The Amateurs (14 page)

‘N
EXT MATCH
…P
RENTICE
, A
LEXANDER
, I
RVINE AND
Mason,’ the starter’s voice trebly and sibilant through the ancient tannoy, drifting over the heads of the usual Saturday-morning crowd, thirty-odd members milling around the first tee. Bert stood double-fisting bacon roll and coffee in a square of sunshine by the door to the locker room.

As Gary took to the tee there was the usual murmur through the waiting players, the usual bets being laid off:
a pound he slices it out of bounds, a pound he shanks it, a pound he misses the ball altogether.
As he pushed the wooden two-and-three-quarter-inch tee peg into the turf Gary was aware of a strange sensation. Or rather, an absence of sensation. Because the emotions which usually trilled through his body when he teed off in the Monthly Medal–quivering nausea, fear, light sweating, the chest-crushing panic which had almost induced semi-blindness on a few occasions–were all gone. His head–usually a blare of noise, of layered voices, of half a dozen caffeine-jacked coaches all screaming contradictory advice (
Keep your
head still! Turn your shoulders! Let the left heel rise! Just hit the fucking thing!
)–was as still and quiet as a winter field at dawn.

He stepped back and stood behind the ball. In the distance, 350 yards away, the yellow flag was flapping gently to the left. So, slight breeze coming off the right. He could just make out a copper-coloured patch of grass fifty-odd yards in front of the green.

Roll it over that.

In his head he saw the trajectory of the shot: a very slight draw, the ball just curling left, bouncing in front of the discoloured patch and rolling left. He addressed the ball and had one final coherent thought before he began his backswing:
I’m going to melt this.

Rab Forest was whispering to Wullie Ellis, a ferret-faced seven-handicapper, ‘Bet ye a pound he–’ when Gary connected with the ball, the KEEERACK! so loud that Bert spilled his coffee.

‘Fuck me,’ said Wullie Ellis.

‘Jesus wept,’ said Forest.

‘Where did it go?’ someone else said.

‘Intae bloody orbit,’ Bert said.

Gary’s ball landed just to the right of the patch of grass he’d been aiming at, bounced twice and rolled, curling left and finishing up against the fringe of grass ringing the green. Three hundred and ten yards if it was an inch.

The stunned silence lasted three or four seconds.

It was Bert who started the clapping.

Ravenscroft is a very decent municipal golf course. But a municipal course nonetheless, designed with the average mid-handicapper in mind. The golf courses that normal human beings play on are gentle affairs of motorway-wide fairways,
light rough and small, slow greens. They bear about as much resemblance to the fearsome layouts played on the professional circuit as the drunken pub brawler bears to the heavyweight champion of the world. For golfers at the very top of their game a course like Ravenscroft is, in all honesty, a glorified pitch-and-putt.

It was in exactly this manner–driver, wedge, putter–that Gary birdied the first three holes straight, just missing an eagle at the second when his fifty-yard sand wedge lipped out, drawing a gasp from his tiny gallery–his playing partners, plus Bert and another pair of old boys from the club who’d watched him tee off and decided to tag along for a few holes.

He’d had to stretch himself a little at the longer third hole–a 420-yard par four–when he pushed his drive out to the right and had to hit a full-blooded eight-iron into the green. By the time the match reached the fourth tee he’d loosened up properly. The fourth: a short par three; 148 yards to the middle of the green, hitting over a water-filled ditch that ran across the front, a ditch that, in his previous life, Gary had skulled and thinned many a seven-iron into. Pin at the front today, just over the left-hand side bunker.

Gary reached into his bag and pulled out the sand wedge.

‘Aye, yer maw,’ Prentice muttered as Gary teed up.

Gary smiled, miles away, his head dancing with the beautiful maths and physics of the game: about 130 to the cup, the shoulder of the front bunker feeding down towards the flagstick. Land the ball on top of that and it should roll nicely down to the hole. Underhit it and you’d be in the bunker, or–worse–plopping into the ditch. These were negative thoughts that the old Gary would have been all too ready to
entertain. Entertain? He’d have laid on a buffet and performed a one-man show for them. Not any more.

Need some height on this. Stop it dead.

WHUMP!–a clod of turf the size of a child’s shoe flying forward through the air, the ball rocketing up in a great inverted U shape, seven heads following it into the air.

‘Cuntfuckbaws,’ Gary said, tongue between his teeth now, holding his finishing position, his eyes flipping between the descending ball and the shoulder of the bunker. (
Shoulder, lip, hole
: the human body referenced all over the golf course.)

The ball landed just two inches over the edge of the bunker and seemed to stop dead. Then it started to roll. Rolling downhill and to the right, very slowly at first, but gathering momentum, trundling through the fine powdery sand that had been blasted out of the bunker by previous matches, trundling down towards the hole.

‘Tae fuck, that’s close,’ Prentice said, awed.

‘Go on!’
Bert urged.

The ball caught the right-hand edge of the hole, circled 180 degrees around, and plopped into the cup on the left-hand side.

They heard the cheer back at the clubhouse.

‘SMOKE MA FUCKEN DOBBER!’ Gary was yelling, dropping to his knees in the still-damp grass, his arms extended rigid in front of him and his partners engulfing him in a torrent of high fives. Gary looked up into the sky.

Did you see that? Were you watching me?

The fifth hole ran back uphill, with the green adjacent to the first tee and clubhouse. As they came up over the brow of the hill towards their drives they saw the crowd gathered behind the green: maybe a dozen people.

‘Aye aye,’ Bert said.

As they walked up to the green Derek Forbes detached himself from the group and approached Bert. ‘We heard yese shouting yer heeds aff doon there,’ he said.

‘Hole in wan at the fourth,’ Bert said.

‘Big John?’ Forbes whispered, nodding towards the green, where they were marking their balls.

Bert shook his head, smiling. ‘Young Gary.’

Forbes looked at him.

‘Boy’s five under par after four holes,’ Bert said.

‘
Gary Irvine?
Away tae fuck.’

‘Ah’m telling ye.’

Forbes stumbled back, almost falling over as he ran off towards his cronies to break the unbelievable news. By the time the group had putted out–Gary’s ball stopping right on the lip, leaving him a tap-in for par, his worst hole of the day so far–and were making their way to the sixth tee, their gallery had doubled.

Bert and Gary fell into step with each other. ‘Whit the hell’s going on, son?’ Bert said.

‘Hoor. I don’t know, Bert. Hoor,’ Gary said.

‘Well, whatever it is, just keep doing it. Right, ah’d better leave ye alone. Ah don’t want tae break your concentration.’

I don’t think you can
, Gary thought to himself as Bert walked over to join his friends behind the tee box.

Word went round.

A dozen or so members were drinking in the bar when Forbes–red-faced from running for the first time in a decade–burst in through the double doors that led to the locker room.

‘Derek!’ said Senga the barmaid. ‘Whit the hell’s the matter?’

‘It’s, he’s…’ Forbes spluttered, fighting for breath.

‘Christ, take it easy, bud. Here, huv a whisky…’

‘He’s just eagled the tenth! Ten under par now!’

‘Who?’

Forbes took a gulp of whisky. ‘Gary Irvine!’

A split second before the laughter started. ‘Away and don’t talk pish!’ someone said.

‘Hey, that’s no the first drink you’ve hud the day!’

‘Ah’m telling yese!’

They saw he was serious.

‘He eagled the tenth?’

‘Aye!’

‘
Ten under par?
’ someone repeated.

‘Christ,’ Senga said. ‘He’s gonnae win the Medal!’

‘Win the Medal?’ Forbes said, knocking back the rest of his drink. ‘He’s gonnae break the bloody course record!’ With that he was off, running back towards the course. A clattering of pint pots and whisky glasses onto wooden tabletops, the whisper of jackets and sweaters coming off the backs of chairs, and everyone was following him.

Ardgirvan is a small town. it has often been said that if you farted on your way out the Bam, then the story that you’d shat yourself would be doing the rounds by the time you passed the the Annick. Stevie got a call from a mate of Prentice’s saying that Gary was playing like Calvin Fucking Linklater and was going to smash the course record. He shut up shop and drove up to Ravenscroft, catching up with the match on the twelfth tee, where he joined the gallery of maybe fifty spectators as Gary’s group prepared to tee off.

At 466 yards the twelfth hole was the longest par four on the course. The right-hand side of the fairway gave the best
line into the green, but it was a dangerous route: out of bounds all the way. A rusted wire fence divided the golf course from the main road and, across the road, the mento home. Today, as every day, its saliva-flecked windows were thronged with the twitching, vibrating faces of those who had proved too much for their children.

Gary stepped onto the tee. There was a decent breeze blowing into his face, coming from the right.

Hit it down the right and have the wind keep it in play.

KEERACK!

Just at the moment the ball left the tee–struck well, flying on the line he had intended–the wind abruptly changed direction, suddenly, crazily, blowing from the left, pushing his ball right, sending it drifting over the right-hand edge of the fairway, over the right-hand rough, towards the road…

‘Fuck,’ Stevie said.

The ball struck the edge of one of the concrete posts marking the Out of Bounds line and ricocheted off across the road towards the mento home.

The mentos all turned their heads skywards as Gary’s ball bounced three times down the roof above them.

‘Shite,’ Bert whispered to Stevie. ‘Three aff the tee,’ meaning that with the penalty strokes Gary’s next shot would be his third.

Understandably shaken, Gary pulled it left into thick rough–the first drive he had mishit all day. He hacked out and overhit his approach shot into the deep bunker behind the green. He got the ball out of the bunker and then made his first three putt of the morning, chalking up a horrific quintuple bogey nine and tumbling back to five under par in the process.

‘Well,’ someone said, ‘so much for the course record.’ A few people began to drift away.

‘What is the course record?’ Stevie asked Bert as they set off towards the next tee.

‘Sixty-two,’ Bert said. ‘Ten under par. He’ll need to birdie every hole from here on in if he’s gonnae beat it.’

‘Sixty-two?’ Stevie whistled. ‘Who set that?’

Bert was laughing as he said: ‘I bloody did!’

Five under par on the thirteenth tee. The old, pre-accident, Gary Irvine would have allowed one of his testicles to be surgically removed–sans anaesthetic–in return for such a score. The new Gary Irvine wanted more. And in golf wanting it too much can often translate into trying too hard; a fatal error in a sport which asks its greatest exponents simply to perform their very best with an attitude of complete indifference. This is the Zone, where the professional golfer must live when he is playing at full stretch: in his own little world where nothing exists except putting the club sweetly through the ball–not the munching, coughing, farting, camera-phone-waving spectators, not the swivelling, trundling black-eyed TV cameras, not the other players. Nothing. The fine art of being there and not being there. Gary had heard about the Zone, of course, but he had never been there for more than a few seconds at a time. Now, the trauma of the last hole behind him, he felt himself slipping back into it; his mind pleasantly vacant apart from a gentle fizzing sensation in his skull, like bubbling lemonade, his body loose apart from the usual nagging semi-erection in his pants.

He was there and he wasn’t there when he drove the green at the thirteenth and then made the twenty-foot putt for his second eagle of the day.

He was there and he wasn’t there when he made a perfect
connection with his approach on the fourteenth, sending the ball straight and high, pumping the eight-iron higher than most players can send the sand wedge, and nailing the six-foot putt it left him.

He was there and he wasn’t there as he birdied the sixteenth and seventeenth (an unlucky roll of the green had denied him his birdie at the fifteenth; he’d tapped in for par) and walked towards the last tee with a crowd of sixty people following him, back to ten under par now and needing one last birdie to break the course record, a record set by the man walking beside him before he was even born. Bert smiled over at him, but Gary didn’t see it.

‘Come on, Gary!’

‘Go on yerself, son!’

‘Come on, big man!’

‘Get in there!’

Gary drove first, bombing one just under three hundred yards up the middle. Prentice, Mason and Alexander, long reduced to walk-on parts and their confidence shredded by having to play in front of an audience, all missed the fairway, finding trees, gorse and–in Prentice’s case–the driveway, which wound up the right-hand side of the fairway, connecting the golf club with the main road.

As they came up the hill the eighteenth green came into sight. It was completely surrounded. Every member was out from the bar. Members who hadn’t been playing that day had been alerted that the course record that had stood for thirty-seven years was in danger of being broken. They had driven up to the course, abandoning lunches and families to witness this momentous occasion.