Father & Son Golf Day

"FORE!!!"

My tee shot [left] and my son’s [right] on the 18th hole.

As I have said before in recent posts, my son is now 18. He has finished his A-levels and will be starting university this coming fall. He will be venturing off on his own and moving away to study.

In the summer months between then and now, he has said he wants to ‘do things’ while he has the chance. By ‘things’, he means activities. Have some fun here in our quiet and idyllic rural home county before going off to the hustle and bustle of university town life as a student.

Between working, he has been spending a lot of time with his friends, many of whom he has been close to since primary school. They are all trying to make the most of their time together in their homeland before going their separate ways to many different universities scattered around our nation that they will be attending. As they are all lads in and around the age of 18, a lot of their activities have typically centred around alcohol consumption.

The boozing worries ‘the missus’ naturally, but I find it funny because we have all been there, right? I know I was exactly the same at his age. In fact, I was a million times worse. The only difference is I had to be the one who cleaned my puke up off the bathroom floor the morning after a drinking session. Unlike my boy, I didn’t have long-suffering parents who would tolerate such behaviour. My drinking had to be done in secret.

I keep telling ‘the missus’ that he is just letting off some steam after the pressures of two years of 3 lectures a day, hours and hours of studying/cramming for tests and the anxiety all that stuff inevitably brings. He’ll grow out of it, it’s just what boys that age do.

But I was thrilled that he hasn’t forsaken myself and his mother in this pledge to experience as much freedom as he can before he goes back into full time education. He has suggested things for us to do to spend time with him before he goes and we have readily agreed.

One of them happened to be one of my absolute favourite things in the world: playing golf. The ‘missus’ backed out because she pulled a muscle in her back at work that week, so it was just the two of us for golf. A lads only golfing day. A rare father and son bonding activity. I was looking forward to it.

We live in Cornwall, the most southerly county on the United Kingdom mainland. The southwest of England (although the locals don’t consider themselves a part of England) is mostly a beautiful place to live. Miles and miles of open country, forests and coastline. The only city in Cornwall (Truro) is essentially a medium sized town and a relaxed, ruralised, country-style approach to life permeates from every last Cornish person you speak to.

In a very real way, it often looks and feels like The Shire in Lord of the Rings, full of plenty of hard-working, no nonsense country-folk who enjoy the rural lifestyle. Sure, in the more built up areas you have plenty of people who have adopted a more modern and urbanised lifestyle, but it is mostly an imitation of modern city life in my estimation. For the most part, travelling south into Cornwall from the bigger cities like London and Birmingham will feel uncannily like you have travelled back in time. Old buildings, outdated infrastructures and a simpler life all around.

I both hate and love it here. I like the countryside and the peace and quiet it affords. But I also dislike how cut off from the wider world it can feel at times, like it has been left behind by modernity. I also never felt like I fit in down here.

I was born here, but my parents were from urban cities in the North of England and moved here as teenagers. As anyone will tell you, those from the North and those from the South have some very different customs, cultural practices, mannerisms and vernacular (not to mention the accents), and I was raised with those values and ideas, not those that exist innately in Cornwall. So I was essentially raised as a Northerner, just in the South. I was also homeschooled because of my mother’s cult religious beliefs, meaning that I spent precious little time engaging with the Cornish and their particularities growing up. For these reasons, I always felt like an alien down here: like I don’t belong. I still do.

Anyway, I am digressing. I should probably revisit my feelings about Cornwall in a later post. The reason I wanted to set the scene is because of where my son and I were going to play golf, or maybe I should say ‘Pitch ‘n Putt’.

Photo via Holywell Bay Golf website

Holywell Bay in Newquay is probably my favourite place in the world, specifically because of its incredible Pitch ‘n Putt golf course. I know what you’re thinking, Pitch ‘n Putt is not real golf, and normally you would be correct in that assessment. But this course is essentially a miniaturised version of a real Links golf course. It has all the difficulty of a real coastal golf course, it's just half the size.

Holes range from 60 yards to 180 yards. Narrow fairways, incredibly thick rough and the occasional rapid crosswinds coming off the sea. If you are not particularly good at golf (like me), playing this course with just a 9 iron and putter can really mimic the challenges of playing a full Links course with a full set of clubs. I’ve played a lot of real golf on real courses, and I love doing it. But there is something special about this place and this tiny, yet challenging course.

Part of it is the views. Holywell Bay is gorgeous, particularly on sunny days. As the back 9 starts, you’re practically on the beach and you can often hear the waves if the tide is in. A few houses line the coast and many of them look like they belong in Malibu. Who they belong to, I don’t much care, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone told me one was Tony Stark’s summer house.

But, the one reason I love this place more than any other is the memories I have of it. Memories I made with my late father.

In his late 60s, I discovered my Dad had been interested in learning how to play golf for a while, but had never actually articulated that desire to anyone. Why that is, I can only guess, but I would probably say that’s because being a ‘working class Northerner’ was a defining aspect of my Father’s identity that he proudly liked to uphold, and golf is a rich man’s game.

Regardless, he expressed his interest in golf to me and was perplexed that I too had a nagging desire to take up the game. Not only that, I knew all the terminology inherent to it as well as all the rules and etiquette of the game. This blew my father’s mind because I was never a ‘sporty’ kid growing up, preferring to spend my time reading books, watching movies and playing music and video games. Unlike my older brother, who lived for any and all kinds of sport, I was a nerd.

I became interested in sport as I got older when I started drinking with my football (soccer) crazy friends in pubs. The communal act of watching sports in the pub was the thing that got me hooked on it. When my son was born, I suddenly found myself being responsible indoors on the weekends instead of going out and getting shit-faced, and that’s when I started watching sport alone avidly.

I never told my father that the reason I wanted to try golf in real life was because I had been playing an inordinate amount of virtual golf on the Playstation. Somewhere along the way, I got addicted to the Tiger Woods PGA Tour games and that’s where I gained all my nerdy knowledge about it. I told him it was because I had been watching The Open on the TV. I had, but only because I had become interested in the sport because of a video-game.

So we arranged to try our hand at ‘Pitch ‘n Putt’ first, before tackling a ‘real’ golf course. We ended up playing at Holywell Bay and falling in love with it. We were terrible, of course; Shanking and slicing the ball all over the place. But we each would hit the occasional decent ball and that was enough to inspire us to keep at it.

For our first round, we made the mistake of going at noon on a Saturday during the Summer holiday. It was so busy that we spent four hours going round a course that I can now complete on my own in about 45 mins. It was Hell. We waited for up to half an hour queueing up at the tee boxes waiting to tee off as all the tourists spend ages looking for their balls in the long rough. But when we were playing the course ourselves, we absolutely loved it.

From then, we went and played a round every Sunday morning at sunrise, come rain or shine, for 3 years or so. We each eventually bought our own set of clubs and trolleys and spent hours chatting and playing golf together. These are my favourite and most treasured memories I have of my Dad.

I got so good at my short game around that course that I started playing it as a Par 3 course in my head, playing against a Par score of 54. My best was 63, just 9 over. I eventually felt the need to hit the ball further and challenge myself more, so I started playing more and more ‘real’ golf over the years.

Dad joined me but struggled more on the longer courses. His health was declining and his legs and back limited how much he could do. I started playing more with my younger brother and some friends.

We did find a 9 hole course with some 400 yard holes that Dad could just about handle and the two of us alternated weekends between there and Holywell Bay for a few years until my father’s health eventually put a stop to his golfing game all together. He died not long after and I have played very little golf since then.

And the memory of my Dad and those times playing golf with him all came flooding back when I played golf with his grandson this past week. It always feels weird going there since Dad passed, but continuing the Father/Son golfing tradition on that course felt right; poetic even. The weather was gorgeous, as were the views, and it wasn’t too busy. Chatting with my boy, hitting some strokes, sinking some putts. Every hole brought back a fresh memory of Dad, and each and every one of them both made me smile and threatened a tear.

I have only played golf a few times since before the Covid-19 lockdowns, and I was terrified I would have lost my entire touch. I was a little rusty, but I hit my second best ever score on the course of 64, only missing my record by a stroke. This was due in no small part to the fact that I had a great day with the putter, sinking long putts from all over the place. My son shot a very respectable 79 on what was essentially the first time he’d played the course in his adult life.

We enjoyed it so much that we went back and played another round a few days later. I fared a little worse, recording a 69 (‘giggity’). My son however improved on his score, finishing the round in 71 strokes. We are thinking of squeezing in as many rounds as we can before September when he moves away, and I can’t wait.

This one's for you, Dad. I miss you. I think of you every shot.

Thanks for reading - The Common Centrist