Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia Read Free

have some Spanish in my blood, from my mum’s side of the family, my Latin temperament is more likely to come out when I’m being kept in a call waiting queue than when I’ve just missed a downhill six-footer for par.
    More importantly, I am nowhere near as good as Sergio Garcia at golf. But, when it comes to a general tee-to-green mission statement of ‘Crap One Day, Dead Good the next’, Sergio and I have a lot in common. The difference, perhaps, is that one can almost believe Sergio’s erraticism is a deliberate gesture in the name of entertainment – a stand against conveyor-belt robopros, and those big-chinned men who sit in the commentary booth muttering about there being ‘no pictures on the scorecard’ 1 – whereas, with me, it seems a little more like a disease.
    Of course, you’ll find lots of golfers who will tell you that this is the nature of the game: one day you’ve got it, one day you haven’t. It’s just that, for me, the essence of each of those days happens to be exaggerated. I’m not talking about the bigger picture here: we’ve covered that. Chaotic my wider golfing life might be, but there is at least a predictability to the chaos. What I’m referring to here is the meat of the equation – the striking of the ball itself – and the frustration that comes from not knowing whether your seven-iron will fly 130 yards or 170 yards, of not knowing whether you will hit your driver like Greg Norman or Norman Wisdom. It is the same frustration that makes you feel, sometimes, as if you are living a golfing lie. But just occasionally, it can make you feel like God.
    As luck would have it, these ‘God’ days tend to occur most frequently when I’m on my own – those late-summer evenings when the birds are singing, there isn’t a Ron or a Roy in sight, and, for once, the imaginary game between the two scuffed, regenerated lake balls that you bought from the pro shop (i.e. ‘Mickelson’ and ‘Garcia’) doesn’t seem quite as much of an exercise in childish fantasy. But, every so often, they have occurred when I’ve been with Jerry.
    I wouldn’t exactly call Jerry a close friend, but in the months leading up to May 2005 I had come to look upon him as a benevolent golfing presence. Maybe if the two of us bumped into one another at the local supermarket we would have said a quick hello and been on our way, but within the confines of our golf club, we were allies: if not crusaders against the tucked-shirt masses, then kindred outsiders looking in, perplexed, at the fishbowl that contained the Sunday fourball elite. Since my return to golf, I’d noticed that a lot more men like Jerry played the game: fiercely competitive, football-loving, straightforward blokes in their late thirties whose love of golf had nothing to do with cheaply engraved cut glass or reserved parking spots or blazer badges. To Jerry, golf was like any other sport, only better, and he had decided that waiting until the age of thirty-three to start wasn’t going to stand in his way of being bloody good at it.
    Jerry said it was depressing, being him, and playing with me. There he was, hitting the practice ground four times a week, chipping slowly away at his fifteen handicap, while this scruffy, fly-by-night, once-a-fortnight chancer pulled into the car park three minutes before his tee time and proceeded to nonchalantly accumulate birdies. What Jerry didn’t know was that he was my lucky charm. Somehow, with him at my side, the Tom that I flattered myself was the ‘real Tom’ would come effortlessly to the fore, easing into his drives like an only slightly more ungainly Fred Couples.
    Being a competitive sort, with a manner as austere as his grade-one haircut, Jerry would very rarely comment on my good play, but I could tell that he was monitoring me. If I told him about a monumental drive I’d hit the