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

Best Shots of … sums up the relationship that I, and countless other golfers who grew up watching the tournament in the eighties and nineties, have with The Masters. Most of us know Augusta is intrinsically a pretty despicable place: a club full of self-important George Bush supporters with outdated, unswerving notions of manners and decorum; an enclave so closed-minded it didn’t agree to admit its first black member until 1990, and still outlaws women. Nonetheless, starved from a winter of golfing frustration, we allow ourselves to be seduced. We permit ourselves to imagine driving up Magnolia Lane to the bright white clubhouse, then taking a juicy, blasphemous divot out of the sixteenth tee and watching as our seven-iron shot takes the right-to-left slope of the marble green and drops into the hole, just like Tiger Woods’ miracle chip did the year he almost lost to Chris ‘fascinating’ Di Marco. Never once do we question the wisdom of expending all this energy fantasising about a tournament whose ultimate prize is an item of clothing so irredeemably naff that our grandparents wouldn’t have looked twice at it had it been on the ‘60% off!’ rack at Littlewoods in 1986.
    A few months previously I’d been comparing notes on Masters madness with James Day and David Ford, from the hi-tech Urban Golf facility in London, and the golf writer Dan Davies. The four of us had grown up in vastly different parts of the country and our birth dates spanned almost a decade, yet our adolescent memories of the fervour surrounding Masters week were almost identical. We remembered those Saturday afternoons after the televised highlights of the first two rounds had been shown on Grandstand , and how, unleashed onto our home courses with these pictures still fresh in our heads, we would hit more stylish, spectacular shots than we’d believed possible. Did we feel any different now, as adults? No. Our Masters adrenalin was still there. It was just that we no longer had a proper outlet for it.
    With this in mind, the four of us came up with a plan. What, we wondered, if we inaugurated our own tournament, that tried to recapture the lawless enthusiasm and instinctive creativity of those junior golfing days? What if we held it on the Saturday of The Masters? What if it combined all the short-game-orientated magic of Augusta with none of its elitism? Shortly afterwards, the Cabbage Patch Masters was born.
    The inaugural Cabbage Patch Masters arrived at a perfect time for me. Not only would it fill a gap in my pro schedule, while I was waiting to find out whether I’d get admitted to the British Open qualifiers and further Europro Tour events, it also promised a relatively pressure-free environment in which I could give my ailing chipping and pitching a much-needed MoT. It was to be held at Biddenden, a pitch-and-putt course deep in the Kent countryside that had played host to the 2005 British Pitch-and-Putt Championship, and it marked an amalgamation of the Society of Secret Golfers, which I had founded the previous year with James, and the Cabbage Patch Open, the cult, anarchic pitch-and-putt event that Dan and David had been holding on a rough patch of ground in Devon since the turn of the decade.
    Maybe it was something to do with watching those guffawing gaggles of men who’d turned up at my home clubs in the past, reserving the tee under some dull-yet-exotic corporate banner, loudly monopolising the course and seeming to have so much more fun than mere club golfers, but I’d always wanted to be a member of a golf society. Since it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to work for a major exporter of chemicals or sell photocopier toner for a living, starting my own society had seemed the easiest way to solve the problem. There was nothing all that clandestine about the Society of Secret Golfers, really. The name simply came from my conviction that there was an ever-growing group of people out