Nice Jumper (23 page)

Terry Clampett was one of them. He’d been made captain at the beginning of that year, and conformed effortlessly to the stereotype of the traditional James Bond film baddie: impeccably courteous on the outside, with a vindictive core. His operations took a more insidious, subtle form than those of previous Cripsley tyrants, but their precision attained new toxic heights. Compared to Clampett, Hell’s Trucker may as well
have
been auditioning as a
Play School
presenter during his captaincy. You would see Clampett on the course on a sunny day, smiling and waving, and mistakenly think he was glad to see you, when all the while he’d be checking to see that the socks you were wearing with your shorts conformed with the regulatory length stated in the club rules. By the time he’d wished you well on your round, he would have not only concocted your punishment, but decided which one of his goons would deliver it.

When Ashley hit his perfect shot on the sixteenth hole and I saw it heading towards Clampett’s sister, Janice, I could see immediately we were in trouble. It was three days before the club championship, and Ashley, Jamie, Robin and I had been surprising ourselves by indulging in a serious practice round with a complete lack of dead legs, arm locks and Eight-iron Tennis. We were back doing what we did best: playing golf well, urging one another to greater heights of excellence. We could see that up ahead Janice, the lady captain, Eileen Stokes and Reg Forman, the new head of the greens committee, were indulging in a foursome, so we made a point of keeping our distance. (The fact that they were playing golf made us keep well back, too.)

‘Playing into’ the players in front of us was a perennial problem for Cripsley’s juniors, as our forearms beefed up and our swings flourished. Our power
increased
in the same way that our voices broke – in vast leaps and tiny false starts, completely beyond our estimation. Often we’d be lucky, and our shots would sail over the group of players ahead of us, leaving four somewhat deaf senior citizens blissfully ignorant of exactly how close they had come to visiting the great golf course in the sky. On other occasions we’d get away with a near miss, a profuse apology and a quick ticking off. But Ashley’s shot shouldn’t, by rights, have fallen into either category. From the top of the ridge, I obtained the perfect view of its voyage. There was no doubt it was a strike in a hundred, but even with all Ashley’s strength at the back of it, there was no way it was going to trouble Janice and her friends, three hundred yards up ahead on the green. We knew that – which is why we had considered it safe for Ashley to play it.

I watched as the ball soared, hung, dipped and rolled, finally coming softly to rest against the wheel of Reg Forman’s trolley, situated to the front left of the green. There was nothing remotely destructive about its descent – anyone could see that. If a centipede had been in the ball’s path during its final couple of revolutions, it might have been a little dazed but it would have got up, dusted itself down, assured its fellow insects that it was unscathed, and gone about its daily routine as if nothing had happened.

‘Shot!’

‘Is it near the green?’

‘Close, but don’t worry – it didn’t hit them.’

We continued to play. But as we drew closer to the green, a funny thing happened: Reg, Janice, Eileen and the lady captain failed to vacate the green. They also appeared to be glaring straight at us.

‘What’s their problem?’

‘Dunno. Do you think they’re pissed off?’

‘Dunno why. I was nowhere near them.’

Ashley and I approached Reg.

‘We’re really sorry about that. Did it hit your trolley? We had no idea we could hit that far,’ we said, propriety itself.

‘You want to watch out. You could have put one of us in hospital,’ replied Reg.

‘You juniors come up every day, and think you own the course,’ added Eileen. ‘You ought to learn some consideration for your fellow players.’

‘But we said we were sorry. It was a genuine mistake,’ said Ashley.

‘That’s all very well,’ said the lady captain, ‘but it’s not the first time that it’s happened, is it?’

‘What do you mean? We’ve never rolled a ball gently against your trolley before,’ I protested.

‘You know very well what she means,’ said Janice. ‘Don’t think I won’t be having a word with the captain about this.’ Even though he was her brother, she still called him ‘the captain’.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ said Reg. ‘I mean, anyway, don’t you have homes to go to?’

And that was how Cripsley’s four best players got suspended and missed the club championship.

There were no disciplinary hearings this time. The news came quickly and unequivocally from Bob Boffinger: we were not to visit the club for the following month, for social or playing purposes. As ever, he broke it to us wearily, as a friend, and we knew that he’d fought doggedly on our behalf in the committee room, using the phrase ‘abbbsolutely imperative’ anywhere between eight and thirteen times.

By the time we returned the club championship had been won and the season was practically over. Clampett continued to greet us with a wave and a beatific smile, like a Mafia overlord who’d just taken our great-aunts as collateral. Fez, who only really performed for an audience of two or more juniors, went into hibernation, and I increasingly found myself alone at Cripsley and free of distractions. Through October and November I hit an average of five hundred golf balls a day. I still have some of the calluses to prove it, and the turf on Cripsley’s bottom practice fairway is only now recovering from my relentless path of destruction. The result was the closest I’d come yet to permanently attaining that elusive back-garden swing. But it was too late. With no more tournaments until the
following
March, I’d have to wait to test-drive it.

I lasted just under a couple of months at Broxwell College. I don’t remember much about the time, the place or the people, but I have retained a vivid mental picture of the back gate. A few years later, I came to be friends with a girl whom I had shared a couple of classes with, and she had no recollection of my existence at Broxwell, despite the fact that, from what we could work out, I’d spent the best part of six weeks sitting next to her. I’m sure she’s not the only one. Holograms have cast more conspicuous shadows.

My parents accepted my decision to drop out with a level of stoicism not often associated with ex-hippies.

‘Over my dead body will you leave that place!’ said my mum.

‘You’re going to ruin your life!’ said my dad.

‘We’ve spawned a monster!’ they both said.

I knew I had to stand firm, believe in myself, and sit out the couple of months until they started speaking to me again. In the ensuing communal sulk, a couple of reluctant bargains were struck: in exchange for a temporary life of leisure, I would stick around at Broxwell until late November to retake my Maths GCSE, and then find some way of rustling up twenty pounds per week board.

I still don’t know how I passed my Maths exam. I turned up at the exam hall with the sole aim of
mollifying
my parents, safe in the knowledge that there was a much easier numerical test devised by the PGA which I could take if I ever stooped to earn my living as a club professional. So when I realized I’d forgotten my protractor, I wasn’t unduly concerned. It was only a few seconds later, when I realized I didn’t have my pencil, calculator, compasses, pen or ruler either, that in fact the only vaguely geometrical instrument on my person was a stray tee peg, that I started to concede I’d come slightly underprepared.

I looked across the hall, scanning for a kindly invigilator, and zoomed in on a well-groomed man in a green blazer. He looked familiar. Before I’d had chance to raise my hand, he began walking towards me. Now, where had I seen him before? From some angles, you could even say he looked a little like Colin Allerton, one of Terry Clampett’s evil henchmen.

‘Hello, Tom.’

Exactly
like him.

With a wink, Allerton opened his big golfer’s hands, revealing all the apparatus I would need to see me through the following two hours, and a bit in reserve just in case. It was quite possible there were a couple of teacakes for later in there as well – I couldn’t tell for sure. I hadn’t even been required to speak. Allerton might have been the most lethal of foes at Cripsley, but here in the outside world we golfers would always be fighting for the same cause. With that wink, it seemed
that
he instinctively knew everything: what I was there for, what I needed, what I was feeling. I couldn’t help marvelling at the way he didn’t seem surprised to see me at all, how there was no logic to his presence (I’d been told he worked full-time as a solicitor) and, most weirdly of all, how invisible he’d seemed to the rest of the exam hall, and it was perhaps then, for the first time, that I began to truly get the inkling that golf was a supernatural force – something that I would never be in total control of, no matter how many balls I hammered up the practice fairway.

I’VE ALWAYS HAD
one major problem with winter golf: I’m too good at it.

If he’s seeking perfection, the shrewd amateur golfing prodigy looks to peak around May, just in time for the British Open qualifying rounds and to impress the county selectors. I, on the other hand, have always shifted smoothly up to top gear somewhere around the beginning of January, when birdies tend to get swallowed up in the great big frosty silence, and the people I most want to impress are doing something warm and sensible, like watching pornography or eating teacakes. Ice-hockey players who find the key to their inner genius while on safari will know what I’m talking about.

Amid the temporary greens, restrictive clothing and ankle sludge, a lot of very good things can be said for winter golf. One is the relatively small number of
golfers
you find indulging in it. Another is that you sometimes get the chance to make friends with parrots.

I first met Ken as I teed up on the final hole of a winter league match, just before Christmas, 1991. I use the word ‘met’ in the loosest possible sense. We didn’t exchange phone numbers. I didn’t train him to sit on my shoulder. Come to think of it, he probably wasn’t even called Ken. Yet over the following couple of months, we struck up a mutual understanding of a depth rarely attained in man–parrot relations. As I hit my shots up the eighteenth, Ken the Parrot would watch thoughtfully, then communicate his approval (via a quick squawk) or disapproval (via a barely perceptible flutter of his crest). In exchange for his expertise, I would refrain from asking him patronizing questions, such as, ‘Where exactly did you escape from?’ and ‘You’re a parrot. What the fuck are you doing hanging out next to the eighteenth tee of a golf course in the middle of an ice storm?’

Ken rarely moved from his perch that winter, and probably didn’t see much of interest, but what he did see almost exclusively involved me. He let out a sardonic chirp, as, upon reaching the eighth green, Bob Boffinger and I discovered a human turd secreted in the hole and found new meaning in the age-old ‘Who should putt first?’ debate. He watched stoically, as if muttering ‘I told you so’, as Mousey fell through the ice on the pond alongside the first green and I jumped
in
to rescue him (a much easier process than I’d been led to believe by the child safety ads, thanks to the shallowness of the pond). He frowned sympathetically on Christmas Day as I crunched through the frost to the practice ground to try out my new titanium-shafted driver in the fading light. He looked away in disgust as I missed a three-foot putt which would have sent me into the winter league final. He was a clever parrot. And my strict practice regimen of five hundred balls per day was sending me just a little bit bonkers.

Still – what else was there to do? I’d left school and college, lost touch with all but a couple of non-golfing friends. I’d turned my back on education for ever. My mum and dad were on the verge of disowning me. I was out in the real world now, and had to make it as a pro, or else – as my parents were fond of pointing out – I’d be spending the rest of my life cleaning out public toilets. Besides, compared to what I was doing in the evenings, obsessing about the tempo of my downswing and craving the endorsement of an errant parrot seemed like sanity itself.

That October, in order to cover my board at home and fees on the amateur circuit the following year, I’d taken a job as a waiter in the carvery of one of Nottingham’s most commercial hotels, the Cresthouse. I’d never worked as a waiter (or at all for that matter) before, but the premise seemed simple enough: turn up, stick on a bow tie, switch your body to autopilot and
your
mind to the thirteenth green at the Augusta National, then wake up a few hours later several pounds richer. Millions of students and dropouts do the same thing every year. The only differences are that when they turn their mind off, they dream about sex or what’s on telly that night, not the thirteenth at the Augusta National, and their boss isn’t Big John Stegley.

‘What I’m talking about, pacifically, Tom, is shit,’ Big John Stegley explained to me the first time I met him. ‘When shit falls, it goes down. And you’re right at the bottom of the ladder, so it will probably fall on you. If you can learn that, you’ll go far in this business. Look at me! I learned the hard way, but here I am, now, the restaurant manager at one of Nottingham’s best hotels. You could be me, in twenty-five years. But only if you remember that: shit falls.’