…says Tom Cox, our favourite golf writer; author of ‘Nice Jumper’ and ‘Bring me the head of Sergio Garcia’.
Tom has very kindly given us permission to feature sections of his books here on the blog. Not as a substitute for going and and buying them of course, but more to whet your appetite for golfing fodder during dark evenings and sideways rain afternoons.
Tom is rather an unusual golfer, as you’ll gather from his writing. Discovering golf in his early teens (‘Nice Jumper’), he abruptly veered off the fairway and gave up when success was a short putt away. After eight years in denial of his addiction, the game proved impossible to resist and he was back swinging dervishly, with a degree of success that pointed him towards the pro ranks, just to see what would happen (‘Bring me the head…’). We won’t tell you the outcome, you’ll have to read it…And if you want to read it quicker than our regular excerpts allow, you can get both books on Amazon here.
So settle down, and here’s a bit of a scene setter for Mr.Cox’s great adventure in ‘Sergio’;
“Sometimes I think none of this would have happened if I hadn’t met Jerry. At other times I think it was all down to the most perfect eight-iron of my life, struck one idyllic summer evening on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. At other times I just blame it all on Sergio Garcia.
Sergio Garcia is a Spanish man with strong wrists, a hyperactive manner and dubious shaving habits. He is also periodically my favourite golfer, but it would perhaps be better for my health if he wasn’t. When, after a long lay-off, I began to get an urge to play golf again, Garcia had just exploded onto the pro scene, and he was largely responsible for re-igniting my interest in the game. Often, I think he is the most exciting player who ever lived. Equally often, for the very same reasons, I think I hate him. Over the last few years he has played with my emotions like no other pro. There is not another modern European player who seems more capable of winning multiple major championships, yet nobody has so frequently got in the running, only to make a cow’s arse of things. You never know what you’re going to get with Garcia from one round to the next. He could reel off five birdies in a row and hit an impossible shot from behind a tree and go charging off up the fairway in pursuit of it like a hyperactive child. Alternatively, he could make a double bogey, then take his shoe off for no apparent reason and throw it in a bunker. When Garcia gets angry, he does so in a wholly original manner; in the early noughties, he even invented his own golfing affliction, when he suddenly became unable to stop waggling the club whilst addressing the ball. I like that kind of irrational behaviour in my golfers. That’s another reason I’m drawn to Garcia: he reminds me of me.
It’s probably important that I qualify that statement. In many ways, I am nothing like Garcia. I do not have a penchant for lurid, buttock-gripping man-made fibres that make me look like the Studio 54 answer to Bananaman. And, while I do have some Spanish in my blood, from my mum’s side of the family, my Latin temperament is more likely to come out when I’m being kept in a call waiting queue than when I’ve just missed a downhill six-footer for par.
More importantly. I am nowhere as good as Sergio Garcia at golf. But, when it comes to a general tee-to-green mission statement of ‘Crap One Day, Dead Good the next’, Sergio and I have a lot in common. The difference, perhaps, is that one can almost believe Sergio’s erraticism is a deliberate gesture in the name of entertainment – a stand against conveyor-belt robo-pros, and those big chinned men who sit in the commentary booth muttering about there being ‘no pictures on the scorecard’ – whereas, with me, it seems a little more like a disease.
Of course you’ll find lots of golfers who will tell you that this is the nature of the game: one day you’ve got it, one day you haven’t. It’s just that, for me, the essence of each of these days happens to be exaggerated. I’m not talking about the bigger picture here: we’ve covered that. Chaotic my wider golfing life might be, but there is at least a predictability to the chaos. What I’m referring to here is the meat of the equation – the striking of the ball itself – and the frustration that comes from not knowing whether your 7-iron will fly 130 yards or 170 yards, of not knowing whether you will hit your driver like Greg Norman or Norman Wisdom. It is the same frustration that makes you feel, sometimes, as if you are living a golfing lie. But just occasionally, it can make you feel like God.
As luck would have it, these ‘God’ days tend to occur most frequently when I’m on my own – those late summer evenings when the birds are singing, there isn’t a ‘Ron’ or ‘Roy’ in sight, and, for once, the imaginary game between the two scuffed, regenerated lake balls that you bought from the pro shop (i.e. ‘Mickelson’ and ‘Garcia’) doesn’t seem quite as much of an exercise in childish fantasy. But, every so often, they have occurred when I’ve been with Jerry.”
You can find out more about Mr. Cox here. You’ll notice he doesn’t just write about golf, but about rock music and cats too. More from him soon.