Nice Jumper (18 page)

At which point, to a chorus of ‘Well done’, the winner would shuffle back to his seat to give his powers of mental agility a well-earned rest, and the whole event, the thing we’d spent so many hours preparing for and bitching about and living for, would just kind of … die.

Was that
it
? I used to wonder, no matter how many times I saw it happen.

Bushy was the only one I ever saw handle matters differently. As the surprise winner of the Waldman Carr Trophy at Bulwell Forest Golf Club, he subverted the rules entirely. Bushy didn’t care about the greenstaff, the clubhouse’s steak and kidney pie wasn’t a patch on his mum’s paella, and he probably didn’t know who the shag the two hundred inane faces grinning at him were, much less want to know. What Bushy said was short and to the point, and did that rarest of things: it reflected his true feelings at the time. It also ensured that his name was a talking point on the Notts golf scene long after the hormonal whims of the pupils of Nottingham Girls High School had transformed him into a part-time player.

All Bushy said was: ‘Bad luck, lads.’

Bushy never
was
selected for the county team, funnily enough.

Unlike Bushy, though,
I
never won a county event – not a
proper
county event, under the gaze of Big Brother. I never got to stand there, look out onto that monotone sea of propriety and say, ‘Look! My clubs aren’t as good as your clubs, my clothes don’t have labels on them, I drink Happy Shopper ginger beer on the course, and my parents don’t even play or like the game, but I’ve still beaten the lot of you!’ Or something which said the same thing in a more witty, concise manner and concluded with the phrase, ‘So, neh-neh-neh-neh-neh!’ I’m still slightly bitter about that, but I’m learning to deal with it. At least now I can hold up my hands and say, ‘Look, I wanted golf to be fun off the course, as well as on, and it wasn’t, so I couldn’t quite give it my all, and – you know what? – that’s OK.’ At least now I can say, ‘Perhaps I simply wasn’t
made
to be a proper county golfer. Perhaps I was made to be a good golfer, but one who likes to throw pine cones and hide large pieces of wood in his fellow players’ lockers. And – you know what? – that’s OK too.’

Back then, though, I had a long way to go before I could be so philosophical. Somewhere inside, an illogical mid-adolescent war was raging between the hormones that wanted desperately to be part of something and the ones that wanted to tear that something down. I loved golf. I hated it. I was supposed to be winning the British Open in just under a year. It all mattered so, so much.

IF I WANTED
to be a better player, I concluded, I needed a better golf course to practise on.

I first saw Par-adise as a spectator, but the sensation that we belonged together was as immediate and overpowering as it might have been if I’d won my first PGA Tour event there. Ever fallen in love at first sight? Remember the feeling? The twittering innards. The blancmange legs. The freakish, intuitive perception of a complete stranger’s soul. Now, take that same enchanting stranger, and imagine their body stripped naked and magnified to a size of five square miles … picture every hump and hollow exaggerated, enabling you to examine them in a manner you never believed possible. Imagine them with not only bumpy bits and crevices but
pine trees
. Imagine a four-hour hike across their surface, with the result that, no matter how hard you tried to get to know
them,
there would always be more to explore.

Sneering bunkers, marble-slick greens, ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!’ rough, pine-patrolled fairways which seemed always to be lurking in mist, and a regal, ghostly clubhouse conspired to make Par-adise the greatest golf course I had ever seen. What made it something more than that, something
carnal
, was the way it revealed itself: slowly, teasingly at first, then – without warning – ostentatiously and imperially. One second you’d be tootling through some bog-standard Robin Hood country, counting off lumberyards, one eye on the road, one eye on your
Good Golf Course Guide
. A moment later, you’d take a right turn down a dusty track, pass through a corridor of woodland, and – blam – there it was, letting you look right down its top.

Par-adise was set in a deep bowl, hemmed in on all sides by monolithic Forestry Commission land, and gave the impression of being an entire, separate country, never mind merely a golf course. Par-adise didn’t have houses backing on to it – not even big, stately ones – for fear, presumably, that a quirk in the tastes of their residents might taint its majesty. Where most clubhouses had strict dress codes, precluding the wearing of things like jeans, trainers and Sigue Sigue Sputnik T-shirts, Par-adise’s probably had a different underwear by-law for every one of its umpteen chambers. Par-adise knew it was gorgeous and
enigmatic,
and asked you what precisely you were planning to do about it. Par-adise – let’s face it – wasn’t
really
called Par-adise, because that would be crap and tacky. Its actual name was something proud and evocative. If Par-adise knew that I was calling it Par-adise, right now, it would be utterly affronted.

Good.

Par-adise broke my heart.

I should have known it was too good to be true.

Par-adise, it seemed to me, didn’t have junior members. While it might have mutated into a leering, gnashing host during big tournaments, for the majority of the year it sat there two-thirds deserted, admiring itself and licking whatever it had where mortal golf courses had wounds. It didn’t seem to manufacture star players in the way that most of the north Nottinghamshire courses did, and, on the odd occasions when it did, these too were solitary, enigmatic (and, I assumed, unusually rich) creatures. So when Ted Anchor offered to help me gain membership there, I was somewhat taken aback.

Ted was one of the junior section’s chief allies at Cripsley. A measure of the immense respect reserved for him among us juniors is that not once – publicly or privately – did we think to add a ‘W’ to the front of his surname. A former champion pentathlete, he represented everything that was good about the people
you
can meet at a golf club. If your entire experience of social golf amounted to Ted’s good manners, selfless sportsmanship and irrepressible sunniness, it might be enough to convince you that dress restrictions, xenophobia and plus fours held the combination to a rosier world.

There were only two ways to make Ted stop smiling: tell him about a misfortune, or pull on his jowls. He was a beacon of optimism for everyone who knew him, the kind of rare man who seemed to be above day-to-day niggles, yet reserved a deep sadness for the properly tragic. Bob Boffinger was the brains, soul and legs behind the Cripsley junior section. Ted was the heart.

It’s a special golfer who can be totally in love with the game yet smile beatifically after futzing six successive eight-iron shots into a stagnant pond, and Ted was that man. Unlike his contemporaries, Ted knew he couldn’t lick us at golf, and didn’t waste his or our time trying. ‘That was one mighty drive,’ he would gasp, whether the tee shot I’d hit was awe-inspiring, decent, or downright ordinary. I might have started to nourish my own doubts about my ability to win that British Open, but Ted was always unequivocal about my potential. On my less upbeat days, I would sign up to play with him, just for the sheer confidence boost.

If there was anything frustrating about Ted, it was that he believed
all
of us were going to win the British Open one day – something even we, deluded as we
were,
knew to be highly unlikely. He probably never realized it, but we squabbled over him terribly.

‘I’m playing with Ted in the Naylor Cup on Saturday.’

‘Ted gave me twenty quid yesterday.’

‘Ted said he thought I was favourite to win the club championship this year.’

Ted probably didn’t put a tenth of the thought, effort, money and time into the junior section that Bob Boffinger did, but he made us feel better about ourselves – better, probably, than we had any right to feel – and because of that he was perhaps the more sought-after patron. His praise, whoreish though it was,
mattered
. He might have slipped Mousey a tenner early in the day (Mousey’s mum had to support two unruly teenagers alone on a small income, and, learning of this, Ted had stepped in as clandestine benefactor) and signed up to tell Jamie how great he was tomorrow, but when he approached me on the practice ground that day,
I
felt like the special one.

‘How’s the swing, killer?’ asked Ted.

‘Ah, pretty good,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t seem to be able to score, though. I creamed it round here in seventy-one yesterday and made four birdies, but I played in the Girton Junior Challenge the day before and stubbed it round in thirteen over. How crap was that?’

‘You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, my boy. You’re
doing
all you can, and it’s obvious you should be scoring better with that kind of swing and the distance you hit the thing. It’s this course: it’s just not difficult enough for you. And that gives you a disadvantage against those Worksop boys straight away.

‘I’m heading up to the clubhouse now to order some teacakes. Now – you finish hitting those balls, and I’ll meet you in the men’s bar in twenty minutes. I’ve got an idea for you, my boy.’

Ted had met Gerald Whitehead in the early sixties while cycling on top of a Swiss Alp; the two of them had celebrated by racing each other down the other side and been friends ever since. Gerald was, Ted explained in hushed tones, a highly influential member of Par-adise. Describing his friend, Ted used phrases like ‘salt of the earth’, ‘owes me his life’ and ‘stand-up fella’. Overlooking the obvious question of why, if he was such a ‘stand-up fella’, he hadn’t secured membership for Ted at Par-adise, I listened, feeling more and more light-headed by the nanosecond, as he outlined just what Gerald might be able to do to further my golfing career. If all went well, I learned, I could be a member at the Midlands’ greatest golf club before the month was out.

‘Don’t get too excited, though,’ warned Ted.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t,’ I lied.

The meeting was set for the following week. I arrived at Par-adise well briefed. ‘Now don’t go worrying about
how
well you play; it’s going to be obvious to Gerry that you’ve got talent,’ explained Ted. ‘What matters is that you show him what a well-bred young man you are. The things that you learned from that little rules book:
they’re
the important things. Gerry’s a good fella, but he admires manners. Now – you just make sure you repair your pitchmarks and watch your “p”s and “q”s and I’ve got a good feeling that before long you could be the newest star player at one of Nottinghamshire’s best clubs.’

‘Thanks, Ted.’

‘Oh, and Tom?’

‘Yeah?’

‘If you’re getting a lift up to the club with your dad, you might want to suggest that he leaves the Sphincter at home.’

He needn’t have worried. I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. I arrived at Par-adise alone, having been dropped off by my parents in the car park of a lumberyard half a mile up the road. My incessant argument that the occasion demanded a brand-new set of Mizuno irons might have fallen on deaf ears, but thanks to a tin of Brasso, a bucket of hot soapy water and the bathroom nail brush, it wouldn’t take too much imagination to mistake my random, orphaned clubs for the Real Thing. My torso was complimented by a handsome Lyle and Scott tank top, complete with ’bilious diamonds’ motif. My breath had been primed
with
an infallible cocktail of Colgate, Listerine and Fox’s Glacier Mints. I was as ready as I would ever be. Emerging from the pines, I paused at the brow of the hill, and admired my new kingdom.

Gerald matched neither my preconceived image of a Par-adise dignitary nor my preconceived image of Ted Anchor’s best friend. A tight-lipped, frugal man, he immediately made it clear that there were a thousand and one things he’d rather be doing than playing golf with a precocious little brat like me. His conversation was strictly limited to a muttered ‘I think it’s your turn to play’ here and an ‘I’m taking a free drop’ there. I think at one point he might have asked me how I’d done in my GCSEs, but it could have been the wind thrashing through the pines. Unlike his Cripsley equivalents, Gerald seemed neither impressed nor depressed by my golf. It simply didn’t penetrate his universe.

I guessed, though, that this was all part of the test. Well, bring it on, I thought. I was in what professionals call ‘the zone’ – the exact place I couldn’t seem to find in all those county tournaments – and nothing could touch me. If Gerald wanted to wait for me to make the mistakes, he could wait as long as he liked.

I handled the whole thing, I thought, with model decorum. Ted had advised me not to worry about the way I played, and I hadn’t, unduly. Par-adise had brought neither me nor the bowed shaft of my five-iron
to
my knees, yet I’d shown it the respect it demanded. My round was pragmatic, reliable, unspectacular, and that was clearly what the occasion called for. I had repaired my pitchmarks. I had replaced my divots. I had beaten Gerald by eleven shots.