Picked-Up Pieces (16 page)

GOLF

F
IVE SHORT YEARS
after Alan Shepard, swinging an improvised 6-iron, took a one-handed poke at a golf ball on the moon, space suits were developed which permitted a nice full shoulder turn and the Vardon overlapping grip. The next year, 1977, the first Semi-Invitational Tournament was scheduled, under the joint sponsorship of NASA, ALCOA, M.I.T., and Bob Hope. An elimination tournament was held under simulated conditions in the Mojave Desert, and the refined field of thirty pros, plus twenty invited celebrities, was lifted from Cape Kennedy on the Monday following the Azalea Open. A maximum of three woods per bag was allowed, mallet-head putters were forbidden, and caddies were expected to double. Two modules, of the “bus” type developed by Lockheed to transport the football teams matched in the previous January’s Crater Classic, cast off from the mother ship Thursday morning, for a tee-off time of 9 a.m. Players grumbled of sleeplessness and the failure of officials to provide for a practice round, but praised the dry, open fairways and evidently relished the absence of wind and water hazards. “We’ll tear this sucker apart,” Lee Trevino’s voice crackled confidently across the vastness of space.

Robert Trent Jones, working from detailed relief maps of the lunar surface, had designed with the aid of computers in Lacus Somniorum a 42,000-yard layout, threaded among the natural outcroppings and effluvia and the debris left by previous expeditions. The cups were cut and the eighteen cores thus taken shipped back to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston for pulverization, analysis, and adoration. The rules
committee pondered the inch or so of ubiquitous dust and suspended the law against grounding your club in a sand trap. But preferred lies were banned. One of the invited amateurs, a Texas oilman playing snugly to a handicap of 23, had brought along a piece of Astroturf to make his own lies preferable. American flags of titanium foil, battery-powered to simulate rippling, vividly signalled the pin placements. The tee markers were pineapples rocketed fresh each day from the private Dole launching pad in Oahu, at not a penny’s cost to the taxpayer.

The pros quickly adjusted to the extraterrestrial conditions. The dust, for instance, was “fluffy” rather than “gritty” and the ball could be “struck” rather than “stung,” as if from a lie of bedded dandelion polls; though it was hard to put enough “stop” on the ball for the rock-hard “greens” of smooth lunar gneiss. “It’s a chipper’s game up here,” big-hitting George Archer confided to the three hundred million televiewers of the tournament. “It’s like playing in a flour bin,” Miller Barber observed from behind his accustomed sunglasses, and the Earthbound gallery could verify, despite the ragged television transmission, that owing to the tendency of the divots to hang cloudlike in the air the players slowly accumulated bulk, like snowmen.

Moon play had other peculiarities. Without an atmosphere, balls could not hook or slice, which licensed lashers like Arnold Palmer to overswing with impunity. Drives one mile long became standard by the second day of play. Smartly struck wedge shots, however, had a worrisome tendency to float into orbit; Jack Nicklaus lost two successive approaches to the fourth green this way, taking a humiliating eight on the hole. “It’s a puncher’s game,” said Nicklaus. “Keep the ball low, and don’t gulp oxygen.” A ball lying in shadow, even a mere few inches from the razor-sharp sunlight, had to be played promptly, lest it freeze and shatter when struck. And unexplained concentrations of basalt beneath the crust played magnetic havoc on some fairways; the shortest hole on the course, a 1,000-yard cutie nestled between a lava flow and a three-billion-year-old impact crater—for most pros an easy 8-iron—was birdied only four times the first two days of play.

Toward the end of the second afternoon, as the frigid lunar dusk was tracing long shadows across the course, Spiro Agnew,
^*
playing in a foursome with Bobby Nichols, Bob Lunn, and Robert McNamara, shanked
a difficult spoon shot with such penetrating puissance that, from 900 yards away, it punctured the fuel tank of one lunar module and rendered it inoperable. The P.G.A. ruled from Palm Beach that those who failed to make the 36-hole cut should not only receive no prize money but should be the ones to stay on the moon and perish. Since this included most of the participating amateurs, several government officials demanded another ruling from the C.I.A., which refused, however, to identify itself over public networks. So the P.G.A. ruling appeared to stand. The next day, however, while the active field was playing the eleventh through fourteenth holes deep in the Taurian Highlands, the disqualified golfers commandeered the operable module and rejoined the mother ship.

“Easy as sinking a six-inch putt,” comedian Jerry Lewis later confided to newsmen.

The tournament, interestingly, was played to a conclusion, though the backpack radios did not send sufficiently powerful signals to announce to Earth the winner. The Dole Company continued to rocket pineapples moonward, and the Mount Palomar Observatory reported sighting on Sunday afternoon a crisp hit to the left of the pin by a player who, judging from his restricted backswing, must have been Doug Sanders.

The participants who returned to Earth found that their ardor for the game had permanently cooled. As singer Andy Williams put it, “I don’t know, it just feels down here like you’re swinging underwater at lumps of putty.” Plans were projected for the next year’s competition, with an enlarged purse and solar-powered golf carts contributed by the Russians; but that autumn the major powers, honoring their commitments to the contending factions in the Ethiopian civil war, staged a prolonged nuclear exchange, and in the subsequent regression of technology not only was the secret of solid-fuel rockets lost but of tapered tempered-steel golf shafts as well.

I
HAVE BEEN ASKED
^†
to write about golf as a hobby. But of course golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer’s eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass, the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves. If neither work nor play, if more pain than pleasure but not essentially either, what, then, can golf be? Luckily, a word newly coined rings on the blank Formica of the conundrum. Golf is a
trip
.

A non-chemical hallucinogen, golf breaks the human body into components so strangely elongated and so tenuously linked, yet with anxious little bunches of hyperconsciousness and undue effort bulging here and there, along with rotating blind patches and a sort of cartilaginous euphoria—golf so transforms one’s somatic sense, in short, that truth itself seems about to break through the exacerbated and as it were debunked fabric of mundane reality.

An exceedingly small ball is placed a large distance from one’s face, and a silver wand curiously warped at one end is placed in one’s hands. Additionally, one’s head is set a-flitting with a swarm of dimly remembered “tips.” Tommy Armour says to hit the ball with the right hand. Ben Hogan says to push off with the right foot. Arnold Palmer says keep your head still. Arnold Palmer has painted hands in his golf book. Gary Player says
don’t
lift the left heel. There is a white circle around his heel. Dick Aultman says keep everything square, even your right foot to the line of flight. His book is full of beautiful pictures of straight lines lying along wrists like carpenter’s rules on planed wood. Mindy Blake, in
his
golf book, says “square-to-square” is an evolutionary half-step on the way to a stance in which both feet are skewed toward the hole and at the extremity of the backswing the angle between the left arm and the line to the target is a mere fourteen degrees. Not fifteen degrees. Not thirteen degrees. Fourteen degrees. Jack Nicklaus, who is a big man, says you should stand up to the ball the way you’d stand around doing nothing in particular. Hogan and Player, who are small men, show a lot of strenuous arrows generating terrific torque at the hips. Player says pass the right shoulder under the chin. Somebody else says count two knuckles on the left hand at address. Somebody else
says
no
knuckle should show. Which is to say nothing about knees, open or closed clubface at top of backswing, passive right side, “sitting down” to the ball, looking at the ball with the left eye—all of which are crucial.

This unpleasant paragraph above, strange to say, got me so excited I had to rush out into the yard and hit a few shots, even though it was pitch dark, and only the daffodils showed. Golf converts oddly well into words. Wodehouse’s golf stories delighted me years before I touched a club. The tales of Jones’s Grand Slam and Vardon’s triumph over J. H. Taylor at Muirfield in 1896 and Palmer’s catching Mike Souchak at Cherry Hills in 1960 are always enthralling—as is, indeed, the anecdote of the most abject duffer. For example:

Once, my head buzzing with a mess of anatomical and aeronautical information that was not relating to the golf balls I was hitting, I went to a pro and had a lesson. Put your weight on the right heel, the man told me, and then the left foot. “That’s all?” I asked. “That’s all,” he said. “What about the wrists pronating?” I asked. “What about the angle of shoulder-plane vis-à-vis that of hip-plane?” “Forget them,” he said. Ironically, then, in order to demonstrate to him the folly of his command (much as the Six Hundred rode into the valley of Death),
^*
I obeyed. The ball clicked into the air, soared straight as a string, and fell in a distant ecstasy of backspin. For some weeks, harboring this absurd instruction, I went around golf courses like a giant, pounding out pars, humiliating my friends. But I never could identify with my new prowess; I couldn’t
internalize
it. There was an immense semi-circular area, transparent, mysterious, anesthetized, above the monotonous weight-shift of my feet. All richness had fled the game. So gradually I went back on my lessons, ignored my feet, made a number of other studied adjustments, and restored my swing to its original, fascinating
terribilità
.

Like that golf story of mine? Let me tell you another: the greatest shot
of my life. It was years ago, on a little dogleg left, downhill. Apple trees were in blossom. Or the maples were turning; I forget which. My drive was badly smothered, and after some painful wounded bounces found rest in the deep rough at the crook of the dogleg. My second shot, a 9-iron too tensely gripped, moved a great deal of grass. The third shot, a smoother swing with the knees nicely flexed, nudged the ball a good six feet out onto the fairway. The lie was downhill. The distance to the green was perhaps 210 yards at this point. I chose (of course) a 3-wood. The lie was not only downhill but sidehill. I tried to remember some tip about sidehill lies; it was either (1) play the ball farther forward from the center of the stance, with the stance more open, or (2) play the ball farther back, off a closed stance, or (3) some combination. I compromised by swinging with locked elbows and looking up quickly, to see how it turned out. A divot the size of an undershirt was taken some eighteen inches behind the ball. The ball moved a few puzzled inches.
Now here comes my great shot
. Perfectly demented by frustration, I swung as if the club were an ax with which I was reducing an orange crate to kindling wood. Emitting a sucking, oval sound, the astounded ball, smitten, soared far up the fairway, curling toward the fat part of the green with just the daintiest trace of a fade, hit once on the fringe, kicked smartly toward the flagstick, and stopped two feet from the cup. I sank the putt for what my partner justly termed a “remarkable six.”

In this mystical experience, some deep golf revelation was doubtless offered me, but I have never been able to grasp it, or to duplicate the shot. In fact, the only two golf tips I have found consistently useful are these. One (from Jack Nicklaus): on long putts, think of yourself putting the ball half the distance and having it roll the rest of the way. Two (from I forget—the comic strip
Mac Divot
?): on chip shots, to keep from underhitting, imagine yourself throwing the ball to the green with the right hand.