THE DOCUMENTATION CERTAINLY looked authentic enough. If this was a cruel ruse concocted by Scott and Simon, I had to admire their professionalism. There was the unmistakable Open logo – the silhouette of the sacred claret jug – and a letter from Peter Dawson, Chief Executive of the R&A, wishing me ‘a very enjoyable and successful championship’, followed by the obligatory sheaf of rules, in migraine-inducing point-size, that tends to accompany any golf tournament of substance. I could be found a couple of pages further on, listed in the thirty-fourth group of the Hollinwell branch of regional qualifying, with a 1.18 tee time: ‘Tom Cox, representing Diss,’1 paired with John Ronson from Tydd St Giles and Michael Hempstock from Doncaster. Possibly such information might not have seemed quite so overwhelming if I hadn’t received it whilst still feeling like the survivor of a minor shipwreck, but I would still have needed a lengthy horizontal moment to digest it. Me. Playing in. The Open. Very soon. Maybe if I rearranged these facts, they would make more sense? The Open. Very soon. Playing in. Me. Nope: it still sounded implausible.
Obviously, competing in the regional qualifying stages of The Open is not quite the same as competing in The Open itself. To play in The Open as recognised by armchair golf fans the world over – the seventy-two-hole part, in mid-July, due to take place at Hoylake, near Liverpool, for the first time in thirty-nine years – I would need to pass through the regional qualifying stage by occupying one of the top nineteen places at my allotted course, then travel to Merseyside, play a further thirty-six holes in the local2 qualifying stage, and defeat my fellow Stage One qualifiers and hundreds of their international equivalents to grab one of twelve coveted spots. But does the unfancied reserve for the Bulgarian national football squad, called up out of the blue for a World Cup pre-qualifying clash, ring up his mates and say, ‘I’ve just been called up to play in a World Cup pre-qualifying match!’? Of course he doesn’t! He says, ‘I’m playing in the bloomin’ World Cup!’ By the same logic, I was playing in The Open. I had sent my qualifying form off to the R&A two months ago, and it had been smoothly processed, along with several thousand others from around the globe.
So who, or what, was responsible for this administrative cock-up? Famously, in 1976 an out-and-out hacker called Maurice Flitcroft had attempted to qualify for The Open, ticking the box on the entry form that said ‘professional’, and gone on to shoot 121 – the worst round in Open history, and, alongside a couple of particularly bellicose streakers, one of the most humiliating moments in the R&A’s history. Flitcroft had returned under a variety of pseudonyms in later years – e.g. Gerald Hoppy, Gene Pacecki (pronounced ‘Pay-chequey’) – only to be rumbled by officials and pulled off the course. I’d imagined that security might have tightened up since then. But no. Here I was, without a professional top-ten finish – without a professional finish – to my name, and golf’s governing body was only too happy to take my £110 entry fee. Could my seventy-six-year-old non-golfing nan have done the same thing, if she too had agreed to relinquish her amateur status?
As a veteran, bemused observer of unnecessarily long-winded golf paperwork,3 I’d been surprised by how simple filling out my Open entry form had been. I’d pictured the most long-winded job application form imaginable, asking for all manner of information about my golfing background, from ‘best round’ to ‘biggest divot’, along with references from my last three Handicap Chairmen, my school PE teacher and the Secretary of the Norfolk County Golf Union, but in reality it had just been a matter of submitting a modicum of banal personal details, stating which tour I played on, which one of the sixteen regional qualifying venues around the country I would ideally like to compete at, and my debit card number. Somehow unable to convince myself that I’d done enough, I added ‘PLEASE!’ next to the box where I nominated Hollinwell in Nottinghamshire as my preferred course.
The reasons why I wanted to qualify at Hollinwell were threefold. Firstly, it was only half an hour’s drive from my parents’ house, meaning convenient, free accommodation. Secondly, it was possibly my favourite golf course of all time: a heather-speckled paradise bowl ringed by Forestry Commission land, from whose heavily guarded fairways one could easily convince oneself that one was entirely removed from twenty-first-century life. Finally, and most crucially, it and I had a little bit of unfinished business to settle. When I was sixteen, I’d had an unsuccessful trial for membership there. I’d never found out what I’d done wrong, but since I’d beaten my handicap in my test round, I suspected the reasons for my fruitless application were not golfing ones. To qualify for The Open at the same course, fifteen years later, in my first visit back, would constitute a fairytale bit of score-settling.
The Hollinwell debacle had been a fork in the road of my adolescence, coming at a time when my deferred rebel years were catching up with me and I needed to decide whether I was going to get serious about my golf, or loaf away my days in the back of the pro shop, drinking too much Coke and serving an apprenticeship in low-grade pyromania. Moving from my soft, slack south Nottinghamshire base to a club in north Nottinghamshire, where the fairways and the juniors were made of flintier stuff, had seemed an obvious way to take my game to the next level. I’d often wondered what might have happened if I’d handled myself differently that day in 1991. What if the man from the committee hadn’t seen my dad’s ancient car with its CND sticker and moss growing up the wheel arches? What if I’d had headcovers without rips in them, had cleaned that big mud stain off my bag, and not stolen the honour from my playing partner on the thirteenth? Would I now be Lee Westwood?
As a boy, Westwood played his golf at Worksop, a neighbouring course to Hollinwell, not dissimilar in character. For a short time in the early nineties the two of us had been teammates on the Nottinghamshire junior side, but I’d always been a bit too intimidated to get to know him. The grim, gritty spirit of north Nottinghamshire mining country ran through his sporting veins. Like most good north Nottinghamshire players, he was big and immoveable-looking, particularly in the posterior and head, and had an odd way of nodding at the ball, as if in dogged self-encouragement, upon initiating his downswing. He always looked, even at his most crestfallen, like the kind of dependable competitor who’d happily sell his teeth for a birdie.4
There would be no regional or local qualifying for Lee this year. As a member of the world rankings top fifty, his place at Hoylake was already assured. Naturally I hoped that the two of us might get paired together in the third round when, as we vied for a place in the hallowed final group with Tiger on Sunday, we’d josh about old times and compare experiences as former winners of the Lindrick Junior Open. Just in case that didn’t happen, though, I needed a back-up plan, as I felt it was an important part of my rookie year to compare notes with a man who in many ways was a grown-up, parallel-universe version of Teenage Golf Me. Pro-am day at the British Masters – a tournament that’s never quite been as prestigious as it’s promised to be, but nonetheless remains an important part of the European Tour calendar – seemed to be the perfect opportunity. Lee, I was informed, would be in a relaxed frame of mind. Maybe, I speculated, I might even be able to tap him up for a lesson.
‘You’ll get ten minutes, and that’s all,’ said David Brooks when I called him from my mobile upon my arrival at the Belfry, the British Masters venue.
I was beginning to doubt whether I’d chosen the right route to Westwood. Because Brooks had extended the invite to the Morson event to me, and also happened to be Westwood’s manager, I’d decided to arrange our meeting through him. Yet a simple call to Bob Boffinger, my old club’s former junior organiser, who still shared many mutual acquaintances with Westwood, might have resulted in a less potentially fraught encounter. Nonetheless, I couldn’t complain. I was at a tournament that featured nearly all the stars of European golf (my nemesis Sergio was the one distinguished absence), I had an access-all-areas badge, and the sun was out. I got out of the car, stretched my legs and let out a satisfying yawn. Immediately, I spotted a grey-haired man. He was scratching his head, and his eyes, while notable for their deep unshakeable wisdom, looked disorientated. I recognised him as Dave Musgrove, one of the legends of the caddying world.
I’d never met Dave before, but I’d spent the first decade of my life living two miles from him, and had watched him countless times on TV, bent double beneath sporting luggage almost as big as him. Now retired, he’d been one of the most sought-after caddies in the business, having won major championships with Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle and Lee Janzen. When I was having a revelatory near out-of-body experience watching my first US Masters in 1988, Dave was there at Augusta, giving Lyle the perfect yardage for the unforgettable seventy-second-hole bunker shot that set up his winning birdie. I’d been told by golfing peers that there was no man alive with better insights into the pro game.
I introduced myself. Dave said he was looking for a friend’s car, where he was supposed to deposit some books that he planned to sell later.
‘I’m damned if I can find it,’ he muttered. ‘They all look the bloomin’ same.’
I looked around. If someone (other than me) had decided to stray from the norm and not drive a BMW 7 Series, they had obviously parked it at least two hundred rows away from where we stood. My miniature, dented Toyota was used to hanging out in car parks where every other vehicle cost more than itself; a car park where every other vehicle’s hubcaps cost more than it, though? That was a new one.
After caddying for very nearly the whole of his walking life, Dave hadn’t quite grasped the idea of retirement. He was here this week, a day early, to scout out the course for his employer, Gary Evans. Was he going to The Open? ‘All depends if my man makes it.’ Evans, a player whose up-and-down form had established him over the years at a level just above ‘journeyman’, had come spectacularly close to winning the 2002 Open at Muirfield, but this year he would have to battle it out with the baseball-capped masses in the qualifying rounds. I told Dave that I was scheduled to play at Hollinwell.
‘That’s where I started when I was a kid, me’oad,’ he said. ‘When I was ten. Used to get paid a shilling a round. Still bloomin’ love it. Always will.’
We compared notes on growing up in the north-east Midlands. Did I live near the pit when I lived in Brinsley, Dave wanted to know. Yes, I built a den in the woods next to it, just before they closed it down. He said he’d built a den in the exact same place, three decades earlier. Few regions do hard-faced taciturnity quite as well as the one stretching from D.H. Lawrence’s birthplace to the Yorkshire border, but Dave was the most accommodating person I’d met on the pro scene, if not on the golf scene as a whole. He was also the first person I’d met for sixteen years who used the phrase ‘me’oad’ in the place of ‘mate’.
He invited me over to the range, where we sat behind five teenage boys, all in matching J. Lindeberg belts and hats, and tried to get a view of the long-hitting, lazy-swinging Argentinian Angel Cabrera. Dave said that although he had a pass to go behind the ropes, he preferred to take a back seat unless he needed to be with his player.
‘All this has changed so much in the last twenty years, me’oad,’ he said. ‘You get all these cling-ons now. In the old days it just used to be a player, a caddy and maybe his coach. Now you can’t turn up unless you’ve got your sports psychologist, your physical trainer, your dietician and your bloomin’ hairdresser.’
It was true: the practice ground was thick with bodies. As players arrived with baskets of gleaming Titleists, many of them had to spend several minutes trying to find a spot between caddies, swing technicians and numerous other red-faced men in polo shirts, none of whom seemed to be doing anything directly related to golf, but all of whom succeeded in making the process of text messaging and eating burgers appear of extreme consequence. There were probably three hundred people in our eyeline, and it seemed that almost every one of them – including the players – was frantically speaking or typing into a small piece of technology. Off to the left, in the logo-spattered trucks now ubiquitous at European Tour events, other, bigger bits of technology waited to do miraculous things to some of these men’s backs and shoulders. And straight ahead, a magical tractor, fitted with a protective cage, waited to pick up their balls. Dave told me how different this was from even the most sumptuously catered European Tour events of the seventies and early eighties. In those days it had been his duty to stand at the opposite end of the practice ground collecting his player’s missiles, in slight fear for his life. He’d just gone on to talk about his favourite experience in golf, the 1986 Masters, when he and Lyle had been paired with the resurgent, victorious Jack Nicklaus – the noises that greeted Nicklaus’s birdie putts on the back nine were ‘the loudest I’d ever heard on a golf course’ – when he was interrupted by another, possibly even louder noise: a booming voice, coming from our left, steamrollering the low buzz of conversation around us.
‘I TOLD YOU I WAS ON MY FUCKING PHONE. DON’T YOU DARE TALK TO ME WHEN I’M ON MY FUCKING PHONE!’
‘Oh, right, here we go,’ said Dave, as we watched a famous, formidably built British golf pro storm into our eyeline, pursued apologetically by a man in his seventies with a look of The Wind in the Willows about him.
‘What do you think happened there?’ I asked Dave. ‘Do you think that bloke was hassling him when he shouldn’t have?’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ he said. ‘Probably not. He’s usually having a go at someone or other.’
For a couple of minutes, our end of the range became muffled and chilly and muted, and people moved more slowly than they had done before – as if a fog had descended on us, carrying all the implicit elements of fog, apart from the fog itself – but not many people looked very surprised at the big pro’s outburst. Pretty soon, normal service was resumed. The exciting Swedish player Henrik Stenson continued perfecting his Boeing 747 ball flight. The cavalier Argentinians Eduardo Romero and Ricardo Gonzalez continued to share a joke (why did the Latin players always look as if they were having the biggest laugh?). Ian Poulter sent another text message. Some teenage boys behind him dressed in bright pink trousers pointed at his bright pink trousers. Some rotund men in front of them ordered some more burgers, and received a couple more text messages (from Ian Poulter?). To all intents and purposes, I had never been more ‘inside’ as a golfer than at this moment. Here I was, a professional, sitting with a living legend, at a club that had staged four Ryder Cups, within putting distance of some of my favourite players, about to meet one of Britain’s best ever players, having just got a rare insight into another’s social skills, yet I’d never felt more like a bemused outsider. I sensed that I wasn’t the only one.
‘Do you think of yourself as a golfy kind of person, Dave?’ I asked.
‘Not really. My wife doesn’t like it, for one thing. She can’t stand the clothes.’
For the first time I noticed Dave’s outfit, which was casually stylish, well fitting, and helped to make him look about a decade younger than he was (i.e. about fifty-three). You wouldn’t exactly have called it a statement against typical golfing attire, but it definitely didn’t look as if it been bought entirely from a pro shop – which was more than you could say for almost every other person in our eyeline.5 It was an unending source of mystery to me that the vast majority of golfers chose to stick to golf brand clothing when a) 95 per cent of the time it was still hideous, and b) unlike uniforms for most other sports, it was no more athletically advantageous than outfits that could be purchased more cheaply from any number of high street stores. I hoped, when I took my game to the next level and qualified for The Open, that I might finally get a handle on this.
‘So I suppose a lot of stuff associated with the game gets on your nerves?’ I continued.
‘Yeah, quite a bit.’
‘But you love it?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you’d never not want it in your life?’
‘No way, me’oad. I’ll always love it.’
‘Me too. It’s weird, isn’t it?’
‘What do you think of the course this week?’ I asked him.
He took a thoughtful look out into the bright green yonder and paused, as if weighing up the much-improved Belfry of today against its previous incarnations: in 1985 it had been dismissed by some as ‘a glorified potato field’.
‘Well, it’s a shithole, isn’t it?’ he said.
Having met a few full-time bag carriers over the years, and read Four-Iron in the Soul, Lawrence Donegan’s terrific book about being a European Tour bagman, I’d already suspected that nobody in pro golf told it straighter than the caddies. Even with this in mind, though, meeting Dave had been unexpectedly refreshing. I wasn’t expecting any such candour from Lee Westwood, who, being a top Tour pro, would no doubt have an inbuilt mechanism enabling him to answer even the most probing question with a statement that was a cliché wrapped in a platitude.
I don’t wish to denigrate the higher plateaux of the golfing profession here. I understand that in a sporting environment not without its history of blackballing, where you’re rubbing shoulders with the same people week in and week out, there is little social sense in making a controversial statement about your contemporaries. I also understand that the mindset that comes up with choice bon mots is not necessarily one that is able to roll forty-foot putts stone dead under pressure. All the same, would it be such a tragedy if someone said something interesting in an interview sometime? It wouldn’t even have to be about golf. It could be about go-karting, or kettles, or iceberg lettuce. During the periods I’d spent watching televised golf in 2006, I’d sometimes questioned my motives for turning pro. Maybe I did want to put my golfing ability to the ultimate test. But perhaps I really just wanted to put myself in a position where I could subvert the post-round interview custom of answering every question with one of – or a slight variation of one of – the following three statements:
a. ‘Well, you know, it’s all just about making a few putts. And today I didn’t make any putts.’
b. ‘Well, it’s all just about hitting the greens. And today I didn’t hit any greens.’
c. ‘We’ll just see how it goes. I’ve just got to take every shot as it comes, and not really think about tomorrow.’
People think politicians do the ultimate line in interrogative stonewalling, but they have nothing on golfers. If you listen carefully, there’s actually a great skill to it. It’s as if, at some point on their road to stardom – possibly shortly after perfecting their standardised ‘I’d like to thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course’ amateur victory speeches – the whole lot of them have been sent to secret seminars with titles like The Use of the Phrase ‘Y’Know’ as a Delaying Tactic, Appearing to Evaluate Your Disaster on the Back Nine When Really You’re Just Spouting Hot Air that Could Apply to Any Round of Golf, and (a favourite of Colin Montgomerie, this) The Merits of ‘As it Were’: How it Can Make You Look Articulate, When You’re Saying Something Quite Obvious and Dull. Long were the hours I’d spent dreaming about bringing my own brand of answers to the mix:
‘So, Tom – 67 today. That puts you just three shots behind Paul Casey, tied with Woody Austin. Still hope for tomorrow, then? And I suppose it could have been better still had you not had that bit of bad luck in the Road Bunker?’
‘Well, Julian, you could call it bad luck, but the truth is, I bollocksed it up! Totally my fault! Should have knocked it on the green, but I got distracted. The problem was that I’d sort of drifted off and started thinking about how much I wanted a packet of Monster Munch.’
‘Er … right. Were you thinking about the roast beef or pickled onion flavour?’
‘Oh, pickled onion, naturally.’
‘Well – remarkable! So, a birdie barrage on Sunday?’
‘I’m buggered if I know. Probably not, I suppose, if I keep swinging like something halfway between Lee Trevino and that mushroom-headed creature you get on Supermario Golf. Also, I’m not that pleased about being paired with Woody Austin. He looks like a right bad-tempered git. Did you see him beating the crap out of himself with his club that time he missed that two-footer? I’m just looking forward to the next interview with you, to be honest. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask: are Dougie Donnelly and Colin Montgomerie actually the same person, and if so, how do you get them in the same camera shot together?’
To be fair to Westwood, there were far less effusive pros out there, and I’d probably have done better if I’d caught him outside office hours (even if a pro-am is a kind of ‘wear your flip-flops to the office day’ in the working week of a pro golfer). My main problem was that he’d obviously been briefed for our encounter in an ‘A golf journalist wants to interview you’ kind of way – with the possible addendum ‘He says you’ve met before’ – rather than ‘A fellow pro who’s a bit lame but who used to play on the Nottinghamshire county team with you would like to talk to you’ kind of way. Again, I reminded myself that I must remember to keep my journalism out of my pro life. One mention of the ‘j’ word and, to Lee, I probably instantly became part of the amorphous, untrustworthy, badge-wearing creature top pros refer to through gritted teeth as ‘the press’.
I’d not expected Lee to recognise or remember me. I’d only ever spoken to him once when we were kids – well, more like mumbled, actually – and although we’d eaten sausage, egg, chips and beans6 at the same post-county-match table a couple of times and I’d watched him thank the greenstaff for the condition of the course in a dozen wooden junior winner’s speeches, I knew that the first rule of talking to famous sportsmen is Assume They Don’t Know Who the Hell You Are. What was surprising, though, was that he didn’t seem to remember our mutual Nottinghamshire acquaintances either.
‘So you used to hang about with Pete Langford?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was pals with Robin Walters. He once played in the same Notts Boys vs Notts Police match as us, I think. But I doubt you’d remember him.’
‘No, I can’t say I do. Sorry.’
‘Ooh, but of course you know Jamie Daniel. I was mates with him.’
‘Who?’
That Lee didn’t recall my old golfing rival Jamie, whom I’d actually witnessed partnering him in at least three events, and sharing a laugh with him in a couple of Midlands clubhouses, was a surprise. ‘How could you not remember the former Next You!?’ I wanted to shout. But then I thought about just how many people Lee must have met over the course of the last decade. A few minutes previously we’d walked from the range to the putting green, and throughout the hundred-yard journey his hands had not been without an autograph pen for more than a second (‘That would have been on eBay tonight,’ he said to me after refusing to autograph a photograph of himself and Colin Montgomerie at the 2004 Ryder Cup, thrust at him by a woman he was certain he’d already signed for. ‘Does your fuckin’ ’ead in’). Before that, I’d watched a man of roughly forty-nine years of age stand next to the gate to the practice chipping green and say, ‘How are you, Ian?’ to Ian Woosnam,7 then, having got his answer (‘Ah, y’know, I’m all right’), thank him, and go literally skipping off to report the good news to his wife, who was waiting on the other side of the barrier, looking slightly uncomfortable (‘Ian is all right! YEsssss!’). When you play the kind of golf Westwood and Woosnam do, everyone wants a piece of you – whether that piece is in the shape of a photo sanctified with your handwriting, or one of your broken tee pegs, or the more transient confirmation that you’re all right or that you’ll take every shot as it comes and see what happens and that it’s all about holing some putts, in the end.
When Lee and I passed beyond the ropes to the restricted-access area beside the putting green, the wanting didn’t stop, it merely took on a slightly more dignified form. As Lee stood there, and I tried to find some conversational space, endless well-wishers arrived from all angles. Of these, only the golf-mad pop singer Ronan Keating acknowledged my presence – or rather, my minidisc recorder’s presence – and said, ‘Ooh you’re doing an interview. I’ll come back and have a chat later.’ Others arrived and Lee spoke to them about his tournament schedule and his new, wispy sideburns (‘I’m taking tips,’ he said, pointing to my bushier ones), and how he’d sent ‘the wife off shopping for the day’. It was not, perhaps, the chat you’d expect of a man whose manager had said he could only spare ten minutes for an interview, but maybe it was the chat of a man who needed that manager. Going on this evidence, a Westwood who took care of his own diary would never make it to the tee on time.
When the area finally cleared, I wasted no time in getting straight to my most important question: what did Lee think was the single most important attribute that a fledgling pro could take with him on Tour? But as soon as he’d given me the answer – ‘You need a complete belief that you fit in and that you’re good enough’ – I knew that my real important question was coming next.
‘But if you’ve got that belief, surely it needs to be so strong and all-pervading that it will take over the rest of your life?’ I asked.
He gave me a frank sort of look, and half a shrug. ‘Yeah, totally. You can’t turn it on and off.’
His answer, I suppose, was not unexpected. After all, this was the man who, when asked what he wanted most out of his golfing life, had responded without hesitation, even at the age of sixteen, with six simple words: ‘I want to be the best.’ Nonetheless, it troubled me slightly. Obviously, there was no point in going out on a golf course and telling yourself you were rubbish, but if you acted as if you thought you were the best away from the golf course too, what kind of person would that make you? I had a feeling that this was a question that might be troubling me a lot more once I’d had time to ponder it properly.
We talked for a few more minutes (to be fair, the total was more like seventeen than ten). I asked him what he remembered about winning the Lindrick Junior Open (not much), and told him I’d won it with the precise same score the following year (‘Hmmmph’). I asked him if he thought there was such a thing as a ‘Nottingham swing’ (he didn’t). I wondered if he could apologise to Mark Foster – another Worksop junior who’d gone on to success on the European Tour, and a good friend of Westwood’s – on my behalf for keeping him waiting on the tee at the 1991 Midlands Boys’ Championship (a nervous I’m-not-quite-sure-if-you’re-serious laugh in response to this). I asked whether he remembered a fork in his adolescence where he’d had to choose between messing about with his mates and long, lonely hours on the practice ground (he looked at me as if I’d asked him if he dropped an E before all his tee shots, or just some of them). Focusing on my technical obsession of the current month, ‘light hands’, I asked him to hold my hands as if they were a golf club and demonstrate what he thought was the ideal grip pressure for a golfer (he was really starting to give me a ‘Jesus – Dougie Donnelly never asked me to do this!’ stare now). He asked, slightly brusquely, ‘Is that it? Are we done?’ I wished him luck on his round, and he went off to hit some putts, watched by his loyal dad, who had once taught at the same school as my uncle (I at least had the restraint not to bring this up).
When I was fifteen and Westwood was seventeen, I’d been in awe of him. I’d had plenty of chances to start a conversation with him but hadn’t, for fear of distracting him from more important business, like cleaning the mud off his golf shoes or eating his sausage, egg, chips and beans. Now I’d finally done so, and probably irritated him slightly in the process, but I felt strangely unconcerned about it. In fact, in a way I felt as if I had been talking to his seventeen-year-old self – or at least someone much younger than me.
Certainly, he was a great golfer, and he had that Ready Brek glow about him that all great golfers had, but on another level he was just a very ordinary bloke who liked a good bit of meat, hadn’t read a book since school, and felt the Sun fulfilled all his daily news-based needs. What made him different from other ordinary blokes, perhaps, was that he’d been smoothed into a wondrous half-adulthood by courtesy cars and prize money and luxury hotels and a management company which (as one of its representatives had explained to me earlier) would gladly take care of the fiddly business of household bills and accounts if it meant he could concentrate on the thing he was best at: hitting a small white ball into a hole. The result of our meeting for me – and seventeen minutes is hardly ample time for a full character assessment – was that I felt pretty much the same about him as I had done before: he seemed nice enough, and I knew I’d continue to root for him when I saw him on TV. But as I left the Belfry later that day, I could not ignore the fact that a few voices in that little choir in the back of my head singing ‘What could have been?’ had piped down.
That night in bed, I made a list in my golf diary of my immediate priorities, as informed by my trip to the Belfry. I was very tired from the drive back to Norfolk from Birmingham, and from the two hundred balls I’d hit at the range on the way, trying to groove in that ‘light hands at address’ technique, so I fell asleep before I’d completed it, but I think I got the main points down.
During my adolescence, June had always been a frustrating golfing month: a time when good weather had usually arrived, but the junior tournament season hadn’t quite kicked in in earnest. I was used to spending large chunks of it on the practice ground, and that’s what I attempted to do now. As a kid, I would skip school and college to spend periods of four or five hours ensconced in the repetitive task of hitting thousands of wedge shots at my umbrella. I didn’t have an umbrella any more, of course, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what was making my attention wander while I was on the practice ground. I loved hitting balls, but I could no longer lose myself quite so completely in the process. Bagger Vance would not have been impressed: I couldn’t stop thinking, and I sometimes came dangerously close to falling asleep. All too often I’d manage thirty wedge shots and find myself wandering over to Diss’s ninth tee, abandoning practice for a distinctly less beneficial match between ‘Garcia’ (Titleist 3) and ‘Couples’ (ancient Pinnacle 5). Even when I was alone, swallowed up in the peace of an early-summer evening at Diss, I would get jittery just thinking about my next professional tournament. This was The Big One. More than likely, after I had played in it, I would have a fair idea of whether I had any remote chance of pulling this pro thing off. In two weeks I would be playing in The Open, and, lying awake in bed, I had already rehearsed the opening tee shot roughly five hundred times. And when I’d got it safely away, I usually rehearsed the shot after it, and the shot after that. By mid-June I had been round Hollinwell in 65, 67, 64 and driven the green of its par-four sixteenth twice. I had been suffering from sporting insomnia all year, but now I had taken it to new levels.
I’d arranged to play two more rounds before the biggest golfing day of my life, and despite my baggy-eyed state, I was looking forward to them both enormously. The second of these was to be a practice round at Hollinwell itself, but the week before that I drove to Woburn, near Milton Keynes, to meet Stephen Lewton and his dad, Mike – something I’d been promising to do for several months.
If the 1988 US Masters had been the first intoxicating snifter of my golfing life, then the British Masters, played at Woburn’s Duke’s Course a few weeks later, had been the invigorating chaser that sealed the deal. The British Masters had long since moved on to pastures new – or rather, pastures a little bit bland but long enough to stand up to the increasingly powerful equipment used on the European Tour – but the Duke’s still seemed like a Valhalla of a course. Cut through a pine forest on the private estate of the Marquess of Tavistock, it was green, mean, walled by trees, and an ideal way to ease myself towards the longer, more penal Hollinwell. This was where Lewton, a plus-four handicapper on the cusp of turning pro, played a lot of his golf, although, as the recipient of an American college golf scholarship, for nine months of the year he was based in North Carolina. Our mutual friend Peter Gorse, who ran the Golf Refugees clothing label,8 had been trying to get us together for almost a year, and I’d finally stopped using the fact that I ‘needed a bit of time to hit my best form’ as an excuse to put it off. I also thought it would be interesting to meet a golfer who was taking a very different route into the pro game to those I’d already seen first hand – a route whose (then admittedly scant) existence I hadn’t even been aware of in my youth.
Lewton was lucky: his scholarship was of the 100 per cent variety, worth £30,000. His main living expenses were in the form of his airfares to and from America. The owner of no fewer than six high-spec golf bags, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to pay for any of his equipment. ‘They throw all sorts of stuff at me,’ he said, pointing to his latest pair of £200 golf shoes. ‘The coaches out there tend to have deals with all the big manufacturers, on top of their salaries.’ He made a beeline for my bag and began to finger my clubs suspiciously. ‘What do you think of these Taylor Made RACs?’
I frowned and pretended to consider the question for a second, then said, ‘I like them!’ This was a stock answer that I’d had the chance to perfect during the fourteen or fifteen times, since the end of winter, that James had asked me the same question. The truth was, since I’d got my new irons, I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to their ‘performance’. The way it seemed to me was that they were golf clubs and, like most other golf clubs, if you swung them well, they would help the ball go more or less where you wanted it.
‘Driver’s nice. Maybe put a bit of lead on the shaft? Putter looks kind of offset.’
Four years ago, Lewton had played as an amateur in a couple of Europro Tour events (amateurs of two handicap and better can enter tournaments, although, not being able to win any money, the incentive is low), and had also missed out on qualifying for the European Tour by a shot. He hadn’t enjoyed the former much (‘I didn’t find it very friendly – people seemed to keep themselves to themselves’), and the latter had proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it allowed him to take up his scholarship at North Carolina State University.
‘I love it out there,’ he said. ‘The courses are in out-of-this-world condition and the practice facilities are like nothing in the UK. The greens are about 13 or 14 on the stimpmeter. They’re so fast that sometimes the ball will roll away if you don’t press it into the grass when you mark it.’ Being on a scholarship (the academic part of his degree was in Business Management) meant that Steve would have to wait longer than many to start earning money as a golfer, but one only had to look at the career of Luke Donald – a former American college golf number one, and now one of the top ten players in the world – to see the benefits of this kind of golfing apprenticeship.
When Steve was at school in the UK, he’d known it wasn’t wise to admit that he liked golf – particularly to girls. In America, he said, it was very different. ‘When you say you’re on the golf team, the women out there are like, “Cool.”’ They love my accent as well. But it’s not quite like being one of the American football guys. They can have virtually any girl they want. And they’ve got the biggest gym you’ve ever seen all to themselves. We have to share ours with the basketball team.’ He said he worked out five times a week on average – three times under supervision, twice on his own.
I knew that the notion that golf wasn’t an athletic sport was one that had become outmoded somewhere between Tiger Woods’s first green jacket and Craig ‘The Walrus’ Stadler’s final season as a PGA Tour regular, but Steve’s intrinsic sportiness still surprised me. It wasn’t just that he had all-round talent – he’d considered becoming a professional footballer too, and had only chosen golf after sustaining a knee injury whilst skiing – but that he was a completely alien golfing being to the ones I’d been taught to idolise while growing up. I’d already noticed that the world’s best golfers were fitter and taller and more positive than they had been when I was in my youth, but my game with Steve was the first time I’d been up close to someone with the whole package: pure-bred confirmation that the days when a belly was OK providing it didn’t impede your swing and the ideal golfer’s height was just under six foot and long hitting wasn’t necessarily an advantage and it was considered ‘bigheaded’ to talk about your inherent greatness were long gone.
Steve was six foot three, he hit his drives well over three hundred yards with an ease bordering on the comical, he talked frankly about how ‘Every time I stand up to the ball, I just know I’m going to hit a good shot … and it was obvious that every one of these things worked hugely in his favour. If I didn’t add anything to my post-Belfry golfing to-do list after meeting him, it was because doing so would have been too depressing: achieving that Lee Westwood glow was a mere enigma; growing three and a quarter inches was a biological impossibility.
I played poorly at Woburn. It was one of those days – with which I was becoming worryingly familiar – when I had so little sense where my hands were at the top of my swing that, for all the good they were doing, they might as well have been back at home, twiddling the keypad on my Nintendo. Only minutes after my round, though, I looked back at it and found that, oddly, I couldn’t remember much about it at all – not even the destructive bits. Had I scored 76? 78? 81? There was the pleasing moment on the eighteenth when Steve had told me to widen my stance, and I’d promptly belted my drive three hundred yards (only about forty yards behind his, that time). And then the moment before that when his dad, Mike, showed me a famous bit of tree trunk that looked like male genitalia. And … that was about it. Had I actually been on the course, or just haunting it from the sidelines, an appreciative ghostly spectator to Lewton’s languorous birdie-making and Mike’s fond tales of his son’s endless childhood brilliance?9 I couldn’t be sure. Whatever the case, I’d had a great day.
There should have been something terrifying, mortifying about playing with Lewton. And, on some level, I knew the facts. I knew that he was bigger than me, stronger than me, more technically adept than me, seven years younger than me. I knew that, although I’d had rounds under 70, and (two) rounds with seven birdies in them, I had never had a round under 70 with seven birdies where I had been able to say, in all truth, that I could easily have had seven more. I knew that he had a dad who believed in him so much that he’d never made him do a day’s work in his life. I knew that, for Steve, golf made everything else go out of focus, in a way it didn’t for me. I had first-hand experience of appendicitis, and I knew that suffering from it and still managing to shoot two rounds of 75 in a tournament, as Steve had done, was an achievement of mind-boggling stamina. I knew that he was that good – so good that, just last year, he’d been tussling with the new star of the PGA Tour, Camillo Villegas; so good that he was in line for a Walker Cup call-up next year; so good that he’d been given a scholarship that thousands of other young British golfers would have killed for – and he still wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to make a career in golf pay. And I knew that all of that really should have been telling me something, and that it was enough to cancel – no, not cancel, STOMP – out all those moments when I’d played with a pro and beat him or hit the ball more sweetly, and thought, ‘I could do this!’ And, finally, I knew that the most worrying thing of all was that none of this dampened my spirits or detracted from the fact that it was perfect golfing weather and it wasn’t often you got to see ball-striking of that quality for free and I was lucky to be playing Woburn.
But, like I said, I really did have ever such a nice day.
It’s only later that you’re able to take a balanced look at what happened. Only later that you think about statements like ‘I really did have ever such a nice day’ and ‘I felt lucky to be playing Woburn.’ Only later that you ask yourself, ‘Do these honestly sound like the statements of a man who is about to show no mercy, wrestle the rest of the Open qualifying field to the floor and beat his chest in victory?’ That’s where before and after are like two separate camera angles: the close-up, showing the man walking into the cave, which he thinks is a little bit scary and stalactitey and damp but sort of cosy too; and the long shot, which reveals the cave to be not a cave at all, but the mouth of a gargantuan extra-terrestrial, ready for its supper.
1 Of course, I didn’t actually represent Diss in any official capacity. I did not even represent Zentex Fabrics. I represented me. Whatever the case, since my Europro Tour debut, I had clearly been demoted from representing ‘England’. Perhaps England had complained.
2 Local, in this instance, meaning ‘local to the course where The Open is held’, as opposed to ‘local to the player.
3 e.g. ‘Minutes of the Thetford Golf Club AGM, 2004’, aka ‘How We can Solve the Badger Problem on the Tenth Fairway: A Ten-Page Treatise’.
4 Not that teeth were necessarily thought of as a major asset in north Nottinghamshire. My own grandma, who was from that neck of the woods, had got rid of hers when she was in her early twenties. ‘There wasn’t anything wrong with them,’ she once told me. ‘It just seemed more convenient to be done with them. And I knew a nice man who could do it on the cheap.’
5 The notable exceptions were Ian Poulter, who gets his clothes tailor-made, and the spectator in his early fifties standing just to our left modelling the ‘Golf Hipster in Mid-Life Crisis’ look: fluorescent bri-nylon orange shirt, jeans and golf shoes. You could put the combination of the first two items down to mere male menopausal disarray, but not the footwear. Why on earth was he wearing them? Was he hoping for a spot in the tournament?
6 Fact: all county-funded junior golf meals consist of sausage, egg, chips and beans.
7 Holder of the record for the Most Frequent Use of the Phrase ‘Y’know’ in a five-minute period (see US Masters, third round, 1991, BBC archives).
8 Sample product: ‘Cheat golf pants, replete with a hole in their pocket, to enable players to drop new balls in the rough when their partners aren’t looking.
9 e.g. The time when Steve was twelve and he won a junior tournament at Wentworth and Ryder Cup captain Bernard Gallagher, who was announcing the final European line-up on TV from the club’s putting green that day, pretended that Steve was one of his two captain’s picks.