The first hole at Cambridge Meridian Golf Club is a par four of a fraction under 300 yards, which most good professional golfers would approach with some confidence – either shooting straight for the green with a driver, or playing a tactical mid-iron short of the ditch guarding the putting surface. Being a bad professional golfer, my approach is somewhat different: I unsheathe my driver, in the unspecific hope that I might be able to manoeuvre the ball ham-fistedly 200ish yards. It’s admittedly not a plan of which my favourite sport’s leading psychologists, with their “golf is a game of confidence” mantras, would approve, but it’s nonetheless one that has often served me well in the past. One day I hope to fully outline its merits in my own golf psychology book, Expect To Screw Up And You’ll Never Be Disappointed , but for now I’ll just say this: try it some time when you’re a bit creaky and haven’t had a chance to get to the practice net – you might be pleasantly surprised.
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| Viv Saunders with her Cardigan corgi, Annika: dogs are welcome at both the golf clubs she owns |
With a few exceptions – and the jovial, slightly bawdy, polymath Saunders could definitely be counted as one – the best golfers have a poker-faced, bored cowpoke demeanour. In my situation, they would have passed the drive off as intentional and kept schtum about the forgotten wedge. But in the space of one hole I’ve given so much away that Saunders, as a qualified sports psychologist, has probably learned all that she needs to know about my game. “So what’s your handicap now?” she asks. It’s a testament to her composure under pressure that when I tell her that I am handicapless and officially a pro, she doesn’t buckle at the knees in a fit of giggles.
Swing with the best of them
It has often been said that 90 per cent of what can go wrong in a golf swing does so before it has even started. Nobody knows who originally made this claim, but it is presumed they had accrued considerable wisdom.
Of the preliminary elements, stance and grip are paramount. As you learn to grip properly, you’ll also learn golf’s goldenest rule: behind the shoulder of every doctrine, another contradictory one lurks, nigglingly. Gripping methods vary, but the thumb-in-palm, overlapping-little-finger Vardon Grip is still thought to be the classic. Its originator, Harry Vardon, won the Open Championship a record six times: a remarkable achievement for a man who played in tight-fitting jackets and ties; a bit like winning Wimbledon in a bodystocking.
Restrictive clothing is now an acknowledged no-no. Swing freely. Resist the urge to hit at the ball. That said, it’s easier to be a hitter and then become a swinger than vice versa. Like I said, it’s a contradictory game.
Belief in the method is often more important than the method itself. Don’t let the bad thoughts creep in. Don’t say, “I will not hit it into the ditch.” Don’t even mention the ditch. Putt in any way you find comfortable, but keep it light and smooth.
Don’t get too fussy about equipment. Pros tinker endlessly with their tools, but the nuances of custom-fitting are less advisable for the more capricious lay player. Concentrate instead on getting the right shaft: a stiff one if you hit long, and a flexible one if you don’t. Perhaps most importantly of all, don’t laugh at the phrase “stiff shaft”. Golf is a game full of ready-made innuendos, and if we stopped to acknowledge all of them, nobody would be able to play at all.
My round with Saunders is a perfect illustration of just how arbitrary the term “pro” can be in golf. The story of my own vegetative professional status could not contain fewer heroics: in 2006, in a deluded attempt to fulfil a childhood dream, I turned pro by the simple act of entering a tournament on the EuroPro Tour and signing a form that said, should I win some money, I would accept it. Seven months later, not a penny better off, I applied to the R&A [the ruling authority of golf apart from in the US and Mexico] to regain my amateur status. Upon subsequently discovering that the R&A had lost my application, I decided not to reapply, on the basis that a) playing in the monthly medal against people who rattle their change on your backswing held minimal appeal, and b) I still get a small thrill from announcing, “I’m a golf professional” to bemused strangers.
Saunders, by contrast, is no longer a professional, yet her journey to contented amateurhood was one packed with biopic-worthy levels of courage, cruel setbacks, legal battles and against-the-odds victories. In 1969, she was the first European to qualify for the Ladies PGA Tour, but had to return to the UK in 1971 when her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, then lost her tour exemption as a result of her time off. With no European equivalent in place, she attempted to become a teaching pro but found, astonishingly, that clubs were reluctant to employ a female to teach their members. She retrained as a solicitor.
Despite her new profession, she still found time to win the Women’s British Open, complete a PhD in sports psychology, institute a ladies professional tour in the UK, write 11 golf books and campaign against sexual discrimination – and general stuffiness – in the game. She now co-owns Cambridge Meridian. Dogs are permitted on the course here – “like at all the best clubs” – and her own Cardigan corgi, Annika (who surprisingly isn’t named after Annika Sorenstam, the most successful female golfer of all time) joins us today. Saunders’ golf shoes are almost-trainers that she enjoys using to bamboozle the stuffies at jumped-up Home Counties courses: “I suppose there should be some uniform. The main problem is how snotty people are when enforcing it.”
In the mid-1980s, Saunders turned her attention back to golf full-time, purchasing Abbotsley Golf Club, a few miles west of here, then Meridian. But she realised that, with no Ladies Senior Tour in operation, the competitive opportunities for a top-level, middle-aged woman golfer lay almost exclusively in the amateur scene. “At first, they told me I couldn’t have my amateur status back at all,” she says. “I got a solicitor involved, but even then it took three years.” When you consider that it took me three seconds to do the opposite, you have golf illuminated in all its perversity.
Again and again, Saunders outputts and outpitches me. Admittedly, my drives do sail past hers, but this offers scant consolation when you consider that she is almost a foot shorter than me, almost twice my age and recently weakened by radiotherapy.
In 2005, Saunders was diagnosed with breast cancer, but she is recovering well. Since finding out about her illness, she’s received hundreds of get-well cards – a figure that you sense would be well into the thousands, were she involved in a less chauvinistic sport. As she tells me this, I wonder what cancer could possibly have been thinking. It must have mistaken her for another Viv Saunders, one who was a far inferior force of nature.
Tom Cox is author of ‘Under the Paw’ (Pocket Books)
