Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia by Tom Cox Page A

Adidas trainers. ‘What did you score?’
    â€˜I think I was seven over par altogether.’
    â€˜That’s bloody shit, innit!’
    Before I could answer, he turned and lurched in the direction of the barbecue, where there were some more interesting people to talk to – many of whom were beginning a singalong of the popular football-themed hit, ‘Here We Go’.
    By this point in my golfing life, I was accustomed to having vaguely unpleasant experiences in the aftermath of a disappointing round. Over the years I’d been told to tuck my shirt in, informed that my ‘training footwear’ (i.e. a pair of undramatic brown leather Velcro-strapped shoes from the Next sale) was not welcome in the Men Only Bar; I’d even had a man take me aside for ‘a quiet word’ and tell me that the Handicap Chairman at my old club believed the ‘disgusting’ golf book I had written about my misspent adolescence ‘shouldn’t have been allowed’ – but never once had I been told that the round I had just played had been ‘bloody shit’.
    That’s the thing about golf, at its most conventional level: it might dress like a complete tool and possess the political and social outlook of a 1982 Daily Express headline, but it always respects a man’s sporting dignity. Maybe today I was seeing the new face of the game: not so picky when it came to dress codes and staying quiet while the other bloke took his address, but a real, boorish stickler when it came to competing like a man.
    Did I like it? I thought so, but I wasn’t completely sure. What I did know was that the SSG was sliding away from my initial vision of a quiet get-together with an emphasis on sexual equality, 6 lawless attire and competitive high jinks. But then, perhaps I’d felt that from the moment I’d founded it. Every anti-establishment golfer had their own ideas about what constitutes a satisfactory break from the staid golfing norm and, as a median of those ideas, the first alternative Masters could be judged a success.
    As Renton Laidlaw says in The Best Shots of the Masters , ‘From small beginnings, great things are born.’ It’s a fairly vacuous statement, when you think about it – from small beginnings a lot of completely inane small things are born too. On a brighter note, though, you have to ask yourself just how many of those small, inane things allow you to play golf with your shirt untucked, shout a lot, and change your shoes in the course car park without fear of getting a bollocking.
    1 What exactly is a ‘swing incubator’?
    2 Used to acknowledge a putt that miraculously goes straight over the hole without dropping. Or, in the case of my former playing partner, Ernie ‘The Luck’s Not With Me Today’ Wilton, a putt that misses the hole by seven feet, never remotely looking as if it might drop.
    3 The Hooters Tour’s similarly sized rival tour – presumably for the more serious-minded struggling pro.
    4 It would be interesting to find out exactly how many pitch-and-putt holes in Britain played between two hills are called ‘Dolly Parton’ – I’d be willing to bet the number is in triple figures.
    5 The possible exception being the eighteen-hole kind used to decide the US Open, which always seems blighted by the special kind of downbeat atmosphere only otherwise experienced after a social gaffe at an inter-village bowls match.
    6 Despite several beseeching emails and phone calls, and a plea in the Independent newspaper, the Cabbage Patch Masters included only two female competitors.

Four
Wind of Change
    â€˜IT’S NOT HOW , it’s how many,’ is one of golf’s most commonly used phrases. The point being that you can play sophisticated three-A-level golf from tee to green, make it look as fetching as possible, but what ultimately counts is the score, and nothing else. An ugly birdie is still, in the