Miracle on the 17th Green (11 page)

At some point close to a year ago, Sarah had mostly stopped talking to me. In the beginning she insisted that nothing was the matter, then eventually conceded there was. And now in the past couple of months, she was talking about the possibility of a divorce. All without really telling me why.

Eventually, I had no choice but to conclude that the reason Sarah had no interest in talking was that, in her mind, it was already over.

“Why does this have to happen, Sarah?” I asked her now.

“I don’t know, Travis. I’ve asked myself the same question.”

“Well, when did it happen?”

“Travis …” She began to say something, then looked down at the counter and started to cry.

“I’ve changed,” I said. “I couldn’t change before, working at Burnett. I didn’t even understand why. All I knew was that it felt all wrong.”

“Oh come on, Travis.”

“Sarah, I know I’ve been a drag for a while. I know I let you down sometimes.”

“After we had Noah, and even that didn’t cheer you up, I figured we never meant that much to you all along.”

“Sarah, until that night I got through Qualifying School, I didn’t know myself how unhappy I was. But it’s not because I didn’t love you and the kids. I’m sure I seemed like this ungrateful wretch, but unfortunately having a great wife and wonderful children doesn’t make you love yourself any more. It just makes you love them.”

“It’s too late,” she said. “I’m really sorry. Anyway, I’m not sure I would know what to do with this new Travis. Maybe I’m setting you free.”
“Sarah, I don’t want to be free. I want a ball and chain, and a pick-proof lock.”

“You’ve always had such a romantic notion of marriage, Travis,” said Sarah, half smiling through her tears.

“Sarah, you’re it for me,” I pleaded. “You always have been. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t watch you get old and wrinkled.”

“I’m already old and wrinkled.”

“Like hell you are,” I said. “I want to be able to look over at you and remind you how beautiful you are, knowing I’ve been through the whole thing with you.”

“You don’t always get what you want, Travis.”

“Can’t we try something, Sarah?”

“It’s just too late, Travis,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t. I really do.”

And then Sarah went up to bed alone.

Later that morning, my ninety-three-year-old grandfather — he had celebrated his birthday two weeks before by shooting a tidy 98 — stood in the middle of the 12th fairway of the Creekview Country Club and dropped three Titleists onto the rich, green sod.

There may be nothing much worse than a Chicago winter, but there’s nothing much better than a Chicago July, and that morning was a fine example of the species, with the temperature in the low eighties and just enough breeze to keep the air on its toes.

So much had changed since I’d been here before, and perhaps to remind me of that fact, Pop had walked me out to the very same spot we had visited on our last playing lesson. The fairway that had been hard
and muddy back then was now covered with thick, luscious grass. The huge oak some forty yards away, which had served as a leafless obstacle, was now full and green and shimmering.

“Pop,” I said, “Sarah wants a divorce.”

“Well, Travis, what do you want?” he asked, as if I still had a choice in the matter.

“I want us to stay together.”

“You tell her that?”

“Yup.”

“You’ve done about all you can, then. How love gets doled out is one of the great mysteries of the planet, but one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t force someone to love you. It’s a little bit like chasing birdies. Wanting them too much only makes it worse.”

“Pop, I’m feeling like a fraud out there on the tour,” I confessed.

“Travis, where does this come from, this picking at everything until you find the tin under the gold? There’s nothing fake about you, Travis. If anything, you’re too goddamn real for your own good.”

“So what do you want me to hit, Pop?” I finally asked, looking down at the three balls he’d dropped.

“I don’t want you to hit anything, Travis,” he said, his eyes sparkling with a light that remains utterly impervious to his years. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got nothing left to prove to me or Sarah or your father or anybody fucking else. All I want you to do is pick up those balls, and play with them at the Open next week, and I want you to enjoy yourself for Christ’s sake, because I’ll tell you one thing, I’m going
to enjoy watching you. And by the way, Travis, there isn’t a goddamn thing wrong with your swing.”

“Pop, you haven’t even seen me hit a ball.”

“I don’t have to.” And with that, Pop turned and headed to the clubhouse. “The lesson’s over, Travis,” he said. “Let’s go have a drink.”

Three hours later, I was standing at the corner of Commonwealth and Baxter in Chicago, my hands trembling like an old rummy, and a ridiculous smile plastered across my face.

Although the evidence was overwhelming, I could still barely believe what I had just done.

As always, my visit with Pop had greatly improved my frame of mind, but as hard as he’d tried, he had not come close to steering my mind away from Sarah. And on my way back to O’Hare to catch a flight to San Francisco for the U.S. Senior Open, I made a slight detour, and did something that under the circumstances might reasonably be interpreted as legally insane.

And yet for some reason, as I stood on the sidewalk in the lovely afternoon sunshine, elegant shoppers trotting briskly past me in their
designer dresses and suits, I had no desire to undo it. In fact, what I had done was so over-the-top that it gave me a kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing you’ve done about all you can. After all, as both Pop and Sarah had pointed out, “not everything is up to me.”

So what exactly had I gone and done that left me feeling so out of my element on that Chicago street corner that I might as well have been naked?

I’d like to tell you. I truly would. But I just can’t.

It’s too embarrassing.

The full, otherworldly, music-of-the-spheres significance of being at Pebble Beach and playing in the U.S. Senior Open didn’t sink in until moments before the first round on Thursday.

That was when Earl slid up behind me on the mother of all practice greens, slapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Travis, let’s go to work.”

Till then, I had been distractedly lagging forty-footers across the huge lightning-fast ellipse, as mesmerized as any tourist by the rugged coastal grandeur of the place, and the brilliant godlike Northern California light that gave every surface a metallic sheen.

Now, as we worked our way through the crowd, my legs forgot how to walk, and as I frantically tried to remaster the basic right-foot, left-foot concept, I thought of James Cagney being led on that long last walk from the Big House to the gas chamber in
Angels with Dirty Faces
.

I’d only been more nervous on a golf course once. That was the afternoon, forty-two summers before, when after three years of beating balls, my grandfather finally decided I could play an actual round, and took me to Hubbard Heights, the more threadbare of Winnetka’s two public courses.

At the Heights, the first tee is set up alongside a large Italian restaurant-bar that the blue-collar regulars have turned into their own country club, as exclusive in its own way as Augusta National, and that afternoon the large concrete terrace was filled with a rowdy crowd of plumbers and carpenters that suddenly quieted as I stepped up to my first real golf shot. I took a shallow breath and poured my cut-down driver straight as a die 140 yards up the rocky fairway, eliciting appreciative hoots and whistles from the peanut gallery, and a warm “I guess you’re ready” from my grandfather.

I guess I could have used Pop’s soothing influence once again, because on my first official drive at Pebble Beach, all I could muster was a weak push that left me in the first cut of rough, 185 yards from the green. But I was just as thrilled with it as with that first drive at Hubbard Heights.

My playing partners the first two days were Jim Colbert and South Africaner Simon Hobday. Colbert, who has never been out of the top five on the Senior Tour money list, is a granite-jawed, flat-topped, ex–football player, whose on-course demeanor falls somewhere between chilly and downright grumpy. Hobday, who wears a huge black Crocodile Dundee hat and a Yosemite Sam mustache, is warm and outgoing. But they both play Big Guy macho golf.

“Look at those two crackers strutting up the fairway,” said Earl, “they think their balls are made out of brass.” I know it’s not the fault of Colbert and Hobday that they happen to have been brought into this world big, beefy, and bouncy, but as someone who at six two has never weighed in at more than 151 pounds, I’ve always competed my hardest against wide-bodies. As Earl suggested, I went to work.

The Open is one of only four Senior events that have a halfway cut, so the pressure is on from the first hole. At the start of the week, my only goal was to play all four days. “Pars will do just fine,” Earl kept reminding me, and although I was all over the place with my driver and irons, I just kept grinding away.

All the hours I’d been putting into my short game were starting to pay off. I missed ten greens, but I got up and down on eight of them. Offsetting the two bogeys with one birdie gave me a one-over-par 73. That was one better than Colbert, one worse than Hobday, and right about the middle of the field.

The best news of the first day was my putting. I was seeing the line again, and it helped me sink a handful of nasty six-footers to save par.

After the round, I went to the range and tried to straighten out a tee-ball, whose unguided flights had taken me to some of the least scenic parts of America’s most scenic golf course.

“I can’t believe people are actually going to stand and watch me hit balls,” I told Earl as a large crowd began to form behind me.

“Don’t worry, Hogan, they’re not here for you,” Earl quickly informed me.

I looked over Earl’s shoulder and saw Herman, Lee Trevino’s enormous
caddy, setting up shop in the spot next door, and then Mex himself, his huge grin bursting his tanned, leathery face into long straight lines.