The brief charms of Worlington

Cox with the BBC rules whizz Ian Pattinson

Popular opinion might suggest that Peter Alliss has the most distinctive larynx in TV golf, but I’m not so sure. I’d know Alliss’s voice anywhere, and if I ever fell into a coma, a recording of him rumbling on during a break in the World Matchplay action would probably be near the top of the list of things my loved ones might use to try to wake me up.

But while Alliss’s tones are unique, they are not, unlike those of his colleague Ian Pattinson, the first thing you remember about him. As the BBC’s resident golf rules expert, Pattinson is on air for nowhere near as much time as Alliss. But when I tell friends I’m going to play nine holes with “the golf guy off the telly with the voice” they immediately know it’s him I’m talking about.

Tom Cox at Worlington

Another BBC commentator, Andrew Cotter, tells me before I meet Pattinson that “it’s almost worth dropping a ball down your trouser leg just to close your eyes and hear him tell you which 17 rules you’re contravening.” Pattinson himself says he was “bricking it” the first time he was featured on the BBC, but such trepidation seems unimaginable, so calm is his accentless drawl.

Strangely for a member of the Royal and Ancient, St Andrews, Pattinson often uses phrases like “bricking it”. Perhaps more surprisingly, on the seventh hole at Royal Worlington & Newmarket Golf Club, he talks about how he’s never really agreed with the idea that collarless shirts should be banned. I’ve met enough closet fairway rebels to keep an open mind when meeting members of the golfing establishment, but I’m still slightly taken aback.

When Pattinson isn’t commentating at the BBC, working as a divorce lawyer, or monitoring equipment for the R&A, he plays much of his golf at Worlington, which, in 1981, The New Yorker called “by far and away the world’s best nine-hole course”. I can see why it might suit him. It’s essentially Pattinson as a golf course: ostensibly old school, but surprisingly welcoming.

The flagstoned clubhouse is one of the smallest I’ve ever been in, and there are no plans to extend it. Worlington is proud of its small-scale cosiness: the locker rooms are pretty much preserved in their 1893 glory. This includes the urinals, which Worlington’s secretary, Scott Ballentine, points out are made by Shanks (in the pre-Armitage days); the most fitting brand name you’ll ever see on porcelain at a golf club.

Out on the course, equally little has changed. There are vague plans to modify the short par-four ninth, but these are being deliberated over long and hard. Worlington might look a little blank at first, but this is largely owing to the initial oddness of finding a sandy links course more than 50 miles inland. There are as many nuances to this terrain as nine of the better holes at a Royal St George’s or a Troon, and I’m tripped up on numerous occasions. What I viewed as a perfect three-wood approach shot to the par-five fourth finds an out of bounds water hazard 10 feet off the right side of the green. This is a shame, because I badly need to take advantage of a free drop given to me by Pattinson, after my ball ended up in a rabbit scrape. “By rights there should be some rabbit droppings there. I shouldn’t give it to you, but I’m feeling generous,” he says.

Encountering a water hazard

On the par-three fifth, Worlington’s signature hole, I pull my tee shot and end up in a deep hollow that Pattinson tells me is called “Mug’s Hole”. Facing a chip shot to a slick horse’s back of a green with a steep bank on the other side, I’m swamped by ambivalence: there’s a very real possibility I could be here all afternoon, but if you’re going to play a hole featuring a hazard with a name as evocative as Mug’s Hole, it seems a waste to bypass it.

Worlington is the home club of the Cambridge University golf team, The Light Blues, which Pattinson captained in the early 1970s. Today, he wears all blue and a cap emblazoned with a pink jug: the club’s logo, and a nod to the receptacle out of which the club’s signature drink – a mixture of lemon, ice, champagne and equal tots of Benedictine, brandy and Pimm’s No 1 – is traditionally served. “A club drink? An old boys’ network-style uniform? Aren’t these the signifiers of an outmoded golfing era?” I should perhaps be wondering, but what I’m actually wondering is where Pattinson got his blue cords and if the pink jug’s contents are available to visitors.

Here is a perfect picture of golfing life that would come in very useful if ever one needed to construct an argument entitled “The Modern Resort Course, Part-Time Membership Schemes, and the Good Things Golf Has Lost Because of Them.”

After I’ve messed up the ninth, another clandestinely tricky hole, Pattinson surprises me again in the clubhouse with a story about a 1970 bet between a bearded, hippieish university foursomes partner of his and moustachioed club dignitary and Walker Cup player Leonard Crawley, in which the loser was required to shave off their facial hair (the hippie lost). The atmosphere here is a couple of par fives from po-faced: a club photo features the cut-out profile of a team member who was too tardy to attend, pasted on by his long-suffering wife. It’s the opposite of those provincial clubs with their boastful prize boards, full of names that mean nothing in the wider world. Worlington’s surroundings speak of modesty, yet on the boards you find the names of famous golf writers (Bernard Darwin), architects (Harry Colt) and commentators (Henry Longhurst).

In the past I’ve often felt drained after 18 holes of club golf, slightly resentful of the obligation of a post-round drink in cliquey environs, but I could stay here indefinitely. Is this a measure of something Worlington knows, that less humble courses have yet to realise: that golf was meant to be played in sensible bursts of nine? Perhaps. As I leave, I’m like the person who changes his mind about a drink order, having realised that two halves are easier to drink than a pint. I’m thirsty for more, and only the prospect of a long, dark, icy afternoon stuck in Mug’s Hole deters me.

Tom Cox is the author of the golf books ‘Nice Jumper’ and ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’

pursuits@ft.com

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The details

Royal Worlington & Newmarket Golf Club, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. 01638 712216; www.royalworlington.co.uk