When I was growing up, the BBC ran a show called A Round With Alliss, where the great commentator Peter Alliss played nine holes on camera with a celebrity. The likes of Sean Connery, Ronnie Corbett and Bing Crosby would chat about this and that on the way around.
The most memorable guest was Vince Furnier, an upright young fellow with a pretty swing, who hit the ball very straight. Vince who? I hear you ask.
Well, you might know him by his stage name, Alice Cooper. When he appeared with Alliss it was the first time many of us had seen him without makeup. Peter opened the show with the great line, ‘Well, from one Alice to another …’
It was astonishingly incongruous to watch the two of them wrangle the dimpled ball. Peter was in his mid-40s at the time, plump and secure. Vince had his seminal album, Welcome to My Nightmare, in the charts and was in England recording his next best seller, ‘Alice Cooper Goes to Hell’.
Unsurprisingly, Vince was in and out of psychiatric institutions in the late ’70s and early ’80s, unable to step out of the character that made him rich and famous. Golf helped save him and when he wasn’t on stage he was on the course as often as six days a week.
Half a century later, Vince is still married to the game, plays off a four handicap, shoots his age regularly and likes to peg it up before the first tee time of the day, so that he has the rest of the day ahead of him. If you are old enough to remember Alice Cooper, you’ll probably be familiar with the following lines as well:
‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth. You pull on your finger, then another finger, then the cigarette …’
Those are the opening lines from ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’, the final track on David Bowie’s immortal album, Ziggy Stardust. It’s a song about dying young, but I can’t help thinking that those lines are really about golf.
This is what it’s like to play with a chain smoker. Light up, insert, grab the glove, pull on a finger, then another finger, then the cigarette. Eventually they’re ready, out comes a club, a practice swish, throw the cigarette on the ground, hit, resume smoking.
I can’t find any evidence that Bowie was a golfer, but he was a chain smoker, so part of the song is autobiographical, at least. Another musician who loved a tug on the weed and a walk on the links was the great Frank Crumit. Frank had hits in the 1920s and ’30s with such ditties as ‘A Gay Caballero’, ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’ and ‘The Prune Song’, the opening line of which goes, ‘No matter how young a prune may be it’s always full of wrinkles’.
But my personal favourite is Frank’s ode to the great game, ‘Donald the Dub’, about a man who, rather like many of us, loves the game but isn’t any bloody good at it. The final verse goes like this:
‘I’ve wrecked more ground than Columbus found
And the guy that I am after
Is the crazy Scot who invented this plot,
That’s robbed all the world of laughter.’
– This column first appeared in the March 2024 issue of Compleat Golfer magazine.
Photo: Scott Halleran/Getty Images
