Nice Jumper (17 page)

Worksop’s juniors were the only golfers who appeared in their local paper more frequently than Jamie did in his. If they weren’t on the back page, grinning toothily with the county championship trophy,
they’d
be somewhere closer to the front, heroically displaying the abandoned infant they’d discovered in the bushes at the back of the green belonging to their course’s sixth hole. Worksop was that kind of course.

You might have heard of one of Worksop’s junior team from this period. He’s called Lee Westwood, and, for the last half decade, along with Darren Clarke and Colin Montgomerie, he’s shouldered Britain’s brightest golfing hopes. Then, as now, the arrival of Westwood on the first tee was a proper event, replete with everything bar a bugle. I did manage to score lower than him in the odd tournament when he was really off form – admittedly one of these was the Kedleston Goose, where I only played seven holes due to sunstroke – and my name is engraved after his on the list of winners of the Lindrick Junior Open trophy, but as a mortal I knew better than to try to make friends with him. Besides, in order to do that I would have had to break through the bottle-green forcefield of kow-towing county officials which permanently surrounded him. We spoke only once, although I use the word ‘we’ in the vaguest sense. Lee spoke. I did something which was a bit like speaking, but with more saliva.

The setting was Shifnal Golf Club, in Shropshire. The event: I can’t remember for certain, but it’s likely it was the Shifnal Junior Open. Westwood: lacing up his Footjoy shoes in preparation for his afternoon
teeing-off
time. Me: returning, rosy-cheeked, from a gratifying round in the low seventies, somewhat startled to find myself alone in the same room with the Midlands’ nearest thing to Tiger Woods.

‘Good round today, Coxy,’ said Lee.

The comment threw me off balance on four counts. Firstly, he had made it without looking up from his golf shoes. Secondly, in the twelve minutes it had taken me to hole my final putt, sign my card, put my clubs in Bob Boffinger’s car and neck a can of Happy Shopper drink, Lee had managed to gain the knowledge that I had shot a ‘good round’. (This was unbelievable! Did he see me as a
competitor
?) Thirdly, he was aware of my existence. And finally, he was aware of my existence enough to
make up his own nickname
for me. I was impressed! So impressed, in fact, that I said this:

‘Thuaaankhghgsds, Lee.’

I’ve been fortunate enough, over the years, to meet several of my heroes, and brave enough to insult some of them. I’ve telephoned the New York rock-and-roll icon Dion and told him that he isn’t ‘always the best judge’ of his own work. I’ve implied to The Who’s Pete Townshend, six minutes after meeting him, that the follow-up to
Tommy, Lifehouse
, might be a load of pretentious old codswallop. I’ve hinted to the original punk rocker, Jonathan Richman, that he should spend less time talking about cement. But to a boy two years older than me who happened to be quite good at
hitting
a ball around a field with some holes in it, all I could say was ‘Thuaaankhghgsds’.

Which should give you an idea of how big a deal Lee Westwood was in Nottinghamshire junior golf in the early nineties.

Westwood was by no means the only one. Around 1991, it seemed blindingly obvious to everyone on the Midlands golf scene that the Worksop team of today was the European Ryder Cup side of tomorrow. They probably could have sent out their under-thirteens team and still beaten, say, Lincolnshire. It didn’t matter how well the rest of us were playing: as county team members from rival clubs, we always felt a little like charity cases, third-reserve goalkeepers called up for a friendly match but only because the top man ‘couldn’t be bothered’ and his immediate understudy had a partially fractured thorax.

Many were the hours when Robin and I and even Jamie puzzled over what exactly gave the Worksop boys their edge. It wasn’t as if their techniques were flawless. Danny Parfitt, one of the youngest and most universally bum-sucked of their ranks, looked to have the wrist strength of George from
Rainbow
, and Westwood himself had an unusual swing where, mid-impact, he appeared to nod at the ball as if he was encouraging it to go closer to the hole.

With hindsight, though, it’s quite obvious where we were going wrong. While we were trying to banish our less impressive rounds from memory by retiring to a
nearby
copse to throw pine cones at one another’s heads, the Worksop contingent were compensating for theirs by trudging back to the practice ground to iron out the kinks in their backswings. While we saw the act of being in the vicinity of the golf course morning, noon and night as dedication enough in itself, they weren’t satisfied until they’d hit enough shots to put blisters on top of their calluses. North Nottinghamshire boys in general were taller, wider, grittier and less imaginative than their southern rivals. I might have spent my early childhood in a mining village not far south of Worksop with people who substituted the word ‘sery’ for ‘man’ in their everyday dialogue, but I played my golf further south, and in the eyes of Westwood and company that made me virtually a Londoner. Subtle signs – the outmoded nature of my equipment, my complete lack of friends called Justin, the absence of the phrase ‘got my putting boots on today, yoof’ in my repertoire of humorous quips – gave me away.

But what really set me apart was my parents.

Don’t get me wrong here. My mum and dad couldn’t have been happier that I spent my wild years hitting golf balls towards flagsticks rather than throwing dogs off pedestrian footbridges like most of the other boys from my school did. But the curious archaic rituals of the game, the sheer grasp it held over my life, bamboozled them.

They gave it their best shot, it has to be said – even if, as far as my mum was concerned, it was at a distance. She never spent too much time watching me in competitive play after the occasion, in the aftermath of an early Cripsley junior event, when she recklessly stepped over the painted white line dividing the unisex area of the clubhouse from the men-only bar and received a ‘talking to’ from the club’s snotbag steward. Thereafter her support was offered telepathically, usually from the safe haven of a nearby garden centre. My dad, on the other hand, stayed right by my side, no matter how many Immediate Past Captains commented on the inappropriateness of his corduroy trousers or bristled at his enquiry regarding whether the furry headcover on their putter was ‘real otter’. It was either that or the garden centre, after all.

I’d witnessed the kid-bashing that went on on the fairways of the Midlands. I’d seen Darren Cheeseman’s dad stalk after him down the fourteenth at Retford, repeatedly chastising him for his morally objectionable choice of club off the tee, and I’d heard about the sun-visor-flinging scene in the car park that erupted afterwards. I knew all about what John Chittock’s mum thought of her son’s putting stroke. (‘Bloody pathetic! You’d of thought we hadn’t trained him!’) That head-down, cocooned look of the north Notts boys arriving on the tee wasn’t concentration; it was
fear
. I didn’t want any of that.

That said, a bit of gentle encouragement every month or two wouldn’t have gone amiss.

‘Did you see that?’ I would ask, turning to my dad and frothing as my five-wood shot sailed over a giant oak tree, two bunkers, a lake and several potentially murderous amphibians to within four feet of the hole.

‘Yes!’ he would reply, looking through his binoculars, in completely the opposite direction. ‘Jackdaw, wasn’t it? Terrific.’

‘I meant the five-wood.’

‘Oh. Fine. Can’t say I was watching. Go get ‘em, kid. Great birdlife around here!’

It was only on the bad rounds, however, that I found this
really
hard to deal with.

‘Fuckin’ ‘ell. That’s three long-iron shots I’ve sliced today. What the shag’s wrong with me?’

‘Oh well. Just think: your mum’s cooking pepper sausage pasta tonight, with that nice basil sauce she does.’

It seemed, at times, as if he was having a conversation with his other, more mellow son, who just happened to be standing behind me, and invisible.

I’m sure the other golf parents felt even more bewildered in his presence.

‘Mr and Mrs Case, who pick the county team, say our Wayne might get called up for the England squad this year.’

‘Oh, really? Some lovely wildlife in this part of the world, don’t you think?’

‘He’s really done well this season, and that coaching he’s got from Steve Loach has worked a treat. He’s shortened his backswing. Can you see? And that low hand position? It’s really helped. But I just wish he’d stop trying to hit those long shots out of the rough grass and take his medicine. I’ve told him a hundred times, wood in the rough, wood in your head.’

‘Mmm? Well, never mind. We’re having pepper sausage pasta for dinner tonight.
Look at the size of that buddleia!
’

My performances in county events were a constant disappointment to me. Away from Cripsley, where I could often idly knock the ball round in two under par in practice, the game seemed more complex, and I found myself unable to relax.

‘Concentrate,’ advised my mum, which worked for a while, but essentially left me concentrating on concentrating, as opposed to on getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. I couldn’t have tried much harder. My preparations – whole hours devoted purely to playing holes in my head – bordered on the catatonic. Yet my away results – the away results that
counted
, anyway – never reflected the golfer my pragmatic self knew I was, let alone the one my hotheaded adolescent self hoped I was.

On 21 August 1991, I found myself standing on the first tee at Church Brampton Golf Club in
Northamptonshire,
playing for the biggest prize of my career: my legs, and possibly several other vital body parts.

That morning, just before I set off for Northampton, an envelope had arrived, containing my GCSE results. ‘Do you mind if I open it this evening?’ I’d asked my parents, nonchalantly. ‘I don’t want the results to put me off my game.’ I said this, but what I’d meant was: ‘I am going to open this envelope, but first, in order to demonstrate the insignificance of my exam results, I’m going to win this golf tournament and prove to you just how great I am at golf, so you don’t shout at me quite as loud.’ I knew I’d messed my exams up. My revision had amounted to a half-arsed half an hour per subject between putting practice on my bedroom rug, and I’d made it perfectly clear to my teachers that, nice though their subjects were, they weren’t going to help me loft a blind nine-iron over trees to a postage-stamp green in the Sun City Million Dollar Challenge. During my multiple-choice Biology exam, I picked answers at random in order to leave more time for designing dogleg par fives in the margin.

Golf was going to save me. I could sense it.

At Church Brampton, however, I came a mediocre twentieth, then sat very quietly in the back seat of Bob Boffinger’s car on the journey home to my doom. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bob. ‘I’m sure you can make it up to your parents.’ I was sure I could make it up to them,
too.
I could shoot sixty-eight in tomorrow’s event, the Kibworth Open, for starters.

I was putting
miles
too much pressure on myself. If I went around the course in eighty, I didn’t think in terms of how I could ameliorate with a seventy-three; I thought about how I could ameliorate with a
sixty-
three. Every time I teed the ball up, I betrayed myself by shouldering the expectations of a miracle-worker, yet somehow simultaneously not realizing how good I really was.

I now know I could have done better. With more realistic standards, I might have been playing off one handicap instead of three; I might have won the county boys championship; I might have been the one who got younger every year. But then again I might not have. I won’t kid myself that my starry-eyed standards were the only excuse for my inability to perform. In all honesty, I don’t think I
wanted
to win enough. For all my dreaming and planning, the idea of stepping up to the prize table in my jacket and tie, in front of all those golf parents, never really appealed to me all that much. On the rare occasions when I was in contention with a few holes to play, I would instantly begin talking myself out of a potential victory. Think about all those expectant, gormless faces, the coward part of my brain would whisper to me. Do you really care about impressing them? And what about the speech? Can you cope with the sheer monotony? Just how much do you
want
to be
bum-scratched
by hundreds of people who aren’t really your friends?

I don’t remember ever blowing a good round deliberately, but it was slightly alarming how often I would wake up from the spell of my Coward Demon to find myself on all fours re-enacting a scene from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
using my ball, my three-iron and a nearby holly bush as props, when just a couple of holes previously I’d been challenging for the tournament lead.

Junior amateur golf speeches are all the same. And by that, I do mean
exactly
the same. If your most boring, cardigan-wearing uncle had been feeling particularly shiftless and uninspired one dreary bank holiday afternoon and decided to pen a few verses in tribute to his local Inland Revenue office, he couldn’t have come up with something more flat and insipid than the anti-climactic declamations I witnessed in the clubhouses of north Nottinghamshire. It wasn’t long before it got to the point where me and Robin, standing at the back of the room fidgeting, could mime along.

‘I’d like to thank t’ greenstaff, for t’ condition of t’ course,’ that particular week’s austere north Notts winner would begin, with all the effervescence of a boy who’d spent the last four hours coaxing otters into a cage with a large stick. ‘And t’ catering staff, for t’ food. And …’

Come on! You can do it!

‘And …’

Now, now – no peeking at that copy of
The Marshall Brickman Guide to After-dinner Anecdotes
.

‘… And t’ organizers, for putting on t’ event.’