Nice Jumper (14 page)

Nothing of this seemed remotely unusual to me: not the filing system (alphabetical
and
chronological, naturally), not the list of past British Open winners on my bedroom wall, not the obsessive note-taking during the final round of the US Masters. From the first time I entered the pro shop and overheard Mike Shalcross and Roy Jackson having an inscrutable conversation about a tour professional who was ‘changing to graphite’, I resolved not only to know what phrases like ‘changing to graphite’ meant, but also to know everything and anything it was possible to know about the professional game. It was only later, when I began to invite golfing friends up to my bedroom and watched their mouths form silent question marks as they saw the endless rows of filed and numbered tapes, that I began to get an inkling that my behaviour wasn’t run-of-the-mill for a wannabe pro. And it is only recently, having met a few thousand too many
Star Wars
fans, that I have started to realize that my habit of forcing guests to watch repeatedly the BBC’s coverage of the 1989 Suntory World Matchplay final and miming along
with
my favourite bits of Bruce Critchley’s commentary – ‘And that is
miles
past Nick Faldo!’ – might have been a touch on the irritating side.

In an unofficial poll conducted among everyone I’ve ever known who has never played the game, golf has been voted the Worst Television Sport in the World, outdulling – among others – horseracing, bowls and (I can’t believe this) darts. The people who have decided this are quite clearly misguided, if not psychologically disordered. Admittedly the camera’s habit of lingering on birdlife for periods of up to ten minutes doesn’t exactly serve as an advertisement for the game’s sex appeal, and the commentators don’t do themselves any favours by letting slip political leanings of the Ottoman era, but golf has a spectrum of environments, permutations and inside knowledge that no other spectator sport can begin to match. Anyone can thoroughly enjoy a football game. It takes imagination and perseverance to get the most out of a golf tournament.

I have worked out the exact amount of time I spent watching golf as a teenager but won’t list it here, since it cripples me to think just how much of it I could have spent having sex or listening to Three Dog Night’s greatest hits. Let’s just say if you took the amount of hours I owned of golf on video, multiplied this number by ten, and added an extra hundred hours to allow for tapes borrowed from friends, you’d be fairly close to the mark. I saw professional golf as my own version of
the
magic potion in Gosciny and Uderzo’s
Asterix
books, which I could drink (watch), then carry inside me in order to fight (play) better, before going back to my druid (telly) to replenish my supplies (tapes) every day or two. The fresher the potion was in my system, the better.

My final act before setting off for an important round wasn’t to check I’d packed my waterproof bottoms and flat cap; it was to rewind my British Open tape and watch Payne Stewart butter that three-hundred-yard drive one last time. I’d then carry the image around for the rest of the day, with its accompanying commentary (‘And that’s right down, over the bunkers, through the gap … He really snorked that one, Bruce!’), and pit it against my friends and
their
favourite images. While other teenagers heard the jangle of the Stone Roses in their heads while they swaggered, we heard the whisper of Peter Alliss in our heads while we swung. Tame or not, it had exactly the same effect: it momentarily lifted us out of our frustrating adolescent predicament and allowed us to see ourselves as something far more stylish than we really were.

These images made us better players and more desirable people, we imagined. Merely by humming the easy-listening theme tune to his Fred Couples instruction video (‘Chck-Chck-Chck-Chckkk-Duh-Duh-Dah-Duuuhhh’), Ashley could inspire me to crunch
fifty
flawless five-irons in on the trot up the practice fairway. By assigning one another the names and characteristics of famous professionals on the first tee and saying things like ‘Good one, Ray’ in a ridiculous Kentucky accent, we knew we would reach a higher standard. If I pretended that the monthly medal was the British Masters, and that asthmatic old Ron Schofield, my twenty-one-handicap partner for the day, was actually Jodie Mudd – ‘a three-time winner on the tour this year, Bruce’ – it would stoke my competitive fire immeasurably. None of this embarrassed me in the slightest. Why should it? I was only rehearsing for adulthood, wasn’t I? In a matter of a year or so, when I’d reduced my handicap to scratch, I’d gain my PGA tour card and I’d no longer need to pretend. All this would be normal: the person standing next to me on the tee really would be Fred Couples; an American man called Bob really would be yapping hysterically about the ‘air brakes’ on my sand-iron shot. I just wished it would all hurry up and happen – that hormones and furniture and windows and general rules and the temptations of Ching! would stop getting in the way. I wanted the professional golf world to come along, swallow me, and seal me off from the outside one. And if that seems weird, don’t laugh – it wasn’t. You would have felt exactly the same way if you had three hundred golf videos and no girlfriend.

IN A HOUSEHOLD
consisting of two schoolteachers, a schoolkid and a self-sufficient cat, July is traditionally a time of liberation and harmony. For years, my family’s ritual would be very simple. A few days after breaking up from school, we’d all hop in the car, leaving Woosnam to survive on dilatory rodents and next door’s prawn salads, and drive vaguely in the direction of Italy in our battered Morris Marina, assured in the knowledge that, wherever we wound up, it wouldn’t be too far from a swimming pool and a man selling some crushed, sticky ice stuff in a tub. Six weeks later we’d come back, several shades darker, able to impress our friends by knowing the Italian word for ‘arsehandle’.

This arrangement worked wonderfully well right up until the late eighties, when I unaccountably turned into the spawn of Satan.

Of
course
I couldn’t stop playing golf and go to
Italy
!
Completely
out of the question. France could swivel, too. And, no – I couldn’t stick it out for ‘just a fortnight’. I had tournaments to play.
Work
to do. Who knew what kind of havoc two weeks in a foreign climate might play with my muscle memory. Besides, August was the height of the season. Couldn’t my parents see what kind of a head start I’d be giving my competitors? If I was going to win that first major championship before my teens were out, I couldn’t go flouncing off to the Mediterranean whenever I felt like it.

‘But think of it this way,’ my ever patient mum would reason. ‘Surely you’re going to spend two weeks of this summer messing around with your mates in the pro shop. Why not just devote that time to practising instead, and come on holiday with us?’

‘You just don’t get it, do you? Being in the pro shop
is
all part of practising. I’m soaking up the atmosphere and learning when I’m in there.’

As a peace offering, out of the living-room cupboard would come the British bed and breakfast guide. And, in reply, as a war offering, out of my bedroom would come the guide to golf courses in Britain and Ireland.

‘What about Aldeburgh in Suffolk?’

‘Erm, I think you’ll find the nearest decent courses there are Aldeburgh and Thorpeness, the longest of which has a total yardage of only six thousand three hundred and thirty yards. Now, I don’t think that kind of length is going to
challenge
me, is it?’

‘Now here’s a nice-looking little farmhouse, on the Yorkshire Moors.’

‘The moors? I’ve never heard of any golf courses on the moors. And that thick heather isn’t going to do my wrists any good.’

‘This looks nice, though. Hangstead Hill Golf Course – it’s only about seven miles away.’

‘He-
llo
! It’s a municipal course. They probably only mow the greens once a month. Do you know what kind of damage that could do to my competitive putting stroke?’

Eventually, a reluctant bargain would be struck. In exchange for a minimum of three games of golf on a quality course, I would agree to spend a week in the company of my parents at an isolated farmhouse, being fed free-range eggs by a rotund, welcoming lady called Jackie who probably couldn’t name the winning 1985 Ryder Cup squad.

While my mum and dad traversed the local peaks and valleys (walking without hitting shots – how idiotic can you get?), I would wait impatiently on the first tee of a nearby course called something like Hillycliffe or Wickledale until an amiable yet lonely member arrived on the first tee and enquired if I would care to join him for his day’s play. Invariably this would be a man in his late fifties or early sixties, searching for the secret formula which would get him playing off a handicap of fourteen instead of eighteen. After three or four holes,
he
would start to quiz me on my formula for hitting the ball so straight and far – at which point I would mischievously advise him to do the exact opposite of what he should be doing. ‘It’s all about keeping your left arm completely rigid,’ I advised Peter Fortnam, a twenty-one handicapper who moved with the ease of a man who had woken up to find his arms had been stolen in the night and replaced with steel girders. ‘Golf is a game all about the legs,’ I preached to a man I remember only as Mr Invisible Football.

When it came to local juniors, I showed slightly more respect. But after a visit to Rotherley Golf Club in north-west Yorkshire, where I was followed around by three fifteen-year-olds who gasped at my every shot as if I was some kind of fearsome proto-John Daly, it was hard not to assume an air of superiority. It’s amazing how much mightier 250-yard drives can feel when punctuated by noises like ‘Cor!’, ‘Bloody ‘eck, yoth!’ and ‘Ohmyfuckinggodlookhowfarit’sgone!’ My wife won’t thank me for this, but I don’t think I will ever again feel as loved as I did for those three hours when, Ian, Mental Ian and Smithy jostled to get the best view of my sophisticated technique. For a tiny, perfect pocket in time, I was as good as I thought I was.

Back at Cripsley, a new, more exciting type of golf holiday was being orchestrated. Like virtually everything that benefited the Cripsley junior section, the
idea
came from Bob Boffinger. For a fortnight of our summer holiday, Cripsley’s juniors would play host to the juniors of Oporto, a golf club in northern Portugal: they would play in our competitions, sleep in our houses and pretend to eat our food. A year later, we would visit their home city, and do the same things, but with slightly less solicitude.

Meeting the Oporto plane at East Midlands Airport, each of Cripsley’s six junior team members was allocated a Portuguese ‘equivalent’. Robin got Pedro, who was serious-minded, swashbuckling and tall. Jamie got Carlo, who was icy and insolent. Mousey got Ricardo, who was defensive and underdeveloped. Ben got Jason, who was eccentric and goofy. Bushy got Mario, who was dark and enigmatic. And I got Alfonso, who wore ridiculously short trousers.

It was hard to work out whether Portuguese golf fashions were ten years ahead of British ones or ten years behind them. Looking now at a couple of photos from the period, I can see that Alfonso could quite easily pass for the singer in a late-nineties American art rock band. But at the time we were pretty much agreed that our Latin counterparts, with their bucket hats and drainpipe trousers, were sartorial cretins – a view which becomes all the more questionable when you consider the prevailing Cripsley penchant circa 1990 for bright green flecked slacks and pink polo shirts.

The summer of 1990, anywhere from thirteen to
twenty
of us – Bob Boffinger, the Portuguese, the Cripsley junior team, and an assortment of other juniors not usually including Rick Sweeney – would ride around the Midlands in a minibus, learning Portuguese swear words and ransacking alien locker rooms. These were afternoons of parched fairways and stolen baseball caps, evenings of repeat screenings of the 1987 US Masters, and mornings of unusual eating habits.

The staple breakfast in my house over this period was cornflakes. Or, in Alfonso’s case, three cornflakes. Each morning he would eye me mistrustfully as I filled my bowl with Dr Kellogg’s finest then added the correct amount of milk to moisten the cereal without making it soggy. Thereafter he would shake his head, smile to himself and tuck into his own creation – to all intents and purposes a bowl of milk with cornflake croûtons.

Still, at least he liked my mum’s sandwiches. Every morning without fail, the two of us would be packed off to the golf club with wholemeal doorsteps containing all manner of exotic delights from the Sainsbury’s deli counter. And every lunchtime, without fail, Alfonso would order a huge lasagne from the clubhouse kitchen. ‘Don’t be silly. He’s obviously just got a good appetite,’ said my mum, when I aired my suspicions about this. ‘I wish you’d eat as well as that sometimes.’ A month later, when I looked out of the spare-room
window
onto the roof of the extension and my eye chanced upon a fortnight’s worth of clingfilm, pastrami and bread, I didn’t have the heart to tell her.