Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia (11 page)

When I related all this to James, he shook his head even more gravely than he had done the first time I'd showed him my twenty-five-year-old Ping putter with the bent shaft. He explained that in order properly to survive on Tour, I needed to put all this out of my head.

‘What you have to realise,' he explained, ‘is that, in pro golf, nobody is really interested in the details of your round, how many birdies you made or what massive drives you hit. All they want to know is whether or not you've beaten them. You need to be the man who can walk into the clubhouse and be able to answer the question “What did you shoot?” with the words “Sixty” and “eight”. Nothing more. That's it.'

There was no doubting James's wisdom, but he was, after all, only twenty-five. Additionally, I knew that if he was being totally honest, he wasn't averse to a few ‘It's not how many, it's how' moments himself. What I felt I needed was a bit of time with one of the steady men of pro golf: someone who had seen it all, someone who wasn't going to let wedge shots that felt like liquid velvet and went twenty yards over the green distract him from the important business of plotting his way calmly around the course. Someone a bit like Ken Brown.

I had never met Ken, but a friend of a golf friend knew him, suggested that he might be amenable to
giving
me a pep talk about pro life, and gave me his number. A couple of weeks after playing in the Cabbage Patch Masters, I built up the courage to give him a call, and he cheerfully invited me down to his home club, in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. To say this was an unexpected boon would be an understatement: not every Europro Tour rookie in his early thirties got the chance to get free advice from a five-time Ryder Cup player. With the exception of Fred Couples, I couldn't think of anyone whose easy-going golfing demeanour I would want rubbing off on me more than Ken's. Always the most patient of players, he had quit tournament golf when he was only thirty-four, owing to a wrist injury and ‘pushing myself incredibly hard for fifteen years before losing the desire'. Before that, he'd been one of the most astute golfing strategists of the seventies and eighties, a willowy swinger – ‘Without,' he said, ‘a lot of weight behind the punches' – who made up for the weaknesses in his long game with Zen concentration skills and a demon touch around the greens. The good points about his game, in other words, probably doubled as an easy-to-use guide to the bad points about mine.

When I suggested to Ken that some players must go out there with the intention of thrilling the crowd first and thinking about the score later, he shook his head and looked at me as if I'd just told him that I enjoyed composing action paintings in the middle of the eighteenth green.

‘Nobody goes out there with a mission to entertain,' he said.

I searched my brain, sure I could think of at least one player who was the exception to the rule: to be specific,
one
gambling, long-hitting, guitar-playing, chainsmoking, cheeseburger-gobbling player.

‘Not even Long John Daly?' I asked.

‘Not even Long John Daly,' Ken said.

It seemed far-fetched, but I had to take his word for it. He tends to be right about most things, after all. In his role as BBC golf's resident trivia nerd, Ken is always being asked questions like ‘Who got defecated on by a pigeon in the 1986 World Matchplay?' and ‘What is the name of Darren Clarke's thirteenth-favourite sports car?' by his colleagues, and is alarmingly quick at coming up with the answers.
²

Perhaps it is the combination of little Britain (the concept, not the TV comedy) ambience, spongy grass verges, perfectly maintained windowboxes and abundant 4x4s, but Harpenden is the kind of place that would seem downright odd without a golf course – a bit like an old-fashioned stockbroker who'd lost his bowler hat. In fact it has three courses, all within an easy three-wood of one another – as I found out, to my cost, on my way to meet Ken.

Harpenden Golf Club was like a lot of exclusive commuter-belt golfing hideaways: security keypads that rendered entering the clubhouse and exiting the car park complex military procedures; a disapproving, square-jawed man in the car park, eyeing the Led Zeppelin sun visor in my car with distaste; architecture that you knew you'd be hard-pressed to remember three minutes after you last saw it. It was something of a
relief
to find out that this was not where Ken played his golf. ‘Ken Brown?' the moist-headed youth in the pro shop had said, scanning his computer printout of the club membership. ‘Nope. Can't see him.' After a couple of minutes we got our wires untangled (‘Oh – Ken
Brown!
') and I was directed to the neighbouring Harpenden Common Golf Club. This was an altogether more welcoming enclave down a leafy, Camberwick Green-ish lane, with open doors, an overfed resident cat and a period clubhouse full of smiling, chattering grey-haired women, all of whom I immediately wished were my grandma.

There was something very Ken Brown about all this, and not just because the course at Harpenden Common is only 6200 yards long – a length that seems commensurate with the reputation for ‘placid' driving that Ken developed during his playing days. In the commentary box, Ken might not have the endearing non-sequiturs of Peter ‘Voice of Golf' Alliss, or the sarcasm of Mark ‘Jessie' James,
³
but there is something perennially warm and welcoming about him. He is neither old guard (‘I don't see any harm in someone playing golf in a pair of jeans,' he told me) nor new, simply a man whose passion for the game runs so deep and pure that he can't help but calmly radiate knowledge about it. It seemed appropriate that, unlike most other members of his generation of the ex-pro British golfing establishment, his home club was not a semi-fortress in deepest Surrey.

He was quick to dismiss my suggestion that he was uniquely unflappable as a player. ‘You'll find that most pro golfers are surprisingly calm people,' he explained. ‘That's why you don't tend to see them going off the rails in the way you might other sportsmen. You have to be on a pretty even keel because you have to concentrate for forty seconds, seventy times a day, over the course of four hours, for four days running. That existence doesn't allow for instant adrenalin rushes or terrible depressions. I suppose Ian Woosnam gets a bit wsssh wsssh sometimes, but that's about it.'

‘Wsssh wsssh' – which I took to mean ‘overexcitable' – was, I was beginning to realise, about as near as Ken Brown got to slagging off his peers.

After our interview, we headed out onto the eighteenth green – clearly the old ‘no practising on the course' rule didn't apply to former Irish Open champions – so he could have a look at my putting and chipping strokes. Strangely, he didn't seem to think either was a total travesty. I told him that I struggled on both. He asked me if I thought I was being honest about my game.

‘Are you blaming your putting for other faults in your game? Do you tell yourself you're hitting the ball to the right, when the real fault is that you're hitting it to the left? It's easy to con yourself. You've got to be brutal in your analysis. The way that you're not deluding yourself is by consistently having rounds of 69 or 68.'

I decided not to tell him that the previous week I'd only just scored better than that at a pitch'n'putt venue barely more than a quarter the length of a normal golf course.

‘When I joined the Tour [in the mid-seventies], there weren't more
than
ten people making a living of any description,' he continued. ‘But because there are now two hundred or more people in Europe in a position to do that, it has got harder to get there. There are more people than ever trying to rush up and give it a go. Players come through with better role models, better advice on fitness and psychology. That and the new technology has made everyone that much more tightly packed. Giving yourself an edge, no matter how small, is that much more important.'

I hit another bunker shot, being sure to take a lot of sand, so as not to send the ball bulleting over the green in a way that might decapitate my temporary mentor. I wondered if Reminding Yourself to Hit the Sand Before the Ball so as Not to Kill Anyone counted as the kind of ‘edge' he was referring to. Probably not.

Before I left, Ken offered one more nugget of advice about the pro game. It sounded familiar.

‘The thing you have to understand about professional golfers is that, unless something really exceptional happens, we've heard it all before. We don't want to know if you holed two bunker shots. So what?'

‘What about if I holed a five-iron from two hundred yards?' I asked.

‘Hmmmm … Not really.'

‘What about if the five-iron ricocheted off a passing blackbird before it went in?'

‘Well, maybe. That's certainly more like it, anyway.'

Thanks to a kindly passing member, I came away from my encounter with Ken Brown with a photograph of the two of us. This showed me putting, with
a
cake-eating grin on my face, and Ken behind me, checking my alignment. It had been an extremely cold day, and I'd worn my thickest woolly hat, partly in tribute to the tea-cosy-like headgear Ken had been renowned for sporting in his early European Tour days. It wasn't the most stylish of golfing looks, perhaps, but I was surprised at the illusion of competence that my posture gave.

‘It looks like he's teaching the village idiot how to play,' said Edie when I handed her the picture.

Actually, I continued to be amazed at how supportive my better half was of my new career. Not only had she been quick to rush in with the Febreze after my Europro Qualifying School disaster (some of the odour had subsequently vanished, but there was still something undeniably oaky in the region of the pocket where I kept my pitchmark repairers), she'd also been surprisingly swift to pick up the complex lingo of a game which, if not for my peculiar passion for it, would undoubtedly have held zero interest for her. There had been the initial, anticipated mix-ups to shed light on – e.g. me having to explain that, no, I didn't fancy taking my parka out with me to the golf course, as it would restrict my backswing, and that, yes, it was weird that the captain of a club often tended to be one of its worst players – but it wasn't long before she got the gist, even if she still wasn't too keen on the accompanying dress sense and complexions. ‘Hmmm. Tradesman's entrance,' she'd comment knowledgeably as Fred Couples' birdie putt at the Nissan Open narrowly snuck into the rear side of the hole, before turning her attention back to her newspaper. Or later, as Jim Furyk took his repulsive, jerky backswing in the
Honda
Classic: ‘What was that? It was horrible! It looked like his arms were attached to invisible pulleys!' (a real ‘That's my girl!' moment, that one.) Before long, I began to see where the golf commentary teams of the world were going wrong. What they really needed was a bit of feminine input:

‘Thanks Jim! Stone the crows … Davis Love III just
spun
that ball like he had
air-brakes
on that baby, I'm telling ya. Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce a new member of the ABC team, Edie Cox. Edie, welcome.'

‘Thank you, Gary. I'm delighted to be here, even if I am a bit confused as to why you speak in that weird voice, where you say some words very slowly and others very quickly, as if to make them sound funnier and more dramatic than they really are. Here we have Darren Clarke, putting for a whatdyamacallit, the one that's one better than a birdie. Anyway, whatever; he's putting. Stroke looks pretty smooth, but … it doesn't look like he's exfoliated since at least 1998. And … OOOH, over the cellophane bridge, leaving him a tricky one coming back. I wonder if it would have gone in if he'd accessorised a little better. Maybe a bit of serum on that hair might have helped. We'll be back, hopefully with some factor fifty suntan lotion, after these messages, including the one about the steakhouse where the food will probably give you some pretty bad meatsweats.'

Edie had been to the driving range with me a few times and, with very little instruction, had hit impressive, lofty shots beyond the hundred-yard marker using the lightweight Lynx seven-iron I'd bought her.
But
I knew that she viewed golf in the same way as most other women in their twenties and thirties: as a closed-off, sombre, sexist island, somewhere a few miles off the coast of 1981. Since that was pretty much what I thought about golf too, I wasn't going to try to persuade her to fall in love with it. It seemed unlikely she ever would, particularly now that she had hit some pure iron shots without having any major existential epiphanies. All I could hope was that I didn't bore her to death with my tales of show-off drives and insouciant eagles. Or bankrupt us with my pro ambitions. Or damage too much furniture with my sand wedge.

Even when I was only playing golf twenty times a year, I had frequently arrived home from a few holes of practice, walked into the living room and announced to Edie, ‘I've found it!' in a manner that suggested something that would turn our world upside down, only to proceed to describe a new grip or pre-shot waggle. Playing almost every day, these revelations came with even more lunatic regularity. ‘I've realised it's all about keeping my swing shorter!' I would proclaim, after a particularly perky nine holes before dusk. ‘It's all become clear now – I'm getting too narrow, not completing my arc,' I would announce three days later, ingenuously, following a brisk morning birdie barrage. More irksome still must have been my tendency to see golf in all of the life around me, and evaluate it incessantly. I tried not to talk constantly about my swing, and sometimes succeeded in finding distraction in a nice meal or a quality sitcom, but it soon became obvious that a good pizza topping was a bit like a good golfing attitude – you needed all the ingredients just right,
but
it was important not to overload it – and that while Joey, Chandler and Ross from
Friends
obviously represented a neat overview of the three predominant types of modern male, they just as obviously represented the three predominant types of golfing persona to be found on the PGA Tour.