Nice Jumper by Tom Cox

Author:Tom Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446497456
Publisher: Transworld

I NEVER DID get round to telling Jamie about Shue’s letter. I was naive, but I wasn’t stupid, and I certainly didn’t want to give Jamie any help finding people to make him feel good about himself. He and I had started playing golf at Cripsley on the same day, and over the years, as Cripsley’s two best junior players, we’d developed a seething, cloak-and-dagger rivalry. That is to say, Jamie’s rivalry towards me always seemed seething and cloak-and-dagger; I was always completely up front about my intentions to thrash the pants off him.

When I played against Jamie, I didn’t just play against Jamie: I played against his mum, his dad, two thirds of the Cripsley membership, the Nottinghamshire Union of Golf Clubs, his brand-new titanium-shafted driver, and the ever-fluctuating age difference between us. Jamie was born in August 1977, two years and three months after me, but not if you were a regular reader of the local paper’s sports page. At one point during 1991 the paper seemed to carry headlines in the manner of ‘Embryo Reaches out of Womb to Win Golf Tournament!’ almost weekly. Jamie’s fellow Cripsley juniors couldn’t decide which to be more baffled by: the way the paper seemed determined to chronicle the most minor of his golfing achievements, or the way he got progressively less pubescent in every article.

Jamie’s parents made a gallant attempt to pretend their son’s sporting future didn’t represent their pension plan, but it didn’t take a sports psychologist to see through them. You’d spot them greeting him on the eighteenth green in the wake of the rare competitive rounds he fouled up, their mouths offering bland sympathy, their eyes offering piercing disbelief. ‘What was that? That was shit!’ I once heard Jamie’s dad say to his son in a quiet, leafy corner of the course during a county boys event. Jamie’s dad didn’t play golf, and to any other non-aficionado the tee shot his son had hit – far from a pure strike, certainly, but long and straight and high enough to be well clear of trouble – would have looked nothing less than spectacular. To him, though, it was the closest thing to a family bereavement.

I always managed to keep a nose ahead of Jamie in handicap terms. A week after he came down from six to five, I would come down from five to four, and so on. In the eyes of the rest of the world, though, it seemed that I was permanently holding his coat-tails, particularly since, at any given time, I was between two and five years older than him. ‘Boy Wonder’ other members of the Cripsley junior section called him, somewhat scornfully, but not scornfully enough to stop them desperately wanting to be his friend and get a go with his top-of-the-range, graphite-shafted four-wood. Whether Jamie was eleven, thirteen or three, he had the preternatural power to make individuals several years older than him turn into sycophantic wrecks with a flash of his copper beryllium sand wedge.

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