Getting into the swing
Rachel Johnson attempts to play her husband at his own game After 15 years of pleading from husband, I finally gave in. ‘You’ve got terrific hand-eye-ball coordination,’ he would say, in a voice that conveyed that this was the highest compliment a man could ever pay a woman. ‘You love long walks and being outside. Why not? Please! It’s something we could do’ — this last bit with a slight catch in his voice — ‘together.’ So it was that 15 years after he first popped the question, I booked us in for a lovely twosome treat: a weekend of golf at the historic Turnberry hotel, that epitome of Edwardian grandeur and comfort that faces out over the Irish Sea to Ailsa Craig, a massive outcrop that rises from the sea like a granite cupcake.
My husband was still not satisfied. ‘I thought when you said a golf weekend we’d be going to Valdorama or Portugal,’ he grumbled on the way to Stansted. ‘Not the west coast of Scotland in midwinter.’ I told him not to be so wet. I explained that I was having four hours of lessons with the legendary Chris Brown in the Colin Montgomerie Golf Academy. He would video my drives and putts, scan in my body angles and posture and grip to computer, and then analyse their flaws. After only four hours, I would be capable, in theory, of going out and playing nine holes on the Arran course on Sunday.
However, the weekend did not start promisingly. When we got to Stansted at 9 p.m., having decided we urgently needed to have a Thai supper in Bishop’s Stortford, we discovered that the gate for our 9.45 p.m. flight had closed. The next flight north in the morning required our presence at check-in ‘no later than 4.25 a.m.’ Grim though this was, the thought of those sumptuous beds and the whisky bar ahead kept us from jacking it in, and we arrived in a blizzard in Ayrshire at 8 a.m. the next day. ‘I’ve never known the weather to be so bad for so long,’ said the concierge from Turnberry, when he picked us up at Prestwick. ‘Och, but it wouldn’t be such fun if it was too easy now, would it?’ While Ivo raced to make his tee time on the Ailsa course in the sleet and the wind, I found Chris Brown, who was tall, kindly and, above all, complimentary about my quite remarkable, innate and natural golfing ability. As a result, I sat enraptured over video replays of my swing on the computer, and simply gobbled it up. After only two sessions, I had started to grasp the building blocks of the game: addressing the ball, grip, posture and balance.
When I rejoined my husband after the first session I was modestly confident that I would be able to do the Arran course the next day. So I didn’t take up Chris’s offer of a practice on the driving range. After all, I had been up since 4 a.m., so instead I headed to the spa, where I fell into a deep sleep during my head massage.
The next day, after sublime dinner and porridgey breakfast, it was back to the Academy, where Chris moved me on to drivers and woods. Things were still going well, in that Chris kept finding new things to praise about my posture, co-ordination etc. And then there was nothing for it: yesterday I was a golf virgin, today I was on the links — at Turnberry, now officially rated the number one course in the universe.
I wheeled my clubs out to the first tee. The sun was shining, a light wind whipped the gorse, and the long white plaster façade of Turnberry Hotel, with its red pantiled roof, gleamed its support.
And now I fear I must draw a veil over what followed. Golfers will sympathise when I reveal that every single aspect of my game disintegrated over the course of the nine holes, to the extent that I played only four — well, OK, three — decent shots that day.
But here’s the funny thing. Even though I felt the deep agony of self-disgust that must follow when one spends time and money one does not have in trying to put a very small ball into a very small hole with tools that are ill-designed for the purpose, I still .. . got it.
Those three shots were enough. Westin Turnberry could not have given me a better start for my new golfing life. Haste ye back, the Scots say. And I will, as soon as I can persuade my husband to accompany me north again.
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