The second of our extracts of Tom Cox’s book; ‘Bring me the head of Sergio Garcia’. Tom, after golf obsessed teenage years and a long layoff, gets lured back into the game and finds he’s still a halfway decent player. Maybe halfway decent enough to have a go at being a pro…
“I’d seen older friends go through similar epiphanies. Upon reaching thirty, it had suddenly dawned on them that, no, at sixteen stone, with a mortgage and a steady job in the civil service, perhaps they weren’t going to fulfil that dream of playing on the right wing for Nottingham Forest after all. My predicament, however, was slightly different. Footballers (goalkeepers and Teddy Sheringham excepted) may be washed up at thirty, but, as of May 2005. the average age of the top fifty players in golf’s world rankings was 32.06. I actually had two full years until I was due to hit my peak! Granted, most 32.06-year-olds on the PGA Tour had spent their twenties hitting three hundred balls per day and playing high-level tournament golf forty weeks a year, rather than hanging around with rock musicians and drinking too much, but it was important not to quibble. There was a plentiful supply of hope here.
Also, hadn’t my decision to leave my pro golf ambitions behind been base, at least in part, on the awful, outdated attitudes surrounding golf, rather than on the game itself? And did those attitudes still even exist? Admitting to a love of golf might have still been tantamount to admitting to being a member of the Bruce Forsyth Fan Club in 1992, but in 2005, who didn’t like golf? Alice Cooper played, Lou Reed played, Catherine Zeta-Jones played, even that weird buttery-faced kid from The Sixth Sense played. When I was a teenager, I’d felt odd for not wanting to be Gary Lineker quite as much as most of my male classmates did, but now Lineker – just one of a seemingly endless supply of Premiership and ex-Premiership footballers who seemed to regret choosing studs over spikes – was shaping up to be the new face of BBC golf. As I’d been told repeatedly, golf was hip, and while the trousers worn by my Saturday Medal partners might fairly firmly refute that claim, I could see that plenty had changed for the better in my lost decade. Dress codes had been relaxed. Owing to the rise of pay’n’play and family-oriented hotel-spa courses, the back-scratching social infrastructure of private clubs was falling apart, and the result was a game played by people who were aware of the world beyond the eighteenth green – or so I hoped. Surely the professional level of a game like this – i.e. what you would assume is the most evolved level – would be a place where I could fit in.
Two weeks after I’d played with Jerry, and two days before my thirtieth birthday, I made a list called Pros and Cons of Becoming a Golf Pro, and showed it to Edie. It read as follows;
Cons;
1. Bad back (already here, could get worse).
2. Financial problems (how exactly does a person break into the male-escort industry?).
3. Would rather leap naked into a pit of vipers than travel anywhere by plane.
4. How many times exactly can someone have a conversation about ‘shaft torque’ before losing the will to live?
5. May need to dress in German businessman spots casual in order to ‘blend in’.
6. Flashbacks to childhood trauma.
7. Less time to write (1000 page East Anglian answer to Stephen King’s The Stand will probably have to be put on back burner).
8. Potential to descend into sport anecdotal hell, leading to divorce and blackballing by all non-golfing friends.
9. Will probably have to keep clubs clean.
Pros:
1. Fresh air and exercise.
2. Closure on lingering ‘Did I take the right Path?’ questions.
3. No better non-sexual feeling in life than great golf shot.
4. Good excuse to finally buy that driving net for the back garden.
5. Get to do the thing where you pick the ball out of the hole and hold it up to the crowd and mouth ‘Thank you’.
6. No more handicap silliness and competitions with needlessly complex scoring formats and names like The Ralph Badger Jubilee Greensome Stableford Salver.
7. Get to enter The Open (The Open!!!!)
8. No grumpy retired hotelier jingling pocket change on my backswing.
9. Might get to play with Sergio Garcia.
At 9-9 I needed a tie-breaker. In the end I got two.
The first came from Edie.
“I think you need to get it out of your system. And who knows – you might actually win something” she said , which I thought was very magnanimous and supportive coming from someone who: a) didn’t like golf ,and b) had just had three episodes of America’s Next Top Model wiped from her Sky Plus box by extended coverage of the Fedex St. Jude Classic.
The real decider, however, came from my eight iron”
They’ll be another extract from Tom Cox next month, or if you can’t wait you can buy the book here. You can find out more about Tom here.