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conveniently antithetical pastime that might keep me sidetracked while the rest of the gang were doing the Garden Fence Grand National or setting fire to one another’s farts. I’m sure they didn’t expect me to take it up with any real sense of purpose – even when I arrived back from the first lesson at Cripsley pledging to win my first British Open before my seventeenth birthday.
    I, however, knew I was serious, right from the first nine-iron shot I hoisted above daisy-scaring level. There were several reasons why golf kept me hooked where other sports had failed to. It was the first outdoor sport I’d played that allowed me to dress appropriately for the elements. Unlike other sports, it didn’t just have its own stadium or court; it had its own kingdom . Even better than that, it had lots of different kingdoms, featuring an infinite number of architectural permutations and an infinite amount of words to describe them. None of the rigid oppression of the basketball court or the football pitch here. There seemed so much to learn, a baffling number of options requiring a mind-boggling amount of mental discipline. Unlike the times that I’d played other sports, I didn’t get a discouraging inkling of what kind of an experience golf would be when I began to master it. I didn’t know what it would be like. I just knew it would be mysterious and complicated and stimulating.
    Suddenly, I was watching the 1988 US Open – surely one of the least remarkable major championships in golfing history, slogged out between two of the game’s least punk-rock players, Nick Faldo and Curtis Strange – and seeing the future. At fourteen, I would become British Amateur Champion; at fifteen, the youngest ever European Tour professional, finishing in ninth place on the end-of-year money list. At seventeen, I would win the first of my seventeen US Masters titles, at the Augusta National Course in Georgia, and the first of my twelve British Open Championships, also at Augusta. The British Open has never been played at Augusta in Georgia, but I knew that I wouldn’t have any trouble persuading the tournament organizers to change the venue, having done so much for the game at such a callow age.
    I began to spend six days a week in a birdie trance – all my thoughts and energy turned towards my Saturday morning lesson. I stole copies of Golf World magazine from the waiting room of my dentist’s surgery. I broke the greenhouse belonging to the lazy-eyed witchy woman next door with a sand-iron lob. I planned. I schemed. I visualized. Every week I improved. Every week Cripsley’s assistant teaching professional, Mike Shalcross, dropped weightier hints about putting me forward for membership of the club. The fact that I hadn’t played the course yet – I’d been settling for midweek games at the local pitch and putt – only made it twice as exciting. From the practice fairway, I gazed out towards the fifth and third fairways, memorizing the contours, projecting my own make-believe iron shots: the kind that would shoot up high over the flagstick, then attach themselves to the putting surface like Velcro. Right here, I saw the rest of my life roll out ahead of me like one infinite, luxuriant, green carpet.
    After six weeks of dreaming, I was given a date for my trial for membership. At last I was about to find out what verdant delights Cripsley Edge held beyond the gigantic hedge separating the fairways belonging to the fifth and sixth holes. The trial was held by Bob Boffinger, Cripsley’s junior organizer, and consisted of me hitting fifty seven-iron shots, being shown around the men-only bar, and nodding solemnly when Bob said things like ‘absolutely imperative’ and ‘dress restriction’. I breezed it, offering what I still look upon as a favourable impression of ‘Tom Cox, future Young Conservative sired by local textile magnate and county bridge champion’, and betraying little trace of Tom Cox, future hippy slacker sired