Over the last few months there have been a couple of milestones that both my sons have reached alongside welcoming our beautiful baby daughter to the world in November that have for one reason or another triggered my thoughts to wonder back to my junior golf days. My eldest is around the age I was when I first fell in love with the game, our youngest son is now old enough to have his very first club and our daughter’s birth has made me wonder whether they would follow the path I took to fall in love with the game.
Memories are both made and recalled. When we recall those past events our mind reconstructs the memory akin to a software programme loading data from a database. When my internal software loads the data of my junior golf days it reconstructs memories of long happy days, that started early in the morning whilst the course was more often that not wrapped in a dew and ended in the final moments of dusk as the sun quilted the course in its golden sheets.
For those of us lucky enough to begin playing this great game in our youth, it leaves us with a lifetime of memories we can look back on with fondness. This was a simpler time in our lives where the main concerns outside of the sport was if we had completed our homework or whether we could complete that tricky level on Tony Hawk. This time in my life coincided with the career of one Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods. The popularity of the sport had skyrocketed world wide on the back of the ‘Tiger Effect’ and the sport had found its way to me.
I grew up in a town in the old Yorkshire coal fields, heavy industry had left town prior to my birth along with the hardworking jobs it created in the area. The close knit communities the industries had forged remained stoic through these times and the community spirit was and to a lesser extent still is prevalent in the area. The main sport as in many areas of these Northern communities is rugby league. It wasn’t just a sport to members of these communities but more a religion, a sense of belonging. Your local team was your tribe and you stuck with them. I, along with most boys in the area, fell in love with this game. I enjoyed the team aspect and working together for a shared goal of victory. Its a rough and tough sport that pulls no punches, one where only grit and determination will prevail, its maybe why it resonates with so many in these areas drawing parallels with their own lives. I wasn’t a great player, devoid of most skills with my only asset the willingness to put my body on the line from which I am paying for now. I built some great friendships during this time and eventually as i hit my teenage years reached a life long goal of playing for my local ‘tribe’.
Alongside this rough hard hitting sport was my other love at this time, Golf. My dad first introduced me to this sport around the time I started high school which in the UK is around 11. I was instantly hooked, the feeling of that first purely struck shot still sticks to me to this day (it was pure but ended up in the middle of the trees, alignment was something to learn down the line). From that initial round I couldn’t get enough of the sport, if I wasn’t playing I could be found chipping/duffing shots and generally making a mess of my parents lawn. Unlike rugby where my love was found when playing the sport outside of this my enthusiasm waned, with golf it was different. I was fully engrossed by every aspect. I became a student of the game spending hours watching videos or dvd’s or reading magazines and books about the game, its history and the great players past and present.
“Do you want to come golfing with me?” it wasnt some profound introduction to the game, it was just a simple question between father and son that started this love affair. That first trip to the course still burns brightly in my memory, i spent the evening prior practising my ‘swing’ not knowing what i was doing was correct just doing as any child would do swinging the swing that felt natural to me. I cleaned my clubs around 4 times that evening ensuring there was no molecules of dirt left on each club, i wanted to look the part and like i knew what i was doing. I was around 11 years old, i did not know that evening the effect that morning round would have on me.
“Dad, is it time yet? Can we go early please?” I dont know what sparked the excitement that morning maybe it was how any child that age is when they try something new, something felt different almost as though i knew internally how this game would affect my young life. My Dad succumbed to my pressure, setting of 2 hours early to that round. He must of known we would not have been allowed onto the course until our allocated tee time, maybe he saw those emotions in ones i had not shown for other things at that age and wanted to see where they would take me.
The first course I frequented was a local council run 9 hole course, now long gone returned to mother nature as a nature walk. The course may have gone but my memories of those early golfing days still burn brightly. On those initial outings I accompanied my dad who taught me the ropes. My dad wasn’t a complete golf nut but he did enjoy the game enough to play a lot with me. Thinking back i dont think it was ever about the game for my dad, more an opportunity to spend time with his son. We still have the odd outing to this day and now as time has elapsed those roles have reversed and it’s more an opportunity for me to spend some time with my dad, something I’m hoping I can pass onto my kids. As Tiger mania took hold there were a few of the other boys in the rugby team who took up the game and we began to have regular rounds. Most of the boys left the game as quickly as they found it, but for a couple of us it built a lifelong feature of our lives. The 9 hole course consisted of a mixture of Par 3s and 4s, there was no membership available, you could just rock up, pay your green fees and you were on your way.
It was a very relaxed atmosphere for our initial baptism, no stuffy types, just people learning the game or those whose means couldn’t stretch much further. We ran with this ‘relaxed’ atmosphere and would pay our initial 9 hole green fee and then would proceed to spend the rest of the day at the course usually clocking up anywhere between 36 and 45 holes. During those long days we would play our own majors, the rules and score keeping may have not been inline with the official way to do things but it built a foundational love and respect for the game.
As our skillset and knowledge of the game advanced we eventually outgrew the course we had our golfing baptism upon. Myself and some of the others joined our first club, again this was a council run course, but one that offered memberships. Thinking back on this time I see the parallels between this golfing education and our school education, during these formative years they both seemed to follow a very similar “curriculum”. Not only did we learn more about the game and our skills, similar to learning new subjects and concepts within a schooling setting, we also learned moral and ethical values, how to make friends with people and respect others. From everything I experienced during my junior golf days these life lessons that you are taught have stayed with me into my adult life which I will look to instill in my children.
I spent the rest of my junior days at that initial club, most of my friends moved onto pastures new, bigger clubs with better facilities, ones I could only dream of. I however stayed, was it an unwillingness to put myself into an unfamiliar surrounding that caused me to stay? Looking back I do believe that played a large part in my decision, but I felt part of a family at my junior club and at home there, making any decisions to leave akin to leaving ones own family. We played every day, sunrise to sunset in Summer. A lot of this time was either spent playing rounds with one another or at weekends we would play in a fourball with the adult members. These weekend fourballs taught us the life skills i mentioned earlier, we learnt how to communicate with someone more senior than oneself but also how to carry yourself in formal and informal settings. We would be invited to play in the adult club teams, something we took great pride in. This affinity with the club was further cemented by the thriving junior team we had. We even managed to reach a county final, during the course of that campaign beating teams from much grander courses than ours.
As my junior days came to their close I was playing to an ‘ok’ level, I held a single figure handicap but could play pretty close to scratch around my home course. This however happened to coincide with the growth of my rugby ‘career’. I had gone from playing for my amateur team to signing with my local club(a boyhood dream) to play in their academy/reserve sides. This increase in focus on rugby along with the usual trappings every late teenage boy faces eventually put pay to my golfing. My love for the game never dwindled, I would still watch the majors religiously, however my playing time went to zero and the clubs sat in the garage gathering dust. Until the last few years when I fell back into love with playing the game, my golfing resurrection.
I look back on those junior days with fondness, this fondness is also tinged with regret. Regret about not pushing myself to join the ‘bigger’ clubs, regret for not entering more external competitions. Those few I did enter initially didn’t go well and my confidence was non-existent, instead of facing up to this I reverted to type and just stuck with the internal club competitions I felt comfortable in. I also regret not focusing more time on a set practice routine. I would hit a few balls now and again, but there was no structure , no end goal. The fondness does outweigh these regrets and for any junior golfers out there my advice would be to fully embrace the moment that you are in. Take this opportunity to learn the game inside out, be one with it, push yourself to become comfortable being uncomfortable. You may not go on to make a living from the game but take from it something that you can’t put a price on, the lessons it teaches you, these will stick with you forever.
