Read a Sample:
View from the Rough
It is not the story of a great golfer. It is the story of someone who simply refused to stop playing.
Like most young men, I was obsessed with playing sport at the highest level I could manage. And like most young men, I never quite reached the dizzy heights I had imagined.
I played rugby union at school and continued at my local club, Kettering RFC, until I was about twenty-seven. My achievements on the pitch were modest, although I did develop a considerable appreciation for best bitter and various spirits - before matches, sometimes during them, and certainly afterwards.
I also discovered that if you could run around the pitch three times without vomiting, you stood a very good chance
of making the First XV.
Around the same time I developed a passion for cycling, which gradually began to eclipse rugby. The sport fascinated
me - not only for the fitness it demanded, but for the romance of it. Heroes like Eddy Merckx captured my imagination, and the bicycles themselves were things of beauty: light, elegant machines that satisfied my growing appetite for expensive sporting equipment.
I eventually reached representative level and continued cycling enthusiastically until I was nearly thirty-seven. During this period - overlapping by about eleven years - I also took up golf. I kept this fact fairly quiet at first.
In those days, in the circles I mixed in, golf was widely regarded as something taken up by men who had more or
less given up on life and simply needed an excuse to leave the house. How wrong I was.
If only I had studied the game more carefully, practised more diligently, or paid it half the attention I gave to other
sports, I might have become a far better golfer - and possibly led a healthier life along the way. Even so, golf has given me more memorable moments than any other pastime I have ever known.
It has provided endless fun, occasional triumph, frequent humiliation and, above all, a strange kind of consistency in a life that has often been anything but consistent. Although I never set the world alight with my own golfng prowess, I am enormously proud of my son Tom, whose achievements in the game far exceed anything I ever managed - while simultaneously building a successful career and raising a wonderful family of his own.
My daughter Natasha showed early promise as well, although life eventually carried her in other directions. Perhaps she will rediscover the game one day. I rather hope so.
My wife Soo also briefly succumbed to golf. She had never played any sport at all before we holidayed in Portugal, where she reluctantly agreed to give it a try. Within two years she was using her stroke-a-hole handicap to devastating effect and I found myself contemplating an early flight home.
In the end, it was she who abandoned the game (temporarily, I hope) until she has more spare time. I, on the other hand, stubbornly continued.
Of all the courses I have played around the world, the one that made the greatest first impression on me was
Monte Rei in the eastern Algarve. Standing on the first tee feels slightly intimidating, as though the course already knows exactly what sort of golfer you are before you have even swung a club. Everything about the place is immaculate - the fairways like carpets, the greens immaculate, the silence broken only by birds and the occasional thwack of a
well-struck iron. It is the sort of course that makes you stand a little straighter and try to behave like a better golfer than
you probably are.
You will notice there are some gaps in the years covered. That is due to various outside influences preventing me
from playing, such as Crohn’s Disease, pressures of work, divorce and other minor issues.
What follows is an honest account of more than fifty years of golfing disasters on the fairways of the world.
I hope you enjoy the journey rather more than I did.
This is an excerpt from View from the Rough