Free The Amateurs by John Niven Page A

clubhouse.
    The clubhouse had been added in the early 1960s. It was a long rectangular room with a bar in the middle, a parquet dance floor and a pool table at one end, whose blue baize was overlooked by the gold-lettered honours boards listing all the club champions. The name ‘Irvine’ was proudly etched there not once but twice–1976 and 1981. (Gary could only remember the second triumph: his father coming in the front door, flushed and holding the big silver cup as he hugged them all to him, the smell of success, whisky and tobacco strong onhim and Cathy whooping delightedly as he broke open the thick envelope stuffed with the sweepstake cash. Gary and Lee’s jaws dropping as his father handed each of them a banknote, a strange banknote, a brown note: a ten-pound note! )
    A couple of fruit machines stood near the pool table. The opposite end of the long, low-ceilinged room was composed of a floor-to-ceiling glass window that overlooked the eighteenth green, where members would gather to watch the outcome of any crucial matches.
    Beyond the clubhouse the golf course stretched over several square miles, bounded on the north by a development of large private homes, to the east by Ravenscroft Academy, the secondary school, and to the west by Ravenscroft Geriatric Hospital: the loony bin. The mento home. (Gary sometimes thought the geography here was convenient: you tumbled out of school, joined the golf club, and, forty or fifty years later when golf had done its work and you had been driven completely insane, you were shipped back across the road to the mento home, where you saw out your days drooling through the glass at the golf course, the very cause of your madness.)
    The southern perimeter of the course ran along the right-hand side of the tenth fairway–a treacherous dogleg right, uphill par five–and formed the dividing wall between the golf course and the gyppo camp. The whole right-hand side of the fairway was out of bounds: any ball flying into the gyppo camp was never coming back. And a good few balls that landed squarely on the fairway too. For the gypsies were bold. Many a Ravenscroft golfer had stood on the tenth tee, posing in his finishing position, elegantly cocked like a proud stag as he watched a perfect drive sail high in the air and land softly on the fairway, only to see a filthy figure streak from the undergrowth, snatch the ball and disappear back into thewilds of the camp. Under an unwritten local by-law called the Gyppo Rule, the unfortunate golfer was allowed to play a new ball from the tee without penalty. Everyone was very happy with this ruling. Alas, in recent years some of the younger gyppos had grown more experimental in their tortures. They would run out onto the fairway and you could only watch helplessly from a few hundred yards away as they straddled your ball, pulled down their trousers (trousers, some of the more bigoted members conjectured, that had probably been freshly stolen from a neighbourhood washing line) and repeatedly and theatrically inserted your pure white Titelist or Spaxon into their anus before replacing it exactly where it was. In this instance there was much debate among players as to what the exact ruling should be. Some argued that the ball, complete with its brown film of gyppo bum residue, had to be played exactly as it lay, but could of course be changed after the hole had been completed. Others argued that the soiled ball should simply fall under the general Gyppo Rule and that a new ball should be dropped without penalty. Often players would try and argue the grey area to their advantage: a gyppo-arse-wiped ball in a bad lie would often be deemed unplayable while one with a perfect lie would mysteriously be found acceptable. Where there was usually complete agreement was in a refusal to pick your gyppo-arse-wiped ball out of the hole when your final putt dropped; on hot summer days you would often come to the tenth green to find the cup filled to the brim