The Amateurs (30 page)

Gary Irvine
resigned from Henderson’s and attended Strathclyde University as a mature student. He graduated with a 2.1 in History and is now a teacher. He recently got his handicap down to sixteen.

April Tremble
became Sports Editor of the
Daily Standard
.
The Amateur
, her account of Gary’s accident and performance in the Open, was a surprise best-seller. She and Gary live in Glasgow with their two young children.

Pauline Irvine
was declared bankrupt after Kiddiewinks finally went into liquidation. She still lives in Ardgirvan, with her friend Katrina, where she works part-time as an escort.

Findlay Masterson’s
body was never found and no one was charged in connection with his murder. After she banked the insurance money
Leanne Masterson
sold the carpet business and retired to the Caribbean.

Lee Irvine
received a substantial cheque from an anonymous benefactor and has invested in several diverse business opportunities. He and Lisa have since had a third son–Ganges. He regularly plays golf with his brother.

Stevie Burns
finally sold Target Video to Silver Screen for a six-figure sum. He donated half of this to the Ardgirvan branch of the Socialist Workers Party. He and Gary still argue about the second Stone Roses album.

Ranta
and
Alec Campbell
were gunned down in a gangland shooting. Ranta alone suffered sixteen separate gunshot wounds. Despite this he survived while Alec died in intensive care.

Ben
lived to be twenty-one years old, earning himself a half-page feature in the
Daily Standard
. (‘Scotland’s oldest dog!’) When finally put down he attempted to bite the hand of the vet administering the injection.

Much later
Cathy Irvine
passed away quietly in her sleep. She loves to walk the manicured fairways of Augusta National with her husband, her leg no longer stretching out into the empty side of the bed.

For the sake of narrative I took a few small liberties with the process of qualifying for the Open. I hope those familiar with the procedure will forgive me. I’d like to thank Dr. Fintan Sheerin for his generous, insightful help with all questions neurological. Also, and most importantly, a big thank you to all those kind and foolish enough to regularly tee it up with me. The Charlie Hodge Invitational boys: Stewart the Bull Garden, Peter McSween, Allen Reid, Graham Fagen (am I 4 up G?), Paolo Righetti, Andy Daly and Martin Murphy; Barry, Joe and Robin at Royal Beaconsfield; Fin and Eamonn at Ashridge; Russell Brown, Ron Fernandez and Danny at Little Hay; and Andy at Princes Risborough. I’ll take this opportunity to apologise for every tortured profanity over the years.

Also a very special thank you to my editor, Jason Arthur at William Heinemann. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, as Jessica Lange would say, enormous and ongoing gratitude to my wonderful agent, Clare Conville at Conville & Walsh.

About the author

2 Meet John Niven

About the book

3 A Conversation with John Niven

Read on

10 John Niven interview: Chip off the old block

About the author

Meet John Niven

J
OHN
N
IVEN
was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland. He has written for
The Times
,
Independent
,
Word
, and
FHM
, among other publications. He is also the author of the novella
Music from Big Pink
and the novel
Kill Your Friends
.

About the book

A Conversation with John Niven

An e-mail interview with Lloyd Cole and John Niven conducted in December 2009. Lloyd Cole is a singer/songwriter and lifelong golfer who plays off a handicap of 7. John plays to a far humbler 15.

L
LOYD
C
OLE
:
Wodehouse and Updike aside, there isn’t exactly a tradition of great literature set in the world of golf. There is, however, a rich vein of lite crap—be it Zen lite, lite humor, or just lite shite. For every decent golf book, there are two hundred fifty duffers. Why take the chance?

J
OHN
N
IVEN
:
It may sound nuts, but I never really thought of it as a book “about” golf. Maybe only—and ultra-pretentiously—in the same way that
Moby-Dick
is a book “about” a whale. I knew it was going to be about family and minor-league drug dealing and infidelity, all set against the backdrop of amateur golf. Funnily enough, when I initially pitched the idea to my agent and editor and I said, “Well, it’s kind of about golf,” you could literally see their eyes glazing over. If you play golf, you forget what a dirty word it is to a lot of people. So gradually I started pitching the book as being about “murder, adultery, contract killing, drug dealing,
and
golf,” and funnily enough, everyone seemed much happier. It was absolutely key for me that the book would work for people who had no interest in, or
knowledge of, golf. I tried to structure the novel so that someone who wasn’t crazy about the golf part would never be too far away from some of the murder, infidelity, and botched drug dealing. And for the record Updike is, I think, the laureate of the sport. Golf features peripherally in all the Rabbit books and centrally in the collection
Golf Dreams
, and it is, for me at any rate, a source of great regret that he never produced a novel with golf at its core. Then again, if he had, I would probably never have had the nerve to attempt one myself.

LC:
What is it with golf? Despite its traditions of bigotry, social climbing, and terrible clothes, despite the expense and the time consumption, the game still attracts a wide demographic. Where exactly does the magic reside?

JN:
I think it’s the possibility of occasional perfection for even the worst duffer. I play off a 15 handicap, and every now and again, once or twice a round, and probably due to luck more than judgment, I’ll catch one right out of the socket. Which is to say I’ll hit a shot perfectly, exactly as I intended. Tiger Woods could not have hit that particular shot any better. I can’t think of any other sports that afford that opportunity to middle-aged men. If I did nothing but play tennis every single day for the next ten years, I would never be able to hit a serve as hard as Roddick or Nadal. I could never return a 120-mile-an-hour
volley with power and accuracy. That feeling of almost omnipotence you get when you connect perfectly with a golf ball is hard to describe. It’s as though the ball isn’t there. You might only be able to make that happen once in a blue moon, but you really do get hungry for that feeling. If you watch people who are learning golf, who are thinking about taking up the sport, you can see the moment when they hit
that
shot—the one that flies a couple of hundred yards straight as a die, high in the air—and you can almost hear a bell ring in their chest. That’s when people get hooked. With regards to social climbing, bigotry, et cetera, it’s worth noting that where I grew up, in Ayrshire, on the west coast of Scotland, golf was a very working-class thing. Everyone played. There wasn’t the association with middle-class retired Wing Commanders there seems to be in many other places. Golf is still relatively cheap in Scotland too. You can find a decent public course to play for around 15 to 20 quid. Which, for a long time, wasn’t the case in many other countries.

LC:
Have you ever been in The Zone?

JN:
Just twice. (And while it was The Zone for me, the scores I shot would still have professional golfers thinking about early retirement.) I shot my personal best round of 79 at a course called Williamwood just outside Glasgow a few years ago. I was just finding all the greens and sinking everything. I hit a
wedge 130 yards over water to about three feet. I think if it hadn’t been for one lost ball I’d have shot maybe 76, which is what a 3 or 4 handicap player might shoot on that course. Obviously I came to the final green needing to hole a slippery six-footer to break 80, which I’d never done before. Normally I’d have missed by a mile, as I’m the world’s biggest choker. But not that day—straight in. The other time was when I shot 81 on a much tougher course: Doonbeg, a Greg Norman–designed links in County Clare, southwest Ireland. This is the funny thing about being in The Zone: the moment you realize you’re in it, you’re fucked. I played the first seven holes in one under par and started thinking, “Christ—I’m not putting a foot wrong here.” As soon as I even
thought
that, I shanked two irons off the tee at a short par three and would up making a seven there! I came back from it a bit, but if it hadn’t been for that, I could have shot 76 or 77 on a very tough layout. That’s why it astonishes me when you see the pros managing to stay in The Zone for four whole rounds over the course of a tournament. It’s hard enough for most of us to do it for four straight holes.

LC:
Juxtaposition is fun—golf and gangsters makes sense, golf and crude language makes sense, but it’s quite a leap to the masturbation. Where did that stroke of genius come from, if you don’t mind me asking?

JN:
Well, like many men of my generation, I grew up slightly obsessed with the 1980s BBC documentary
John’s Not Mad
, about a Scottish kid with Tourette’s syndrome, and I always knew I wanted to work it into a novel somewhere. I had the initial idea for the book, which was “world’s worst golfer suffers a brain injury and somehow develops the perfect swing,” and then I thought it might be fun to give him Tourette’s as another side effect. As it says in the novel, if you stand on a golf course with the wind blowing in the right direction, you might be forgiven for thinking half the population had Tourette’s! You really do hear some very passionate, creative swearing on golf courses. Now my girlfriend’s brother is a golfer and a doctor. He’d done a stint in neurology, so I put the basic premise to him and said, “Could something like this happen?” His response was basically “We know so little about the brain and brain injuries that nearly anything is possible.” There are lots of cases of people sustaining head injuries and coming out of comas with skill sets they never previously had. Then he said to me, “Have you heard of Klüver-Bucy syndrome?” It’s a condition that was first observed in monkeys that had been partially lobotomized: they became hugely oversexualized, constantly masturbating and trying to have sex with anything that moved. It’s very rare, but the condition has also been documented in humans who suffer certain types of head injury.
I’d already decided to seed in the novel that Gary was very frustrated sexually because his wife is having this affair and not sleeping with him, so I started thinking, “Well, can I give him
both
these things?” The answer, obviously, was “Yes, I can!” Authors are, of course, total sadists.

LC:
Despite your cynical foul-mouthed front, I detect a strong value system with family and friendship at its core. Or is this just my reading and the characters are purely comic?

JN:
Well, coming off the back of
Kill Your Friends
, I’d decided I wanted the next book to be much lighter in tone, breezier if you will. I’ve compared it to going from the set of
Apocalypse Now
to a Bill Forsyth film. I also knew I wanted the Scottish location: I’d written a novella set in upstate New York in the 1960s (
Music from Big Pink
) and one set in London during the mid-to late 1990s (
Kill Your Friends
), and I felt it was time to write something set in the world I grew up in. I actually had the idea for
The Amateurs
while on holiday in Ireland in the summer of 2005, before I wrote
Kill Your Friends
. But I put it off, partly because I knew it was going to be more challenging technically—third person as opposed to first, four main characters whose story lines had to intertwine in the right way, and so on—and also because ideas generally need a few years to percolate away at the back of your mind before they’re ready to write.
(I finished
Kill Your Friends
in December 2006 and started
The Amateurs
in January 2007, and it was finished by June 2008.) It’s actually a far more autobiographical novel than
Kill Your Friends
. A lot of the family stuff in there is drawn from my own life, particularly Gary’s relationship with his late father on the golf course. If you’re a son whose father teaches you golf and then they die, there are things that never leave you, that you feel acutely on the course—even more so when, like myself, you have a son who is now starting to play golf. I suppose the best way of putting it is that, like many atheists, I only really think of the dead watching over me when I am doing something I imagine would have pleased them. Many times when I’m playing golf and I pull off a good shot, I’ll find myself glancing heavenward in a silly and sentimental fashion. My father died sixteen years ago, and one of the best things about writing the novel was getting to go to my study every day and spend some time in his company again. Which is also one of the great privileges of being a writer.

LC:
I bet you never thought you’d write a feel good novel…

JN:
Hopefully it’s a feel-good novel with a certain spikiness and grit to it, but yes, you’re right. No one was more surprised than me. Sometimes books, like children, turn out how they want to without much regard to your input.