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

golfers. Or hirsute dogs. Or blonde women who looked as if they’d stepped freshly out of a Chanel advert. Nonetheless, that ‘shank’ demon was still there.
    The traditional pre-tournament warm-up routine of a pro begins with the shortest clubs in the bag – a few finesse shots with the wedges, for example – and gradually moves through the bag in order of power, before finally reaching the big-headed, long-flying metal clubs still confusingly referred to as ‘woods’. But I’d been impatient, keen to move quickly onto the macho clubs, all of which have less of a curve at the join between head and shaft and are thus less easy to hit destructively to the right. Now I knew that, to feel properly prepared for my day, I really needed to test out my lob wedge and gap wedge. In other words, the two most shank-happy clubs in the bag.
    As I addressed the ball and took a nervous waggle, the headlines flashed before my eyes.
    THREE-TIME DORDOGNE INVITATIONAL CHAMP DECAPITATED!
    â€˜FORE!’: SERGIO GARCIA COPYIST GOES ON RAMPAGE. WITNESSES SAY: ‘WE COULD TELL HE DIDN’T BELONG HERE AS SOON AS WE SAW HIS PUFFY SWING.’
    â€˜I WAS ONLY DOING WHAT KEVIN COSTNER DID,’ CLAIMS GOLFING SLAYER OF THREE!
    I waggled once more. In my peripheral vision, my neighbour took another jerky backswing. I looked at the ball again, and had two simultaneous revelations.
I was a proper golf pro.
I was not the golf pro with the worst swing at the tournament.
    Steadily, confidently, I swiped at the ball. I watched as it hissed through the air, about twenty yards lower than intended, then landed about thirty yards past the flag at which I’d been aiming. As wedge shots went, it was a freak of nature, a true runt of Satan. It was also definitely, definitely not a shank. I was elated.
    After that, my opening drive of the competition was a mere trifle. Well, actually, that’s not true: it was still one of the hardest shots I’ve hit in my life. As drives go, it was no oil painting – it only travelled about 220 yards and landed in some scruffy wet grass to the left of the fairway, but it did the crucial thing, which was get airborne. Ten minutes later, I was grazing the hole with my attempt at a dream opening birdie three, then tapping in for par from the kind of inconsequential distance that Beaker from The Muppets wouldn’t have got in a flap about.
    Here’s a tip. If you’re ever feeling stressed whilst watching the first round of a golf tournament, and need to soak up some relaxing vibes, try standing next to the second tee. Providing, of course, that there have been no major disasters on the first hole, it is quite possibly the most mellow sporting environment in the universe. On the first hole, I and my playing partners, Grant and Michael, had been three bunched fists disguised as men, but now, having secured two pars and a birdie and passed beyond the physical and metaphorical thicket that separated the first green from the tee of the short par-four second hole, we all but let out a harmonious sigh. The three tee shots that followed – each of them gently tracking the right-to-left dogleg of the fairway – might have been hit by those cyborgs I was talking about, but only if said automatons had been smoking vast quantities of weed beforehand. If we bent down to pick up our tee pegs before we’d established the destination of our shots, it was not just the gesture of men with a piercing sun in their eyes, it was also the gesture of men with a Zen understanding that their balls would be in, or close to, the ideal part of the fairway, leaving only elementary shots to the green.
    As we walked to our balls, I learned a little about Michael and Grant’s backgrounds. Michael, who shared a coach with Colin Montgomerie, split his time between the UK and Australia and funded his tournament play by selling Astroturf putting greens. Grant, meanwhile, had just quit his