. My feelings on the subject are mixed. There are plenty of sports that fixate on youth and offer it an unbecoming amount of power, and there’s something perennially comforting about the fact that golf isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, few are the under-50 club golfers who haven’t arrived at the course for a quick nine holes in a window in their hectic schedule, only to be confounded by the ever-present retired fourball elite with their bellowing banter, immovable slow play and snide “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” comments. My suspicion is that there aren’t really all that many of these Hell’s Granddads at clubs; it just seems that way, because they’re always there. “Don’t you have homes to go to?” they moan to the club’s juniors, never stopping to ask themselves the same – and rather more pertinent, in their case – question. These are really just more of the “disappointed men” the ex-committee member at Northwood talked about, drunk on a remarkably small amount of power.

Even in a place as elitist as Northwood, circa 1994, it’s obvious to see that these kind of people are not in the majority, just from hearing the groan of dissent that swells at the AGM as the committee attempts to silence any voice that doesn’t tow its robotic line. Maybe the other downtrodden members don’t have Lockwood’s eloquence or ability to put themselves outside the situation, but they are on his side, ultimately. It is he, and not the bullies on the committee, who is their real representative. What the documentary doesn’t tell us is that, when not prodding his iron clumsily down the fairway, Lockwood was a TV actor, who’d had bit parts in everything from The Vicar Of Dibley to Inspector Morse, and worked right up until his death, aged 83. As a man who clearly had plenty of stuff going on in the rest of his life, he had no need to treat his golf club as a battleground for the demons of a squandered existence. But as the cult of The Club grows, the irony is that he may end up being better remembered for his detached, clear-eyed commentary in it than he is for any of his acting roles. As the ultimate anti-leech and a real-life fighter of the good fight, he should be added to the golf’s outsider hall of fame, right up there alongside Lee Trevino, John Daly and the gopher from Caddyshack.