Many years ago, as a sport-obsessed teenager, to the bewilderment of my family and most of my peers, I attempted - and failed - to hack out a viable future for myself as a professional golfer. Golf made me bunk off school and my part time job as a waiter and mess up my exams. I view it now as an anomalous phase of my life which has, in the unpretty annexe of my memory bank where it sits, a wobbly hallucinatory quality to it, but also - despite the fact that I haven’t launched a ball into space with a club for almost eight years, feel utterly at odds with the pseudo countryside the game is played on and its ecologically questionable practices and the political beliefs of the vaster segment of those who worship at its slightly-too-green altar every weekend - it is an unignorable part of who I am. It still makes semi-regular cameos in my dreams. Very occasionally I will have the abrupt and disturbing realisation that I am standing in my living room swinging an air club, lost in a sensuous vision of finely forged and grooved metal pinching a small dimpled globe of white rubber off a patch of closely cropped grass with precision and speed. Despite the shortening of my sight I remain freakishly adept at estimating yardages when out on the good walks that striving to compete against par used to spoil. It would not be going too far to say that golf haunts my recovering non-golfing self a tiny bit. I couldn’t help thinking about it today, as I often seem to when I’m shaping the early part of the narrative of a new novel. Golf requires an extraordinarily disciplined mind, or perhaps even what some might describe, if viewing it from another angle, as a somewhat deadened mind. As you stand over the ball there’s essentially only one option when it comes to hitting what might be defined as a good shot, but virtually infinite options where bad ones are concerned. For someone like me, with a brain naturally leaning towards misbehaviour, the latter’s kaleidoscope of potential misfortune was a bit too seductive, and herein* can be found my central problem as a golfer. In a way, as I sit at my laptop and prepare to make a fictional universe exist out of thin air, it’s like I’m standing over the ball again, waggling my 7-iron and doing that shuffling thing with my feet that golfers do that makes them look like my cat Charles when he’s preparing to comprehensively trash the world of an unsuspecting rodent. There appear to be a dizzying number of options, so many nuances of misbehaviour. “How on earth am I supposed to choose the correct path?” I ask. “What if my decision turns out to be wrong? What if the ball goes in a bunker or a small ornamental pond or the garden of the owner of an internationally successful debt recovery firm who lives in a five-bathroom mock Tudor house backing onto the course?” But then I remember: this isn’t golf. It’s writing, where an unruly imagination is a benefit, not a hinderance, where the right shot is not just one boring singular option but can in fact be infinite paths, all of which thrive on misbehaviour and might initially appear unconventional or downright feral. And then, with a flood of relief, I write another sentence, slice it wildly into the bunker just for fun, just to see what will happen next, and - despite a notable disparity where earnings and lifestyle are concerned - feel relieved I am here, and not on the PGA Tour.
*Autocorrect tried to change this to “heroin”. Heroin definitely wasn’t my problem as a golfer. I was 13 when I took up golf, by which time I’d been off heroin for more than a decade.
My latest novel is Villager. My second one is 1983, published in summer, and you can support it here by ordering a signed first edition, if you’d like to. My third one is being written right now. I’ll tell you more about it very soon.
In a nod to your article from yesterday, despite reading this article with interest and enjoying it (as with all your articles), when I got to the end and saw your note about autocorrect, I remembered seeing the asterisk in the article but couldn't remember the word next to which it was placed. Heh. (I re-read through and found it.)
Not a golfer, but many of the same principles apply to many things.