Nice Jumper (11 page)

Robin blurted out the opening consonant of a protest, then sank back into his chair. He didn’t want to be suspended. He was also well aware that Bob wouldn’t dream of doing anything to jeopardize our golfing futures.
Hell’s
Trucker had a notoriously short memory, as evinced by the astonishing amount of junior tournaments he forgot to attend as organizer, and Bob and Robin were perhaps postulating that this would be the kind of ban that would stand as Big News only until HT’s next social function as captain.

I, on the other hand, silently wondered how the hell I was expected to operate on only five days’ golf per week.

It didn’t make sense. For years Cripsley’s elder statesmen had yearned for a junior section that would venture forth and make the club famous with its crashing drives, metronomic irons and honeyed putting strokes. Now they’d got them, they seemed to be overwhelmed with feelings of ambivalence. We didn’t misbehave any more or less than we had before we became accomplished players, but we were certainly reprimanded
miles
more frequently. You couldn’t help wondering what was really going on. Was Graeme Finch, for example,
genuinely
upset when he reported me to the committee for failing to repair that pitchmark on the seventh hole? Or was he simply pissed off that two days before, during my six and five defeat of him in the club’s matchplay championship, I’d been routinely out-hitting him by ninety yards? Was Gerry Cummings
truly
bothered that Jamie had played his shot out of turn in his league match against him, or was he jealous at the
height
and backspin that Jamie got on his pitch shots?

Whatever the case, Robin’s conjecture about the ban was right. Three Tuesdays after its instigation, we were tying Mousey’s shoelaces together in the pro shop. Two Mondays after that, we were sneaking out to the fifth hole and dropping a bag of practice balls in one of the greenside bunkers.

We were on our guard, however, and feelings of victimization – ours – did our golf no end of good. Rarely a week went by without Ashley, Jamie, Robin, Bushy, Mousey or me reserving a spot at the prize table. The more oppressed we felt, the more we won, the more our actions fell under the spotlight, and the more risqué and enjoyable our games of Ching! and Eight-iron Tennis became.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I won the club championship by five shots from an elusive adult member named Terry Titterton. This made me abruptly, immensely popular – more popular, perhaps, than you’d have any right to expect to be having just beaten the best players in a modestly ranking East Midlands golf club. Titterton had held the championship for the previous five years, the members greeting his victories with an increasingly bilious stoicism. He was a ‘country member’ of Cripsley – which, in this case, meant he came to the club once a year, won its most prestigious event, then vanished back to
his
‘proper’ club in leafy Surrey, leaving Cripsley’s shell-shocked league team sitting around with steam coming out of their ears. Hell’s Trucker probably had fantasies about driving over Titterton’s golf bag in one of his juggernauts.

Titterton seemed like a nice enough bloke to me, but for the captain and many of the other low handicap players, his ability annually to bring
their
course to its knees in just two rounds mocked their failure to do the same thing over the course of a year, and his easy temperament and Home Counties charm while he was doing it seemed to undermine everything from their swings to their sex drive. Obviously, I wasn’t their ideal choice to do the dethroning (I suspect they would have preferred someone with a few more Pringle jumpers – or even one, for that matter), but, in the absence of any other candidates, I would have to suffice.

Moments after I’d signed my winning scorecard, the clubhouse grapevine began to whirr. Titterton had ‘left in disgust’, ‘couldn’t even be bothered to stay for the prize-giving’. By the time I had made my way from the clubhouse to the locker room to change into my blazer, my back felt raw. If you had removed the polo shirt I’d borrowed from my dad, you would have found a patchwork of bright red hand marks.

‘Well done, Tom. You sure socked it to him,’ said the man with the glasses who once told me off for looking for balls in some gorse near the seventh green.

‘You scared him off, kiddo,’ offered the camp man with the long putter whom Jamie had christened ‘Puff Legs’.

Who the fuck
were
these people?

As I wrestled my way towards the prize table, there, waiting – grinning – was the tournament chairman, poised to shake the winner’s hand and present the trophy. Earlier in the year when I had been triumphant, he had been sure to undermine my victories with backhanded compliments, such as, ‘Enjoy it while it lasts, Tom,’ and, ‘I see by your dress sense that your mum makes good use of her old curtains,’ whispered beneath the shelter of applause. This time, though, he just glowed: ‘You’ve done us proud, Tom.’ It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been the one to break Titterton’s stranglehold; what mattered was that it had happened in his year as captain.

Finally, at long last, the two of us were poised to be united. Here was my chance to initiate a future of peaceful adult–junior relations, maybe opening up some career opportunities in the transport industry in the process. I have gone back over the scene countless times over the years, and there are a lot of things I would have liked to say as Hell’s Trucker passed me the trophy and I stared, dry-throated, into all those eager faces who pretended to know me, and wondered whose victory it was. But, in the end, the two I used – the only
two
that I could find at the time – probably did the job as well as any.

‘Thanks, Gordon,’ I said.

IF SOMEONE TELLS
you that golf isn’t a dangerous game, the chances are they’ve never been hit on the arm by a three-wood shot that hasn’t bounced.

Don’t be suckered in by TV golfing injuries. Those spectators you see grinning and rubbing their ankles after John Daly’s ball has clattered into the gallery are putting on a brave face for their heroes. Two minutes later, with the TV cameras elsewhere, they’ll be reverting to their baby voice and pleading for a hot-water bottle, a comfort blanket and an ambulance. Golf balls
sting
. I found this out in 1990 during the annual Notts county juniors
v
. county police match, when Sergeant John Trevanean propelled me into a bunker with his hooked fairway wood shot. One second I was standing thirty yards in front of him, forty-five degrees to his left, in what I assumed was a safe position. The next I was prostrate in forty feet of sand, with a
tangerine-sized
lump trying to work its way out of my arm.

The first sensation, upon getting hit by a golf ball, is a mixture of dizziness and extreme pain. Then comes the easy part: a prolonged, malevolent throbbing. Finally, you feel like something is growing inside you, directly beneath the point of impact – a spherical thing, yes, but at least twice the size of the missile that hit you, and fitted with rotating teeth. I’m still thankful that I put my arm up in time. The ball had been heading directly for my temple.

But golf is a man’s game. Trevanean’s apologies were sincere, but businesslike – I was disappointed; I’d hoped I’d be offered at least a free guided tour round the local CID for my misfortune – and we moved quickly onto the next hole. First aid? First schmaid. We had a match to play.

Don’t let the long johns and umbrellas fool you; golfers are
tough
. The balls are the least of it (although the legendary club player who had to have his legs amputated after licking the poison from the inside of one might beg to differ). Additionally, there are unruly, flailing swings, loose clubheads, water hazards and – in the case of the Cripsley juniors – flying killer apples and Mars Bars to think about. By the time I was sixteen, I’d been stabbed with the jagged metal shaft of a five-iron, almost decapitated by a low-flying Braeburn thrown by Jamie, pushed into a pond, subjected to witchcraft by a manual labourer, intimidated by a
red-neck
trucker, buried to my neck in leaves, and tripped over by an errant flagstick. At the 1991 British Open at Royal Birkdale I had stood two hundred yards up the fairway, listening helplessly to the terrible snapping sound as a tour professional – England’s Richard Boxall – broke his leg
just by swinging
. I knew the risks, but I carried on regardless.

What I hadn’t bargained for, however, was just how much damage a wooden tee peg could inflict.

This particular tee peg had been dozing innocently in my golf trousers, a remnant of my round earlier that day. Like most of its breed, it was about an inch and a half long, with a less than threatening appearance. Sure, it had a pointy end, but if you wanted to use it to commit an act of violence, you’d have to go to extreme and fairly pointless lengths, such as attaching a chain-saw to it.

Put it this way. If I had been looking to cause some trouble that night, it wouldn’t have been my weapon of choice.

Accompanied by Mousey, I was staying over at Ashley’s place, which was only five minutes’ walk from the course. The golf trousers were an unfortunate by-product of a last minute sleepover invitation. I was sure, though, that if I wore my shirt loose, put my hands in my pockets, and introduced a slight strut into my gait, I could just about pass myself off as a non-golfer.

Having tired of ordering pizzas and pest control for Ashley’s unwitting neighbours, we’d decamped a mile down the road to Stablebridge, where Ashley’s uncle lived. Ashley didn’t call Stablebridge ‘Stablebridge’; he called it ‘Stabbo’, just like every other affluent Beeston kid who went there to convince himself that he was three times as tough as he really was. ‘Stabbo’ was Nottinghamshire’s answer to the Bronx, but without the swagger – the kind of place teenagers visit under the illusion that it is ‘happening’, and the rest of the world visits only to buy secondhand cars, and only if nowhere else is selling them.

Ashley’s uncle, Lanky John, lived dead in the heart of Stabbo, on a street (I noted silently) where my dad claimed he had been thrown into a hedge during early sixties gang warfare. It’s not beyond the boundaries of possibility that Lanky John was the person who pushed my dad into the hedge. My parents, who’d grown up in places like this, had warned me about ‘Stabbo’ and people like Lanky John – which of course was exactly why I was here.

No one seemed to know what Lanky John did for a living, but Ashley, Mousey and me could only imagine it was something important and exciting. His place was a council house masquerading as a theme park. Our guided tour of his home entertainment began with a television set the size of a small cinema screen, took in a cellar full of brand-new sports equipment (all
mysteriously
still in its boxes), bypassed a ‘Scalextric room’, took a couple of detours via a mini bar, and finished up in a heated swimming pool. An hour later we were back on the street, unanimous in the notion that we were going to be just like John as soon as we were old enough to get a driving licence, a Filofax full of underworld contacts and a fast getaway van.

I wondered why my parents couldn’t be more like John. Why didn’t
we
have a pool room and four hi-fi systems? I didn’t understand my mum and dad. Their working-class youth had been spent in places like Stabbo, surrounded by the salt of the earth, but having been to teacher training college and circulated among Nottingham’s hippy community, they had moved to more affluent, middle-class areas where people wouldn’t beat you up for owning a copy of
Jean de Florette
. What was their problem? Why did they have to go and make me middle class, when it was clearly much more fun to be working class? Stabbo wasn’t so bad. If they lived in a cheaper house in an area like this and bought fewer books, they too could afford a Super Nintendo and a globe-shaped drinks cabinet.

Well, I decided, I was going to be different. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking that I was ‘above’ Stabbo. So its housing estates looked like good places to go and get murdered? So what? Pierce the surface of these monotone buildings and you found proud, ace-laugh blokes like Uncle John,
with
their infinite supply of games rooms and goodwill.

Yes, I mused. This was
my
place, populated by
my
people, and if I did happen to get thrown into a hedge while I was there, I wasn’t going to let it make me feel any different. Sure, I thought, as I double-checked my polo shirt was untucked, you might get into a few scrapes while you were in a place like this. But that’s the law of the jungle. That’s what it’s like in the
real
world. Some of us can hack it. Some of us can’t.

Golf Tom had worked for a while, but the persona was starting to have its limitations in terms of parent-bothering, in the same way that trying to out-amplify my dad’s Rolling Stones records with Bing Crosby would have its limitations. This, though, this – the very thing my mum and dad had been part of, and fought to get away from – could work. Right here, in Stabbo, I might have found the very thing that would unravel my infuriatingly placid parents. I looked across at my friends, swaggering along beside me: Ashley to my right with his polyester jumper sleeves drooping over his arms and a pitchmark repairer between his teeth, Mousey to his right with his sideways-on baseball cap. Oh, yeah. We were heavyweight. And we knew it.