Nice Jumper (16 page)

There’s a photograph of me with Shue, taken on the final night in Portugal, just before our farewell dinner at the club. Decked out in my dark blue blazer with its Cripsley Edge badge, I look like I’m blushing for the camera, flushed with young love, as my friends grin politely in the background. The truth, though, is that my face is red because twenty minutes earlier, I had been in the Oporto club’s tiny sauna with all my clothes on. I did this because Robin and Ben shouted, ‘Last one in the sauna is gay!’ and, in an at the time highly important attempt to cast aspersions on the nocturnal
activities
of Mousey, Jamie and Bushy, I valued hetero-sexuality over comfort.

What the picture also fails to reveal is that eleven minutes earlier Shue thwarted me in my attempt to put my hand on her thigh, seven minutes earlier I punched Carlo, the most insolent of the Portuguese juniors, in the chin for making kissy noises at me, and three minutes earlier Shue handed me a letter, which she made me promise not to read until I was back in England.

You could say it looks like a normal kind of golfing picture, hinting at a normal kind of golfing romance, at the end of a normal kind of golfing holiday.

But then you could also be the kind of idiot who says the camera never lies.

I read the letter on the plane home, in the toilet – chiefly because I didn’t want Robin and Ben reading over my shoulder and finding out that I had been lying about putting my hand down Shue’s shirt. The standard letter from dumper to dumpee is usually cushioned by ambiguity, with lots of statements like, ‘I’m not looking for a boyfriend at the moment,’ which actually mean, ‘I’m looking for boyfriend, just not one like you.’ But clearly not in Portugal. In unnerving sentences worthy of a grade-A English student, Shue informed me in no uncertain terms that she had a boyfriend already but had smooched with me because she thought I ‘might
be
a better kisser than him’. She went on to admit she had been proved wrong in her assumption, and that the feelings from the night in Lisbon had not been strong enough, and, besides, she had decided she fancied Jamie more. She signed off by saying that she didn’t mind if I wrote to her to ‘ease my pain’, but only on the condition that I told Jamie to write too.

I had snogged an ice queen.

Assuming an expression of zero emotion, I returned to my seat, where Mousey and Jamie were dividing the tee pegs they had stolen from Portugal’s locker rooms over the course of the fortnight. I regarded Jamie for a moment: he was two years younger than me, with the looks of a young John Lennon and a handicap of seven. If pushed, I’d have to admit I thought his swing was a bit on the loose side to hold up under pressure. I could understand, though: Shue was a capricious girl, uncertain of what she wanted out of life, but sure it was something she couldn’t have. If she’d snogged Jamie, I was sure she would have written him a letter confessing that she couldn’t go out with him because she had a crush on me. At least, I thought I was sure.

As I sat there dodging the tee pegs flying over my seat, I took a moment to weigh up the evidence, which, in no particular order, went something like this: 1) I felt heartbroken. 2) I was fifteen. 3) I had been led on and messed around. 4) I had a picture of a golfing goddess in my wallet who was too far away to tell my
friends
that my anecdotes about her weren’t true. 5) She had preferred Jamie. 6) I could beat him in the county championship next Tuesday. 7) I felt sad. 8) In five minutes, I was going to be giving Mousey a dead leg.

It seemed I was going to live through this, after all.

‘We nearly lost him for ever,’ Bob Boffinger told my dad, who was waiting at the airport to drive us home in the minibus, as we came off the plane. ‘But I think his mind’s back on the job now.’

I NEVER DID
get round to telling Jamie about Shue’s letter. I was naive, but I wasn’t stupid, and I certainly didn’t want to give Jamie any help finding people to make him feel good about himself. He and I had started playing golf at Cripsley on the same day, and over the years, as Cripsley’s two best junior players, we’d developed a seething, cloak-and-dagger rivalry. That is to say, Jamie’s rivalry towards me always seemed seething and cloak-and-dagger; I was always completely up front about my intentions to thrash the pants off him.

When I played against Jamie, I didn’t just play against Jamie: I played against his mum, his dad, two thirds of the Cripsley membership, the Nottinghamshire Union of Golf Clubs, his brand-new titanium-shafted driver, and the ever-fluctuating age difference between us. Jamie was born in August 1977,
two
years and three months after me, but not if you were a regular reader of the local paper’s sports page. At one point during 1991 the paper seemed to carry headlines in the manner of ‘Embryo Reaches out of Womb to Win Golf Tournament!’ almost weekly. Jamie’s fellow Cripsley juniors couldn’t decide which to be more baffled by: the way the paper seemed determined to chronicle the most minor of his golfing achievements, or the way he got progressively less pubescent in every article.

Jamie’s parents made a gallant attempt to pretend their son’s sporting future didn’t represent their pension plan, but it didn’t take a sports psychologist to see through them. You’d spot them greeting him on the eighteenth green in the wake of the rare competitive rounds he fouled up, their mouths offering bland sympathy, their eyes offering piercing disbelief. ‘What was that? That was shit!’ I once heard Jamie’s dad say to his son in a quiet, leafy corner of the course during a county boys event. Jamie’s dad didn’t play golf, and to any other non-aficionado the tee shot his son had hit – far from a pure strike, certainly, but long and straight and high enough to be well clear of trouble – would have looked nothing less than spectacular. To him, though, it was the closest thing to a family bereavement.

I always managed to keep a nose ahead of Jamie in handicap terms. A week after he came down from six to
five,
I would come down from five to four, and so on. In the eyes of the rest of the world, though, it seemed that I was permanently holding his coat-tails, particularly since, at any given time, I was between two and five years older than him. ‘Boy Wonder’ other members of the Cripsley junior section called him, somewhat scornfully, but not scornfully enough to stop them desperately wanting to be his friend and get a go with his top-of-the-range, graphite-shafted four-wood. Whether Jamie was eleven, thirteen or three, he had the preternatural power to make individuals several years older than him turn into sycophantic wrecks with a flash of his copper beryllium sand wedge.

My relationship with Jamie is perhaps best encapsulated by our coaching session with Gavin Christie and Pete Boffinger in the winter of 1991. Pete, Bob’s eldest son and Cripsley’s finest player at the time, had decided to do a good turn by taking his two most promising understudies to the local driving range to meet his teacher, who, we all hoped, would offer us a jumpstart on the road to stardom. Christie, who allegedly once turned down the chance to work for a beseeching Seve Ballesteros, worked regularly on the practice grounds of the European Tour, offering swing tips to a quarter of the European Ryder Cup team. Ian Woosnam, Howard Clark and Mark ‘Jesse’ James had all worked with him and, un-coincidentally, possessed the most arid senses of
humour
on tour. To describe Christie’s manner as ‘blunt’ would be like describing Mount Everest as a ‘hillock’. Picture a less optimistic version of Frazer from
Dad’s Army
(‘We’re doomed!’). The thing that amazes me most about my meeting with Christie is not that I was brave enough to carry on playing golf but that I have recovered from the psychological scars of the confrontation and gone on to become something roughly approaching a self-confident human being.

Here follows a transcription of our encounter. The dialogue begins with me standing in the driving range bay, hitting shots with my five-iron, feeling somewhat self-conscious and wondering why the stubble-flecked vagrant in the trenchcoat behind me is watching so intently.

Stubbly trenchcoat man: What’s this?

Me: What?

Stubbly trenchcoat man (swinging arms in the manner of
Thunderbirds
cast member): This.

Me: It’s you, doing an impression of my swing.

Pete Boffinger: Sorry. Hello, Gavin. I didn’t see you there. Tom, this is Gavin. Gavin, meet Tom.

Me: Hello, Gavin. Nice to meet you.

Gavin (removing trenchcoat): The problem is that you’ve got no flex. There’s no flail in your swing. It’s craaap. You look like you’re rowing, not playing golf.

Me: Oh. Really? I’m not very good at rowing.

Gavin: I don’t expect you would be, if you row with the swing you should be using for golf.

Jamie: Ha!

Gavin (picking up my five-iron and hitting a powerful, straight shot with wristy, springy motion): You got to do this, you see.

Me (retrieving five-iron and imitating him): Wow.

Gavin: That’s where all the strength comes from. The flail of the wrists. Effortless power, not powerless effort. If you don’t do that, you’ll always be craaap.

Me (feeling simultaneous need to cry and shout for joy): I see what you mean. I think I felt something once on the practice ground.

Gavin: Yeah, but thaaat was your girlfriend.

Pete: Ha.

Me: This is amazing. I’m hitting the ball twenty yards further. The strike’s more solid, too.

Gavin: Of course it is. (Moving on to Jamie’s bay.) He’s got it. Tom, look at your mate. He flails it. Waaatch him. (To Jamie.) Now, move your thumb a centimetre to the left.

Jamie (moving thumb and hitting an even straighter, better shot than the ones he’d hit immediately before): Nice!

Gavin: Of course it is. What do you think they pay me for? Now, Pete, I’d love to stand around chaaaatting all night, but, well … I wouldn’t. And, besides, a coach has got to eat.

Pete (opening wallet): Thanks for this, Gavin.

Gavin: No problem. Remember, boys: flail. Jamie, you’ve got it, naturally. Tom, you can learn it, if you work aaat it.

See what I was up against? Here was the eternal battle of the gifted golden child and the plucky outsider. T-Rex
v
. Slade. Manchester United
v
. Wimbledon. What I identified in myself as the swaggering radicalism of the insouciant misfit, everyone who mattered seemed to see as the plodding perseverance of the determined underdog. I couldn’t win. If I practised, I was showing the world just how hard I had to work to reach my friend’s hereditary standard. If I didn’t practise, I was admitting defeat.

It seems to me now without a sixteen-year-old brain to obscure my judgement that Jamie and I could have pushed ourselves to the top had we conducted our rivalry in a different manner and fully appreciated the value of it. Instead, we squandered what was meant to have been nurtured. Rather than seeing who could work on their game most, the race was on to see who could appear to work on it
least
, who could get to the tee latest, who could pretend to be entering the least amount of tournaments, who could demonstrate to the other just how many more things in life were more important than golf. It’s impossible to overemphasize the futility of this little mental game, when you take
into
account the fact that we were playing it from the standpoint of two people who spent their every waking hour at their local golf course.
Of course
we both wanted to be the best!
Of course
we loved golf!

What were we scared of? Why were we ashamed of being so damn dedicated? For a pair of kids who were rarely apart for five years and would play between ten and thirty-six holes per day in their summer holidays, head-to-head practice rounds between Jamie and I were rare. When I look back and see myself at fifteen, striding down the fairway, laughing, on another irresponsible sunny day, I don’t see myself with Jamie: I see myself with Robin or Mousey or Bushy or Ashley or Ben. Jamie’s there too, but a couple of bunkers’ distance away, never truly with me. Yet on the few occasions when the two of us
did
go out alone, with serious golf on our mind, there was nothing more invigorating, and it represented the one time when we truly seemed to admit to ourselves that this was where we belonged.

In only one environment, though, were we truly united.

Our inductions into the county junior team arrived – like so many new frontiers for the two of us – within a few weeks of one another. Jamie probably felt the same way about the rest of the county boys as I felt about him, and somehow this brought us closer. If Jamie had this year’s state-of-the-art equipment, our county teammates
had
next year’s. (I, meanwhile, was quite content with a mish-mash of 1967’s, 1981’s and 1987’s.) If he was worshipped by the powers of the Nottinghamshire Golf Union, they were worshipped harder. No longer was he the youngest, the most spoiled, the most natural, the best dressed, the most born for the role …

Nottinghamshire golf at this point could be summarized in a single word: Worksop. ‘Golf does take us to some beautiful places,’ the legendary British professional Henry Cotton once observed, but clearly he had never driven along the A57, bypassing Manton, in the direction of Belph. If he had, what he would have said was, ‘Golf does take us to some beautiful places, in the middle of some
absolutely fucking abysmal
places.’ Four types of people end up in Worksop: those who are born there, those who get lost there, those who go to clandestine right-wing rallies there, and those who are extremely good at golf. Worksop Golf Club itself – like all the very best courses in Nottinghamshire, strangely enough – was a sporting fantasyland within pitching distance of an urban nightmare. A stunning mixture of woodland, heather, gorse, sculptured fairways, enormous wire fences, adjoining dual carriageways and tower-block vistas.