Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia Read Free Page B

if?’ or two. And, for me, the big ‘What if?’ was always golf.
    Seventeen is an awfully young age to make any major decision about your life. But that was how old I’d been when I’d walked off a golf course as a budding pro golfer for what I believed, with all my broken heart, would be the last time. The scene of my exit has stuck with me – probably more like a memory of a memory now, but no less clear for that. The place: a forest in Staffordshire. The tournament: The Beau Desert Stag. My ball: abandoned (by hand and not, for once, by club) in some heather 400 yards behind me. My hands: sticky and callused. The smell: hot pine needles. My hat hair: not much of a hairstyle in the first place but now, if anything, looking more like two separate non-hairstyles. My golfing dreams: gone up in smoke. It had been one of those occasions when you can almost hear the click as your life changes direction. That night I would attend a rock concert – not a very cool rock concert, or even a very great one, but one loud and energetic and different enough to suggest that there might be another life out there for me that didn’t involve spiked shoes and winner’s speeches. In the days following, golf would never seem quite as important. Soon, as I stopped playing altogether, it would seem like an aberration at best, a dirty secret at worst. I remembered it like a brief schizoid episode: something that had nothing to do with the real me.
    But now here I was – a fully-grown man, and still only a half-grown golfer. I definitely felt like the real me, yet I also couldn’t help feeling, just as I had at seventeen, that the secret to life itself was held in that lightning second when the body waits for the club and everything arrives at the ball in perfect sync. I’d initially told myself that my golfing rebirth was to do with getting fit and researching my golf memoir, Nice Jumper. And that is all it had been … for about a month or two. But in 2003, my first full year back playing, I had won my club’s Scratch Cup. Increasingly, I would arrive home from the course and explain to my bewildered wife, Edie, in the manner of a man outlining plans for his family’s financial future, that I thought all I really needed was to curtail my backswing by five inches and we’d be just about there. Maybe I was not playing golf with quite the obsessive fervour with which I’d played it as a teenager, but it would not have have taken a genius to see that this was about more than fresh air and a bit of gentle, competitive fun, and that something long-submerged was pressing to the surface. In short, I had begun to ask myself a little question.
    Who really knows who they are at seventeen? Had I really given golf a proper go back then? It wasn’t as if I’d started playing as soon as I’d learned to walk, like many kids I’d known back on the Nottinghamshire golf scene. I’d actually come to the game quite late, and left it quite early. I’d been pretty good for those four and half years, too, hadn’t I? Within a couple of years, I’d become Club Champion at my home course, Cripsley Edge, the winner of a dozen junior competitions and one of the very best young golfers in Nottinghamshire, if not quite in the Midlands. But by the time I’d reached my seventeenth birthday, it had become abundantly clear that I wasn’t good enough: that two handicap of mine just wasn’t getting any lower, and, as I struggled to combine late nights in a minimum-wage job with early mornings on the tee, I could see the interest dying in the eyes of the men in the bile-coloured suits who patrolled the fairways looking for young talent. I’d only ever been a half golden boy in the first place, but now I was an ex-half golden boy. I was also one with some appalling GCSE results and two very anxious parents.
    That period had felt like a mini-lifetime while it was happening,