Fast Greens (21 page)

Beast was so shaken that he sculled the top half of the ball and it flew like a wounded quail only halfway to the green. To his credit, I must add that Beast had learned one thing: he didn't break his club. There was one hole left in the match. Instead he squinted his red eyes toward a white-tailed deer that his shot had flushed out of a shady midday bed in the left rough. Bambi had trotted out into the middle of the fairway, where she stood broadsided looking at us.

Beast tossed down a second ball. Puzzled at what he was doing, the rest of us watched as he again moved into his stance—his hands quivering with rage this time, as he shifted them forward, effectively turning the six-iron into a two- or three-iron of destruction.

I don't know whether he was trying to further prove his idiocy or his golf prowess, but before anyone could stop him, he took a flat, short backswing and smashed the second ball at the unsuspecting doe. The ball whistled through the air and slammed into her hindquarters with a sickening thud that sounded like a hollow-point bullet finding flesh. The deer actually went down for a moment, then leapt to her feet and sped off limping on three legs.

“Got her!” yelled Beast. “How's that for a shot?”

His gloating gaze panned over our wide-eyed horror and came to rest on Fromholz, now striding quickly toward him. Beast made as if to defend himself with the six-iron, but Fromholz deftly took it away from him and laid the big man out on the ground with some sort of jujitsu or karate maneuver. Then Fromholz raised the club above Beast's head as if to strike him dead between the eyes.

“How'd you like to get hit with a six-iron, you steaming sack of white-trash defecation? You a wimp! You know that? You some kind of wimp and a bum and an egg-sucking half-breed, diseased mongrel that ought to be sent to the glue factory in a little box. If you ever do that again, I'll kill you twice and enjoy it both times. What do you say, pussy, should I hit you?”

“I been hit,” stuttered Beast, almost in tears. “M-my old man hit me, lots of times.”

This was a good tactic. Our hearts softened almost immediately. Fromholz, his damaged eye about to pop out of his face, suddenly looked more like an animal than the cowering Beast. The ref even felt it himself.

“Sorry, Hoss!” Fromholz said, grabbing the big man by the forearm and helping him to his feet. “When you were a kid, huh? Man, that's tough. How old were you?”

“Thirteen,” said Beast. But then he realized that this figure didn't seem that young for such a big guy. “Thirteen,” he corrected himself, “the last time.”

I don't really know what moved him to tell us this story. I don't even know if it was true. He might have been trying to escape Fromholz's anger, but just maybe he really was a great big scared and lonely galoot, haunted by his past and terrified of falling back into that hardscrabble life.

“When the driving range got real crowded on holidays and stuff,” Beast began, “we'd run out of balls and my old man would make me pick 'em up while people was still hitting 'em. So he used to dress me up in this stupid padded jacket and football helmet, and I'd walk around out there with a bucket and a club picking up balls. So one day I'm out there with my four-iron and the people on the tee are laughing at my football helmet and they're hitting balls at me. It's not too bad to get hit in the jacket, but this one guy—I seen him—he beans me in the football helmet twice in a row. I mean he rang my bell. I got so mad I dumped all the balls down and started hitting 'em back at the tee. It was great! All them golfers yelling and screaming and running for cover. Man, they were getting in their cars and peeling out of the parking lot, and then I sorta accidentally hit one guy in the face with a ball. It wasn't even the same guy that had been hitting at me. It was just some guy and he got hurt bad. The ambulance came and took him away. Afterwards, my old man beat the crap out of me.”

When Beast finished the story, there was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Pop mighta killed me,” Beast concluded, “if I hadn't of knocked him out with a shovel.”

As he finished the story, his downcast eyes lifted long enough to check the reactions on our faces. And just as he turned his own face back to the ground, I thought I saw the slightest smile.

“Very interesting, Mr. Larsen,” said March. “A good example of how cruel and unfair life can be.” Then almost as an afterthought he said, “Fromholz. Lemme ask you again, how'd you lose that eye?”

We all turned to Fromholz.

“I was hit in the face with a golf ball,” he answered. “On a driving range.”

Beast shrunk back—rather ashen-faced I thought—and Sandy stepped to the tee box.

35

The first time I saw Sandy hit the flagstick with his tee shot, I thought it the most amazing thing I'd ever witnessed and I gushed like a fool. Sandy had to remind me that not only had the ball not gone in, but with the bounce off the metal post, it had actually ended up farther away than if it had just bit into the grass.

In subsequent rounds I managed to control my enthusiasm as he continued on a long string of almost aces. Once he nearly made two holes-in-one in the same round. It was incredible the way he was bouncing them off and lipping them out and hopping them over. And these near miracles didn't seem like good luck at all. To me, it seemed like every one of those shots should have gone in. They looked perfect; why shouldn't they drop?

Sandy explained to me that scoring well doesn't require many great shots. Even for a duffer, one good shot is all you need to make a bogey on a par four. Two good shots—say a nice drive and a good putt to go with it—will usually earn you a par. The problem with birdie is that it usually takes three good shots in a row, a feat beyond most golfers whose handicaps or ratings as excellent, fair, or pitiful players are generally just an indication of how consistently they strike the ball.

“You're not as good as your best shot,” Sandy told me. “You're only as good as your worst.”

And since Sandy didn't have a bad shot in the bag, he was darn good. I knew it was only a matter of time before he fired one of those middle-irons at the flag and left all the bad luck and crummy bounces behind him by sailing or bouncing or rolling one into the hole. All he had to do was forget that he was spooked and quit concentrating on the little things that didn't mean anything, like the fox running in front of the car or his history of losing to Beast. None of it would mean anything to Sandy's game as soon as it didn't mean anything to Sandy.

As he stepped onto the eighth tee, Sandy knew he had to win the hole or lose the match. He lofted a pinch of grass into the air to test the wind, and in the stillness of the coming midday, it fell straight down below his hand. Then he tossed aside one of the two clubs in his hand—I think it was the six-iron—and stepped up to the snowy-white hundred-compression Titleist he'd just taken out of a new sleeve of three.

In unison with Sandy, my right hand tightened gently, as if I too were gripping the club. To hide the involuntary action, I slipped my hand into my pocket and discovered something cool and hard and marvelous. It was March's moon rock. My fingers closed into a tight fist around the magic stone, and I could almost feel it begin to glow as I wished: “Go in! Go in!”

“Go in!” I silently and fervently urged as Sandy took the club back, turning then tilting his shoulders, reversing on the down-swing, tilting then turning back, and carving across the lower inside corner of the ball so that it arced in a high-drawn trace of light to the green.

I never ceased to marvel at how Sandy could divide the back face of the ball into quarters, almost like slicing a cherry pie. He'd adjust his swing trajectory and move the clubhead into the quarter of his intention, hitting either a low-cut fade, a high fade, a high hook or a low draw to suit his needs. It was as if the land had been tailored to the swing rather than vice versa, golf mechanics and shotmaking at their finest, and Sandy used this skill at will. He used the high shots and the following breeze to stretch a seven-iron to a hundred and seventy yards, as he was doing here, or the easy-swinging low shots with a minimum of spin that could bore a hole into an onslaught of wind.

The greatest marvel of all was that he never knew how impossibly difficult these feats were. Sandy seemed to think that all good golfers understood and mastered such mechanics. And thus he underestimated his own abilities by half, shutting the door on the greatest tool of all: confidence.

“Don't move, hole,” said Fromholz.

“Go in!” I silently begged the gods of golf, my hand squeezing the moon rock tightly. “Go in, go in!”

The ball hit two feet short of the hole and hopped directly into the cup. It was in the hole. There was no doubt about it, but still I kept wishing. “Go in. Go in.” It had dived in there so hot, I figured it might be thinking about hopping out again.

There was a long silence, broken by March.

“I'll be damned! An ace in one!”

“With one hole to go,” translated Fromholz. “This match is all even.”

Before Sandy shook our offered hands of congratulation, he bent over to replace his divot, mopping the tears from his eyes so we wouldn't see them.

36

“Big girls don't cry,” the school bullies taunted me as they twisted my spine. But I cried anyway. It took me a long time to learn there's no shame in yesterday's tears, only a salty aftertaste. That's part of what makes it possible to write about the way things were. But the meaning of this story that has so long haunted me is equally related to the way things are. And that is not so easy.

Freelance advertising writer. I dislike advertising in general but find that I'm pretty good at writing it, so instead of working for one firm and being assigned whatever stupid accounts please them, I basically work for no one. The only way I get on an account is to find a product I like, come up with a snappy way to sell it, and then pitch myself, and my idea, to the agency in charge. The agency then has three choices. Number one, they can kick me out on my ass because they think I'm an idiot. Number two, they can steal my idea because they think I'm a fool. Number three, they can buy my idea and hire me to see it through because they think I'm a genius. The infrequency of the latter leaves me a lot of time for golf.

Don't think this commercial independence in any way makes me an advertising elitist. My most successful gig to date has been boosting a marginal office products company into a hit regional chain, a feat accomplished through the oldest sham in the book: sex. I wrote a spot that featured a gorgeous long-legged secretary and a handsome upper-management male boss, both shopping and flirting at the office store where the beautiful people shop. And for a follow-up spot, I made the secretary a gentle but bluff young man and the boss a sexy business-suited woman. It's low rent, but it works.

That's why, when I got a chance to pitch to golf's classiest clubmaker—the Ben Hogan Company of Fort Worth, Texas—my mind immediately went to sex. This may sound like a leap of logic and a violation of faith, but sex has rarely been used to sell golf or golf clubs. Unable to come up with anything better, I was desperate enough to think it would work.

For once, the agency actually called me. They wanted a thirty-second spot and they wanted it to pop out of the screen. Something new and wonderful that would make people jump their lard butts up off their sofas and run out and buy a full set of Ben Hogan golf clubs for a sum of money roughly equal to the national debt of Argentina. Even though all golfers want to hit the ball farther, I knew we couldn't use that tack. Longer is the claim used to sell golf balls, not golf clubs.

Longer, no. Sexier, yes. Why sell only golf balls when you can make a commercial that will sell anything? The spot I pitched to the agency had a comely young woman watching a classically sculpted male golfer eyeing his target and grabbing a Hogan five-iron (in close-up, of course). Addressing the ball with his perfect stance, his fans in the background (including the babe) watch his fluid swing with long, arcing extension and a follow-through that slaps him on the ass in a manner with which we are all now familiar. We see the woman's little thrill at the slap on the ass and her disappointment as the ball lands ten feet past the pin. Then suddenly the ball spins furiously back toward the hole and drops in. The woman gasps with passion and, as the young stud kisses the club, we see the brand name again in close-up: “Hogan.”

The agency sent me packing.

The next day I was riding Amtrak's Texas Eagle to Fort Worth. I had been given the opportunity to present the idea to the man himself, Mr. Ben Hogan, winner of four U.S. Opens, perhaps the greatest ball striker who ever lived, and the designer of the club with which Sandy had made that timely hole-in-one.

During the trip, I kept thinking about how Hogan was famed during his years on Tour for being a very quiet man. Several golfers reported that the only two words Hogan said during an entire round were while putting, and those of course were: “You're away.”

Having been wined and dined the evening before by the potential producer and director of the commercial (both of whom needed the job as much as I did), I was convinced that my idea was flawless. “Nobel and Pulitzer prize material” was how they put it.

Still, the idea of meeting Hogan terrified me, and I walked into the Hogan complex with no more confidence than I had possessed at age thirteen when I walked into my first office building to see March. Again I was ushered down a hallway lined with golf photos—none featuring horses, I was disappointed to note—and steered through an imposing door to meet the man himself. If my mouth hadn't been so dry, I'd have peed my pants.

I sat down across from his desk, mesmerized by his lined face, reflective of a life's dedication to a single passion. I could see his eyes, flecked with the various victories and defeats of his life in golf. And it seemed to me that the darkness around them was just the shadow of the Greyhound bus that smashed head-on into his car on a lonely West Texas highway so many years before, mangling his body and threatening his ability either to play golf or to ever walk again. And the eyelids, blinking just a little more often than you'd expect, seemed no more than the constant memory of the failed nerve yips that had rendered him unable to putt even two-footers. And yet he had risen above it all, as a champion golfer, as one of the most respected names in the history of the game, and as the designer and manufacturer of a line of golf equipment that his customers have been known to take to their graves.