Nice Jumper (2 page)

Am I about to realize that golf is cool?

Moreover, would this necessarily be a bad thing? Ironically enough, in the years since I abandoned golf in favour of rock and roll, there have been a glut of ‘golf gets hip’ features in the British broadsheet newspapers, suggesting that, in the aftermath of Tiger
Woods,
Burberry street fashion, rock-and-roll golfers such as John Daly and golfing rock-and-rollers such as Alice Cooper, golf is becoming less bourgeois, more working class, more open-minded. I’m not wholly convinced this is true – the last time I spent any time within its iron borders, the golfing establishment had at least a hundred years of evolution to go through before it attained what most fashion editors and cultural commentators would define as ‘cool’ – but something, certainly, has changed. In chic secondhand shops and boutiques, eighties Pringle sweaters sell for upwards of forty pounds. Acquaintances of mine speak brazenly of weekend trips to the local pitch and putt. For the first time, I almost feel like it’s safe to hold up my head among normal human beings who have never taken a free drop from Ground Under Repair or shown consideration for a dress code, and announce: ‘Yes! I once wore a ridiculous hat and a left-handed glove! And if you have a problem with that we can settle it outside!’ During the conception of this book, I had the unique experience of meeting an ex-greenkeeper at a night of psychedelic folk music in central London, who revealed to me over the course of an unusually passionate two-hour conversation that he, too, had once been a promising amateur golfer, and still covertly believed that ‘golf holds the key to existential and spiritual peace’. Could there really be more out there like me, hiding their secret histories from the world? It’s possible.

Nevertheless, by owning up to a golfing past, I realize I’m putting myself at risk. After all, I’m telling people that I
used
to play golf, when I was supposed to be getting hip, not that I want to play golf
now
, when I’m supposed to be getting boring. There’s a big difference. Alice Cooper might spend his leisure time working on his pitch and run shots
now
. But did he do the same thing as a teenager? Of course he didn’t. He was much too busy corrupting his classmates or teaching himself the art of cracking a whip and singing with an eight-foot-long python around his neck.

I fully grasp that, to many, the words ‘golf’ and ’credibility’ are still approximately as compatible as the words ‘Thatcher’ and ‘breakbeat’. A book seems the least painful way to put my confession out there – a method, at the very least, of sidestepping those incredulous stares and that special tone of questioning that’s normally reserved for such tentative enquiries as, ‘So. At what point exactly
did
you enrol at the nunnery?’ and, ‘Precisely what kind of burning ambition drives the collector of rare Nazi memorabilia?’ On the few occasions that I have chosen to disclose my golf life in public, I’ve regretted it.

‘You? A former amateur golfing prodigy?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re winding me up!’

‘No, honestly, I’m not.’

‘But you like
After The Goldrush
!’

‘That’s true.’

‘Did your parents play golf?’

‘No. Could you keep your voice down, please?’

‘What about the rest of your family?’

‘No. Nobody.’

‘So what made you take it up?’

‘I don’t know. It’s a long story.’

‘But I thought everyone who played golf was a right-wing bigot with no dress sense!’

‘Not everyone.’

‘Wow! You? I mean, I never would have guessed it, what with those sideburns and everything. Hey! You lot! Yeah, that’s right – you over there, the coach party of impossibly gorgeous, trendy and intelligent fashion models! Come here. You’ll never believe this. Guess what? My mate Tom took five years out of a normal teenage life just so he could hit a little white ball around a field with a big metal stick! For no apparent reason! And guess what else? The whole time, he didn’t do any rude or sexy stuff with a girl, not once.’

If it comes down to a choice between the written word and a packed Soho bar, I’ll take the coward’s option every time.

Yet, simultaneously, I wonder if the written way isn’t the most frightening way of all. I’m not just composing a teenage memoir here; I’m opening up the gates to a life that stopped feeling like my own several aeons ago, but which, at the same time, despite everything I’ve
told
myself in the past, might be the same life that formed a vast part of who I am. Once I begin coming clean, I wonder what kind of terrifying personal truths I might uncover. I embark on this mission fully aware that when it’s over I probably won’t be the same person I was when it began, and that I have no way of predicting the extent of the changes that might take place. Similarly, I’m conscious that while the first three reasons for writing about my life as a teen golf alien are logical and persuasive enough, it’s the fourth and final reason that’s the most visceral and dangerous.

And that’s the fact that somewhere, somehow, I know I kind of miss it.

‘
IF YOU COULD
just drop me here, that would be perfect.’

‘Don’t be silly. You don’t want to be lugging that great big bag all the way up the hill.’

‘No, honestly, I could do with the walk. My head feels a bit stuffy, actually.’

It’s September 1988, and I’m in my dad’s car, trying to break it to him as tactfully as possible that I would prefer it if, from this point on, we weren’t related. It’s nothing personal, he has to understand. In fact, some people might say that his corroding 1975 Toyota Corona is quite a tasteful automobile. But not me. And certainly not the people I’m about to mix with. I’m praying that I won’t have to resort to a ‘tough love’ strategy here, hoping that the grinding of my teeth and the sight of my hand hovering anxiously over the door handle will subtly yet vehemently transmit the message that if he doesn’t stop the car within the next thirteen
seconds
he is going to render the rest of my life an abject nightmare.

‘Are you sure? I mean, I don’t see why I can’t just take you up to the top of the road and drop you there.’

‘I’m sure.
Please
.’ The vehicle is still moving, but I am now inching the door open.

Two weeks ago, I was somehow granted membership at Cripsley Edge, one of the East Midlands’ more exclusive golf clubs. My dad tells me he is glad about this, but knows nothing about golf – has never played or wanted to play. The game is probably as alien to him as an expenses-paid weekend at a Rotary Club convention. For two months, drawing on all my reserves of patience, I’ve just about managed to deal with these fundamental character flaws. He has unquestioningly taxied me up to my new Utopia for my weekly practice sessions, parked the main family car, a 1986 Vauxhall Astra, surreptitiously on the gravel behind the professional’s shop, avoiding the members’ car park and clubhouse, and kept interference into my golf life down to an acceptable minimum. But today is different. I can sense a change in him, a new curiosity. What’s more, in a singularly unfortunate bit of timing, my mum has taken the Astra to the local garden centre, and we are travelling in the family’s very own emergency vehicle, a tin-can-on-wheels known to anyone who has ever been intimately associated with it as the Sphincter – a car which, if driven at over 21 miles per hour, makes a noise
suggestive
of a giant, senile mechanical pig struggling to free a knot in its colostomy bag. All this would have been tricky enough on its own, but since today is the very day I am scheduled to play my first competitive round – the culmination of three months of coaching, three months of waiting and fantasizing from the vantage point of the course’s practice ground – it is downright unacceptable.

‘I mean it,’ I say, unhooking my seat belt. ‘I’m getting out now.
Now
. You may as well stop, because if you don’t stop, I’m going to jump out anyway.’

‘Well, if you insist. But I don’t understand why. I was hoping that maybe I could stand outside the clubhouse and watch you tee off.’

‘What?’

‘You know – just quickly, and then go. I wouldn’t try to talk to anyone or anything.’

‘No. No chance. Please, please, please, could you stop the car now, and let me out.’

‘Well, all right, but—’

‘
Now!
’

Slamming the car door a little more forcefully than intended, I turn to check on my artillery.

One 1979 Slazenger golf bag, gut pink, passed on from friend of friend of grandfather.

One thirties seven-iron, custom-made – for a Smurf, judging by the length of its shaft.

One half-set of scuffed, randomly orphaned irons, on loan from junior coach.

One seventh-hand putter, closely resembling a boulder on a stick.

Sixteen and a quarter wooden tee pegs.

Two cartons of Happy Shopper orange ‘drink’.

One ‘Hollyhocks of the British Isles’ tea towel, ’borrowed’ from kitchen drawer.

Five second-hand two-piece golf balls, procured from undergrowth beside second green.

I appear to be all set …

The short ad in the local paper boasted ‘Free Golf Lessons for the Under-fifteens’, and nobody ever seems able to agree upon who spotted it. My mum claims I did, but I’m pretty sure the likelihood of me at thirteen reading a newspaper would have been about as high as the likelihood of me today putting on a pair of muddy jogging bottoms and nipping across the road with a football under my arm to ask if my 84-year-old neighbour, Clara Woodbridge, is ‘playing’. My grandad claims that he placed the ad himself, but tends to undermine the authority of this statement by shortly afterwards claiming that he single-handedly overthrew Hitler’s Germany. My dad, whose memory is the best out of the three, recalls the ad being pushed under the front door one morning by an anonymous source. It’s the last explanation that seems most appropriate, but my
own
guess is that my parents spotted the ad together.

They needn’t feel ashamed about this. They weren’t to know that golf would be the One. I forgive them, and can totally understand their thought processes. It probably appeared to them that, between the ages of nine and thirteen, I’d worked my way through every sport in the average teenage boy’s lexicon. I was good at everything, brilliant at nothing, and brilliant was the only thing I cared about being. The positive aspect of having an athletic kid, from my parents’ point of view, was that it kept me away from the Village Gang. The Village Gang was something I drifted in and out of, depending upon whether I was just getting into, or just getting out of, a new sport. It was led by Sean Ryder, who not only had nearly the same name as Shaun Ryder, the lead singer of the Manchester indie dance group Happy Mondays, but nearly the same face as well. Several years after I stopped hanging around with Sean Ryder, I saw Shaun Ryder performing on
Top of the Pops
and was stunned to discover that my old friend had opted for a cooler way of spelling his name and made something of his life, but then I checked the chronology and realized that at the exact time Happy Mondays were mastering their 1988 album
Bummed
, Sean Ryder would have been engaged in dangling Mark Spittal off the Swingate bridge by his ankles in an attempt to bribe him into lending out his maths homework.

I imagine that around the time my parents saw the
ad,
I was going through one of my dejected stages – I seem to remember it was the same summer I failed in my attempt to secure a place on the county table-tennis team – and spending a little too much time in Ryder’s company for their liking. Golf probably seemed like a potentially effective distraction: a conveniently antithetical pastime that might keep me sidetracked while the rest of the gang were doing the Garden Fence Grand National or setting fire to one another’s farts. I’m sure they didn’t expect me to take it up with any real sense of purpose – even when I arrived back from the first lesson at Cripsley pledging to win my first British Open before my seventeenth birthday.

I, however, knew I was serious, right from the first nine-iron shot I hoisted above daisy-scaring level. There were several reasons why golf kept me hooked where other sports had failed to. It was the first outdoor sport I’d played that allowed me to dress appropriately for the elements. Unlike other sports, it didn’t just have its own stadium or court; it had its own
kingdom
. Even better than that, it had lots of
different
kingdoms, featuring an infinite number of architectural permutations and an infinite amount of words to describe them. None of the rigid oppression of the basketball court or the football pitch here. There seemed so much to learn, a baffling number of options requiring a mind-boggling amount of mental discipline. Unlike the times that I’d played other sports, I
didn’t
get a discouraging inkling of what kind of an experience golf would be when I began to master it. I didn’t
know
what it would be like. I just knew it would be mysterious and complicated and stimulating.

Suddenly, I was watching the 1988 US Open – surely one of the least remarkable major championships in golfing history, slogged out between two of the game’s least punk-rock players, Nick Faldo and Curtis Strange – and seeing the future. At fourteen, I would become British Amateur Champion; at fifteen, the youngest ever European Tour professional, finishing in ninth place on the end-of-year money list. At seventeen, I would win the first of my seventeen US Masters titles, at the Augusta National Course in Georgia, and the first of my twelve British Open Championships, also at Augusta. The British Open has never been played at Augusta in Georgia, but I knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble persuading the tournament organizers to change the venue, having done so much for the game at such a callow age.