Miracle on the 17th Green (4 page)

Mike Kidd thought I looked forty-two. Hell, I could barely believe
I was fifty myself. I felt more like thirty-seven, or twenty-eight, or fourteen.

But no matter how I looked or felt, there was no denying that time was getting precious. The meter was running. And if I was going to do anything of consequence in this final third or whatever of my life, I had to get on with it.

As in now.

Without further deliberation, I went to an ATM. I transferred three thousand dollars from my savings account to my checking account.

I bought some envelopes, stamps, and sent my three-thousand-dollar Senior Q-School entry fee to the PGA office in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you get fired, isn’t it? Spend three thousand dollars in the first hour just to get the blood flowing.

Then I went to a Greek coffee shop, where I wrote a long, emotional letter to Elizabeth. She had already headed back to New Haven. In the letter, I described the day I was having so far, my plans for the future, but mostly I told Elizabeth how much I loved her. I must have got choked up, because when I finally stood to pay, the waitresses were all looking at me funny.

Even after taking care of all this business, it was still only midafternoon. I caught an early train back to Winnetka. I picked up Noah at nursery school and the two of us went grocery shopping.

By the time Simon and Sarah got home I was ready for them with linguini and clam sauce, garlic bread, and a huge salad with
three different kinds of lettuce, which happens to be one of Sarah’s favorites.

I kept thinking:
I have to talk to Sarah. I need to talk to her
. And the fact that I still hadn’t gave the meal a surreal, Last Supper quality.

“Isn’t anyone wondering,” I asked, as soon as they had a chance to take a couple of bites, “how on the first workday of the new year, I was able to get home so early that Noah and I had time to prepare this incredibly garlicky and delectable repast?”

“Dad did most of it,” Noah piped in, “but I gave him something he called ‘moral support.’”

“Okay, Travis,” Sarah bit, “how is it that you got home so early?”

“Because I got fired, dear,” I said, my voice cracking a little bit. “Would you like some more wine?”

“That would be lovely, Travis, but I didn’t realize getting fired was a cause for celebration.”

I took a deep breath. “You’re right. Getting fired was just a prelude. This modest celebration is for what I have decided to do next.”

“Which is what?” asked Simon.

I let out the breath I’d sucked in. “I’m going to Qualifying School. I’m going to try to make the Senior Tour. I think I have a real good shot.”

“I thought you were done with school,” said Noah.

“It’s a school for grown-ups,” I patiently explained.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Sarah.

I glanced at Sarah, and she gave me a look so piercing it might have been fatal if it weren’t for the slightest hint of a smile.

I had wanted to tell her about Q-School on New Year’s, but the fact that I hadn’t called her this afternoon was undeniable evidence of how bad things had got between us.

“Travis, I have just one question,” she said. “When, as you say, you get through this so-called Qualifying School, where do you want your mail forwarded to?”

Noah spoke up again. “Is that what they said at work, Dad, ‘You’re fired!’ like in the cartoons?”

“Actually, the exact words were ‘Travis, we’re going to let you go.’ …
Sarah, I tried to tell you
,” I said to her.

“Were you asking them if you could go somewhere?” asked Noah.

“No, that’s just the way they put it. It’s called a euphemism.”

“A upamism,” tried Noah.

Sarah got up from the dinner table and left the room, while I continued to talk things over with the boys, answering their questions as best I could.

I explained, mainly to Noah since Simon was already pretty familiar with the concept, that Q-School was the name of this huge annual tournament in which the top eight finishers get to play for one year on the Senior Tour, a series of pro tournaments held all over the country almost every week for players fifty years and older. Most of the spots in this tour, I said, automatically go to players like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino, guys who were stars on the regular tour, but that every year there are these eight spots up for grabs — that theoretically, at least — anyone can win. Both of them lit up at the thought of their dad playing with the pros, particularly
Simon. It was as if the two of us were crawling out of our malaise together.

But Sarah and I apparently had nothing more to discuss, and that seemed to say it all.

Sad. It’s going around these days, isn’t it?

The next afternoon, my ninety-two-year-old grandfather, Edwin Joseph McKinley, stood in the middle of the 12th fairway of the Creekview Country Club.

He dropped three Titleists onto the cold sod.

In deference to the 35-degree chill, he wore a red flannel shirt buttoned all the way up against the loose folds of his neck, a heavy cardigan and corduroys, a wool cap, boots, and a tan workcoat, like the kind he wore when he and a friend built my parents’ house, the house I was born in, fifty-one years before.

About forty yards away, directly between us and the small green, was a large leafless oak.

“All right,” said Pop with a gravelly voice worn thin but still full of purpose, “you got two eighteen to the front edge. On the first one, I want you to slice the ball around the tree.”

I pulled out a 2-iron, took a deep breath and a brisk waggle, and hit a hard low cut that caught the right edge of the green.

“That’ll play,” said Pop. “Now, a hook.”

With the same club and same basic swing, I drew the ball around the tree. Since my grandfather first introduced me to the game forty-two years ago, he has been my only teacher. He gave me my swing and my game and a great many other things at least as valuable. “There’s no such thing as a straight ball” was one of his basic tenets. “If you’re not shaping the shot, you’re not playing golf.”

If my relationship with my father, who died three years ago of a heart attack, was always complex and unsatisfying, my relationship with my grandfather has always been blood simple. I adored him, and he got a kick out of being adored. I loved everything about him and still do. His laugh, his scent, the touch of his skin, that he was a carpenter and a mechanic and never graduated from high school, and that he loved to fight.

The oldest brother and de facto bodyguard for an enormous farm family of eleven kids, my grandfather is both the toughest and the gentlest of men. Although in his later years he began shrinking and shedding pounds in bunches, as if his body, guided by an intelligence of its own, were streamlining itself for old age, in his prime he was about five feet nine and weighed 235 pounds and was the strongest man in Winnetka.

My younger son, Noah, has a fixation with action figures, particularly X-Men like Cyclops and Wolverine and Metalhead, and as a
young boy my grandfather filled a similar need for me. I can describe in great detail each of his unscheduled bouts in a pugilistic career that started when he was eleven and ended in his late forties, but a characteristic tale was when as a twenty-year-old on his first foray into Chicago, in his brand-new Model A Ford, a cabbie, irked by his hesitant driving, yelled at him, “Go back to the farm!”

Since that was exactly where he’d come from, and where he would soon return, the suggestion was particularly nettlesome, although the driver would probably have met the same fate had he shouted something as generic as “I haven’t got all day, pal!”

You see, not only is my grandfather a terrible driver, he brooks no criticism of it, from anyone but a blood relative.

So Pop put his car in park, walked back to the cabbie, and knocked him out through the window.

As a rail-thin, bespectacled, almost emaciated little kid, whose distant father seemed to have no discernible connection to the physical world, I latched on to these stories like a precious inheritance, often prompting him to retell this one or that one, and after every retelling my grandfather would tilt his head back and laugh, with a delight that was as pure and righteous and essentially modest as the snow that still covered this course in patches.

As a golf teacher, Pop was demanding. He introduced me to the game at eight, but wouldn’t let me play my first round until I’d spent three years hitting balls on the driving range, and practicing on and around the putting green. And he always began our literally thousands
of rounds together with the same terse but merry challenge — “No gimmes. No mulligans. No bullshit. Let’s play golf.”

But he always made it clear that his stringency was based on respect for both the game and me, and that if we went about it in the right and thorough manner, there was no limit to what I might be able to accomplish.

I suspect that whatever confidence I have as a person in this world is based directly on what, as a very young man on this very course, he gave me the opportunity to earn.

“The third shot is easy,” he said. “Just hit the ball over the goddamned tree.”

For a second, I was so overcome with affection for this nerveless old coot, I couldn’t see the ball. How many more of these playing lessons would I have? Would this be the last? Time, as I said, was getting more and more precious. Although I can’t say that’s why my 2-iron crashed into the upper branches.

“Pop,” I said, “I got fired yesterday.”

“Well, you better learn how to hit the ball a little higher then.”

“You’re right about that,” I said, “because I’m going to try to play the Senior Tour. You don’t think I’m fooling myself, do you?”

“I think you’ve been fooling yourself for thirty years,” he said. “I always thought you should try to play the tour, but your parents thought I was crazy. Too risky, they thought, so I stayed out of it.”

“You don’t think it’s too late?”

“Christ, no. It’s about time you try to make an honest living.”

“Things haven’t been too good with Sarah either,” I said, figuring I might as well get it all out on the table.

“Could be related,” Pop said. “A guy who hates his job isn’t going to be too charming at home.”

If this were a movie, and hopefully it will be soon, the producers would buy an uptempo song like “Taking Care of Business, Working Overtime” and show a two-minute montage of me practicing furiously, progressing from utter ineptitude to a very tentative competence, as I prepared myself and my game for the Senior Tour Q-School. Sort of a charmingly geriatric version of Rocky sucking eggs and running the steps of the Philadelphia City Hall.

I didn’t have time for that.

Two days later, I threw some clothes into an old suitcase, along with my birth certificate and a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. I grabbed my sticks and golf shoes and a handful of Sinatra and Tom Petty tapes.

Sarah drove me to O’Hare, and even gave me a kiss (on the cheek)
before I passed through the metal detector. The night before we finally had an actual conversation, and I tried to explain how important it was for me to try this. I can’t say she was happy about it, and she clearly wasn’t enthused about the prospect of supporting our family if it didn’t pan out, something she essentially felt she was doing already.