Fast Greens (6 page)

“Good. Stay that way!”

Being pissed, unfortunately, was no help on number two. Sandy made a decent chip to the green, but he still had a four-footer for par. When Beast bent over to repair the deep hole his own tee shot had made in the green, he made a wisecrack about the divot reminding him of his ex-wife.

“You and every other two-handicapper in town,” Sandy told him.

In a flash Beast was eye-to-eye with the source of the insult. I thought they might swat it out with their putter blades like samurai, but they just continued to stare. A fly buzzed around their heads, and still they stared. Long after Sandy should have turned tail and run, he
still
stared. And then I noticed their feet: one of Beast's oversized shoes was trodding heavily on one of Sandy's size nines. Sandy couldn't back off because somewhere under that massive steel-clad hoof at least one sharp spike was impaling him to the ground. Something needed doing.

“Beast,” said Fromholz dryly, “I think that guy's trying to get your goat. Now let's play some golf.”

The big foot came up slowly, like heavy machinery, and as Sandy's stare abated I realized that his face had just been frozen in pain. He limped away, two spike holes in the toe of his shoe, both showing spots of blood, bright red against the white leather.

Beast cackled a similar warning to the rest of the group.

“You guys think he's funny, don't you? Well, see how funny this is.”

Replacing his ball on his mark, Beast putted out of turn. This was just the kind of rash action that Sandy had hoped to push him into. But that's where the plan went astray; Beast knocked the putt right in the hole.

“With seven holes to play,” said Fromholz, “the team of Fowler and Beast are one up.”

“Shit!” said Sandy.

“Shit has been mentioned!” added Fromholz.

8

Shit was Sandy's one and only cuss word. He also had a weakness for Tammy Wynette music and double orders of chicken-fried steak. His girlfriend's name was Darla. Like any true golfer's gal, she didn't play the game herself. One set of heroic feats per household, please. Otherwise dinner would never end.

I'd met him while caddying in the quarterfinals of the Texas State Amateur. To avoid playing Beast in an early round, Sandy had entered in West Texas. He'd asked around the San Angelo Country Club pro shop for a good caddie who worked cheap and they referred him to me. Since I was only twelve, he doubted my abilities but found the price just right.

Even at twelve I took the job seriously, unlike a lot of boobs who carried the bag backwards on their shoulder and cast their shadow on the hole when tending the flag. Partially guided—I like to think—by my expertise on the local greens, Sandy won his match five up with four to go.

In the quarterfinals at the Midland Country Club, he'd drawn a local oil-money favorite named Preston Deforest-Hunt, Jr. Having played at the course daily since he was seven years old, Junior knew it well enough to be a formidable opponent, even for a much better golfer. Unfortunately though, Junior was the occasional victim of a serious duck hook, the result of having learned the old-style hickory-shaft swing from his aging and doting father. A duck hook to a serious golfer, in case you don't know, is the golf equivalent of a Baptist preacher developing Tourette's syndrome, that dread and little understood neurological malady that makes one involuntarily spout the foulest profanities and bark like a dog. I once heard a respected golfer-slash-doctor claim that the only cure for either was a double dose of Thorazine, a shot of Old Crow, and a glass of Budweiser. Simultaneously.

Deforest-Hunt Senior was one rich oil-pumping son of a buck, but he had yet to find the right golf professional to cure his own infernal hook. To make matters worse, he'd taught his own weak game to his young son. Then having handicapped the kid almost beyond recovery, Dad had pinned all his hopes on Junior winning a prestigious tournament like the state amateur. So on the day of the match with Sandy, Junior was clearly out for blood.

Carrying Sandy's clubs, I was astounded at the consistently high quality of my employer's golf. Throughout the round he ignored the unlikely means that Junior utilized to get the ball in the hole. Sandy didn't panic, didn't choke, and didn't get demoralized by the miraculous recoveries from certain doom that his opponent hit on the odd holes or the long putts that he snaked in on the even ones.

“Well!” said Junior in his pseudo-British accent. “I
have
been everywhere on this course dozens of times.”

Sandy ignored all this, negotiated the course with long drives and crisp irons and trusted in the fact that, since he was the better golfer, he was bound to win. He was two down with two holes to go when Deforest-Hunt Senior showed up to watch the product of his loins and inheritor of his own faulty golf skills kick some lower-class butt. But Dad's very presence reminded his offspring of all those early golf lessons, and Junior suddenly remembered how to duck hook the ball. Sandy won the last two holes and the playoff on number one.

The semifinals were at Fort Worth's famed Colonial, a long trip on the train that still carried passengers twice a week east and west from San Angelo. Jewel had a teacher's seminar that weekend, but put her trust in me by letting me go alone (with Sandy meeting me at the station in Fort Worth).

I didn't get a chance to study the course because the train arrived only the evening before, but it mattered little, as Sandy's opponent was a stiff, unable to work the ball under the big oaks (now dead but not forgotten) that used to overhang Colonial's greens. On the way to winning seven and six, Sandy taught me more about golf than I'd ever known there was to learn.

He taught me how to read the grain of the greens by the angle of the sun and the cut at the cup, how to tell the differences between bent grass (slick putting but lots of bite) and Bermuda (slow putting but bounding approaches), how not to be fooled by the mower cut, and on short putts how to listen for the ball to drop before moving my head. He told me to chip uphill with less loft and downhill with more, and never to hit a driver from the fairway when the grass is leaning toward the ball and away from the green.

Sandy could name all of the great Texican golfers and he occasionally did so when walking down the fairway, as if he were in a trance: “Guldahl Nelson Hogan, Mangrum Thompson Trevino, Sanders Zaharias Rawls…” chanting their names over and over like a mantra.

“Who was Trevino?” I asked.

“
Is
Trevino,” Sandy corrected. “Who
is
Trevino.”

“Okay. Who is Trevino?”

“The guy who taught me how to fade the ball.”

“A fade is easy,” I told him.

“Not a slice, Brainiac, a fade,” answered Sandy. “There's a big difference. A fade is intentional; a slice is a curse.”

According to Sandy, the reasons why Lone Star golfers win so many tournaments include the diversity of the courses in the huge state, the ability to play in the constant coastal and western winds, and having to putt on both bent and Bermuda greens. More important, they have that infernal sense of moral and physical superiority that's brainwashed into all Texans at an early age, and a Texan's commitment to a life's pursuit that doesn't take place behind a desk or in a store.

In learning all this, I had no doubt that one day Sandy would join the ranks of those chanted greats himself. And he saved the best for last, finally informing me that he'd also learned to play the game by caddying. So there was hope for my game yet. I was in caddie heaven.

But my elation was deflated somewhat when Sandy returned to Austin for the finals at Morris Williams, a course named for the most charismatic and heroic Texas golfer of his day. Morris Williams was a Harvey Penick student who was the only player in history to win the Texas Junior, Texas State Amateur, and Texas PGA championships, and he did it in one twelve-month period. Sadly, his career was cut short when he was killed while flying a training mission during the Korean War.

Knowing this, unfortunately, was no help in convincing Sandy to take me to caddie at the finals.

“It's too far from San Angelo, and there's no train,” Sandy explained. “Plus you don't know the course.”

True, but not the real reasons I didn't get to go. Just as Sandy had known in his previous matches that he was the better golfer and would certainly win, he also knew that Beast was the better golfer and would beat Sandy in the finals. He simply didn't want me to see him lose to Beast. In a way, I suppose I didn't want to see it either. I had never seen Sandy lose.

Now I'd ended up a traitor, caddying for his archenemy, the evil Beast. Luckily, Sandy carried only one grudge and it wasn't against me. He'd proven that by picking me up long before dawn and fueling me up for the big match with breakfast at the Big Wheel truck stop. As we made the drive through the hills to the course in his beat-up Plymouth Valiant, we talked about everything but his chances that day.

When the early hour overcame me, I leaned my head against the window and watched sleepily as the black sky was imposed upon by a slender turquoise wedding band of dawning light, creeping ever upward from beyond the hills in the east.

I was jolted to attention when Sandy pumped hard on his brakes to avoid hitting a red-tailed fox that scurried across our headlights and off the road.

Wow, a fox! I thought. That's a good sign.

“Almost hit him,” Sandy said. “That would've been bad luck.”

I glanced at Sandy, his face lit up green by the dashboard lights. He looked spooked.

9

Beast was to Sandy as a timber wolf is to a clever circus dog. Back when Beast was still called Carl, his old man owned a driving range, which is to say Pop drank a lot of beer and collected the money while young Carl picked up the balls. When you're in your preteen years and picking up and washing ten thousand golf balls a day, retrieving an extra thousand balls you hit yourself isn't much worse. So Carl grooved his swing by hitting balls till his hands bled.

When Carl was fifteen, Pop went out in true white-trash style, going on a three-day stinker and taking a folding buck knife in the gut (unfortunately, it was unfolded at the time). The bank took the driving range and Carl took to hustling golf for a living. No matter how much money he won, and it was plenty, he couldn't escape his trailer-trash heredity and always lived in a cheap motel. And no matter how much he lost (he often played the best at Hundred-Dollar Low Ball with equal side bets on greenies and sandies), he never carried his own bag. He'd picked up so many range balls as a kid, he didn't even like to pick 'em up out of the hole. A caddie I knew once followed him at a safe distance around the Austin Country Club where Carl was playing a solo practice round. My pal picked up eighteen brand-new Titleists that Carl had left in the holes.

In typical Texas-schoolboy style, Carl got passing grades, despite the fact that he rarely attended class; the schools needed all the winning athletes they could muster. Thanks to the curve of the grade and to some nifty work with a one-iron, Carl was medalist in the state high school championship as a junior, but he was disqualified for gambling on the tournament. To make matters worse, that meant he lost the bet he'd placed on himself. Maybe it was the bookies who turned him in. In any event, the treasured first prize was passed to the second-place finisher, Sandy Bates. I heard Sandy threw the trophy into a pond at Morris Williams. He knew who'd won.

A couple of years later, in Knoxville, Nashville or Gatlinburg—one of those faceless, reporterless stops on the Southern beans-and-rice tour—Carl met a golf groupie with substantial backspin and bite of her own. It must have been lust at first sight, for after winning his first tournament against the semi-big boys, Carl married her on the eighteenth green. Not long after, so the story goes, Carl's new wife started playing midnight driving range with a number of other golf pros who began to refer to her as the Dragon Lady (supposedly in tribute to her fiery talents with lips and tongue).

It was the Dragon Lady who rechristened big Carl as Le Beast. Apparently they were quite a team. If Beast was in the finals of a match-play tourney, she'd slip him a late-night mickey, sneak over to the opponent's motel room, and screw
his
lightbulbs in and out all night long. Beast, having slept like a baby, never understood why he was winning all those final rounds against tired guys with limp putters, till one of them—desperate to get back in the match—confronted the jealous husband with the bare-assed truth.

It was a rare day in the history of match-play golf. Since neither of the players in the final eighteen actually completed the round, the winner of the consolation match was awarded the five hundred dollar first-place prize. Beast was resting comfortably in the county jail and his opponent was in guarded condition at the local hospital. The other guy's memory lapses cleared up after a few weeks, but his hearing was never the same. Beast had bitten off much of the guy's right ear but, lucky for them both, the crowd pulled him off before he could get the other one.

 

 

10

“One up,” said Roscoe as we waited on the third tee for the greenskeeper to finish mowing the fairway. “Wanna press the bet?”

“You seem pretty confident,” answered March.

“Confident? Hell, we gonna kick your butts! You
and
your pretty-boy partner.”

“In that case,” said March, pulling a sheaf of folded documents from his golf bag, “let's bet the whole kit 'n' caboodle.” March handed the papers to Fromholz and the girth of our circle tightened considerably.

“What's that?” asked Sandy.

Fromholz cocked his head and held the papers in front of his good eye to look them over.

“That, Miss Curious, is the deed to a golf course, a clubhouse, a house, a barn, and some very old and tired oil wells.”