Miracle on the 17th Green (14 page)

“Son-of-a-bitch hit it too pure!” said Earl appreciatively.

I hope that all of you, at least once in your life, get the chance to walk up the 18th fairway of Pebble Beach with Jack Nicklaus and Raymond Floyd, on a perfect July afternoon, tied for the lead in the final round of the U.S. Senior Open.

It’s a lot of fun.

By the time we reached the green, every spectator who had come out for the final round was standing on the bank between the hole and the clubhouse, and they were going apeshit. Times Square on V-E Day, Woodstock when the rain stopped, and the ticker tape parade for the ’69 Mets must have felt something like this. In all the excitement, I may even have doffed my hat.

The only person who wasn’t delighting in the ecstatic suspense was Jack Nicklaus, who had just hit three perfect golf shots and was away.
After caroming off the stick and cup, Nicklaus’s ball had rolled more than thirty feet to the base of the green, and now as Jack, wearing a yellow cashmere sweater and powder blue slacks, circled his double-breaking uphill putt, surveying it from every angle except from beneath the ground, his face was locked in a deep scowl of concentration.

He really did look like a bear, a very pissed-off bear, who had just caught somebody trying to steal his honey pot. As Nicklaus stalked, the crowd grew quieter and quieter, and when he finally stepped up and rapped it firmly toward the hole, the collective tension of twenty thousand mute, stone-still golf fans dying to explode was almost unbearable.

For the second time in a row, Nicklaus aimed his ball straight and true, and this time when I turned to Earl in despair, he didn’t bother to contradict me.

Like everyone else who was there, he just tilted forward and stared slack-jawed as the ball rolled inexorably toward the hole. With the bloodchilling vividness of an unwelcome flashback, I replayed in my mind Nicklaus’s immortal squat and charge at the Masters in ’86, when he had sunk that huge putt on 15, and raced off the green, his putter shimmering overhead in the dying afternoon light like a cavalry saber.

The putt barreled holeward, dead center all the way. I braced myself for yet another Nicklaus sprint into history, recalling in that gloomy instant the often-forgotten fact that, in addition to being a golfing prodigy, young Jack was the Ohio high school champion in the 100-yard dash.

I had no right to complain. It had been a great ride. Better than great.
But now it was over. The fat lady was about to sing. Jack dropped into his standing crouch. It was in!

Until it screeched to a stop on the lip, half a turn short.

The crowd exhaled.

So did I.

Jack tapped in for par.

My own Titleist 3, the sole survivor of the sleeve Pop had dropped on the grass the week before in Winnetka, was sparkling on the slope five feet off the green, twenty-five feet from the hole, with the green running sharply downhill away from me.

It was the kind of chip you definitely wouldn’t want if you had to make par. But for a golfer on the verge of a nervous breakdown who needed a birdie, it was a chip with possibilities. For one thing, it was physically impossible to leave the ball short.

Choking up — no pun intended — on a 9-iron, I set the blade behind the ball, then gave it the gentlest of flicks. I watched as the ball barely cleared the rough and bounced softly on the green. I watched it steadily put on more and more speed. Then I watched it
dive
like Bugs Bunny into the back of the hole.
At least that’s what I think I saw
.

Everything went sideways. Twenty thousand people leaped toward the sky, and I fell to my knees, where Earl got down with me and gave me a hug I swear I can still feel. For several minutes, the world was nothing but noise.

Finally the roar began to subside, and I stood up and walked to the hole to pluck out my ball. But before I retrieved my ball, I did something I hadn’t done in eighteen holes.

I looked over at Raymond and I stared straight into his eyes.

And I winked.

Now, it’s one thing having to sink a six-footer on the last hole of the U.S. Senior Open to force a play-off with Jack Nicklaus, the holder of twenty major titles and the greatest golfer to ever trod the sod. It’s quite another having to sink a six-footer to avoid losing to Travis McKinley, an unknown rookie, who had never won a single full-length sanctioned event in his life, and six months earlier was squeezing out bad advertising jingles. As Floyd stepped up to his putt, he was fighting more pressure than any competitive psyche should ever be asked to handle.

But if Raymond was feeling the heat, he wasn’t sharing that fact with me or anyone else. As I’d seen so many times before on TV, he strutted up to his ball with brisk, officious little steps, wiggled his butt into a comfortable position, and with his lips slightly pursed, squinted back and forth between the ball and the cup as if he couldn’t quite decide which of the two was a bigger asshole.

He looked composed, and focused, and utterly unflappable. He
looked like a contract killer taking care of business. Then he yanked that six-footer so far left that
it missed the hole by half a foot
.

Suddenly, I had Sarah, Simon, Noah, and Elizabeth in my arms. I was dancing with Pop and then with Earl, and then I think Earl had all of us in his arms. I was shaking hands with Raymond Floyd and Jack Nicklaus, and then I was giving the winning golf ball back to my grandfather. “Thanks for the loan, Pop,” I shouted through the roar. “Now don’t hit this one in a lake.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, beaming even more brightly than usual, “I’ll just use it for chipping.”

And somewhere in the basement of the Pebble Beach clubhouse, a lonely jeweler began scratching “T. McKinley” on a very large silver cup.

Two months later.

Two in the morning.

A dream stirs me from a deep sleep, and I sit up in a large oak bed where, in an odd way, I feel completely comfortable for the first time.

As my eyes adjust to the moonlight, I scan a room that is both familiar and brilliantly new. On one side is an old wooden chest I inherited from my great-grandfather. On the right is a chest and mirror that Sarah got from her grandmother, with inlaid flowers on the doors, and a large lacquer tray resting on top filled with tortoiseshell combs and a pair of antique Russian silver bracelets she has been wearing for more than twenty years.

Although I’d only been gone about six months, I have no trouble
imagining how Odysseus must have felt to be finally back home with Penelope after a ten-year trek through the world.

Careful not to wake Sarah, who lies on her side facing me, the slightest trace of a smile curling the edges of her small mouth, I slide out of bed and wander through my old house, a house my grandfather built, with the help of only a single laborer, the year I was born.

Even though she hasn’t lived at home for half a dozen years now, I visit Elizabeth’s room first. With its fading rock star posters still taped to the wall, and its stuffed animals, it looks like a kind of teenage time capsule, circa 1984. Earnest, irreproachable Elizabeth, who in twenty-seven years never gave us a thing to worry about. Was she ever really a teenager, or did she go directly from infancy to radiology? It occurs to me that I know less about her than my other children. The next morning I will call Elizabeth to schedule a trip to New Haven to try to do something about that.

Then I lean into Simon’s room, and see him peacefully stretched out, three earrings and all, his thin, six-two frame hanging over the edges of his ten-year-old single bed. You can’t love any one of your kids more than another, and I swear to God I don’t. But for better and worse, Simon is me, and my heart feels so connected to his that it doesn’t even have to go out to him. It’s already there.

Lying beside him like a faithful little pup, or better yet, like a not-to-be-underestimated watchdog, his oversized shaggy brown head resting on Simon’s back, is our own great man Noah, who must have been feeling restless himself and wandered to his brother’s room in the middle of the night. Noah, the third and final member of this small generation
of McKinleys. The miracle kid, whose arrival itself was a surprise and who has been startling us in one way or another ever since. But then again,
as Lee said
, and I call him Lee now, even in my mind, we’re all miracles out here, every last one of us.

I carefully pick Noah up, and deposit him back in his own bed, in his own room across the hall. Then I take a seat in the living room, and sit there for a good long while in the dim light, just drinking it all in.

Sarah. Elizabeth. Simon. Noah. Sarah. Elizabeth. Simon. Noah.

I sit there until I catch my own smiling reflection in a large silver bowl on the mantel above the fireplace, and then I wander back to my own bed.

If I’m not the happiest man alive, God bless whoever is.

One last thing.

That following Christmas morning I went out to play golf again.

It wasn’t anything I’d planned on doing, but when I stepped outside that morning to scrape the
Tribune
off the stoop, and saw that even at eight in the morning the temperature was already in the high teens, it just seemed like the right thing to do, if only as a way of showing my gratitude for the whole chain of events last year’s round had set off.

Once again Christmas caught the Chicago winter napping — the mercury continued to soar throughout the morning — and by the time I pulled my big burgundy Beemer into the Creekview Country Club a little past noon — the temperature was a balmy 34 degrees. For some
time, I just stood by my car in the empty lot, stretching and thinking in the steep light. I was like a seal sunning himself on an ice floe.

Finally, I headed to the 17th tee, and as I bent over to thumb my tee into the resistant turf, I caught a wave of déjà vu so powerful it almost knocked me over.

As I started to play, it only grew more intense.

Hadn’t my first drive last year come to rest beside the very same sprinkler head? Didn’t my 5-iron check up on this exact spot on the green? Haven’t I seen that skinny red squirrel somewhere before?

Once again, I stood over a nine-foot eagle putt on the 17th green. Once again I saw the line as clearly as if it had been stenciled on the short grass. Once again I poured it dead center into the back of the cup.

And once again, I played or replayed, however you want to put it, the round of my life. If anything, I played a little better this time out, because after a year on tour and a lot of help from Earl, I wasn’t quite so unnerved by being a few strokes under par.

But this was more than a few strokes under par. Eagles weren’t an endangered species in Chicago that Christmas — I had two in the first four holes — and by the time I made the turn, I knew in my bones I was going to break the course record of 62, a mark I’d been chasing since my grandfather brought me to this course almost half a century ago.

With only 15 and 16 left to play (remember, I started on 17), I was already eleven under par. To break the record, all I had to do was par out. Then I birdied 15. Now all I had to do was bogey 16, and 16 is the shortest and easiest par 4 on the course.