Thomas Levet

Every inept outsider golf pro can benefit from the services of a shady informant as they negotiate Europe’s fairways on the social back foot. I call mine Deep Divot. In two decades in the golf industry, Deep Divot has met most of the top players, and has concluded that “playing pro golf is worse than cleaning toilets for a living”.

Listen to the game’s luminaries and you’ll believe that life on Tour is a sunny, mobile youth club where everyone spends free time at weekend barbecues exchanging cute nicknames. Listen to Deep Divot, and you’ll believe it’s a claustrophobic nest of childish rivalries where being alone isn’t a prerequisite for feeling alone. To someone who persists in putting pro golf on a pedestal, his wisdom feels like a bump to the coccyx. However, when I tell him that I am travelling to PGA Golf de Catalunya to play in the Spanish Open pro-am, and he informs me that I’ll have a miserable time, I take heed and prepare for the worst.

What I hadn’t prepared for – and which even Deep Divot couldn’t have prepared me for – was the eventuality that I would steal three-time major champion Ernie Els’s golf balls by mistake. Els wasn’t even playing that week. All I did was follow the instructions given me by the man from Callaway, who offered to loan me some equipment to save me humping my own on the overnight train from Paris. I didn’t realise that “take any balls” meant “take any balls, but if you take the ones on the top shelf you must pay with those attached to your body”. Still, it confirms a long-held suspicion: Els couldn’t be hitting his drives that far using any old missiles.

Pro-ams, in which competitors for big golf tournaments break off from their intense pre-match preparation to accompany amateurs of questionable ability for a round lasting 20 per cent longer than most others, must seem like a masochistic pursuit to those who make a living from sensible sports.

This was a bad start to the first one I’ve participated in as a civilian, which was a shame, because I’d been hoping to atone for my previous outing: a soggy 2006 European Challenge Tour event where I played the most underwhelming of pro hosts to three Welsh umbrella manufacturers. I doubt I’ll ever forget the looks on the faces of Gary, Nathaniel and Gordon from Zentex Fabrics as it dawned on them that I would not be contributing a single point to our score over the front nine.

Tom Cox sits out the remainder of an unforgiving hole at the pro-am event of the Spanish Open

But if I needed a reminder, I could have looked at Thomas Levet as he pondered my first, brutally topped tee shot at PGA Golf de Catalunya. Levet, who can arguably be considered the best French golfer of all time, was the pro in my fourball team. A minute earlier, he glanced at the start sheet and saw that I was also a pro – albeit an unemployed one; now he was attempting to make this information and my drive correlate.

In fact, Deep Divot did not exactly say I’d have a miserable time playing in a pro-am. He said I’d have a miserable time unless I was playing with “a Swede, a Frenchman or Padraig Harrington”. As usual, he was spot on. In the past, I’ve enjoyed watching Levet’s exuberant victory celebrations, and I fiercely wanted him to beat Ernie Els in the sudden death play-off for the 2002 Open, but after an hour in his company I was embarrassed: why, I wondered, hadn’t I decided years ago that he was my favourite European golfer?

Levet has played past pro-ams with amateurs who ended up picking up their balls on every single hole, but he’s a delightful companion nevertheless. He posed surreal mathematical brain twisters for our group (the two others were Gary, a fellow golf writer, and Johan, an art director); he offered us swing tips; and he stole a walkie-talkie from a tournament marshal and used it to try ordering a burger and fries.

If Levet could be bottled and sold as golfing massage oil, I’d set up as a market trader. He’s so relaxed he makes you forget you’re playing with a man who came within a whisker of winning the world’s biggest golf event. And he makes you see Catalunya differently: as a tunnel of billiard-top green strips leading to the perfectly round holes, rather than as an undulating assault course carved out of the forest of doom. Twelve holes in, and I’m playing almost smoothly, on a course recently ranked by Golf Monthly as the third best (ie, “toughest”). I even contributed a couple of birdies to our team score when Levet found trouble.

Levet seemed very much part of our fourball, in contrast to the group ahead, where Steve Webster, a British pro, could be seen striding up to a hundred paces ahead of three struggling high handicappers. Can I blame Webster? No: one of his partners had a swing that looked like three lobsters having a fight. You wouldn’t ask a football team to train hard for an FA Cup quarter-final, then go out and play 90 minutes plus extra time against 11 geriatric mascots.

Can I blame the tournament organisers for banning amateurs from the practice ground? Also no. I should consider it an honour to be able to take one of my ridiculous divots in this sublime golfing environment.

Four days later, when Thomas Levet became the 2009 Spanish Open Champion, a deluded warm glow spread upwards from my stomach. Could he have found some infinitesimal, subconscious inspiration in the chaos of my golfing arsenal? Unlikely. Did it help that I didn’t put him off? Possibly. Would it have made victory even sweeter if I’d managed to sneak him a couple of Ernie’s balls? I’d like to think so.

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

pursuits@ft.com

..................

The details
For more information on PGA Golf de Catalunya visit www.pgacatalunya.com/golf/en or telephone 00 34 972 47 25 77