Ramblings Of An Inappropriate Professional Golfer

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

"That is NEVER 100 yards!" (a column for Golf International Magazine)

I recently went on a lovely walk near Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk. On a hazy day in late summer, this is about as close as you can get to being in LP Hartley’s classic novel The Go-Between without actually wearing a waistcoat and starting an affair with a local tenant farmer. Another plus of the walk was that I only got lost once: a good result for me, and an oversight for which I blame not myself, but the AA’s 50 Walks In Suffolk guidebook, which told me to turn off onto a field edge path after keeping on a lane for a distance of 400 yards which was clearly 325 at the most.

Like a lot of golfers, I’m an enormous pedant when it comes to yardages. In the same way that I thought “There is no way that this is anywhere near a drive and a nine iron!” when I was in Somerleyton, I will often frown as friends tell me that the pub where I am meeting them is “about a hundred yards past the post office” when it is quite obvious I couldn’t get there with my best 3-iron, even if I hit it out of the button. They are mere civilians, so I forgive them, but it doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated. “A hundred yards” is not one of those nebulous numbers like “a couple”: it cannot be casually applied to mean “somewhere between a hundred and five hundred yards. Eventually, that sort of negligence is going to get a person caught in a lateral water hazard.

There was a time when I viewed all everyday experiences through the prism of golf, but I’m slightly better than that now. These days, I can walk in the country for periods of up to ten minutes without sizing up a tree and wondering how lofted an iron I’d need to get over it from the vantage point in question. That said, there was so much golf in my life for so long at such an impressionable age, the game has left its permanent marks on the rest of my life. Lawn- mowing is a notable example: I’m absolutely rubbish at gardening, so can only imagine that my increasing obsession with the lushness of the quarter acre of grass outside my window is my repressed inner greenkeeper struggling to get to the surface. Then there’s wind: give me a blustery morning, and I’m a nervous wreck – at least until I remember that I’m a) not 15, b) don’t have a crucial Junior Open to play in that day and c) the travails of walking to the local train station in a 20mph headwind is not likely to put up my Walking To The Local Train Station Handicap by 0.1.

This might seem like highly antisocial behaviour to many, but I’m convinced that golf has also helped prepare me for adult life as much as it has hindered me. Ditto with the golfing friends I grew up with. I got together with the principle among these last month at my old golf club in Nottinghamshire, Cripsley Edge, for a deferred reunion, marking the two decades that had elapsed since we first met. All of us have had our heartache in that time and let go of dreams – some of them almost realistic, some of them less so - of making a living as playing pros, but I was immediately struck by just what polite, socially well-adjusted people my old friends had all grown up to be. Of course, there’s every chance that this impression might have been coloured by the fact that, the last time we all saw each other, we were probably throwing apples at one another in the club orchard, but I was reminded of PG Wodehouse’s comment that “the only way to find out a man’s true character is to play golf with him”. Perhaps, as people who all came of age believing that golf was more important than life itself, now we’d been through the ultimate heartache of knowing that we had failed, we’d become better equipped to deal with life’s other disappointments.

It’s a theory, anyway, if a flawed one. What I am sure of is that, as kids who went to some pretty dodgy schools, golf kept us (mostly) off the streets at a crucial time in our life, and has made us men with firm handshakes, an innate appreciation of bad luck, a consideration for the most concentrated moments of our fellow humans and a super dim view of cheating.

In stating this, I’m not saying that golf always breeds socially adept adults – a person only has to watch the post-round interviews during a large professional tournament to have that idea blown out of the water – or that it has necessarily made us great people; I’m just saying that, if you take the best things it can teach you, it doesn’t make you a complete sociopath in the outside world: a fact that, to me, as someone who for a long time didn’t think golf had done anything good for him, is still coming as a revelation. After twenty years, I have realised that I like handshakes, and I like good sportsmanship. I’m also starting to realise that I like the non-golfing person golf has made me (somewhat annoying though it undoubtedly might be, particularly to those with a laissez faire attitude to short distance calculation). Although to undermine that, I probably should add that we’d only played four holes at Cripsley before one of us had hidden a loose branch from a tree in one of his fellow players’ bags. I should also point out that the person who hid it was me, and that, yes, I do do that when I’m not on a golf course as well.

Nice Jumper

Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia

My First Open As A Tweeter (A Column For Golf International Magazine)

When you consider where we have got to as a social beings and consumers of information in 2009, it seems slightly preposterous to talk about how you liked to “shut the world out” twenty years ago. Particularly if, like me, you were a teenager living in the British countryside, what on earth there could possibly have been to shut out? The sound of my mum vacuuming? Iris and John’s peacocks across the road? The ring of a prototype mobile phone that you’d borrowed while Anneka Rice wasn’t using it on Treasure Hunt? Nonetheless, when it came to the week of The Open, “lockdown” was my intention. Door closed. Snacks arranged on the coffee table. Curtains drawn for fear of a rhombus of sunlight across the screen spoiling my enjoyment of a Seve escape shot. Beanbags and cushions painstakingly arranged at least an hour before Steve Rider made his opening address.

I was aiming to create a similar sort of ambience in the build-up to the last day’s coverage this year at Turnberry, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I mean, I could have switched off my mobile phone, ditched my laptop and plugged in an old TV, without Sky Plus, but that would have been a contradiction of the fact that I am fundamentally without self-discipline. Like an increasing number of people, I like to feel connected while I watch my majors, but it doesn’t always make for the most relaxed kind of viewer experience.

It is now an established custom that, within the course of a big tournament, my friends and I will exchange a twenty or so text messages discussing anything from the chances of a David Duval renaissance to the apocalyptic nothingness that might result from a Steve Flesch victory to the myriad ways in which Sergio Garcia has let us down (again). Since the performance of Tom Watson raised more emotions than usual, and drew the interest of a considerable amount of my friends who don’t normally give a flying divot about golf, the texts buzzed in more plentifully than ever this year. But the thing about texts is that they don’t demand your immediate attention; nor do they make you feel like you’ve been sucked down a giant virtual well, where whole hours of time can vanish without you realizing. Neither of these things, however, can be said about Twitter.

Twitter is the social networking facility where people are asked to express, in no more than 140 characters, what they are doing at that particular moment. It’s quicker-moving and more addictive than Facebook and feels like one evolutionary step further towards the inevitable day when each of us has a screen for a face. Presumably you know about it by now, since the BBC’s Ken Brown – a man who, for all his pluses, could not exactly be described as a maven of the information superhighway – knows about it. It’s only recently that Peter Alliss has stopped saying “We’ve had an email” in the manner of a man who’s just been hand-delivered a letter by androids, so when Ken asked us to “Twitter” him during proceedings at Turnberry, I’m sure many younger viewers had the feeling that one gets when one’s grandma begins using the word “phat” at a family dinner party.

This was my first Open as a tweeter, and I found the experience a pleasantly communal one. As to whether it actually enhanced my enjoyment of the Open… I’m not so sure. It was nice to sit alone in my living room and share with numerous other golf fans around the globe the joy of Mark James’ comment that “Ken Brown used to soak his balls in hot water before playing” (presumably James would know, being his former roommate) and a general consensus that, through the course of his anchoring, Gary Lineker had the distracted air of a man hearing someone repeatedly shouting “Boobs!” into his earpiece. Nonetheless, with the phone buzzing and the tweets mounting, I soon slipped behind on the action. My attempts to catch up, then proceed to watch with a ten minute time delay using my Sky Plus didn’t help: I’d read seven tweets about Ross Fisher’s quadruple bogey at the fifth before I’d actually seen it.

The BBC’s newfangled, faster-moving coverage only added to the feeling of being overwhelmed with information. Televised golf used to be infamous for its lulls, but not any more, when, even when you’re not swamped with action, interviews and statistics, you can press your red button and watch something happening elsewhere on the course, with entirely different commentators. In this kind of environment, with a heated finish, the chances of there being time for Alliss to slowly ponder some birdlife and say something like “The crow… I wonder what’s in store for him this winter?” are almost zilch.

Yet for some of us, this is what TV golf, at least partly, has always been for. Of course we like the action-packed parts of golf, such as the battle between Watson, Westwood and Cink at Turnberry, but what always used to make them even more exciting was the sleepy bits that offset them. Sure, Alliss still has a habit of adding the phrase “I fancy” to ordinary thoughts and sentences for no apparent reason and Andrew Cotter will talk about Tiger having “missed the fairway and found some horrible cabbage” but is that enough? I want to also have the time, as a viewer, to speculate on what it would be like if Tiger literally found some cabbage whilst rooting around for his ball, and whether, if puckish, he might consume it. I want to have the space to practice adding my own “I fancy”s to ordinary sentences (“I found a tee peg in my hair… I fancy”; “I fancy that woman off Mad Men… I fancy”). The action at Turnberry was so fast-moving that it was only an hour or two after Cotter called Man’sero “the full Monty” that I found time to pontificate on how Monty might feel about this (would he need to return to his mid-nineties weight in compensation?).

This information age approach might go some way to silencing the people who still claim that golf is an old man’s sport, but it also means that commentators lose their flow and seem harried. And why wouldn’t they be, when there’s so much going on, and, to boot, they have to update their Twitter status? I noticed two exchanges between Wayne Grady and Alliss when one man seemed keen to silence a non-sequitur from the other, and I can only imagine that this is because of the pressure that’s on them to provide news, news, news. But is this what we really want, as viewers, when news is all around us anyway? We – in our technology saturated state – might not have time to smell the flowers any more, in the Bobby Jones tradition, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be nice to still have someone to do it for us.

Nice Jumper

Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia