Authors: Tom Cox
But, at the same time, I kept going back – tentatively and mockingly at first, then, as I learned more about the outside world, increasingly confidently and acceptingly. There was the first time, in 1997, when I regained my handicap, played every week for six months, got my hair cut, wore a complete lack of offensive T-shirts, won a couple of competitions, and
still
got told off for wearing the wrong-coloured socks in a manner that most people would reserve for scolding mischievous toddlers for pulling the legs off insects. There was the time the following year when I visited the club for a reunion party, got drunk with my old friends, and as I talked to them in a brand new way – i.e. without the lingering subtext of who’d played the best golf recently and managed to look least bothered about it – felt a dysfunctional part of my fifteen-year-old self rise up out of my body and leave me for ever. There was the time just after that, when I went to clear out my old locker
wearing
a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and got seriously ‘checked out’ by the security guard the club had installed in the car park (I swear I even saw him pick up his radio at one point and mouth that he had a ‘one-eight-six’ or something in progress).
Meanwhile, layer by layer, my post-golf idealism was being stripped away. In the outside world, the coarse little realities slinked up on me. Perhaps loving music
wasn’t
synonymous with being a wholesome person. Perhaps being left wing and working in the media and wearing sandals
didn’t
go hand in hand with an inherent lack of duplicity. Perhaps I
did
prefer the Carpenters to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Perhaps I
did
need to get some fresh air.
My subconscious kept drawing me back to golf. Maybe it
was
a great game after all? Maybe it
was
a more enjoyable way to spend your free time than standing in a pool of vomit swigging watered-down lager while three bearded Americans attack their guitars with violin bows?
I started to get the tee peg dream again – naggingly, relentlessly. The following day, I would find myself en route to my local driving range, without having made any quantifiable decision to go there. Having arrived, I would line up in my enormous flares, comedy sideburns and unruly hair, and ease ball after ball into another time zone with yesteryear’s equipment, while men with baseball caps and space-age drivers looked
on,
perplexed. I felt addiction kicking in. Out of the corner of my eye I saw people in tank-tops whispering about me. I arrived home with flaps of raw skin hanging off the palms of my hands. I started to break things in the house with my clubs again and concoct preposterous excuses in front of my wife. (‘I don’t know how it happened. I just walked into the room and for no reason a picture frame dropped on to the lamp, which fell off and smashed the mirror. No: of course it was nothing to do with my putter!’) Doubtfully, I told myself it was all ‘research’.
There was one thing I still needed to do, and then I’d know.
I arrived at Cripsley in July 2001 with a few things I’d never arrived there with before – a hairstyle I was comfortable with, a semi-modern, smooth-running automobile, a sense that there was more to life than golf but not much more – anticipating that the place would counter my personal development with its own. Since I’d last been a serious golfer, Tiger Woods had revolutionized the game, breaking ancient barriers of race, class and age, but Cripsley seemed somehow oblivious to all of this. The painted white line still warned of the hideous retribution available to those unscrupulous females who dared cross over into the men-only bar. Around the corner, a couple of silver-haired oldsters sat, each with one eye on me and one eye on the TV, which showed the tee shot of an
incredibly
dull-looking, badly dressed young British professional with the kind of haircut that should, by rights, be torn off the head and thrown high into the air and shot at as a statement. His name, the graphic below informed the viewer, was Justin.
I’d arranged to meet my playing partner for the day, Pete Boffinger, at 1 p.m., which gave me ten minutes to kill. Pete would be older and thinner on top than when I’d last played with him, just as my sideburns would be bushier and wider than when he’d last played with me, but until then, time seemed to be standing still. In the car park, the same security guard looked up from his
Daily Mail
and eyed me with the same ill-disguised suspicion that he had done a few years before. In the practice net, Jack ‘Net Man’ Mullen bashed away, still searching for that elusive backswing trigger. I watched him, becoming momentarily distracted by what sounded like a bee attacking me from behind, and turning to see Steve Kimbolton bellydancing a plate of teacakes over to the pro shop.
‘Hi, Tom,’ said Steve, as if he’d seen me at some point in the previous four years.
‘Er … Hi, Steve.’
Was someone screwing with my mind here?
Outside, the world had changed immeasurably. The internet had arrived, and quickly mutated into the world’s biggest shopping mall. Global leaders had risen, fallen and committed inappropriate acts with
cigars.
Pop music had coughed out its dying breath, keeled over, then got up and eaten its own corpse for the hell of it. I’d gone from punk to soft rock, from elitist anger to cheerful uncoolness. But golf hadn’t moved. It had merely been waiting for me to stop revolving.
I glanced down at my clothes, noting that, after years of sartorial felonies, I’d inadvertently found my natural look in the fashions of the 1976 British Open. I looked at Pete, who’d joined me on the tee – not some alien golfing being from my past, but a downright ace fella, with whom I could discuss the recorded output of Crosby, Stills and Nash. I looked at the immaculate fairway. I looked at the brilliant white ball, sitting squarely – securely – on the tee peg, inviting me. In this sleepy corner of my past, I felt every event nudging me further towards myself, and let it.
Tom Cox’s writing has appeared in the
Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Jack
magazine,
The Times
and the
Guardian
, for which paper he was Pop Critic between 1999 and 2000. He is the author of two books:
Nice Jumper
, which was shortlisted for the 2002 National Sporting Club Best Newcomer Award, and
Educating Peter
. He was born in 1975 and lives with his wife in Norfolk.
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NICE JUMPER
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552770767
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446497456
Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,
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Bantam Press edition published 2002
Black Swan edition published 2003
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