Miracle on the 17th Green (10 page)

“In all my years,” proclaimed Earl, apropos of nothing, almost as if he were talking to himself or had suddenly decided to initiate a conversation with the setting sun, “I have never observed anything quite so sorry, so miserable, and downright pathetic as a human being in love.”

After Nashville, the tour had headed to Phoenix for a week, and on our first evening in Arizona, I was sitting beside Earl on the terrace of the Hilton, wondering what Sarah was doing at that moment and where, if anywhere, I stood in her affections.

“Is that a fact?” I asked my spiritual and physical adviser.

“Let’s take you, for example,” he said.

“All right,” I obliged. “Seeing as I’m not too busy at the moment.”

“What do you see right now?” Earl asked.

“The sun going down, and the floor of the desert looking as if it’s on fire,” I answered.

“Would you say it’s a pretty view, Travis?”

“Breathtaking, Earl.”

“And how ’bout the weather? How would you describe that?”

“Pretty damn pleasant,” I replied.

“Pleasant my ass,” said Earl. “It’s perfect. Christ, it’s so perfect, I can’t even feel the air on my skin. And what’s that in your hand?”

“An ice-cold Budweiser. Can I get you one?”

“I’m fine, but thanks. How ’bout your bank account? How’s that doing?”

“I don’t mean to be crass, Earl, but it’s six digits healthier than it was three days ago.”

“Thank God for rain,” said Earl.

“Crops got to grow,” I agreed.

“And what is it exactly that you do for a living?”

“Earl, I play golf.”

“Let me get this straight. You get paid — handsomely apparently — to play golf on the most beautiful courses in the country.”

“It’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it?”

“So here you are nursing a cold one, taking in one of the more spectacular vistas on the planet, one hundred thirty-five gees accruing interest daily, following an improvement in your circumstances so extreme some might suspect God is playing favorites, and
how do you feel?
”

“Miserable,” I said.

“I rest my motherfucking case. And yes, I will take that beer now.”

Four weeks to the day after my terrace chat with the duke of Earl, I stepped up to the first tee at the Nationwide Championship in Alfaretta, Georgia. I was a changed man.

How could it be otherwise? In a matter of months, I had shed my old life as an advertising copywriter and been reincarnated as a pro athlete. First, I made the Senior Tour. Then I won on it. I earned more money in two days than I had in two years. In the process, I had all but assured myself a second year on tour, earned an invitation to the U.S. Senior Open, and given myself a chance to vie not just for dollars but for a small piece of history.

Let me tell you the effect of all this fine fortune on my game and head.

I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t putt. I couldn’t hit my irons. And I couldn’t chip. If I left anything out, I couldn’t do that, either.

In a month, I went from consistently breaking 70 to religiously topping 80. My previous three finishes were last, last, and last —
detect a pattern?
— and my scores at the Cadillac NFL Classic — 83, 86, 89 — may long live in infamy as the highest three-round total in the fourteen-year history of the Senior Tour. After my win in Nashville, I didn’t suffer a letdown or a slump, I went into free fall.

My state of mind was about the same — a Molotov cocktail of depression and anxiety. If the yips is the nervous affliction that undermines the putting stroke, then I was suffering from a much more lethal and pervasive condition that sabotages every mental and bodily function. I started shaving with an electric razor for fear I would accidentally do myself serious harm.

All the most noted swing doctors paid house calls. David Leadbetter, acclaimed for his work with Nick Faldo and Nick Price, prescribed a complete overhaul by which I would come to make my torso and not my legs the “engine” of my swing. Butch Harmon squinted at me on the range. Jim McLean analyzed every millimeter of my swing on videotape. And the Irish mystic Mac O’Grady gave me a two-syllable mantra to repeat at the top of my backswing. I’d tell you what it is, but I paid two thousand dollars for it.

Every day I began to feel more and more like the label I had been given in that article Trevino had referred to — “the Miracle of Q-School.” A sham. This year’s impostor. A party crasher. I thought I might become the first professional golfer to ever leave the tour — out of embarrassment.

No doubt I was mentally exhausted and overgolfed. Try playing golf
forty-five days in a row, after playing twice a week for thirty years. But more than anything else, I was homesick. I missed my family. I missed Noah and Simon and Elizabeth. I missed Pop and my tick-infested pooch. And I missed Sarah more than I ever had in my life, because, by this cruel twist of fate, I seemed to have lost her just as I’d found something to share with her.

Yet as much as I had wanted to go home, I had also been dreading it, because I feared that the only thing Sarah had to give me was even more conclusive bad news.

What if after thinking it over quietly and objectively for a few weeks, she had come to the inescapable conclusion that she was better off without me? If that was her decision, I wasn’t sure I would ever recover from it. On the other hand, my fears were so bad, reality couldn’t be any worse.

It was time to talk to Sarah, no matter what she had to say. It was more than time to hug my kids. It was time to go home, even if in some way it turned out to be for the last time.

On Monday morning, as I drove my rental car out of the airport, from O’Hare to Winnetka, there was no giddy sense of excitement and anticipation.

There was no Sinatra in the tape player singing “Come Fly with Me.” There was only silence and dread.

Sometime that evening I was going to have what might end up being my last genuine conversation with Sarah, and that possibility was too awful to consider, let alone accept.

As I pulled onto my street, Old North Winnetka Road, I felt like a fifty-year-old Adam, sadly looking over his old neighborhood one last time. Every familiar detail, from the circular driveway on the Lampke house to the speed bump in front of the Crasswellers’, felt like something I was about to lose.

When I called Saturday night and told Sarah I was coming home for a visit, she was hardly enthusiastic. She had to work Monday, she said, and wouldn’t be back till late — but Elizabeth, who was visiting for the weekend, immediately decided to stay a couple of extra days. And Simon and Noah announced that they’d gladly skip their soccer practice and day camp.

Nevertheless, on my flight and drive home, I thought mainly of Sarah. I can’t explain why, unless it was because I had come to feel as undeserving of the kids as of Sarah, but I didn’t believe that my children were going to miss me that much. Like a lot of fathers, I had begun to see myself as the family’s one weak and dispensable link. I half-expected to walk in my door and find every trace of me removed from the shelves.

Instead I found Simon, Noah, and Elizabeth waiting in the front yard, holding a sheet with painted letters reading “Home of Travis McKinley, BellSouth Classic Champion!!!”

Man, what a cool sight that was. And when I stepped out of the car, Noah jumped into my arms and wrapped himself so tightly around my neck, I could barely breathe. Even Simon and Elizabeth hugged me in a way they never had before.

But it wasn’t just the physical wave of affection. It was the way they looked at me. They were trying to make something so goddamn clear that even a fool like myself couldn’t misread it, or turn it inside out.
They loved me. They missed me. They were proud of me
.

I was proud of what I had accomplished, too, but lately I’d been so desperate about Sarah, it had lost a lot of its meaning. But to them, this
whole thing had been a pure kick and more. “Dad, I always told my friends you were this stud athlete,” said Simon, “but no one believed me. Now it’s not up to them whether they want to buy it or not.”

Even Elizabeth was gushing. “I swear to God,” she said, “you’re the hero of the entire faculty of the Yale Medical School. You’d think you’d won the Nobel Prize for medicine the way the head of the department treats me now. In fact, that would be a big step down in his eyes. Maybe it’s because they all play golf, and they suck, but all they do is ask about you.”

“You’re cool, Dad,” said Noah into my neck. He had still barely loosened his grip, and in two days would let me put him down for a total of ten minutes.

That day was one of the best of my life. It made me realize that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to lose them. It was also a revelation. I’d never understood how desperately kids want to feel proud of their father. It made me think my little run could have a bigger impact on them than me, by letting them know it’s all right to do what they want. They don’t have to resign themselves to some soul-destroying nine-to-five they hate. There are possibilities. I know they’ve learned some of this from Sarah already, but they had to see it from me, too. It’s hard to explain.

I don’t know how aware they were of the troubles between Sarah and me. Elizabeth and Simon must have known about them. Maybe they all did, because the push for us to do some kind of family activity came as much from them as me.

That’s how we ended up going swimming at the gorge, one of those
perfect anonymous little swimming holes at the end of a country road on the very outskirts of town, where I’d taken Elizabeth and Simon at least once every summer, and which had assumed a mythological status in the big bright dome of Noah’s.

We got to the gorge at three on a perfect July afternoon, and for about two hours we had it completely to ourselves.

The water was chilly and quick, but the sun on our backs, as we sat on the half-submerged boulders strewn across the thirty-foot-wide stream, was strong enough to keep us from getting too cold.

Simon, wearing his beloved Oakley shades and the light bouncing off his earrings, crouched on a stone the farthest out.

A couple yards away perched Elizabeth, like some brainy Ivy League mermaid, her beautiful brown hair pulled straight down her narrow back.

Noah sat on my lap in his life preserver, on a wide stone ten feet from the shore. For one memorable stretch, we just smiled at one another, and no one said a word, the only sound water rushing over flat stones.

“So how’s that baby doing?” I asked Sarah. She had just arrived home from the hospital. I was waiting nervously in the kitchen.

“Which one?” asked Sarah, only meeting my gaze for a second. She dropped her things on a chair and poured herself a glass from the half-empty bottle of white wine in the refrigerator.

“The first baby born in Winnetka this year,” I said, “the New Year’s baby.”

“Oh, she’s doing fine,” said Sarah. “She’s got this tiny pierced nose. She’s Indian.”

Noah had finally passed out at 10:00 P.M., Elizabeth and Simon at about 12:30, but Sarah didn’t arrive home until almost two in the morning. Although it was possible some hospital emergency had kept her that late, it seemed more likely that she had stayed at work so long because she was dreading this conversation as much as I was.