'If You Can't Enjoy Playing In The Yorkshire Challenge Then I'd Consider Hanging The Sticks Up'

"It dominated everything that happened over the few days, from the pre-game to the post-game. Even when I was first asked if I wanted to play in it months in advance I could already feel the dread building….”

If I do have a golfing kindred spirit it would be Andy Wright. Andy is a scratch golfer at Royal Troon. He comfortably drives the ball 300-plus yards, his irons, Mizuno blades, are a stand-out strength and he’s considering trying to qualify for this year’s Open at his home club. He’s the kind of golfer that you’d stop to watch on the range and he has the look of someone who genuinely knows what he’s doing with some tour sticks. You’d easily think that he plays the game for a living and, for a good while, that will have been the dream. 

But, up top, he’s as risible as I am. Andy’s inner chimp resembles some type of frenzied orangutan, with dark thoughts constantly getting in the way of anything productive, and his body language is a complete giveaway of what’s either just gone on in his head or is about to take place.

All of which made him the perfect partner for the 10th annual Yorkshire Challenge.

My main concern, I would repeatedly reassure myself, was that we would be a bit lightly raced for the opening exchanges. I was just back from a family holiday, Crete should you be interested, while Andy has a five-month-old baby daughter. But the rota had been kind to us – Lindrick, Ganton and then Moortown – and we both, without saying as much, had mentally envisaged a steady start before putting the clog down at the business end of things.

He had never played Lindrick nor Ganton before so I would be able to lead him round the first couple of days before removing the blinkers at Moortown, where he had played a few times, and where I have been a member for the past five years.

In truth I had summered well and I had even come through two holes, both par 5s, with Matt Fitzpatrick unscathed by not having to chip and posting back-to-back pars. My irons are quickly catching up a crippling short game but I can generally nudge my way round. A performance coach might point to the fact that I’ve broken 75 half a dozen times this year, a realist would quickly temper those boasts by reminding me that all of them came during rounds where none of it mattered. Not that it ever does.

I knew, and Andy knew, that our collective negativity would likely render us useless. If you were to handicap us for our ability mentally to get the best out of our games then Andy would probably struggle to get by on a stroke a hole while I would require the gentleman’s maximum for whatever was going on the day. Together there was a very real possibility that we could be a genuine abomination.

The 1st hole at Lindrick has thankfully been cleared out in recent years which allowed for a nervous prod up the left side from me and a more purposeful 2-iron from Andy. Ten minutes later I was able to produce a 30-yard flop shot over some timber to kick-in distance which should have put me in a positive frame of mind but only served to tell me that this would be as good as it was going to get.

Two holes later, carried away by a back-foot, checky little pitch to the 2nd, I advanced my tee shot at the next not even a third of the distance. Again, part of my brain delighted in the fact that my partner was able to brush off having to then follow this cataclysmic fat, on what I had left behind of the tee, as he flushed his tee shot to four feet (he missed). But the more vocal monkey was telling me that I wouldn’t be able to shake this off for at least the rest of the round, more likely the remainder of the week.

We would reach the turn in 16 points, mainly thanks to Andy’s run of four pars to close out the nine, which felt like a crushing disappointment but should have been a cause for celebration. We wouldn’t better it.

Stranger shots began to emerge and, while we knew all too well that less was more when it came to any pre-shot chat, there was that familiar nagging doubt that things were about to get worse. Our first blob came at the 17th, a hole where Greg Norman made a 14 in the Martini International in 1982, and we consolidated that with a one-putt bogey for 31 points.

As is generally the case the further we got away from having to hit a golf ball, the more our confidence rose. The following day’s 1pm tee time would give us plenty of time to hit a few balls, enjoy a liquid lunch and get acquainted with the rapid putting green at one of the most unique and special courses on the planet. The forecast was for 26˚ and we were going to have ourselves a day at what Golf Digest ranks as the 71st best course in the world. We were now into the competition proper and we’d get after it a bit more, whatever that means.

The first five holes at Ganton are still something of a fog. I failed to find my tee shots at the 2nd and 3rd, courtesy of two very anxious flat pulls which came hot on the heels of a very unsettling opening hole which showed up my inability to a) play a fairway bunker shot or various distances of a chip-and-run and b) display some element of self-awareness when to pick my ball up.

Three holes in we had a solitary point. Come the 6th tee, a 469-yard par 4 with a Stroke Index of 1, Andy power-piped his 2-iron into a very dark corner of North Yorkshire which, bizarrely, he refused to label a shank – ‘I blocked it’ – and, even more oddly, he actually went to look for. This was a new low point and, though it probably was just about possible to sink even deeper, thankfully we didn’t.

It should be added that I did miss an 18-inch putt for par, and three points, but, in the grand scheme of things, this was a big move forward. Now we could hit the reset button; Andy’s shank was out the system and the driver would now come out the bag, I was on the board and we could happily go about our business of making too many bogeys and enjoying a course that is unlike many others.

There was a rally of sorts and we got to see most of Ganton’s back nine from the short stuff. Thirty-one holes in we would add our second three-pointer apiece, sadly at the same hole, and we would finish with the possibility of a thundering climax, and one which never even looked like materialising, as we knocked our short irons to within 15 foot of the final pin.

The easy headlines around both Lindrick and Ganton are that they have both held the Ryder Cup, part of a special club of just nine English courses to have done so, but it is their ability to also move with the new that keeps them relevant. In 2022 Lindrick staged the Girls’ and Boys’ Home Internationals while Ganton held the Senior Amateur, indeed the latter remains the only inland course to have hosted The Amateur Championship.

Both have undergone management programmes to clear out gorse and woodland and, while the modern professional game might now sadly overlook these types of courses, they’re perfect for the rest of us. And, judging by what seemed like everybody else’s scores, very playable.

The bits not spoken about in the promotion of competitions like this is the camaraderie, both with your partner and those playing the same loop of courses. If you want to sign off a round with a pint, the club actually has their own gin, and to sit round a table with eight relative strangers and have a laugh about what’s just happened then Ganton would be right up there.

The past two days had been two of the greatest on record, for laughs, friendship, new faces and the odd good shot, and all played on two of the very best courses in one of the game's leading golf counties. We depart up Station Road, one of the great thoroughfares to and from a golf course, half of them turning left to Scarborough for fish and chips while we return to Leeds. We fill the car journey with the self-affirming game of our worst three shots of the day and then what was the particular mental breakdown that helped fuel them.

Day three and the denouement of our efforts. Moortown, another Ryder Cup venue, another classic and another course that is very much on the up thanks to the efforts of its staff and the architect Clyde Johnson. No need to over-think this one; this is my happy place.

Away from the course we’re now dove-tailing beautifully. We are able to order the other one’s food without the need for any unnecessary chatter and our anti-inflammatory programmes, Andy for his thumb, me for my back, are now perfectly in tune. In the space of a few days we’re acting like an old married couple, albeit one that isn’t very good at golf.

Moortown plays at its very best at this time of year and the old girl is looking resplendent. Again, the early exchanges are something of a blur. There is something called post-traumatic amnesia where you can’t remember a distressing event, like a car crash, and this comes close to describing the front nine. I do remember Andy emerging from the halfway hut having reconvened with his mental coach over a WhatsApp SOS; he’s muttering something along the lines that ‘this can’t carry on like this’ as we arrive on the world-famous par 3, Gibraltar, and he promptly misses the green.

At the 15th Andy splits the fairway 320 yards away and would then chip in, both of which were things of beauty in their own right, but they would sadly book-end a knifed approach and subsequent chunked chip.

My own tale of woe was summed up at the next where, for the 15th time in 17 shot holes over the three days, I would make the most straightforward of bogeys after having less than a 6-iron in. For the past decade my sole focus has been on not knowing where I get a shot and now, when the big occasion arose, I couldn’t dim the inner noises. In among all the self-loathing this remains one of life’s great mysteries – why does the possibility of scoring three points on a golf hole cause such needless anxiety?

There’s still time for Andy to hit a screaming hook at 18 that still sends a shudder through me and we sign for 29 points and 168th place. We’ve managed to finish ahead of two teams.

If there was to be a happy ending to this doomed relationship it’s that we’re still good friends, probably even better than when we both missed the opening fairway at Lindrick. Andy is now back with his mental coach and now has an almost never-ending body of work to refer to while I am now the new owner of his old TaylorMade Spider putter. Three days watching me under-hit putt after putt after putt may well have done nothing for our scoring but it did prompt Andy to courier something more suitable down from Scotland.

"Not even having a partner could keep the demons at bay. They've penetrated my psyche so deeply a route out now seems impossible. Still, what a laugh. If I had it to do all over again I wouldn't change much and I'm not sure I'd even be able to learn from the countless errors made. Mark and I have bonded over many things since we first met but nothing glues us together like our inability to access even a fraction of our potential on the golf course," explains our team leader.

"There were a lot of factors that came together to make the Challenge arguably the most enjoyable competition I've ever played. Up there with the old university tournaments that are as much about the social element as they are about the actual golf. The golf, however, was excellent. Not literally but as an experience.

"Playing with a partner who's just as needlessly nervous as you are creates a brilliant atmosphere, there's nothing like shared misery to bring people together. Everyone is out to have a good time on three brilliant courses and the way it is run by everyone involved makes that possible, no matter the scores. If you can't enjoy playing in the Challenge then I'd consider hanging the sticks up because it's about as good as it gets for amateur golf."