Free Nice Jumper by Tom Cox Page A

through impact so it remains square to the target, in much the same way that you see Paul Azinger, the American touring professional, doing. I’ve had a go at correcting it over the years, but it has never felt right, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if Paul Azinger can use it to win one major championship and come second in two more, I should be able to live with it.
    That’s not to say, however, that it doesn’t bug the shit out of me.
    ‘Shut your face and carry the bag, Gary,’ I told Gary.
    By the difficult dogleg par four seventh, relations had fully deteriorated. Having been advised that I had a treacherous ’spinning right foot’ on my follow-through, warned about the dangers of a ’decelerating putting stroke’ and reprimanded for ’hitting from the top’, I’d made a deal with Gary: if he stopped playing junior golf doctor, I’d resist the temptation to fling him by his head into a nearby bunker.
    How on earth had he learned so quickly? He must have been up all night, every night, since he’d offered to caddy for me, memorizing every instruction manual on the market. In golf, there’s not quite such a thing as a ‘textbook’ style. Even a photogenic swinger, like, say, Fred Couples – who always seems to aim twenty degrees left of his target and can look as if he’s poised to keel over like a skittle at the top of his backswing – has the odd defect. But Gary’s ideas were about as orthodox as they come. Lowly baghandler or not, he’d planted malignant seeds of doubt deep within my hitherto reliable methods – the kind of flaws that the quality player shouldn’t even concern himself with during a competitive round when, between that big-lipped sandy deathtrap on the right and that gorse bush on the left, there’s no room for technical tinkering.
    This probably went some way towards explaining why I was eleven over par after ten holes.
    Jamie, on the other hand, was hot. At one over par, he was already seven better than the score his handicap suggested he should be achieving. I watched as, gradually, Gary gravitated towards him. I didn’t mind since, although this meant I occasionally had to fetch my own seven-iron, it also meant I could remind myself what it felt like to play while not under a microscope. Besides, it had been fun to watch Jamie assault Ross a couple of weeks ago with the extra-long, bendy flagstick from the twelfth hole, and I had a feeling that if Gary kept making those adjustments to Jamie’s hands at the address position he was in for similar treatment.
    But then a very strange thing happened: Jamie started playing even better . He birdied the thirteenth and fourteenth, holed a bunker shot at the fifteenth, and from tangled rough at the sixteenth hit a three-iron shot further than most helicopter pilots travel in a year. By the seventeenth, I was lagging behind the two of them, like a sulky child being dragged on a country walk. By the eighteenth, Gary was carrying Jamie’s bag as well as Jamie’s swing secrets, and the pair were crouched studiously over a putt for a round of seventy-one, while over in a copse to the left of the green I poutingly attempted to locate my ball, unassisted, and salvage a miserable eighty-nine.
    I saw less and less of Gary after that. The nods we exchanged in school corridors went from courteous to imperceptible to non-existent. It was the sad end to what might, without my strong left-hand grip, have been a beautiful (I never did get to see the au pair in the shower) friendship.
    Or almost the end. In 1994, as a very different kind of golfer, I handbrake-pirouetted into the car park at Stoke Rochford Golf Club in Lincolnshire, fifteen minutes before my teeing off time in the Midlands Youths Championship, and noticed a crowd shielding the first tee almost as effectively as the cloud of dust I had disturbed was shielding the Sphincter. Keen to see what the commotion was – it was a big event, but not that big – I put off changing out