It has to be said, golf is not exactly in line with my love of keeping fit. Walking around a course for hours on end whacking a little white ball around doesn’t really float my boat. Why on earth would I by a set of golf clubs then? Good question.
I’d occasionally gone down to Lichfield municipal golf course in Beacon Park with my mates from school whilst we were at the Friary. This mainly happened during the school holidays and involved renting a set of mangled clubs from a little white hut next to the children’s playground and crazy golf course. The course itself was pretty small and was very much designed to be a social thing rather than anything remotely serious. Some of the lads were quite handy players, but I was very much in the ‘whack it and attempt to putt’ category. My technique was awful, and my patience wasn’t much better. I was well known amongst my friends for having a short fuse and getting frustrated if things weren’t going to plan. Playing a game where patience and calm are fundamental was not really playing to my strengths. So it was fair to say that I didn’t take these games very seriously and had no intention of getting better by practising.
We also occasionally went down to the local driving range. This better suited my personality given that it was all whacking and no putting. It also didn’t really matter if your technique was awful as you just picked another ball out of the basket if you hit a complete clanger. Every now and then I’d connect properly with the club and the ball would go sailing off in to the distance. It’s a pretty good feeling to be fair so I do get the attraction of regularly doing that but this was clearly never going to be a serious hobby.
I played a few times at University with my mates. This time we went to proper courses where the etiquette was a lot more formal. Sharing clubs and not wearing the proper attire was frowned upon, but we somehow managed to get a few rounds in. As with my school mates we treated it as a bit of laugh. We were all around the same mediocre standard apart from Ian, who was my roommate in my first year and one of my housemates in the third year. Ian was the first person I met when I arrived at Loughborough University. My parents brought me with all my stuff to the hall on the weekend before term started. I knew I was in the Holt hall of residence, which was off campus. This was a bit of a disappointment when I found out as my expectation was that I’d be in one of the halls situated on the main University site. I’d imagined that being on campus was a normal experience of student life so felt I was going to miss out in some way. It was therefore an even bigger shock to find out when I registered at the hall that I wasn’t actually going to be in the Holt site either. I was in one of the annexes called Westbridge, and this one was an all-male hall. Now, being off site was one thing but being surrounded by blokes only was a different proposition altogether.
It was with some trepidation then that I got back in the car with my parents and headed over to my new home. That’s when I discovered I was sharing a room. Things were going from bad to worse. My student dream life was rapidly going down the pan.
When I got to my room I met Ian who was already unpacking his things. We began the small talk and it soon turned in to one of those weird coincidences that sometimes happen. We got on to the subject of where we were from and at that time I had been living in a village called Whittington, a few miles from Lichfield. We’d moved from Stonnall when I was eleven, just before I went to secondary school. Where we lived was down a quiet lane that ran around the back of the village playing field where there were only a few houses. It was called Vicarage Lane and it turned out that Ian’s Uncle lived in the house at the end of the lane so he had regularly been there for family gatherings. Small world. It was a great icebreaker as we had something in common, even though it was fairly trivial. From that point on we got on pretty well.
Ian was there to study Mechanical Engineering and had signed up for a Masters degree, so would be doing one more year than me. It was obvious that he was very intelligent. He was also a keen golfer (got there in the end, I bet you were beginning to wonder what I was going on about). He had grown up in Sheffield and had been very good friends with Lee Westwood, who went on to be a very successful professional golfer. Like virtually everyone in the hall, Ian soon picked up a nickname. Due to his strong Sheffield accent, he was Ratskin as in ‘two bob and a ratskin’. Can’t recall who’s bright idea it was to name him that, but it stuck. It was a hall ritual of the second year students to provide everyone with nicknames. As well as Ratskin there was a whole variety of new names. My friend Mark became Closet, due to being a closet ginger. Wyn became Hoop as his surname was Hopkins. Paul became Damian, because he had a passing resemblance to a character in Australian soap Neighbours. You get the idea. This made it really difficult when the hall phone rang and a parent asked for their son. Quite often no-one knew the real names of their house mates, so there would be confused scrabble to work out who they were referring to. This soon developed in to the phone game, where the person answering would deliberately put the wrong person on the phone. This was hilarious until you were the one it happened to. It was quite a regular occurrence for the caller to hang up after the third incorrect person came to the phone.
Ratskin ended up doing his Master’s dissertation on golf club design, which was a fairly good indication that he was a fan of the sport. Not only was he a very intelligent guy but he also had the great fortune to have a photographic memory. This was a major advantage for him and a source of great annoyance to us. As we went through the painstaking process of cramming before the exams, Ratskin would be calmly confident as he’d taken it all in from just one reading.
So every now and then we’d head to the golf course to spend a few hours whacking a ball about. Nothing serious, except for when Ratskin joined us and easily got the lowest score of the day. We also played golf after leaving University when we went up to see Closet at his family home in Berwick. The golf course was on the top of a hill, with RAF planes acting out dogfights. There was more than one occasion when we got frightened to death when a fighter jet came roaring over the course.
However, it wasn’t until after University that I went ahead and bought my own set of clubs. It wasn’t because I suddenly had some mad epiphany that I was going to become good at it, it was actually because it was the only chance to really meet up with one of my school mates, Wieland (his real name was Jonny, but in true bloke style we called him by his surname). Wieland was a keen golfer, having inherited his dad’s skills. He was also a policeman working shifts, so it was pretty difficult to see him on a regular basis. A few of us started to join him for a game of golf on one of the council golf courses in Birmingham. We started off by sharing clubs from Wieland’s set but after getting abuse from club members on multiple occasions I decided I’d invest in my own set.
I really was not very good so decided to have a lesson at the driving range in Lichfield. The coach asked me to hit a few balls while he videoed me. The idea was that he would analyse my technique and then offer some tips on how I could make some improvements. I thought I’d done pretty well as I connected with the balls and had hit them a fairly long way. The coach told me he had a couple of suggestions. This included my grip, my stance, my head position, my swing rotation and my eyeline. So basically everything. Once he’s made all his suggestions I could hardly hit the ball, and it felt like learning to write left handed. I’m sure it was all perfectly valid, but it was hardly inspiring me.
Armed with my new knowledge I took to the course with Wieland and company and proceeded to be just as bad as ever, much to everyone’s amusement. Every so often we would organise a weekend away at a hotel and golf course in what became known as the ‘Wielnad Cup’. A handicap system was applied to level the playing field, but Wieland generally won. It didn’t help that getting drunk and having a laugh was the main priority rather than the golf.
Much as it was great to spend time with mates, four or five hours on a golf course was getting a bit unmanageable, particularly when my first daughter, Erica, came along. So apart from a few rounds at stag do’s, and work conferences the golf clubs didn’t really get used. The most memorable golf experience at work was at a course near Cheltenham as part of a national sales event. The UK MD for the company at the time was an American, and he was a mad keen golfer. He also used to be an American football quarterback, so was a pretty big guy. Being the MD he would always be the one to tee off first, proudly knocking lumps out of the golf ball with his massive driver. Being quite a loud bloke as well, he would shout something like ‘watch this!’ before smashing it down the fairway. It turned out that myself and another work colleague called JY were in a four ball behind Jim’s group, which consisted of three senior members of the management team. On the approach to one of the greens, JY managed to slice a shot so badly that it went straight towards Jim’s group who were lining up at the next tee. It must have missed the MD’s head by a couple of inches. JY’s desperate cries of ‘Four’ didn’t so much to alert the group, much to the anger of one of them who stormed over yelling at us. Jim himself wasn’t that fussed and instead tried to coach JY into improving his swing. Needless to say we hung back a little after that.
Unsurprisingly, the golf clubs got consigned to the garage of discarded hobbies soon after this and haven’t been used again since. Not a huge surprise that golf wasn’t my thing but it had provided a few comedy moments and had helped spend some time with a mate. Golf is now an Olympic sport after being introduced at the 2016 games in Rio, which I find slightly strange. Even so, it’s not something I see myself doing again.