The Sand Trap (28 page)

“Hi Gord!” Bruce was waiting at the bag drop
area and was greeting all players as they drove up and either
dropped off their clubs or made their way into the clubhouse.
“Ready for this?”

“You bet!”

“Look Gord,” Bruce pulled him aside. “I know
you’ve been working hard, and I know the changes we have made are
the right ones. Just don’t expect instant success. Remember the ten
thousand thing OK?”

“Yeah well, I think I’ve hit ten thousand
7-irons over the last two months, so don’t worry. I’m ready.” And
with that Gord slapped him on the back and went off to the locker
room to put on his golf shoes and head to the range for warm
up.

The tournament was a shotgun start and Gord
and the other three members who he was playing with that morning
started on hole three, a tricky 168-yard par three. Gord smiled at
this. He had only hit six or seven thousand of these 7-irons over
the past month and he felt he could hit land the ball on a dime at
this distance. The tee toss put him off third and he watched the
first two players, a junior player still in high school and a
manager of the local Safeway, both land safely in the middle of the
green. The green was hourglass shaped and was at forty-five degrees
to the fairway. A sand trap filled the space left by the narrow
portion of the glass closest to the fairway and for the first day
of the tournament the pin was placed at the back, or top right of
the hourglass, only eight feet from the back edge of the green
where a steep slope ran down to the creek that meandered throughout
the course. The green sloped back to front so the perfect shot,
apart from in the hole, was somewhere in front of the hole, leaving
a straight uphill putt for a possible birdie. Both of the first two
players were in the middle of the green, but with longish makeable
uphill putts.

Gord, on the other hand, went for the dime.
He hardly glanced at the hole as took his stance, new grip and with
perfect and rhythmic balance hit a gentle fade that started for the
middle of the green and slowly curved towards the hole. It was only
after he had hit that he realized he had forgotten the 'one foot
from the ball' thing. As he watched the ball flight he was relieved
that it didn’t appear to matter. It looked like a perfect shot, and
thoughts of a hole in one to start the tournament went through his
mind.

“Wow. Nice shot!” the kid exclaimed. "Right
at the hole!"

Gord was still holding his follow through,
he had been taught to do this as a kid, as the ball landed six
inches in front of the hole, took one bounce and rolled off the
back of the green and into the creek.

“Ah, bad luck,” the other players groaned in
unison.

Gord just stood there, gaping at ‘brilliance
gone to shit’, as his first golf teacher used to say. A good chip
and a better putt with the long putter saved a bogie on the first
hole, but Gord the obsessive perfectionist was not in a good frame
of mind when they moved to the second hole. It had been a long time
since the score he earned on any particular hole mattered that
much. As a top junior prospect he had been extremely competitive
and was very hard on himself for any lapse in judgment or play. He
would be depressed for days after losing a tournament or sometimes
just losing a hole in match play that he should have won. He did
not throw clubs or react in a way anyone could see; instead he kept
the reaction very much inside. It was not losing that bothered him,
but rather not performing up to the potential he knew he had. After
losing a tournament in University he would hide himself in his
headphones, playing his bass to the blues songs that told of lost
love and things like ‘a mule kicking in my stall’, whatever that
meant, and he soon recovered from his funk. Later in life he would
use his obsession with perfecting the unique Tai Chi methods and
even his search for the perfect invisible killing method in the
same way. As long as he played golf he had to have counter points
that were so much under his control to make up for his inability to
control the golf course. In the end it was his inability to give in
to the many uncontrollable variables on a golf course and the game
that caused him to withdraw from competitive golf and, with the new
obsessions of his career and music he put golf into a recreational
corner of his life. Golf with the guys on Saturday, even the senior
championship, just became a distraction from the intensity of his
other lives, not an obsession or an avocation. But now he was
obsessed with the game again. He had forgotten the feelings of rage
he had often felt as a teenager when he could not be perfect at the
game and he had forgotten how that internally directed rage had
ruined the game for him. Now he was in turmoil again.

The second hole was a spectacular dogleg
left par four that curved gently along the Ottawa River. The Ottawa
Valley Club was actually not in Ottawa, but in Hull, Quebec, across
a bridge from Ottawa that for most residential, government offices,
and shopping purposes was considered part of Ottawa itself. The
best urban golf courses were also there since the Ontario side of
the river was all apartment buildings and office towers, including
the national parliament buildings. The Quebec side on the other
hand had been slower to commercially develop so land had been
available 100 years ago along the river to build this and other
courses popular with golfers from both provinces. The only quirky
thing about this arrangement for golfers from Ontario was that, in
accordance with Quebec law, all of the signs were in French. It
made no difference to Gord since he was fluently multilingual,
including French, but some of the old guys from the Ottawa side
griped about it.

As the golfers teed off on number two, they
looked west to the fairway and the green, and left over the river
to the Canadian parliament buildings on the other side. The hole
was only 313 yards long. Gord thought it odd that a country that
had gone totally metric still had golf courses that used imperial
measures. Some of the young, long hitters could occasionally make
this green. The wind, bounce and golf gods had to be with them
since water on the left and the creek running up the right side and
a green surrounded on three sides by traps, the hazards made up for
the length. Gord was last to hit this time since the other golfers
pared the first hole, and he felt the indignity of being last. They
all hit hybrids two hundred-plus yards to the middle of the
fairway, leaving short irons to the green and they all looked at
each other as Gord took out his driver. He knew he had been hitting
three hundred-plus yards for the last month and he had rolled one
up onto this green when he was playing with the guys last Saturday.
With another perfect swing he aimed for the top corner of the net
and hit a perfect trajectory drive, rising up to an apex over the
left side of the fairway before it landed and rolled into the
Ottawa River.

There were no “ooohs” or “aaahs” from the
other three players this time as they waited anxiously for Gord’s
reaction. He just looked down at his hands and saw that without
thinking he had used his old grip. He smiled at the others. “Looks
like the golf gods aren’t with me today!”

And they all laughed, relieved that they
were not going to witness a meltdown.

“Mustn’t have made your sacrifice to the
driving god this morning Gord!” one of them quipped.

“Or maybe you did it in English?” another
offered to further laughter. “The gods only speak French here!”

And Gord laughed right along with them and
complimented each of them on their good drives and their second
shots to the green that gave each of them pars again. The drop and
penalty gave Gord another bogie. As they walked to the third hole
all Gord wanted to do was to go home. This was not working out the
way he had envisioned. He only had three things to remember and he
could not seem to think of them all at the same time. He was polite
and professional on the outside, but churning inside at his
inability to do exactly what he wanted to do. By the fifth hole he
subconsciously found himself reverting back to his old grip and
stance and he ended up playing the rest of the round with his old
swing. He ended up with his old score – a four over. Only some
sensational putting with the long putter saved him from a much
higher score. At the end of the round he shook hands with his
playing partners and quickly went to his car, but he was so angry
he couldn’t drive right away. When he saw Bruce coming towards him
from the clubhouse he started the car and raced out of the parking
lot towards the bridge back to Ottawa and his house in the Glebe.
He had left his clubs in the bag rack, but right now he didn’t
care. “Golf could go fuck itself!” he raged to himself as he raced
out of the lot with all the acceleration a tired old Civic could
muster.

As he left the parking lot he almost hit a
Hyundai SUV that had been sitting at the entrance to the lot and
was now just pulling out of its spot. In his mood he hadn’t seen
it. When he swerved around it he could see there were people in the
SUV and they must have seen him, but they didn’t honk at him or
anything so he calmed himself and quietly apologized to them as he
drove out the gate and headed east towards the Portage Bridge that
led to the Ontario side and Ottawa. Before he turned onto the
bridge he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that the Hyundai
was a couple of cars behind him. He thought for a moment that if
the opportunity arose he would apologize to the driver. He had
cooled down a little now and just wanted to get back to the house,
his bass and a little Bushmills. He turned right onto the bridge
into the right lane and noticed that the SUV was pulling up into
the left lane of the two four-lane bridge. At the speed it was
going it would be beside him and in a moment he could smile over at
the driver and mouth a “sorry!”

When the SUV pulled up beside him he was so
low in the Civic that he could not see the driver but he saw an
Asian passenger looking down at him and it was not a pleasant look.
One reason that Gord had been recruited to the Agency was that
after some weird testing he apparently had some special ability.
One day he had to play the palm slap game all day with another
woman in a lab coat while another person used a special instrument
that looked like a radar gun and jotted down notes, Gord guessed a
timing measurement of some sort. After this, and some other unusual
testing, the Agency had determined that Gord was one of a very
small minority of people who had what they could only describe as
“quick reflexes”. More recent work by a Dr. Johnston at Harvard had
labeled the phenomenon as “Spatial Awareness” and hypothesized that
maybe one percent of the population had a special ability to
quickly analyze their surroundings and instinctively take action
without thinking. This instinctive, not thinking about it, action
was common to all good athletes, but a small majority of that one
percent were able to use their ability to excel at their sport.
These athletes described it a “seeing things in slow motion.”
Johnston was continuing her studies with other high motor skill
performers and was finding the same instinctive, slow motion effect
in musicians who were able to play a musical piece inhumanly fast.
Gord was one of these people and it had explained his level of
hockey playing, much of his golf success and even his extraordinary
skill at the bass guitar. And now that spatial awareness instinct
took over as he saw in slow motion the passenger look over to the
short guard rail on the bridge, back over to the driver and say
something, look back over at Gord and reach up to grasp the hand
grip above the passenger door. Gord hit his own brakes just as the
Hyundai took a sharp turn right that was clearly intended, not just
to cut Gord off, but to send him into the roaring Ottawa river
rapids two hundred feet below the bridge. Like a hockey player who
misses a check the Hyundai lost control for a moment when it turned
violently into a space that had just milliseconds before held
Gord’s car and, expecting to meet resistance, found only air. It
accelerated and sped off and the last Gord saw of the vehicle it
was off the bridge and racing south towards the freeway.

“Fuck!” was all Gord could say as he slowly
drove to the other side of the bridge and pulled over on Sparks
Street to gather his wits and let his adrenalin recede. “I was
going to say I was sorry, but fuck that you asshole!” he yelled at
the car that was now long gone.

“Christ! What a day,” he thought to himself.
“Killed on the golf course and almost killed on the highway. How
can it get any better?”

His humour didn’t improve any when he
returned to the house. The house was in the trendy canal area of
Ottawa and it was one of only a few new, less than one
hundred-year-old houses that fronted the almost two century old
canal that ran from Ottawa to Lake Ontario. The kids had loved
skating on the canal in winter and the whole family enjoyed walking
or biking on the path that bordered the canal all the way to the
Parliament buildings and the Byward Market full of fresh produce
and funky clothes. For the first time since he started this golf
obsession he admitted he felt a little lonely. It was one thing to
come home pumped from a day of practice and find some escape in his
Bushmills and music, but it was another thing to come home
depressed – not to mention a recent brush with death – and have no
one to complain to. When he used to come home grumpy from a bad
golf game Gail used to berate him and ask him why he played the
silly game in the first place if all it did was piss him off. She
misunderstood. On those days he was not pissed off, he just needed
to do what most amateur golfers do after a round of golf; complain
and have someone nod sympathetically and say it will be better next
time. It was childish he knew, but right at this moment he needed
either that sympathetic ear or someone to berate him and the empty
house held neither. There was not even any furniture to kick. Just
as he poured himself a Bushmills and sat on the floor in the
kitchen someone banged on the door. He ignored it since he had no
interest in talking to a realtor or to show the house to anyone
like he had done on occasion over the past month or so.