After more years service that I care to remember, I decided that my venerable old Cleveland driver should be retired. It’s so many generations behind the current crop of drivers that I almost expect to see it telling other clubs to get off its lawn before taking its teeth out and having a nice nap.

The trouble is, buying golf equipment can be a minefield. Your options are either to pony up a big wad of cash at your local shop, scour BST boards on reliable websites or use everybody’s favourite auction site and run the risk of being royally ripped off trying to get a bargain.

My local shop is pretty good but the prices are enough to take your breath away. Ebay is, unfortunately, a wretched hive of scum and villainy and buying from there means running an unacceptable chance of being ripped off. Golfers are easier prey than people who play other sports for various reasons but mainly because of the high turnover of new and used equipment and the generally higher than average discretionary income of a golfer. We are all looking for the next great thing that will cure our swing ills or give us that extra distance – and we are prepared to pay for it. We are, in the scammers parlance, easy marks for fakes and knockoffs.

Because of this when I decided to buy a new driver I knew what I wanted to do: I would dealt with someone I knew (or rather thought I knew) through online forums, avoiding eBay, I would make sure he wasn’t overseas and do all my research so that I knew exactly what I wanted.

A few months ago, in an idle PM with another golfwrx user, I casually mentioned that I was looking for a new Driver and would value some advice on how to go about buying one on BST. This person was one of the most active posters on this website. He said he was an ex-touring pro having played on tours just below the European Tour. He said he nearly made it once at Q-school, but that the number just slipped away from him at the end so he called it a day, gave it up and got his amateur status back. He offered advice to beginners and the sort of insights that only someone that has been on the other side of the ropes would know.

No need to go on BST he said, as luck would have it he could get me a great deal on a driver as one of his friends from his tour days ran a golf shop. He could offer me ‘mates rates’ and save me a packet and at the same time get me a top quality product that would be built to my specs. ‘Result!’, I thought. The only problem was that because I had specified a custom shaft, it would take 5 weeks to order and get built. Not a problem for me as while my current driver was not all I wanted it to be, it was still more than serviceable, and anyway I knew that the standard order time for this club was about a month. So I arranged a bank transfer into his account so he wouldn’t be out of pocket and waited for my new driver.

Five weeks later, having arranged to meet up for drinks at the end of the week so that he could give me the club I got a phone call from him telling me that the driver had arrived but there was a problem; it had the wrong custom shaft! Apologies and offers of money back while it was sorted out assuaged any suspicions I had. While it is uncommon to get a mis-specified club, I could imagine that happening easily enough, especially to a club in notoriously high demand where turn-around times are bound to be a concern, so the sense that something was not quite right could be easily dismissed as the paranoia that I would be scammed.

A couple of phone calls and PM conversations later, he got back to me saying that they would rush this one through and that it would take no longer than 4 weeks. Again not a problem I thought, I’m dealing with a good guy not some scam artist so I was happy to wait. This time, rather than meeting up for a drink so that I could get the club, we would play golf instead. This was going to be exciting for 2 reasons: firstly I would finally get my new club that I had waited 10 weeks for and secondly, he was a member of one of the most prestigious courses in the UK – one that had been the host of a Ryder cup – so I was as excited as a kid before Christmas for the chance to play at a venue that that.

Because the previous order had turned up with the wrong shaft, I thought that it would only make sense to check up when it was supposed to arrive. On the Monday five days before we were supposed to meet up and the day the driver was supposed to be delivered, I emailed him to find out about tee times and also whether he would mind checking that the driver had turned up with the correct shaft this time. As I would be travelling about 300 miles there and back, I wanted to sort out my travel arrangements and to make sure that there wasn’t going to be a repeat of last time.

Silence.

What the………This was when I began to doubt that all was well. This was a guy who normally posted online at least twice a day, why was he suddenly silent? He had logged on a couple of hours after I had sent my message so I knew that he had received it.

In the week previous, he had told me that he had been a bit tied up at work so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that he was so busy at work that he literally couldn’t get back to me. And not everybody has a computer at home so maybe he was unable to reply there.

Still the days dragged on, and after multiple emails, PM’s, messages both SMS and left on his mobile phone answerphone he had still not got back to me. By Friday it was obvious that our golf was going to be a bust (which in itself was pretty rude and fairly disappointing but nothing to get my knickers in a twist about), so that just left the club. What was happening with that?

More silence.

He wasn’t answering his mobile phone but we had exchanged emails before, and he had emailed from his work account. This meant that I had could phone up his work. If he was still working there that would have been a great opportunity to ask him what was happening but unfortunately when I rang up I was politely informed that he was no longer employed there. When I say ‘politely informed’ I mean of course that they said he was fired and weren’t surprised that he wasn’t in contact with me for various reasons that they felt unable to go into.

Just great.

As the only contact details I had were his work email address and what could well be a work mobile phone number, this meant as far as getting in contact with him I was stuffed, and he appeared to have no inclination to contact me.

This left me with 4 options: go through the hassle of phoning everyone in the phonebook with his surname that lives in the same area, phone the club where we were supposed to be playing and where he was supposed to be a member, phone the police or just walk away. None of the options were palatable as all would involve a fair amount of hassle and/or embarrassment but there was no way I was going to stop now.

Read "Dude, Where’s my Driver? – Part Two" next week.