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A Round With Rathbone – 18 Holes with the Man Called Baz

Around Coombe Wood golf club you hear a lot about a man called “Baz”. Often, his name comes up when the problems come up; the problems that are the stock in trade of the PGA pro. There might be a tricky padlock on one of the sheds: “Baz’ll sort it.” There might be a diplomatic issue, requiring charm and tact, with a lady member known for her slow play and quick temper: “Send her to Baz”. Or, after hours, when the shop shuts and the professionals – o wonder of wonders! – get to play the game rather than help others to do so, “Baz” is invoked when the tricky lies and impossible shots are faced around the green. Coombe Wood is tight and demanding, and even the best players will sooner or later find their ball buried under the lip of a deep bunker, or snared in malicious grass with a short-side chip to the pin. At this point, the local etiquette is to inspect the lie, form a “double-teapot” (both hands on hips and a face like a sucked lemon), and announce to playing partners: “Yerdafterbe BAZ to get up and down from there!”

Baz’s real name is Martin: Martin Rathbone. His nickname will make sense if you remember the great Englishman Basil Rathbone - one of the most charismatic and successful actors in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. He was the tall, courteous, English aristocrat with the wicked glint in his eye. He was often the man Errol Flynn stabbed in the last reel of pirate films, although rumour had it he was really the far better swordsman. And in later life he became synonymous with Sherlock Holmes. When people ask Martin if he’s related to Basil he always says no – but sometimes adds that perhaps you can’t be sure, given the way actors in those days conducted their social lives.

Martin is built like a golfer, not a swordsman. Like many men in his trade he has strong shoulders, wiry forearms, and big muscular hands from years of beating balls. He’s polite and amiable, and he has the tolerance and the sense of irony that any man needs if he wants to be happy in golf. He moves like a pro golfer, too, with that steady methodical pace you see them use on the course. When playing, the pros go with calm purpose from shot to shot, all of it planned in advance to achieve the desired result, while the rest of us dawdle and skitter from surprise to puzzle and on to inevitable disappointment.

There are some ways, though, in which Martin is very different from other golfers. For a start, he took up the game at 23 – about two decades later than most who make it to the professional ranks. And there were no pushy parents, and no moment of revelation watching the Masters on TV, to put a club in his hand. He and a friend had both broken up with girlfriends, and over a consoling pint one evening they decided to give golf a try because a local range had an offer on group coaching. They were both hooked from the start, says Martin. “And it didn’t do any harm”, he adds, “that the other six in a group of eight were women.”

He joined the club at the public course in Richmond Park, where the handicap committee sized him up as an amiable bloke from the motor trade and awarded a handicap of twenty-odd. A few weeks later he shot twenty-odd under his handicap in a club competition, and the committee realized they had underestimated him.

Talk about golf to Martin now, more than a decade later, after years of study and exams to become a PGA pro, and it’s clear the game is still fresh to him. His swing is always under review, as he looks for ideas in the great swings of men like Nicklaus, Hogan, Curtis Strange, or the ambidextrous genius Mac O’Grady, a cult figure in the circles where golfing mechanics are studied to PhD level. He practices hard and hits the ball with crisp authority.

Even so, the short game is his true speciality. He doesn’t miss short putts, and holes more long ones than any man has a right without selling the Devil his soul. He wields the wedge with fiendish ingenuity from fairway, sand, or rough, and all in all it’s enough to make you think that back in his bloodline there might indeed be devilish characters able to unbutton your waistcoat with the tip of a rapier. But Baz doesn’t think so: he reckons the secret of his short game is that he spent his formative competitive years playing darts to county standard. Compared to the bed of a dartboard double, he says, the four and a half inch width of a golf hole makes a pretty inviting target.

Yes, he concedes, if in his teens and twenties he’d been grooving irons instead of arrows, perhaps now he’d be teeing it up on tour. But, then again, probably not. And maybe the fact that his golfing talent was untapped for so long is one reason why Martin Rathbone is so happy – and so good – at his work today. Many teaching pros grew up as prodigies destined for greatness, before something happened – or didn’t – to leave them shipwrecked in a life they never thought would be theirs.

For Martin it was a first, not second, choice to become a teaching pro. Not long ago he played with a philosophy student who remarked that society today is unique in human history by placing so little value on teaching: only we, among all the cultures that have thrived on earth, have valued it so little. In truth, it is a rare man who has not only wisdom and knowledge of his own but the subtle ability to make others gain from it. Baz agreed, and has his own way of putting it: if you only teach because you can’t do, then you probably can’t do teaching. Martin’s students know that he can.

Ian Smith June 2009

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