Ramblings Of An Inappropriate Professional Golfer

"That is NEVER 100 yards!" (a column for Golf International Magazine)

2009-10-07T14:17:00.003+01:00

I recently went on a lovely walk near Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk. On a hazy day in late summer, this is about as close as you can get to being in LP Hartley’s classic novel The Go-Between without actually wearing a waistcoat and starting an affair with a local tenant farmer. Another plus of the walk was that I only got lost once: a good result for me, and an oversight for which I blame not myself, but the AA’s 50 Walks In Suffolk guidebook, which told me to turn off onto a field edge path after keeping on a lane for a distance of 400 yards which was clearly 325 at the most.

Like a lot of golfers, I’m an enormous pedant when it comes to yardages. In the same way that I thought “There is no way that this is anywhere near a drive and a nine iron!” when I was in Somerleyton, I will often frown as friends tell me that the pub where I am meeting them is “about a hundred yards past the post office” when it is quite obvious I couldn’t get there with my best 3-iron, even if I hit it out of the button. They are mere civilians, so I forgive them, but it doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated. “A hundred yards” is not one of those nebulous numbers like “a couple”: it cannot be casually applied to mean “somewhere between a hundred and five hundred yards. Eventually, that sort of negligence is going to get a person caught in a lateral water hazard.

There was a time when I viewed all everyday experiences through the prism of golf, but I’m slightly better than that now. These days, I can walk in the country for periods of up to ten minutes without sizing up a tree and wondering how lofted an iron I’d need to get over it from the vantage point in question. That said, there was so much golf in my life for so long at such an impressionable age, the game has left its permanent marks on the rest of my life. Lawn- mowing is a notable example: I’m absolutely rubbish at gardening, so can only imagine that my increasing obsession with the lushness of the quarter acre of grass outside my window is my repressed inner greenkeeper struggling to get to the surface. Then there’s wind: give me a blustery morning, and I’m a nervous wreck – at least until I remember that I’m a) not 15, b) don’t have a crucial Junior Open to play in that day and c) the travails of walking to the local train station in a 20mph headwind is not likely to put up my Walking To The Local Train Station Handicap by 0.1.

This might seem like highly antisocial behaviour to many, but I’m convinced that golf has also helped prepare me for adult life as much as it has hindered me. Ditto with the golfing friends I grew up with. I got together with the principle among these last month at my old golf club in Nottinghamshire, Cripsley Edge, for a deferred reunion, marking the two decades that had elapsed since we first met. All of us have had our heartache in that time and let go of dreams – some of them almost realistic, some of them less so - of making a living as playing pros, but I was immediately struck by just what polite, socially well-adjusted people my old friends had all grown up to be. Of course, there’s every chance that this impression might have been coloured by the fact that, the last time we all saw each other, we were probably throwing apples at one another in the club orchard, but I was reminded of PG Wodehouse’s comment that “the only way to find out a man’s true character is to play golf with him”. Perhaps, as people who all came of age believing that golf was more important than life itself, now we’d been through the ultimate heartache of knowing that we had failed, we’d become better equipped to deal with life’s other disappointments.

It’s a theory, anyway, if a flawed one. What I am sure of is that, as kids who went to some pretty dodgy schools, golf kept us (mostly) off the streets at a crucial time in our life, and has made us men with firm handshakes, an innate appreciation of bad luck, a consideration for the most concentrated moments of our fellow humans and a super dim view of cheating.

In stating this, I’m not saying that golf always breeds socially adept adults – a person only has to watch the post-round interviews during a large professional tournament to have that idea blown out of the water – or that it has necessarily made us great people; I’m just saying that, if you take the best things it can teach you, it doesn’t make you a complete sociopath in the outside world: a fact that, to me, as someone who for a long time didn’t think golf had done anything good for him, is still coming as a revelation. After twenty years, I have realised that I like handshakes, and I like good sportsmanship. I’m also starting to realise that I like the non-golfing person golf has made me (somewhat annoying though it undoubtedly might be, particularly to those with a laissez faire attitude to short distance calculation). Although to undermine that, I probably should add that we’d only played four holes at Cripsley before one of us had hidden a loose branch from a tree in one of his fellow players’ bags. I should also point out that the person who hid it was me, and that, yes, I do do that when I’m not on a golf course as well.

Nice Jumper

Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia

My First Open As A Tweeter (A Column For Golf International Magazine)

2009-10-07T14:02:00.004+01:00

When you consider where we have got to as a social beings and consumers of information in 2009, it seems slightly preposterous to talk about how you liked to “shut the world out” twenty years ago. Particularly if, like me, you were a teenager living in the British countryside, what on earth there could possibly have been to shut out? The sound of my mum vacuuming? Iris and John’s peacocks across the road? The ring of a prototype mobile phone that you’d borrowed while Anneka Rice wasn’t using it on Treasure Hunt? Nonetheless, when it came to the week of The Open, “lockdown” was my intention. Door closed. Snacks arranged on the coffee table. Curtains drawn for fear of a rhombus of sunlight across the screen spoiling my enjoyment of a Seve escape shot. Beanbags and cushions painstakingly arranged at least an hour before Steve Rider made his opening address.

I was aiming to create a similar sort of ambience in the build-up to the last day’s coverage this year at Turnberry, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I mean, I could have switched off my mobile phone, ditched my laptop and plugged in an old TV, without Sky Plus, but that would have been a contradiction of the fact that I am fundamentally without self-discipline. Like an increasing number of people, I like to feel connected while I watch my majors, but it doesn’t always make for the most relaxed kind of viewer experience.

It is now an established custom that, within the course of a big tournament, my friends and I will exchange a twenty or so text messages discussing anything from the chances of a David Duval renaissance to the apocalyptic nothingness that might result from a Steve Flesch victory to the myriad ways in which Sergio Garcia has let us down (again). Since the performance of Tom Watson raised more emotions than usual, and drew the interest of a considerable amount of my friends who don’t normally give a flying divot about golf, the texts buzzed in more plentifully than ever this year. But the thing about texts is that they don’t demand your immediate attention; nor do they make you feel like you’ve been sucked down a giant virtual well, where whole hours of time can vanish without you realizing. Neither of these things, however, can be said about Twitter.

Twitter is the social networking facility where people are asked to express, in no more than 140 characters, what they are doing at that particular moment. It’s quicker-moving and more addictive than Facebook and feels like one evolutionary step further towards the inevitable day when each of us has a screen for a face. Presumably you know about it by now, since the BBC’s Ken Brown – a man who, for all his pluses, could not exactly be described as a maven of the information superhighway – knows about it. It’s only recently that Peter Alliss has stopped saying “We’ve had an email” in the manner of a man who’s just been hand-delivered a letter by androids, so when Ken asked us to “Twitter” him during proceedings at Turnberry, I’m sure many younger viewers had the feeling that one gets when one’s grandma begins using the word “phat” at a family dinner party.

This was my first Open as a tweeter, and I found the experience a pleasantly communal one. As to whether it actually enhanced my enjoyment of the Open… I’m not so sure. It was nice to sit alone in my living room and share with numerous other golf fans around the globe the joy of Mark James’ comment that “Ken Brown used to soak his balls in hot water before playing” (presumably James would know, being his former roommate) and a general consensus that, through the course of his anchoring, Gary Lineker had the distracted air of a man hearing someone repeatedly shouting “Boobs!” into his earpiece. Nonetheless, with the phone buzzing and the tweets mounting, I soon slipped behind on the action. My attempts to catch up, then proceed to watch with a ten minute time delay using my Sky Plus didn’t help: I’d read seven tweets about Ross Fisher’s quadruple bogey at the fifth before I’d actually seen it.

The BBC’s newfangled, faster-moving coverage only added to the feeling of being overwhelmed with information. Televised golf used to be infamous for its lulls, but not any more, when, even when you’re not swamped with action, interviews and statistics, you can press your red button and watch something happening elsewhere on the course, with entirely different commentators. In this kind of environment, with a heated finish, the chances of there being time for Alliss to slowly ponder some birdlife and say something like “The crow… I wonder what’s in store for him this winter?” are almost zilch.

Yet for some of us, this is what TV golf, at least partly, has always been for. Of course we like the action-packed parts of golf, such as the battle between Watson, Westwood and Cink at Turnberry, but what always used to make them even more exciting was the sleepy bits that offset them. Sure, Alliss still has a habit of adding the phrase “I fancy” to ordinary thoughts and sentences for no apparent reason and Andrew Cotter will talk about Tiger having “missed the fairway and found some horrible cabbage” but is that enough? I want to also have the time, as a viewer, to speculate on what it would be like if Tiger literally found some cabbage whilst rooting around for his ball, and whether, if puckish, he might consume it. I want to have the space to practice adding my own “I fancy”s to ordinary sentences (“I found a tee peg in my hair… I fancy”; “I fancy that woman off Mad Men… I fancy”). The action at Turnberry was so fast-moving that it was only an hour or two after Cotter called Man’sero “the full Monty” that I found time to pontificate on how Monty might feel about this (would he need to return to his mid-nineties weight in compensation?).

This information age approach might go some way to silencing the people who still claim that golf is an old man’s sport, but it also means that commentators lose their flow and seem harried. And why wouldn’t they be, when there’s so much going on, and, to boot, they have to update their Twitter status? I noticed two exchanges between Wayne Grady and Alliss when one man seemed keen to silence a non-sequitur from the other, and I can only imagine that this is because of the pressure that’s on them to provide news, news, news. But is this what we really want, as viewers, when news is all around us anyway? We – in our technology saturated state – might not have time to smell the flowers any more, in the Bobby Jones tradition, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to still have someone to do it for us.

Nice Jumper

Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia

Woodhall Spa

2009-10-07T13:59:00.004+01:00

Me, my friend Robin, and my friend Robin's hair do battle with the 111 bunkers of Woodhall Spa: my latest column for the FT...

A Round With Disabled British Open Competitor Richard Saunders

2009-08-02T20:59:00.003+01:00

Latest column for the FT.

The Day I Almost Stole Ernie's Balls

2009-06-15T18:31:00.003+01:00

A golf column for the FT on playing in Pro-Am for The Spanish Open.

Olden Golf

2009-05-16T06:10:00.003+01:00

My latest golf column for the FT.

Golf At Saunton With Emma Hope

2009-04-23T08:53:00.002+01:00

My latest golf column for the FT.

Gleneagles And St Andrews

2009-04-06T07:07:00.002+01:00

A travel piece from the FT.

A Round Of Golf With Viv Saunders And Her Cardigan Corgi

2009-04-06T07:04:00.002+01:00

My latest FT column.

I Take On Wentworth. Wentworth Wins. Various Vulgar Houses Look On, Amused...

2009-02-14T10:34:00.004Z

My latest FT column.

Britain's Best Pitch'n'Putt Course

2009-01-12T14:01:00.001Z

My latest FT golf column.

Prog Golf

2008-11-15T13:48:00.002Z

My latest FT golf column.

Royal St George's and Cinque Ports

2008-10-31T15:53:00.003Z

Another FT golf column.

Some pics (including some from Thorpeness):

The Best Golf Course I Have Ever Played

2008-10-31T15:51:00.001Z

Les Bordes.

What Is the USPGA's Thing?

2008-10-01T17:41:00.001+01:00

It might not have had the asset of Tiger Woods, but only the terminally churlish could claim that the 2008 USPGA Championship lacked the ingredients of a “proper” major championship. In terms of adrenaline-fuelled shotmaking and down-to-the-wire intrigue, not one of the year’s other three majors quite matched it. I would like to think that this might help to finally lift it out of the shadows of the Masters, The US Open and The Open in the minds of the general populace, but I have a feeling it won’t.

Nine decades into its history, The USPGA remains The Major Golf Championship Your Grandma Hasn’t Heard Of (provided, of course, that your grandma doesn’t happen to be Barb Nicklaus). It’s the lone major where, asked to name one of its winners from the recent past, the average TV golf nut will not usually have instant recall. “Who won it in 1997?” I found myself wondering frustratingly the other day. I had to look up the answer, and realised with a bit of a jolt that it was one of my favourite golfers of all-time, Davis Love III. Think Masters and think Augusta, think US Open and think cruelty, think Open and think links, but it’s hard to put your finger on quite what makes the USPGA distinctive. The inclusion of everyday American club pros does not significantly affect the character of the tournament, so, were you to be asked by a newcomer to define the tournament, you’d probably find yourself scrambling slightly: “Well… it’s normally played in quite hot weather. Oh yes! And it’s got a really big trophy!”

There was a time when the PGA could be relied on as often as not to be won by journeyman pros in fairly forgettable fashion, but since Sergio Garcia’s famous “tree shot” to the eighteenth at Medinah in 1999, it’s been pretty much - Shaun Micheel’s 2003 victory being an exception - top level entertainment all the way. But, somewhat paradoxically, it’s actually the more recent years, when the USPGA has been a better tournament, that have served to most clearly highlight its lack of one significant distinguishing feature. The fact that the USPGA is now a great tournament that brings out the best in the best players makes its lack of kudos more of a glaring, niggling enigma.

It strikes me that, ultimately, what the USPGA needs is a Thing. I’m not talking about a sexual appendage here: that would be obscene, and is hardly the kind of thing anyone would want to see sticking up out of the hallowed fairways of Hazeltine National or Sahalee Country Club. What I mean is that, for many years, Tom Selleck was just an ordinary, strikingly handsome second-rate TV star, then he grew a moustache, and suddenly he had his Thing. At one point, Jesper Parnevik was merely an everyday, Swedish baseball-wearing tour pro with an occasional habit of jumping into icy lakes after winning tournaments, then he met Johan Lindeberg, who told him to turn the peak of the cap up at the front, and he had his Thing. With a Thing invariably comes widespread recognition: just ask Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, or the fruit juice manufacturer who suddenly decided to make pomegranates cool.

The PGA does not quite seem to have the same store of classic, enduring golfing images as its peer tournaments, so over the last nine years, it’s clung to Sergio’s tree shot somewhat, reshowing footage of it around 369 times during TV coverage of every USPGA since it, but one single shot cannot shoulder the burden of being a tournament’s Thing. With Larry Mize’s 1987 chip-in against Greg Norman as its Thing, The Masters would not be The Masters. With Doug Sanders’s missed tiddler at St Andrews in 1970 as its Thing, The Open would not be The Open. Until 1958, when it changed its format to strokeplay, the fact that the USPGA was matchplay was its thing, but at the moment its problem is that its Thing, if anything, is that it’s the least prestigious major. Simply using the tagline “Glory’s Last Shot” doesn’t really sell it. It needs something more potent, and, during those moments of Garcia and Harrington’s final round duel at Oakland Hills that were too tense to watch, I jotted down a few suggestions. These included:

1. Start Playing On Horseback.
We have polo, so why not golfo as well?
Possible upside: Might provide a big enough controversy to make any “USPGA isn’t a proper major” issues fade into the background.
Possible downside: Distressing scene involving World Horse Welfare might ensue if Woody Austin’s temper becomes a factor.

2. Get An Even Bigger Trophy.
At the moment, The USPGA has a big trophy, donated by early 20th Century aviation pioneer Rodman Wanamaker, but if you compare a photograph of someone holding it, taken from thirty feet away, to a close-up of someone holding the US Open trophy, they don’t look all that different.
Possible upside: “Biggest trophy, biggest tournament” subtext planted in public’s minds.
Possible downside: Freak return to form for Ian Woosnam might lead to damaging “Silverware Squashes Golfer” press coverage.

3. Have Jelly In The Bunkers Instead Of Sand
An innovation that would almost certain silence those who complain that pros have reduced bunkers to being anything but “traps”, or that American bunkers are homogenous and unimaginative.
Possible upside: Could introduce winning moments of levity in tournament’s final stages.
Possible downside: If John Daly is ever going to get back to form and fitness and capture a second title, the last thing he needs tempting him after an errant iron-shot is a big pit full of tasty treats.

4. Make It A Pitch And Putt Tournament
Don’t you just love watching those clips of the par three tournament before the Masters? Don’t you wish you could see more? Would there really be anything wrong with an entire tournament, complete with World Ranking Points and large prize money, played along similar lines?
Possible upside: Would take long-hitting out of the equation.
Possible downside: Would take long-hitting out of the equation.

Out of these, I find myself leaning most strongly towards the last hypothesis. At this year’s USPGA, the talk was all about how brutally the course had been set up. A player could hit a great shot to the green, bounce a yard too far, and end up in a virtually unplayable lie. The eighteenth, meanwhile, had been moulded and lengthened into arguably the most remorseless finishing hole in major championship history. Perhaps the USPGA was trying to outdo the US Open, but in doing so it just made itself look even more like the tournament’s less noticeable younger brother: yet another very tricked-up, stamina-sapping golf event. It’s no surprise that, in the Sky Sports commentary box, as Ben Curtis lined up a chip, Butch Harmon mistakenly announced: “If he can get this up and down he’ll be leading the Open Championship.” And, since Butch is American, he wasn’t talking about our Open. It’s not enough for the USPGA that it’s played on the same courses as it’s home country’s national championship (this year’s USPGA venue, Oakland Hills, has held six US Opens), it seems to want to operate on the same par-is-pain aesthetic. What it really needs to do, perhaps, is go completely the other way.

Okay, so par three golf would probably be taking matters too far, but why not play the USPGA on significantly shorter courses? Somewhere between, say, 6200 yards and 6600? There’d be lots of birdies, and no doubt lots of comments from officials about the course being “humiliated” but would the entertainment really be diminished? How many people really complained that it was boring when Tiger Woods reduced Augusta’s 15th to a drive and a wedge in 1997, or in the days when so many birdies and eagles would pop into the hole on the final day at the Masters and Open that a person would often need to go outside and take a breath of fresh air, for fear of hyperventilating?

Is it really we – the viewers – who feel wronged when big tournaments result in players finishing 17, 19, 23 under par, or is it just a few men in suits with too much time on their hands? By breaking the modern trend of fighting equipment with terrain, the USPGA might find The Thing it is definitely looking for, and had it taken the same approach at Oakland Hills this year, I cannot believe we would have seen a significantly less interesting tournament. The only difference, in my case, might have been the eradication of the little, devilish voice in my head, as I watched Sergio Garcia come down the home stretch. The one that, even though it wanted Garcia desperately to win, could not stop itself from whispering: “But are you sure this should be that momentous first major victory? After all, it’s only the USPGA.”

Thorpeness

2008-08-14T07:48:00.002+01:00

My latest golf column for the Financial Times.

Eco Golf

2008-07-29T13:58:00.001+01:00

It would be extremely hard to be a golfer these days and remain completely oblivious to Florida. If you haven’t been on holiday to one of the place’s seemingly endless supply of ultra-manicured golf resorts then you’ve probably at least had the idea drilled into you that it’s a Valhalla for the golfing rich: half eternally sunny retirement monolith, half PGA money list commune. Me? I’ve never been, but I’ve seen enough East Coast Swings – both types – Golf Channel ads, and episodes of Miami Vice to have a fairly lucid mental picture of its character. That said, over the last decade, nothing has told me more about the Sunshine State than the books of Carl Hiaasen.

As a comic crime writer, Hiaasen is even more reliably madcap and ebullient than Elmore Leonard. To say that, since 1986’s Tourist Season, he’s essentially written the same novel eleven times is not to remotely denigrate his art. Each Hiaasen book features a gratifyingly familiar cast of characters: the evil property developer/strip club owner, the hard-done-by minimum wage heroine, the hapless, good-heartedly jaded investigative journo, the slightly scary but well-meaning off-the-grid eco warrior. Each is just as tightly-plotted as the one before it, and manages to paint a clearer, more damning picture of the demise of a corrupted Wetlands area than a hundred politic non-fiction tomes on the same subject. Hiaasen is the Trevino of the written page: he has the talent for a broader, more classic approach, but why bother, when he does what he already does so well?

You’re more likely to find someone trying to snare a bobcat than a birdie in a Hiaasen novel, but it turns out that, way back before he got his journalism degree from the University Of Florida, Hiaasen was a golfer: not a devoted one, or a particularly great one, but a slightly obsessive and troubled one all the same. In his new memoir, Fairway To Hell (Bantam Press, £14.99), he writes of his haphazard return to the game after three decades away, and tries to come to terms with a golfing world that has changed beyond all recognition since his early seventies walk-out, featuring freakish psychological aids and “clubheads as large as Ozzy Osbourne’s liver”. It’s a book in which every masochistic hacker with a head full of swing instructions will find something to relate to.

If I were trying to convert a newcomer to Hiaasen, I would not recommend Fairway To Hell as the place to start. Next to the banquet of his fiction, it’s snacklike, and sometimes a bit bony at that. Since there’s never any real sense of what Hiaasen is trying to achieve with his golf, an essay format would have probably been more successful, rather than trying to hammer and stretch his adventures into inappropriately linear form.

One very interesting element of the book, however, is its commentary on the ecological issues associated with golf. As someone who once wrote that Dick Cheney’s pacemaker should be hooked up to a polygraph machine, Hiaasen worries that, by playing at Florida’s Republican-populated country clubs, he’ll be rubbing shoulders with the enemy. Being shown around one clubhouse, he sees the taxidermied heads of elk, moose, brown bear and even an African lion, and wonders if “bagging large game is a requirement for membership.”

“Untold thousands of acres of wild habitat in this country have been sacrificed for the dubious cause of recreational golf,” he writes. But in the end Hiaasen wonders if golf course development is actually the lesser of the two evils. Most new courses in Florida use recycled water and less toxic fertiliser, and, with almost every unspoilt acre in the area up for grabs, is a new golf course really as bad as a new strip mall with accompanying unsightly housing and sewer? During Hiaasen’s golfing travels, he encounters bald eagles, alligators, racoons and red-tailed hawks. In fact, one of the many reasons he can’t break ninety seems to be that he’s distracted by the abundant wildlife. “Look at that fucking monkey!” he shouts at one point, distracting a playing partner from an important putt. “In a sad but ironic way,” he concludes, “the boom in golf courses is actually keeping greener what’s left of florida.”

As a state of extremes – extreme natural beauty, extreme climate, extreme environmental devastation, extreme expanding population of nearly 1000 new residents per day – Florida does not represent the norm of golf-related ecological issues, but it’s hard not to come away from Fairway To Hell with some more generalised food for thought about the game and the environment. As a golfer, I’m fairly unique in having a smallish carbon footprint (I’d like to say this is purely from reasons of conscientiousness, but the truth is that it’s mainly because, like Hiaasen, I’m terrified of flying) but every time I drive around the country to lose a dozen balls Pro-Vs at another artificially-maintained, closed-off green kingdom, I’m not just making another little contribution to the greenkeeper’s tax-free coffers, I’m making another little contribution to the demise of our planet. Tell a Guardian-reading, eco-aware charity fundraiser that you play golf, and you’ll quickly hear all about the harm that your needlessly indulgent sport has done to our planet’s human, animal and plant life, and rightly so. Golfers drive some of the biggest, most gas-guzzling cars, take some of the most elaborate holidays and often pay little attention to where their clothes are manufactured.

On the other hand, a teenage part of me – the same part that once argued that the courses where I played were far more stunning pieces of natural terrain than the countryside where my mum and dad went on their weekend walks – has a tendency to leap irrationally to my beloved decadent pastime’s defence here. Golf can be thoughtless and thuggish to the land around it – for evidence, one only has to look at the monstrous edifice that has been built in place of the art deco masterpiece that formerly overlooked he 17th green at Wentworth – but it can be thoughtful and nurturing too. Would the site of the Old Course be quite as stunning if golf had never been played there? Would it still even be green? Would Sunningdale? Pebble Beach? Fulford? Just north of Thetford, in south Norfolk, adjacent to the A11, there’s an undulating patch of heathland which I often drive past and always tell myself I should walk across, but what most of my brain is thinking when I see it is: “That’s a terrible waste of good golfing country!”

Once you start arguing about whether it was pre-ordained that golf simply had to be played on certain tracts of land, you’re not far away from the age-old argument of how exactly, bearing in mind the inexorable thrust of evolution, a person defines “natural”: How much more ”natural” is a domestic dog than a cloned sheep? How much more “natural” is a loaf of bread than some uncut heroin? The future hinted at by Hiaasen’s golfing Florida – a land where, with more and more affordable and unaffordable housing destroying the countryside, wildlife flocks to the fairways - might seem like a very unnatural, and slightly apocalyptic, one, but there are times when I can see it. This summer, I told myself I’d get out into the countryside more, but my own East Anglia seems overpopulated – everyone doing the same walks, everyone trying to get away from it all in the same places – and it’s frequently been on the golf course where I’ve felt most at peace, most at one with the land. I mean, I like walking across a heath, and seeing a colourful bird in a tree, but walking across a heath and seeing a colourful bird in a tree, and nailing a 300 yard drive… now that’s real spiritual peace. Obviously this comes from the biased perspective of someone who was permanently hypnotised to think in tees and greens from his youth, and whose opinions are hence too intrinsically warped to be taken seriously on any environmental issue, but if we are to keep destroying our planet at the current rate, there are times when the idea of golf course-as-compromised-green-haven does not seem like the most horrific dystopia imaginable.

www.tom-cox.com

Professor Yaffle

2008-06-30T11:06:00.000+01:00

I still own my first golf club. It says on the bottom of it that it’s a seven-iron, but, looking at the width of its face and its angle of loft, I have my doubts. Back in the mists of time, a member of my old club’s scratch team began calling it Professor Yaffle, after the woodpecker from Bagpuss – possibly because it’s made out of wood, possibly because I would adopt a sudden, studious aura whilst using it – and the name has stuck. I think of The Prof as a kind of inverted Trojan device: it originates from timber, and you can sneak it onto the battlefield without your opponents being any the wiser. Its shaft rises only just above knee-height, and while I’ve never used it as a hidden fifteenth club, I cannot deny that I’ve often been tempted.

If you saw Professor Yaffle’s face, which only a mother could love, and its tiny hickory shaft, you’d immediately assume that I kept it for sentimental reasons. In a sense, you would not be incorrect. It was given to me by my late granddad, whose wartime buddy had heard his grandson had taken up golf, and kindly fished some old, mismatched clubs out of his attic. My granddad was the most good-natured and absent-minded of men, and I still have fond memories of our games together on the local pitch and putt course. Some of these – the time he stood, completely oblivious, gnawing on a biscuit four feet in front of the people teeing off on the adjacent hole, for example, or the time that I informed him, as we walked up the seventh fairway, that he had mistakenly put the flag from the sixth in his bag, mistaking it for an unusually long club – will surely stay with me forever. Nonetheless, the other clubs from that original quarter set have long since been sold, lost, or abandoned. The truth is, the real reason I’m keeping Professor Yaffle is that I hold out a tiny hope that, one day, it will be the secret weapon responsible for winning me a championship of significant magnitude –a proto rescue club performing one of the biggest rescues in golfing history. I’ve even rehearsed the interview that follows this performance:

Lineker: “So, Tom. 62 today. Quite a change after your 91 of yesterday. If you were to attribute your good score to one factor, what do you think it would be?”

Cox (holding Professor Yaffle up to the camera): “Well, Gary, I really couldn’t have done it without this.”

Lineker: “Well, there you have it. I’ve seen plenty of players experiencing a resurgence in form because of a new club, but this is the first time I’ve seen one of them experiencing it because of a walking stick!”

I do not know exactly how old Professor Yaffle is, but I would estimate that he dates from the Edwardian era, when mid-irons apparently looked like confused wedges and grooves were dimpled. The inscription on the bottom of his much-dinted head says that he was made in Scotland, but also that he came from Tom Williamson, from Hollinwell golf club, one of the most famous British teaching professionals of the early 1900s. Since Hollinwell is probably my favourite golf course of all time, this only draws me to The Prof even more. As for his grip, I am sure it is not the original, but I can say with certainty that it has not been replaced in the twenty years I have owned him. It now provides a misleading yardstick (and I emphasise the “stick” part of “yardstick” here) when the grips on my other clubs need replacing. To any sane golfer, the shiny rubber at the top of my driver is about thirty months past its renew-by date, but I can always look at Professor Yaffle and say, “Well, it never did him any harm, did it?” and put it off for a few more months.

Of course, to most sane modern players, my persistence in clinging to The Prof is an indication of my overall slapdash approach to toolsmanship, my criminal lack of understanding of the technological intricacies of club design. But that’s not quite true. I like new golf clubs very much. I like the way they shine more than the old golf clubs that I haven’t got around to cleaning. A few weeks ago, in fact, I got a new set of Nike SasQuatch Sumo irons, and they’re very nice. As for what more together players call their “performance”, who knows? The way it seems to me is that they’re golf clubs and, like most other golf clubs, if you swing them well, they will help the ball go more or less where you want it to go.

A couple of years ago, when I made the rash step of trying my hand at the Europro Tour for a year, I took the unprecedentedly enlightened step – for me, at least - of getting custom-fitted for the endeavour by a top golf club manufacturer. I’m not going to blame the clubs for the insipid, shank-happy chaos that followed, but my poor form has only served to exacerbate my suspicion of custom-made weapons. I mean, swings can change shape significantly on a day-to-day basis (mine especially): What if you’re swinging like Jimmy Tarbuck on fitting day, but fully intend to mimic the hand movement of Steve Elkington come the time of your first tournament? Are your custom-made clubs going to be right for you then? At least with my latest irons I know that they’ve been standard-made for someone with a generically half-decent swing, rather than the caffeine-propelled, flailing octopus that I was circa February 2006.

I should probably point out here that I’m not a complete luddite. I appreciate a lot of things about the modern game. I would not want to return to the era of the small ball, just as I would not want to return to the era of the three day week or that dodgy mustard-coloured ensemble Doug Sanders wore during the 1970 Open. I enjoy the fact that a Titleist Pro-V goes twenty percent further off the tee than balatas did when I took golf up. But I can see that the instant awareness that young players have of high-spec equipment is doing the game more harm than good. When Peter Alliss talked recently about modern pros being “mollycoddled”, I was with him all the way. That mollycoddling includes equipment, and it starts long before a good player has hit his first shot on tour.

It is hardly surprising that, in the wake of the many newspaper articles about Nick Dougherty branding Alliss’ comments as “disgusting”, the overwhelming reader support is in favour of Alliss. Dougherty might have sounded slightly less like exactly the kind of spoilt robo-pro that Alliss was describing if, in his own defence, Dougherty had been able to offer a story about chipping stones on a beach as a ten year-old, equipped with only a Professor Yaffle-style hand-me-down. It might be a long time since Alliss struck a shot in a major tournament, but you can guarantee he has more awareness of the modern game than Dougherty has of the bygone one. Has Dougherty ever even used a club with a wooden head, let alone one with a wooden shaft?

I started playing golf at the dawn of a new, techno-obsessive era and, even at that point, I was surrounded by kids who were increasingly interested in the latest graphite-shafted driver and decreasingly interested in the artistic nuances of swing and course design. These were the precursors to Dougherty’s generation: the last kids to grow up with one woods with heads significantly smaller than their feet, blinded by the glinting shafts of Tour Burners and Wilson Whales. Maybe it was because I immersed myself in the biographies of Seve and Lee Trevino – in their stories of ingeniously manufactured three-iron pitch shots and balls hit with soft drink bottles – that I stayed permanently behind the times with equipment, but I can’t help thinking that an obsession with techno-perfection stifles creativity. It is also probably one of the major reasons why we are stepping worryingly towards an era of professional golfing clones.

Dougherty might be able to correct me on this, but my guess is that, growing up, his granddad did not give him a hickory-shafted seven-iron, and he did not then proceed to take it on his family holiday to a campsite in the Cotswolds, and – imagining hard that it was the shiny wedge that Seve employed from the edge of Royal Lytham’s eighteenth to secure the 1988 Open – use it to chip shot after shot over his neighbour’s tents. On the other hand, he has turned out to be a much better chipper than me, so read into that what you will. But, given the choice between watching Dougherty or Paul Casey or Justin Rose, and Seve, Trevino, or any other better than half-decent player who had been forced to grow up manufacturing shots with a less-than-perfect club, I’d opt for the latter every time. Moreoever, when, back in August 2006, I started to hit long game form in my final Europro Tour event of the season, The Bovey Castle Championship, but got the short game jitters, it was with a genuine faith – a faith you can’t buy from your local American Golf – that I removed my smart new 64 degree Taylor Made wedge and replaced it with Professor Yaffle. And, even now, two years on, with my dreams of ever making an money in a pro event long since shattered, I still can’t help believing that, had he not slipped so far below the dividers in my bag that it was impossible to get him out, my old hickory friend would have helped me out of a jam.

Golf: A Minor Rehearsal For The Ten Commandments? Really?

2008-04-20T19:44:00.003+01:00

I’ve been reading Alistair Cooke’s The Marvellous Mania recently, which is almost certain to enter my list of all-time top five golf books, alongside George Plimpton’s The Bogeyman, Pete Dexter’s Train, PG Wodehouse’s Golf Omnibus and Timothy O’Grady’s On Golf. This is all the more impressive, since it’s not really a “proper book” at all, but a posthumous collection of Cooke’s golf writing and broadcasting. Perhaps it’s because, during my childhood, I perceived Cook as merely another one of the many hundreds of sleepy sounds that came from my mum and dad’s beloved Radio 4, but his observations about the game seem sharper without his soothing, moist-throated tones.

I’m now at a stage in my life when I regularly realise that, while some of the people associated with golf that I once thought were tedious old fogeys were actually tedious old fogeys, others were simply iconoclasts grown wise, and Cooke was certainly one of the latter. If I’d actually listened to some of his Augusta-themed Letters From America when I was sixteen, instead of just dismissing them as a slightly more far-flung version of The Shipping Forecast, I not have taken quite so long to understand some of golf’s more profound truths.

Now, at the age of 32, as possibly the UK’s least appropriate golf pro, having finally given up my hopes of making it on any Tour, ever, I find that Cooke, a hacker who couldn’t even break a hundred when trying to impress the screen siren Rita Hayworth, tells me things I’ve always known about the game, about my game, but not always been able to put into words. I love his confession that he’d always imagined his swing to resemble Tom Weiskopf on the takeaway and Dave Marr on the downswing but that on tape it actually looked like “a man simultaneously climbing into a sweater and falling out of a tree.” He’s also spot on when he says “golfers are a special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.”

One statement, though, gave me a little bit of trouble. “Golf,” wrote Cooke, “is not only a major exercise in military strategy and tactics, but also a minor rehearsal of the Ten Commandments.” I’d built up so much respect for Cooke’s understanding of the game by this point that my initial reaction was to rub my chin and say “Ah, so true” but then I really thought about the second part of the observation and reconsidered. Like many people who rarely saw the inside of a religious building whilst growing up, the only one of the Ten Commandments I could remember was something about not coveting my neighbour’s oxen, which – with the possible exception of a couple of courses in north Derbyshire – didn’t seem relevant to golf, and when I looked the other Commandments up, I remained nonplussed. Still, Cooke seemed to be right about everything else, so he must have been right about this, too, surely? Did his observation contain the secret to why my handicap had been pretty much in reverse ever since the time in 1991 when, for one single heady afternoon, I got down to 1.4? Why I had not made a single cut during my EuroPro Tour campaign of 2006? I decided it was time to put Cooke’s theory to my test, to find out a) if Cooke was talking rubbish and b) if my own golfing woes were actually not down to my wristy backswing after all, but to my lifelong atheism.

1. I Am The Lord Your God
I have no quibble regarding the relevance of this one, if you substitute “golf” for “God”. Nobody ever shot 65 from the back pots at Wentworth without a level of worship that had, at some point, verged on fundamentalism. Admittedly, golf is no longer the primary concern in my life, but I think I can safely say that, at the height of my golfing obsession, the game was utmost in my thoughts: a green deity for which I would sacrifice everything, whether it was the revision for my GCSE Maths retake or the possession of any remotely fashionable hairstyle between the dates of April, 1988 and September, 1992.

2. You Shall Not Make Yourself An Idol
At this point I can’t help but ask, “Did Cooke, in his 96 years on the planet, ever actually witness an interview with Nick Faldo?” Anybody who’s ever stood over a chip shot from a bare lie over a bunker and told themselves, “I am the greatest!” then watched the ball bounce once, check and stop dead an inch from the cup knows that, in the realm of mind golf, there is no substitute for self-worship. Me? I try it, and it works four or five times a year, but I find that my resident evil brain worm mostly gets in the way with helpful advice like “Shank it!” and “Remember when you almost missed your tee shot of the Open Qualifying, 2006!”. Phil Mickelson, though, bouncing down the fairway with that big pork-eating grin on his face? What do you think Phil’s telling himself? “I am not an Idol”? Or “I am a big, left-handed, eagle-making, Kennedy-esque, pork-eating God!”? I think we all know the more likely answer.

3. You Shall Not Make Wrongful Use Of The Name Of Your God
Assuming that once again we’re substituting “golf” for “God”, I take it that here Cooke is suggesting that golf is so omniscient and magical that it will know when you are slagging it off, even if it doesn’t happen to be present in corporeal form at the time. If so, in my case it’s a fair cop. It was a drunken night. I was just shy of my 18th birthday. I was backstage with some extremely credible and angry rock musicians. So when the subject of my favourite game suddenly came up, and words like “bourgeois” and “elitist” came up, no, I did not stand up, beat my chest and say “that happens to be my own personal Almighty you’re talking about, Mr Four Nose Ring Green Hair”. What I did was sneer slightly and make some ineffectual, adolescent noises in agreement. Actually, come to think of it, that was about the time my game first really began to go off the boil…

4. Remember The Sabbath And Keep It Holy
Why am I now thinking back to the time that I was due to play in that Sunday greensome and phoned and said that I had a last minute deadline but actually stayed at home and watched my new DVD of the movie Old School (twice)?

5. Honor Your Mother And Father
This is a bit subjective. If we’re talking about Lee Westwood, who pretty quickly paid back his ex- schoolteacher dad for his financial and spiritual faith in his golfing career, then it definitely applies. If, by contrast, I had fully honoured my own parents, I would probably never have even broken 100, never mind won the Club Championship, or gone on to write books about golf. What I would have been doing is teaching English As A Second Language to children in Tanzania and fronting my own experimental jazz band.

6. You Shall Not Murder
Got to hand it to old Al on this one: homicide on the fairway – and I say this fully in the knowledge that it would have brought some much-needed peace to me during my round with John “The Pocket-Change Rattler” Settlecombe in September 2004 - is never going to be anything better than a short-term golfing boon.

7. You Shall Not Commit Adultery
But what if the Ladies Captain is Rachel Weisz? And what if she’s got the Handicap Chairman in her pocket? And what if, as a favour to her, he’ll sneak you down an extra half a shot so you can make it through the ballot into that year’s county trials? And what if you win them, and then win the next three medals, and give the Open a shot, and get to play with Tiger in the first round? And Rachel’s right there by your side all the way? And she’s wearing that lipstick you like? And your wife, for all her good-heartedness, has just never shown that much belief in your golfing endeavours, and would prefer if you just concentrated on getting a promotion at Virgin Railways so she can put the kids in public school? Did you ever think of that, Mr Cooke? Huh? Huh? Did you?

8. You Shall Not Steal
Not, as far as I can see, any real impediment to good golfing form on a minor scale, but who knows what can happen, if matters escalate? Today’s casually snaffled tee pegs could be tomorrow’s sneaky Claret-Jug-in-the-waterproof-jacket-pocket, and that’s surely only going to end in tears.

9. You Shall Not Bear False Witness Against Your Neighbour
The karmic results of claiming that your playing companion sneakily moved his ball forward when he marked it are hard to pin down. It can definitely be said that nobody likes a scorecard fiddler, and it’s unlikely any good will come of being one. On the other hand, when Tommy Aaron innocently marked Roberto De Vincenzo down for the wrong score at the 1968 Masters, helping prevent De Vincenzo from winning his second major in two years, it did not stop Aaron from winning the same tournament five years later.

10. You Shall Not Covet Your Neighbour’s House/Wife/Oxen
You know what it’s like. You’ve got a nice little A-frame by the river: the floor-to-ceiling windows, the granite worktops, then that supercilious sod nextdoor starts on that big show-off extension. Next thing you know his wife’s putting in the lintels, stripping down to her underwear, Kevin Whassisname from Grand Designs is over, and there’s juicy livestock in the garden. You try to get on with your life, go up to the golf course, smack a few five-irons up the practice ground, but it just doesn’t take your mind off things. We’ve all been there, and no doubt Cooke was no exception.

Either that, or he was a writer who, in between his genius, could get just a little bit overstretched with his metaphors.

Then again, I suppose he did say “a minor rehearsal”…

Golf: World's Second Least Sexy Sport? Really?

2008-04-04T11:35:00.002+01:00

Having devoted my last Golf International Magazine column to golf’s first bonkbuster – a book with more carnal activity than usually seems appropriate in a magazine not published by Larry Flynt – I told myself I’d lay off the sexual themes this time around. I changed my mind, however, when I saw a piece in the Guardian about the results of a recent survey by psychologist Richard Wiseman. Wiseman, who’s best known as the professorial presence on the Tv show The Real Hustle, recently asked a random selection of 6142 people what they thought were the sexiest sports. The results found that golf was the second least sexy men’s sport. This could be bad news for readers of Golf International, particularly when you consider that the first least sexy sport was aerobics, which a) involves leotards, and b) isn’t a sport at all.

I suppose, like a lot of golfers, I’ve long suspected that golf was a turn-off to most members of the opposite sex, but, seeing the cold facts in front of me, I can’t help feeling somewhat affronted. Right from the time I watched Seve winning the 1988 Open and failed to impress Sarah Hodgkinson by wearing a navy blue Slazenger jumper in double Geography, I already had an inkling that I was now going to be at a disadvantage in the wars of woo compared to my school’s county badminton stars and future Nottingham Forest reserves. But that was a long time ago and golf’s image has changed since then. There are a lot of sexy pin-up golfers on tour these days. Okay, so I can’t think of any right now, and I can concede that golfers are never going to be in the same hunky league as, say, triathletes, but, but… less sexy than bowls? Less sexy than weightlifting: a sport mainly revolving around talcum powder and facial expressions suggestive of constipation? Are you serious?

Ask the average woman in the street whether she thinks golf’s image is sexy and, even now, in a world showcasing Catherine Zeta-Jones’ jerkin, she will probably wrinkle her nose with distaste and mention something about plus fours and nose hair. But I suppose I’d hoped that beneath that distaste was a clandestine respect for the game’s innate sense of fair play, its manners, its psychological complexity. I imagine, though, that I’m just kidding myself, in that way that its possible to when you’ve been married for several years to someone who accepts your fairway habit and have forgotten what it’s like to be golf-blocked in a potentially romantic situation.

When I properly think back to my single days, I cannot pinpoint a single occasion when golf made it more likely that I would get to go out with, or continue going out with, a girl I liked. The best I can come up with was the time when I was eighteen and Ellen, a girl from Nottingham who dressed almost entirely in tassles, and I were looking for a place to quickly get out of the rain and have a naughty smoke, and my local knowledge enabled me to recommend a shed behind the seventh green on my home course, Cripsley Edge. There were also the parties held by Mandy Routledge – one of Cripsley’s two female juniors – but it was clear that the private schoolgirls who frequented these were using us golf boys as mere “training” before coming into bloom and jettisoning our company for that of guitarists and petty thieves.

Other than that, golf could always reliably serve as the opposite of an aphrodisiac in any situation involving me and a desirable member of the opposite sex. Sometimes, I exacerbated the problem needlessly. When my college girlfriend Janet patiently agreed to watch the US Masters with me in 1993, I probably shouldn’t, in retrospect, have insisted on “priming” her with some taped coverage of Tom Watson’s last round Amen Corner charge in 1991. But I couldn’t help it when one of the junior section’s most selfless supporters at Cripsley, a sixty-three year-old car salesman called Terry, gave her a giant hug upon meeting her. I tried to explain that Terry was just happy that one of his pimply prodigies finally had a proper girlfriend, but, to Janet, who read a lot of Camille Paglia, he was just a “weird chauvinistic golf bloke” invading her personal space, and there was nothing I could do to change that. More painful still is The Toilet Roll story.

I haven’t told The Toilet Roll Story to many people, but those who have heard it have all agreed that it’s a good illustration of just how golf can make a person unappealing to the opposite sex. It took place in 1993 and involved a girl called Louise who, if you’d been my friend at the time and hadn’t known Louise, I would have told you I was going out with.

I’d known Louise at school and she’d been a quiet, studious girl who probably would have been a good friend, if I hadn’t been too idiotic to notice her. However, I noticed her afresh two years later at a Rage Against The Machine gig at Nottingham Rock City. A couple of drunken nights and a drunken kiss after that, she’d admitted that she was about to split up with her boyfriend. I subsequently admitted that I wouldn’t mind applying for his position. She’d had to go on holiday the following day, but the next week, with my parents away in France, we’d arranged to meet at my house and listen to some CDs. This was also the day of the Cripsley Edge Jubilee Bowl. I have no idea what Jubilee the bowl was celebrating, just that my mum wouldn’t have it in the living room, but, having won it three years earlier, I felt obliged to compete for it.

The plan had been that I would finish my round, make the twenty minute journey home, then have at least an hour to shower, change, sling a couple of Hunter S Thompson books about the room in noticeable positions and light a couple of joss sticks before Louise arrived. After that, who knew? That morning I’d bought the new PJ Harvey album, so anything was possible. However, four complications to this plan arose. Firstly: my round stretched on a little longer than planned. Secondly: I decided to give my friend Robin a lift home, necessitating thirty minutes extra driving time. Thirdly: I remembered that I needed to buy toilet roll. Fourthly: as I was turning into my road, I spotted Louise walking into the local petrol station forecourt.

What happened next constitutes one of those situations that you can’t help repeatedly replaying in your mind in the years that follow – not because it was particularly pivotal, but because you can’t get over your own stupidity. In my replays, what happens is this: I drive on home without stopping, throw my sweaty golf clothes in the wash basket with one hand and change the toilet roll with the other, hurl myself into the shower, then throw on my jeans and Dinosaur Jr t-shirt and open the door to Louise. In reality, what happened was this: I pulled into the forecourt in my sweaty golf clothes, called out to Louise, moved my giant family-sized pack of toilet rolls from the passenger seat into the back of the car, then drove Louise back to my house, saving her the grand total of ten minutes’ walking.

Louise and I never did go out with one another in the end.

What was it that put her off? Maybe it was those toilet rolls, whose sheer abundance and solitude – I’d bought nothing else from the supermarket that evening – was undoubtedly alarming, but Louise was a hippieish girl with the open-minded approach to bodily functions that came with regular trips to the Glastonbury Festival. More likely, it was the combination of the toilet rolls and the sight of me in my unadorned golfing incarnation, hat hair, pleated slacks and all – so different to the Tom she’d met known from Rock City slam-dancing to Nirvana in his sub-Jim Morrison hair and tie-dye top. This was the pure essence of golf. Some people can take that kind of thing uncut. Others can’t*. A lot of others, if you believe Wiseman’s survey.

But when you boil it down, what was I, that day, in 1993? I was a sportsman: a sweaty sportsman, back from a day of hard (I shot 83), sweaty sport. Obviously I was a sweaty sportsman who had a giant pack of toilet rolls in the car with him, but had I been, say, a tennis or squash player clad in shorts and t-shirt, or had I had some mountain climbing gear in the back seat with my toilet rolls, instead of some Mizuno blades, would Louise have been so cool with me that night? I think not. What would she have thought if she’d known the distances I’d propelled the ball that day, the gorse bushes I’d done battle with?

Was Louise just one of a million potential girlfriends – and boyfriends – who have misunderstood golf’s true, swashbuckling, sexy nature, having been blinded by its decorum and flesh-covering clothes? Maybe. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to tell people how it really is. So Wiseman’s survey claims “climbing” is the sexiest sport? What golfer hasn’t climbed every once in a while, after an errant five-iron?

We cannot be party to this misunderstanding any more. It’s time to take back the night. Let’s not be ashamed of our sweat! If we want to roll up our Marks And Spencer trousers, let’s do it! If we feel like running up the fairway, let’s run! Feel that cool fresh air flowing through your newly long and sexy locks as you hurtle up the fourth fairway to the bemuse stairs of the Immediate Past Captain! And then, when you’ve felt it, ask yourself a question: Do you think someone doing aerobics feels that kind of physical freedom?

Well, do you, punk?

*Of course, there is always the possibility that this is a moot argument and the real reason she wouldn’t go out with me is that I’d headbutted her with the peak of my baseball cap when we kissed the day before.

The First Golfing Bonkbuster?

2008-02-06T10:25:00.000Z

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of the amount of sexually aggressive glamour models hanging out at golf clubs these days. They’re everywhere, aren’t they? Sitting on the veranda overlooking the eighteenth fairway, gossiping about their forthcoming reality TV commitments and the head pro’s clandestine drug dealing. Sneaking into the janitor’s cupboards, seducing the part-time pro shop helper. Racing across the course in buggies wearing undersized tube tops, ruining the herbaceous borders and pushing one another into water hazards. I mean, really. What happened to the good old days, when you could count on the female members of your golf club to be over the age of fifty-five and blend innocuously into the background in a selection of modest woollen garments?

These, at least, seem to be the concerns of the members at St Benedict’s, the exclusive fictional Cheshire spa course that forms the backdrop to Leonie Fox’s new novel Private Members (Penguin, £6.99). “Half the male membership at St Benedict’s only joined so they could drool over all the pretty girls wafting around the place – and, God knows, there are plenty of them,” explains one female character early in the book. In the two decades since I first took up the game, I’ve heard many reasons given for joining golf clubs - proximity to one’s home, a particularly challenging dogleg eighteenth, good practice facilities – but I have to admit that this is a new one on me.

Of course, it is not that young, golf-mad men don’t appreciate young, fame-mad blonde women of the type that might pose for Nuts or Zoo Magazine, nor is it that they wouldn’t put getting to know them right up there next to “get new Nike Sumo SasQuatch driver!” towards the top of their list of life priorities. Neither is it that this type of woman is never known, in the quasi-evolved golfing environment of the 21st century, to be found in the vicinity of golfers. It is just that, WPGA and LPGA tour excepted, seeing a young woman of any kind hitting – or watching the hitting of – a golf ball remains a rare sight. It’s a bit like going for a country walk on a crisp autumn morning and seeing a red squirrel skip in front of your feet. It should happen more often, and you feel certain that life would be a lot more balanced and rosy if it did, but, because the world is a cruel and senseless place, it doesn’t.

Bearing this in mind, one can look at Private Members – a book all about women, most of whom are young, and what they get up to at their golf club - in two ways. The first is as a shallow, contrived attempt to transfer Footballers Wives’ to the fairway, or a kind of modern British equivalent to Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, with soft lob wedges instead of phallic guitars. The second is to commend it on the sheer far-fetched ambition of its subject matter – in the way that you might commend, say, a sci-fi epic set on a planet ruled by giant ants and with a molten core made of pure toasted waffle.

Taking the latter outlook, I could just about live with the melodrama of a teaching pro who moonlights as a gigolo and a tour pro who gets his female conquests to shout “Hole in one!” during sex, but even having accepted that I was in an unrealistic world, I found myself questioning some of the details. Would St Benedict’s, a course “set in 200 acres of prime Cheshire parkland”, really have been permitted onto the links-only British Open rota in the first place, let alone have played host to the tournament ten times? In one scene, we find the club’s Head Caretaker complaining to the trophy engraver about the club’s resident touring pro, Sam Bentley, winning all the club’s amateur competitions, but, given the strict rules regarding amateur status, let alone the tournament commitments of a player ranked 52nd in the world, such a scenario strikes me as unlikely. Later, when his wife drives over his clubs in response to reading a tabloid story about his after hours dogging habit, Sam is heard to wail “Not the broomhandle… Please God not the broomhandle!”. This is almost certainly the most extreme recorded expression of love between man and broomhandle putter since Sam Torrance won the 1990 German Masters, and lacks contemporary credibility.

A Google search brought up scant information about Leonie Fox and all we can glean from her author biog is that she lives in Kent and is a former magazine journalist. While the content and stylistic sensibility of Private Members would not seem to refute either of these facts, I can’t help suspecting she’s a pseudonym. Such is the two-dimensional, male-friendly sexual world of Private Members – a world where breasts are like “exocet missiles”, legs go right up to their owner’s armpits and everyone is “fit” or lush” – my hunch is that she’s actually a fourteen year-old boy. Probably one who spends a lot of time watching sports TV. Frequently in Private Members, we find characters speaking to one another as if they are reading straight off the Grandstand autocue. “A few years ago he was one of Britain’s brightest racing talents, but his career came to a grinding halt when he crashed into a wall at the Belgian Grand Prix,” explains one of the pros of another sporting resident of St Benedict’s neighbouring village, Kirkhulme.

“It’s another well-known glamour model – Shannon Stewart,” says Keeley, the most avaricious of the book’s females, when a well-known glamour model, Shannon Stewart, appears. When they’re not talking like Ray Stubbs or the voiceover for a late night reality show, the characters from Private Members will usually converse like characters from an early 1980s sitcom. There’s certainly a lot of snobbery at British golf clubs, but I can’t quite believe that anyone outside of a repeat of George And Mildred would unironically use a phrase like “See what happens when you let the riff-raff in” in the late Noughties.

Of course, nobody actually speaks like this to one another in real-life, but sometimes, reading Private Members, I wondered if things might be better if they did. If someone actually came out and talked about the “riff-raff”, rather than making nasty pretend jokes about the riff-raff’s rubbish clubs or surreptitiously moving away from them in the men’s bar and furtively reporting their dress code violations to the committee, wouldn’t life be more straightforward? If you saw a well-known glamour model called Shannon Stewart but didn’t know who she was, wouldn’t it be better if there was someone on hand to straightforwardly fill you in on the facts, rather than to just say “Oh, look, it’s Shannon Stewart”, prompting you to pretend that you were familiar with her, leading to a myriad of potentially embarrassing misunderstandings? Wouldn’t life be less of a headache if, like seemingly all the characters in Private Members, we had no shading to our desires and wanted nothing but sex, money and the chance to regain our “Scottish Strokeplay” title? Or maybe some of us do. It’s a long time since I was fourteen, so I’m probably not the best person to ask.

I suppose this is the point of Private Members: it allows you to escape to a place where adults are ribald cardboard cut-outs, all of whom want the same things out of life – primary among these being, in fluctuating order of importance, 3) A wristwatch worth £20,000 or more, 2) some giant silicone breasts and 1) a mock Georgian mansion. That kind of escapism, perhaps slightly unwittingly, might sum up the state of mind of many modern adolescent golfers, but singing its praises might also be a way of excusing a book full of unbelievable characters and bad dialogue, whose knowledge of its central subject seems to come primarily from a BBC Sports Personality Of The Year golf highlights reel. Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling glad that Private Members exists. Just as in the Kingdom Of The Blind the one-eyed man is King, in the Kingdom Of The Golf Bonkbuster the female writer with a publishing deal is Queen, and any book that might bring more women to golf has to be incontrovertibly a good thing. One just hopes for their sake that, unlike many of the women in Private Members, their legs don’t go “right up to their armpits”. I don’t speak from firsthand experience here, but common sense suggests that kind of physical deformity is going to make a good full turn on the way back nigh on impossible.

The Club

2008-01-04T11:11:00.001Z

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.

Respect Your Youngers

2007-11-14T09:18:00.001Z

An article I wrote for today's Daily Telegraph.

Medal Vs Stableford

2007-11-07T16:03:00.000Z

Stableford has always seemed a fairly pointless pursuit to me, but the last vestiges of anything faintly resembling love between us vanished one very rainy day last year just outside Manchester. Late in 2005, I'd made a career move possibly unique to sado-masochists and writers of light-hearted non-fiction books who haven’t quite got over not realizing their childhood dream of becoming Seve Ballesteros: I had decided, just for a year, to have a "stab" – and I use the word in an all-too literal sense - at playing the pro circuit. After being disqualified from the Euro Pro Tour Qualifying School after just two and a half holes for playing the wrong ball, my inauspicious travels led me to The Morson International Pro-Am, at Worsley Park, a newish parkland course just off the M60 with little to distinguish it from approximately 834 other newish parkland courses just off Britain's motorways.

I'd heard other pros talk about pro-ams: they did so in the same way that computer software salesmen talk about dull but necessary oral presentations. The anticlimactic feeling of the event didn’t particularly bother me, nor did the chronic flatulence of one of my amateur partners, or the clicking sound in my hip that got louder with every sodden fairway. What really bothered me was the scorecard. Or, rather, the fact that, as pro, I was required to mark it: a task that involved not only recording all four players’ scores, deducting three handicaps and choosing the lowest amateur score and adding it to mine, but converting the whole thing to a futile points system. I failed GCSE maths, but I think even if I’d been a human calculator the card for the Zentex Fabrics team would still have resembled papier mache by the time we made the turn for home. After all that, teeing off came to resemble an afterthought.

I think this is a good illustration of how stableford makes an already complex game needlessly more complex. Those who argue for stableford against “straightforward” medal golf claim that it speeds up play, but my day at Worsley pretty firmly refutes their theory. Certainly, the fact that Stableford only awards points for bogey or better has allowed many a player on his way to nasty quad to pick his ball up and move on, but how much does this really benefit us? Is this not just another part of the grand handicap propaganda that, in a way unlike other any other sport, can give terminally rubbish athletes delusions of competence: the same propaganda that ultimately lead small-minded men with empty lives to demand to be referred to as “Mr Captain”?

Handicapping is a separate issue, and there isn’t room here to argue just why many of golf’s social problems stem from the fact that people who haven’t really shot 68 can pretend they have, but I can’t help thinking that ridding the world of stableford would help redress the balance, and strike a small but crucial blow for all that is just and noble in the game. In medal play, a man is pitted against his environment in a way that is as pure and primal as a caveman stepping out on a C02-free morning to hunt his lunch. We already have the intricacies of par, of stroke index, the nuances of a zillion different courses; adding some spurious points system to the equation seems downright greedy. After all, stableford was invented by a bloke called Dr Frank Barney Gordon Stableford, and it’s hard not to distrust the motives of a man with that many names.

Being the kind of erratic competitor who probably makes more birdies than most players of a similar overall ability, but rarely plays a round without at least one triple or quadruple bogey, some would say it’s not in my interests to stick up for medal play. Yet the truth is, I’ve never turned in a good stableford score without feeling like a man hiding from himself. Why is it that people who announce that they’ve scored 36 points seem so much happier than those who have turned in a net score of par? Do they think that just because the name of the game is scoring higher, it makes their achievement inherently better? In the end, Stableford is nothing more than a euphemism. It’s a slimy “We’re going to have to make you redundant” to medal play’s straight-talking “You’re fired!”. It’s New Labour spin. It’s a snake, and a show-off. It’s a format for bored people who just don’t like real golf enough.

Golf In The Year 2115

2007-10-18T09:40:00.000+01:00

It looks, at first, to be one of those gifty books that shove their way so bullishly into stores at this time of year: a spoof, but a good one. As someone who writes about golf for a living, one has to admire – even envy, for a brief flash - the playful ingenuity of the idea: a fake novel predicting what golf would be like in the modern age, supposedly written in the “olden days” by a pretend, golfy writer (“J McCullough” indeed!). They’ve even frayed the edges of the pages to give them that cod authentic theme pub olde worlde look. But then you look a bit more closely, noting the earnest Editor’s Foreword and the original publication details. Slowly, you began to look at the artefact from a new angle.

First published in 1892, Golf In the Year 2000 is not one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written about golf – you probably would have found more wit, narrative arc and incisive observation about the frustrations of the game in the furthest recesses of PG Wodehouse’s waste paper basket – but it may be one of the most culturally telling. In its story of Alexander John Gibson, a golfer who falls asleep in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, and wakes up over a hundred years later, it predicts digital watches, female politicians, the decimal system and a rudimentary version of Sky TV. McCullough’s vision of the current golfing climate is uncannily close to the real thing as well, featuring metal woods, motorised trolleys and a craze for ever-longer courses.

McCullough doesn’t get everything right. Perhaps most misguided of all is his prediction that, more than ten decades on, someone wouldn’t have realised that playing in a big, heavy jacket would inhibit your swing. Despite his best hopes, it is still impossible to get from one side of Britain to another in half an hour, and his description of the cleaning devices of the future (“the whole structure began to fly round and about and backwards and forwards, till I was almost drowned”) sound more like he’s talking about the Orgasmatron in Sleeper than a futuristic shower. When he writes about a world where all the women work so all the men can do nothing but play golf, you realise he’s not so much a novelist as a creator of novelty sports mug slogans who has been given a bit too much literary leeway. Nonetheless, in his irritatingly breezy, throwaway story, there is an ominous message to be found: something powerful about the inevitability of evolution. If a writer as bland and trifling as McCullough could look into his crystal ball and come up with something that so closely resembles golf in the early Twenty First Century, then what does that tell us? I think it either tells us that a) we were always going to be where we are now, as a human, and golfing universe, or/and b) that stuff was a hell of a lot easier to predict in the old days than it is now.

Towards the end of Golf In The Year 2000, Gibson gets a little disenchanted with newfangled golf and announces, “I think I like the old days best after all”. McCullough’s comparisons between then and now are without depth, but they presage an argument so commonly heard today: Is the new technology taking the art out of the game? Unlike Gibson and his fictional “Golfton” club, we 21st Century golfers don’t have dials which determine how far we hit our putts – not unless we’re on our Xboxes and Nintendos we don’t, anyway – nor are we able to switch the wind off and on, but we do seem to be living in a kind of golfing Endland, where every part of the game has been pushed to its limits, and any new innovation would be more tokenistic than it was useful. Recently, I tried to think of some of my own golfing predictions for 108 years from now. The best I came up with were:
1. Wooden-headed irons.
2. Air caddies.
3. Self-cleaning grooves.
4. “From the makers of Superglue: Divot Seal!”
5. Unleaded driver fuel.
Finding a bit tough, I reined it in a bit, and decided to set my golfing utopia in 2025 instead, coming up with:
1. Radar balls.
2. The first openly bisexual Ryder Cup player.
3. John Daly: The Opera.
4. The Rooftop PGA.
5. Shankless wedges.

These days, it’s not so much a case as “the future’s so bright, you’ve got to wear shades” as “the future’s so opaque, you’ve got to have some special kind of laser surgery that hasn’t been invented yet”. Of course, back in the 90s, many people might have thought home entertainment had reached some kind of final frontier with DVDs and CDs, then Sky Plus and the iPod came along. Soon, something will probably come along to replace them. But golf does seem to have reached some kind of limit, at least in purely physical terms. Our best courses have squeezed every inch of extra space available out of their terrain in order to lengthen their holes to brutal new championship standards. In most cases, there is nowhere left to extend, other than the local bypass or the outgoing Lady Captain’s rhododendrons. In the unlikely event that a world-beating player comes along who is more toned and fit and strong than Tiger Woods, then his fitness will probably have minimal impact on his golfing prowess. Is there that much further to on the PGA long driving stats after Bubba Watson?

For the last three decades, Olympic sprinting has repeatedly appeared to reach a brilliant, never-to-be-passed limit, and repeatedly proceeded to smash its records. But nobody is ever going to run 100 metres in three seconds. Golf is currently in a similar situation: every year, the driving stats creep up, Augusta gets harder and less interesting, par fours you previously thought were monstrous suddenly become thought of as medium length, but it can’t go on indefinitely. I’m not complaining: the new power game was one of the premier reasons that I began playing golf again in the early part of this decade, after a long lay-off. But one wonders how the evolution can continue.

Perhaps the answer lies not in a move forwards, or even directly backwards, but sideways. If golf is an art form – and I feel certain that it is – perhaps it will mirror other art forms that have had their great revolutions, then turned to smaller, more subtle innovations and reworkings of their past for inspiration. Golf has moved towards the city in recent years, but the game of urban golf, or street golf, where players hit soft balls down city streets and hole out in fire hydrant covers, is still in its very early stages of development. Hopefully the tragic young death of the founder of The Shoreditch Urban, Jeremy Feakes, earlier this year, will not lead to the event’s demise, since it showcases a unique game that requires its own kind of skill, and has the potential to be much more than an excuse for web designers to get drunk and wear plus fours (and I’m not just saying this because I won it last year).

There may be no need to ban all drivers made after 1997 and start using hickory shafts and balls that take on the shape and texture of a satsuma after you’ve thinned them. Equally, however, there is no reason that we shouldn’t revisit the golfing technology of the past. Mix it up a bit: let’s have an Urban Tour, a Power Tour, and a Vintage Tour. And what about beach golf? Has anyone really looked into that yet? Okay, so maybe I’m getting a bit carried away, but it proves that just because we may have reached a kind of robotic impasse in our top tournaments, that is no reason that we should stagnate. The future is not the place it used to be, but it’s not necessarily a barren desert populated by swinging cyborgs. It’s worth remembering that McCullough probably felt like he was living in some sort of End Of Time environment when he wrote Golf In The Year 2000 too – hope for an escape from it was probably part of his motivation for writing the book. We might think we’re living in the last days of golfing civilisation, but so will the generation after us, and countless generations after them, until one day, three men stand on the final tee in some distant Urban Beach Golf Championship of the future, pouring jet fuel into the nozzles at the top of their drivers, air caddies waiting faithfully beside them, and the lights go out for the last time.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF SERGIO GARCIA! Out now...

The Notion Of "Character" In Golf

2007-09-18T13:58:00.000+01:00

I recently set up a page on the social networking website, myspace, for my new book, Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia!. This is what a lot of writers and their publishers do these days, in an attempt to maximise exposure in the long tail of the publishing world in an era when slots on the front display tables in bookshops have never been harder to come by. It’s time-consuming, but the thinking is long-term: with a bit of luck, sometime in, say, 2013, the ensuing word of mouth will have bagged you thirteen or fourteen more sales.

Sure enough, as soon as www.myspace.com/bringmetheheadofsergio was born, it was proving something of a hit, particularly with the opposite sex. A nice lady from LA called Cassandra with a very small vest messaged my book to say she was bored, and wanted to know if my book was interested in “bedroom fun” and also if it wanted to buy a mobile phone. Casey, Chaka and Emily all quickly wanted to be my book’s friend too. In amongst this avalanche of evil spam were a few messages from real people who liked golf. One of them was an enthusiastic man called Pete. “You sound like a real nutter,” he wrote. “Can’t wait to get the book!”

I’m sure Pete meant this in a nice, “I bet you’re a right laugh after four or five pints” way rather than in a “you’ve got a borderline personality disorder” way, but I think, were he to meet me, Pete would be disappointed. I could not, in any way, be described as “a nutter”. I tried being a nutter a couple of times when I was sixteen, quickly realised it wasn’t for me, and settled for being “fairly ordinary” with occasional forays into “something of a div” territory. But had I been kidding myself? I scanned the synopsis of Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia, wondering what could have brought Pete to his conclusion. Was it the bit about my “trusty 1980s putter” or my “whippy wrist action”? Or maybe that I had mentioned I owned some checked trousers? None of it seemed to quite qualify as bona fide nutter behaviour, but then, Pete was clearly a golfer, and in my experience, golfers have very different definitions of words like “nutter” and “Character” than the rest of the universe.

There have been several authentic Characters in golf over the years, but nowhere near as many as golf itself would have you believe. John Daly, Lee Trevino, Miguel Angel Jimenez, Jesper Parnevik – these are all people who, whether on the golf course or off it, could probably be described as unique, off-the-wall personalities. But is Ian Poulter really a Character? Or just a bloke from Hitchin who happens to wear some very loud trousers? A few years ago people started calling Darren Clarke a Character when he wore some checked slacks. Admittedly, Clarke smokes big cigars, which is slightly Character-like behaviour, but that in itself is not exactly enough to qualify you for a slot in The A-Z of Irish Eccentrics.

It’s not just the top level of the game where these overestimations of personality occur. All over Britain, there are people written off as merely “a decent bloke” or “an average sort of guy” during the week who, come the Saturday morning threeball, are magically transformed into “totally spanners”, “a right card” or “f-in’ mental”. Even more magically, these men are not having to drastically modify their behaviour for this change to occur. They are the golfing equivalent of the people immortalised in Sister Sledge’s Lost In Music: the folk who were released by disco from the drudgery of their 9 to 5 and could suddenly be who they wanted to be.

There’s no mystery about what makes millions of people sacrifice their weekends in order to spend several hours alternately hitting and shouting at a small white ball: golf assays character like no other sport, is the ultimate sado-masochistic tease and a balm for the spirit. But I wonder if it’s not just the game itself that draws some people back, but the way the game allows these people to be a larger-than-life version of themselves. Golf’s uniquely regimented social environment can repress personality, but it cuts both ways: in such an environment, unusual behaviour, when it occurs, seems to occur in Technicolour. Back at my first golf club, the most notorious Character was a man called Dave Halewood. Dave was a terrific, unserious sort of bloke, but his reputation as one of the game’s nonconformists was largely based on the fact that he had a loud voice and a penchant for putting bits of dead tree in people’s bags. I think, even in a non-golf context, putting branches in bags qualifies as suitably daft behaviour, but who’s to say Dave could find branches in his everyday life, as manager of a medium-sized sporting goods store? It’s entirely possible that, away from golf, he was written off as merely “a good laugh” or plain “loud”. Golf – and, more specifically, its profusion of branches – elevated his status.

I have to admit to having dabbled in a bit of branch-hiding in my time too, but I certainly didn’t do any last year, when I was playing the bottom rung of the pro circuit and researching Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia!. I was actually very well-behaved. Nonetheless, during the GMS Classic, a Euro Pro Tour event at Mollington, near Chester, I overheard two fellow pros talking about me on the range and the word “Character” came up. Perhaps I misheard, but I’m still trying to work out what I did that was so outrageous, or if it was just the fact that I was in need of a haircut and wearing non-golf-brand trousers. I certainly didn’t make much of an impact on the money list, but it’s nice to think I made something of a splash on the circuit – even if it was probably only in the form of the milk stain that was clearly visible on my shirt in the “funky dressers on the Euro Pro tour” segment of Sky Sports’ coverage of The Bovey Castle Championship. As nutty behaviour goes, it wasn’t exactly Hunter S Thompson or Steve Irwin, but I’ll take it.

Lesser-Known Golfing Diseases

2007-08-08T11:07:00.000+01:00

It is perhaps a mark of golf’s long-established role as a perfectly adequate substitute for life that, like life, it comes fully armed with its own set of major illnesses. While other major sports have mere injuries, some of which (e.g. tennis elbow) they have somewhat arrogantly claimed as their own, golf is different: it has fully-fledged diseases, exclusive to its grassy environs. Who has ever heard of “Nuggle Fist” (boxing), “The Duhs” (football) or “Inman Wrist” (badminton)? Nobody, because they don’t exist, although no doubt they would, if any of the sports involved were more capable of crushing a man’s spirit. Golf, however, is fertile territory for the mind of the hypochondriac. It is a rare – and, presumably, very happy – golfer who is not familiar with the shanks or the yips, just as it is a rare person who has not had a severe headache and been convinced he has a brain tumour or woken up with swollen underarm glands and hastily diagnosed himself with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

“It’s really just about getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible,” Peter Alliss will often tell us, puzzling from the safety of his commentary box over why the game isn’t simpler, but there is more to a statement like this than meets the ear. As a former yips sufferer, Alliss has to tell himself things like this, to keep the demons away. Even when golf seems simple, thoughts of debilitation and decay are never far away, and it’s at times like this that you wonder whether the mind rules the body or the body rules the mind. Take me, for example. Not long ago, after a couple of shaky three-putts, I diagnosed myself rather hastily with the yips. By the time I’d realised that I was wrong, and that the real problem was merely that I had drunk too much coffee that morning, it was too late and I really did have the yips. It sometimes seems we know too much about our golfing ailments. But could it actually be the case that we know too little? We talk plenty about the yips and the shanks and – more recently – the chyips, but are we wrong to focus purely on the Big Three? It would be foolish to remain unaware of cancer, AIDS and heart failure, certainly, but they are not the only diseases a person can succumb to, and it would be equally foolish to stay ignorant of some of the smaller, yet often equally insidious, illnesses associated with golf. With this in mind, I feel it my duty to provide a guide to some of the game’s underreported maladies:

Worldowesmealivingitis
Most common in – but not exclusive to – men over the age of forty-seven, particularly those who have been through two or more expensive divorces. Frequently compared to the modern real-life disease, ME: partly because it can be such an energy-drainer, and also because there are some schools of medical thought that still believe it is an entirely make-believe affliction. In fact, the defining trait of Wordowesmealivingitis is that the victim remains entirely unaware of his malady. “Did you see that? Did you? Over the cellophane bridge!” he will say, as a shaky putt misses the hole by a full nine inches. “Can you bloody believe it? I must be the unluckiest player alive!” he will rage, as his scuzzy four-iron tee shot takes a straight bounce into a gorse bush, instead of magically veering back into the fairway at right angles. At times like this, it might be tempting to correct the Worldowesmealivingitis sufferer, but this could be disastrous, leading to a hurled lob wedge, or, at the very least, the emission of a strange low growling noise for periods of up to fifty-six minutes. “What’s important to remember about Worldowesmealivingitis,” explains Dr Thomas Placebo, a specialist in golfing ailments from the University of Dog Springs, Arkansas, “is that, despite its superficial resemblance to mere grumpy ungraciousness, it is an illness and its afflicted should be treated with the same sympathy and care as sufferers from other illnesses – particularly if they have a large piece of metal in their hands at the time, or have recently had a hefty insurance claim on their BMW 5 Series.”

The White Cold Humphries
Cold day? Thin six-iron shot? Feeling like icy electricity is pinging up and down the inside of your forearms? Chances are, you’ve got the White Cold Humphries. Just as there is no evidence to suggest that the WCHs are debilitating to the player in any long-term manner, there is also no evidence to suggest that they are readily curable – although it is thought in some homeopathic golfing circles that wearing some really big mittens between shots can help.

Repetitive Waggle Syndrome
Not common, but ignore it at your peril. RWS is golf’s equivalent of a stammer. Does it come from stage fright? Childhood traumas? The conviction that the rubber grips on your clubs are covered in strawberry jam? Nobody is quite sure. The affliction was exemplified by the trials of Sergio Garcia, who, at his most distressed point, during the 2002 season, was averaging around 21 waggles per shot, and earned the nickname “waggle boy” with unfeeling American galleries. Garcia is cured now, but others have been brought to their knees by RWS, often letting it leech into the rest of their life and lead to such conditions as Chronic Necktie-Adjuster’s Syndrome and Nervous Road-Crosser’s Disorder.

The Cranks
“Great shot!” you say to your playing partner, as his long-irons bisects the fairway. “Neh, didn’t quite get it,” he replies. Perhaps he is talking rubbish. Perhaps, on the other hand, he’s being truthful, and he is suffering from an attack of the cranks. Like a much, much less extreme version of a shank, a crank is a shot that comes out of a part of the clubface a half millimetre away from the centre, towards the hosel: a discrepancy only discernible to the person who has hit it. What makes it officially a “crank” as opposed to merely a shot hit slightly out of the heel of the club is its frequency: a crank sufferer is only a crank sufferer if he hits at least nine or ten cranks per round. In fact, many crank sufferers claim to have never hit a good shot in their lives. Those who have never suffered from the cranks have called them bunkum but, to the sufferer, they can be unbearably niggling. However, it is doubtful that, even at their worse, they are as niggling as the typical crank sufferer’s habit of greeting a crank by using the phrase “Heel do!” then pointing to the neck of their club, just in case their playing partner didn’t get the fact that they were replacing the word “he’ll” with “heel” for comic effect.

Golf ‘Flu
Many experts have claimed that the suggestion that there is a brand of influenza endemic to one sport is poppycock. Nonetheless, golf ‘flu, much like man ‘flu, has its advocates amongst the golfing medicine profession. Unlike real ‘flu, it spreads quickly, with little warning. Classic symptoms include first tee shivers, a feeling that your drives are only travelling 67% of their rightful distance, and the tendency to break out in cold sweats – particularly when you’ve just arrived at the club and seen that your regular threeball partners have crossed their names off the competition sheet and been replaced by two pub landlords who jingle change on your backswing and suffer from one of the more extreme strains of
Worldowesmealivingitis.

Golfcommentaryitis P72.
It starts innocently enough: you’re on the couch, putting the worries of the office behind you. You crack open a cold one. You’re relaxed. Your brain is empty of thought. But that brain is now a receptive thing: a virtual Velcro patch to which the conversational lint floating around the golfing airwaves can easily stick. Be careful. Telltale symptoms of Golcommentaryitis P72 – also known as Burble’s Disease - included finding yourself staring wistfully at squabbling ducks and saying “steady on now, steady on” in a voice suggestive of pleasant, low-grade senility; suddenly referring to people in films and on TV who you have never met by their complete names (e.g. “Jonathan Adam Belushi, you do crack me up!”); overusing the phrase “cor blimey oh riley”; and throwing screwed up bits of paper at dustbins, missing, then discussing where the missile “finished” and how “you just can’t legislate for that”.

Montgomerie’s Non-Linguoma
A less deadly version of Golfcommentaryitis, this time involving the sufferer thinking he has made erudite, articulate point, only to look back later and find that he has actually just used the phrase “as it were” a lot, and spouted a lot of airy nonsense. Frequently confused with Woosnam’s Non-Linguoma, the disease where the patient finds himself compelled to use the phrase “y’know” every sixteen seconds. Not known for any serious long-term affects, but highly irritating all the same.

Bodypopalitus
Involves the player labouring under the delusion that, by contorting his body into a variety of shapes, he can affect the flight, bounce and roll of the ball after it has left his clubface. A recent survey showed that 87% of golfer suffer from this disease in a mild form (e.g. kicking a leg out in the hope that doing so might make a putt dive into the hole); the real worry is when it manifests itself to such an extent that, in watching the flight of a perfunctory wedge shot, the Bodypopalitus casualty will begin to resemble a breakdancer performing a move on a Brooklyn street in 1982. However, there is a school of thought that claims that there is nothing intrinsically harmful to the golfer about Bodypopalitus (see Ballesteros, Seve, US Masters, 1980 and Garcia, Sergio, USPGA Championship, 1999).

Learning To (Almost) Love The Links

2007-06-28T13:10:00.000+01:00

“Have you seen the course?” said Mousey. “It’s a pile of c***.” It was 1989, the Open had just got underway at Royal Troon, and, in the clubhouse of my Nottinghamshire golf club, outraged heads were turning in my friend’s direction. I’d watched the Open before, the previous year, at Royal Lytham, but I was particularly looking forward to this one: my first Open as a “proper” golfer, to be observed, at length, with my new golf mates, in the middle of a long hot summer holiday that, with hindsight, seemed to last more like six months than six weeks. I’d heard great things about Royal Troon - particularly about its cheeky little 8th hole, the one named Postage Stamp ,where that odd, cheery-looking midget who kicked off the Masters had had a hole in one. I was also aware that, amongst my friends at Cripsley Edge Golf Club in Nottingham, Mousey hardly had a reputation as a bastion of golfing knowledge - once, after dislodging some dust from the tee mat on Cripsley’s par three third he had encouraged us to “look at the steam!” and, upon being quizzed upon the exact nature of links golf by the previous year’s club captain, he had answered with a hesitating, “Woodland... or fir?”. That said, his prognosis about Troon was cause for concern.

Making my way into the Men’s Bar, I made a quick analysis of the picture on the TV. What I saw was far from inspiring. Yellowed and parched, the terrain did not put me in mind of any course I had played before. I was more than a little confused. Surely the organisers of the greatest golf championship in the world would have wanted to choose a better course than this for their event? One with a few trees, for example, or one that didn’t so closely resemble the sun-dried wasteground beyond my school’s science block.

Looking back, I can see how the older, wiser members in the clubhouse might have tutted disapprovingly at the hotheaded innocents blocking the view of their screen. Like anchovies, the radio presenting style of Terry Wogan and the music of Leonard Cohen, links golf is an acquired taste that can only be truly appreciated with a certain amount of life experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the 1989 Open in the end, Mousey, several of our friends and I staying in the clubhouse bar late in the evening after a Nottinghamshire County Boys event, impotently willing Greg Norman not to mess-up in one of the most gripping play-offs in major championship history. Since then I have played many great seaside courses and come to appreciate that their intrinsic beauty is something that reveals itself slowly, in the form of subtle undulations, rather than in the form of breathtakingly verdant vistas. But the fact remains: I do not particularly care for links golf.

I realise that to make such a statement, as a low handicap golfer brought up in the British Isles, is considered blasphemy. To make it as someone who writes about golf for a living, it’s probably worse - the equivalent of a film critic saying that the movies of Ingmar Bergman are “boring”. But I have still yet to play a good round on a links golf course. Instead, I tend to cower beneath the shelter of pines, birch and oaks on fairways whose herbaceous borders are thick enough to dictate that the only people who can laugh at my shanks and duffs are my playing partners. Talk all you will about manufacturing punch shots and using “imagination”, but I like to see golf as a form of showing-off, and this means that I can muster little enthusiasm for attempting to replicate the swing of Christy O'Connor Jr. If I'm going to hit an eight iron, I want to hit it way up into the air, 165 yards, all carry. Then, when I shout “bite” at it, I want it to make its way back towards me like a well-trained border collie. What I do not want to do is scab it along the ground 134 yards, then watch it negotiate a bunch of random hillocks, before finishing somewhere vaguely near the pin, leaving me to be congratulated by my playing partners on “playing the percentage” - sort of in the way Bruce Forsythe might congratulate someone for winning a consolation toaster on The Generation Game.

Nonetheless, every now and then, I am forced to submit to peer pressure. “I fancy some proper old-fashioned bump and run golf,” a friend will say one day in the pub or clubhouse. “Yeah! Let’s get out in the wind and give ourselves a proper test,” another will add. I am thoroughly bewildered at what gives people these masochistic urges, when surely the psychological challenges of a typical average round of heathland or parkland golf provide all the “test” a sane person could ever need. Nonetheless, I will be forced to compromise. If I have my way, this will normally involve a visit to Aldeburgh or Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast.

I love Aldeburgh and Thorpeness because they demand the intricacies of links course management that even an ardent target golf enthusiast like me can appreciate, but without the usual accompanying sense of barren despair. Aldeburgh is the best-known and more regal of the two. It’s perhaps a measure of how much I love it that the last time I played it I lost thirteen balls, and received a bite the size of one of them on my arm, from an unidentified flying beast, and it was still the most enjoyable round I had all year.

When golfers in my native East Anglia talk about Aldeburgh, they tend to talk about it in the manner you would talk about a masked stranger who'd swept into town, killed all the baddies and wooed all the women, then swept out just as quickly. It always seems deserted when I go there - usually in early autumn - and doesn’t allow players to go out in anything more crowded than a twoball. Add to this the pleased-with-itself-looking clubhouse and the fact that the accompanying town is London-on-sea personified, and one can be forgiven for approaching it with trepidation, expecting to be told off for any number of minor rules infractions walking the wrong way, perhaps, or sporting an incorrectly-proportioned nose. In truth, it’s very welcoming, with one of the most relaxed clubhouse lounges on the east coast and a pro shop that always seems to be staffed by a friendly middle-aged lady or some labrador-like, spiky-haired teenagers with an aura of boy band about them. “This is millionaire's golf without the expenses,” said the sixty-something member who let me through on the back nine the last time I played. “And without the snootiness,” he might have added, since the incidents of green fees being let through by retired members are usually about as frequent as Brad Faxon three-putts.
The course itself is all gorse, niggling cross bunkers, perfectly-maintained tees and cryptic borrows. And when I say gorse, I mean gorse. Smack a shot into one of the eight or nine hundred mutant thorn blobs that flank the fairways here, and searching is not an option. For one thing, it would probably mean a trip to casualty, or at the very least, an uncomfortable evening with a pair of tweezers. For another, there's no actual way inside these things - or at least not without the help of a King-Size lopper from Homebase. Even if you did manage it, you’d probably only get bitten by an insect of similarly freakish proportions.

If golf didn't exist and you happened across the gorsey, crisp, sandy, hillocky land that lies a mile or so to the west of this seaside town - famous for its high quality fish and chips, arthouse cinema and classic music festival - you'd almost certainly have to invent it. I feel the much the same way about Thorpeness, which lies two or three miles to the north. If anything, though, it’s even better, owing to the greater diversity of its holes. My particular favourite is the par four fifteenth, which cuts back on itself almost at right angles, meaning that a full, straight drive must be aimed into what looks like a forest and what is actually an ocean of an only-slightly-smaller relation to that Aldeburgh gorse. This might be ok if you’re feeling on top of your game and you’ve totted up your yardages, but when you’ve already been stung by Aldeburgh earlier that day and you’re tired and down to a Dunlop 65 from 1973 that you didn’t even know you owned, it’s gruelling. Still, it’s a good kind of gruelling, I think - even if, at times like this, I find it easy to believe that giant golf ball in the near-distance at the Sizewell B power station can only be mocking my plight.

It has a smell to it, Thorpeness: sort of brackish, sort of hot, a bit like a burning version of a herb that hasn’t yet been invented. I don’t know where it comes from (my hopes don’t lean towards Sizewell) but it’s powerful enough that, every time I go there, I’m immediately transported back to my first ever game at the course, back in 1989, not long after that Troon Open. My parents had gone off to do some rambling (i.e. golf without the interesting bits) or something similarly tedious and holidaymaker-like, and left me in the company of the cheerful man who owned the guesthouse where we were staying. After some liqourice disagreed with him, necessitating a quick dash into some heather, he made his way back home, clutching his stomach, leaving me to play the last five or six holes alone. I’d played a couple of links courses the previous month, and I’d thought they were ok, but to argue the case for them over this would be like arguing the case for baldness over a full, beautifully-styled head of hair. Here was that sandy links turf, but here also was heather, an adjacent mere, a spectacular House In The Clouds to provide a line for the drive up the majestic eighteenth. I was smitten.You could even see the sea at one point, out by the eleventh tee. I’m sure I’m supposed to find some extra magic attraction in the more traditional links golf that’s played a thousand yards or so closer to the edge of the land, but, almost twenty years on, I’m still wondering what it is.