The Sand Trap (5 page)

And there were her clubs. They were chosen
from the clubs left behind by visiting golfers. Some inadvertently
forgot a club or two and were not likely to ever come back for it.
More than likely these were golf clubs morphed into javelins for
their unwillingness to perform as the owner expected. Salvaged from
the corn and wheat fields, or even from the shallow parts of the
North Saskatchewan, they were now Melanie’s friends. While some
were old and of a high quality, and others box store cheap, the
clubs in Melanie’s bag, a gift from a local farmer who decided
after a round at the Folly that golf was not his thing, shone like
new cutlery. For the first tee shot she chose a 5-iron for the shot
that Bob had just hit with a 3 wood.

Bob started to say something to Melanie but
Helen jabbed him in the ribs and quietly told him to “shut up for a
change and let the girl do her thing. Can't you see the look on her
face?”

The look was a mixture of pleasure and
intensity. There was no shyness. No reticence to act or to move.
Such was her obvious focus that Helen suspected that even if Bob
did say something she was sure Melanie would not hear it. There was
no practice swing. There was no pausing over the ball to mentally
get ready for the starting gate of the swing. No multiple
regripping of the club to build up the psychic momentum to move.
The walk to the ball, the stance, the swing and the contact with
the ball seemed to be all one continuous, fluid movement. The ball
flew in a gentle drawing arc to land five yards before the wheat
field on the far side of the landing area. Without looking up she
reached down and picked up her tee and only glanced down the
cornfield fairway in time to see the ball land right where she knew
it would.

But Bob never even saw the ball’s flight.
His brain was still on her swing. He had never seen anything like
it. The only thing normal in his mind was the grip. The rest was a
swing somewhere between Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez and Babe
Ruth. For a start she started her swing with the club head a good
foot behind the teed up ball. Then she kept her left arm and the
club in a perfectly straight line. No dropping the arms straight
down from the shoulders like he had been taught. And her right
shoulder was very low at address. The rest happened too fast for
him to really grasp or analyze. But the result was unmistakable.
She hit a perfect 5-iron draw farther than he had hit his 3
wood.

Neither Bob nor Helen said anything as they
all picked up their clubs and headed down the path though the
cornfield to the landing area. Helen took a free ball from the
landing area bucket and hit another ball into the cornfield with a
muttered, “Shit! Oops, excuse me, Melanie.”

“It’s OK,” Melanie suggested. “I work on a
golf course. You can't imagine what I’ve heard from the guys that
come out here.”

Bob hit his 120-yard second shot into one of
the bunkers near the green while Melanie used the same swing
technique to hit a shot that landed fifteen yards past the pin and
spun back ten yards to leave her a five-yard uphill putt. Bob hit
out of the trap to twenty yards and missed his par putt. Helen just
dropped a ball on the green and four putted from twenty feet.
Melanie pulled out her putter and walked over to her ball. She did
not mark it. She did not wash it. Or line it up from a prone
position. Or pretend her putter was a plumb bob. With no practice
swings she just walked up and stroked it into the hole. She picked
up her ball from the hole, put the flag back in place and walked
over to the next tee box as if this was as common as brushing her
teeth in the morning.

“That’s an interesting putter you have
Melanie,” Bob observed. “How did you come to be using that?”

In truth he was being polite. The putter she
used could not have been two feet long and she had to bend way over
-- almost to parallel to use it. And the grip was a fat piece of
PVC piping that had been slipped over the shaft of the club.

“Most people don’t leave their putters
behind and any who throw them usually wait until they can throw
them into the North Saskatchewan, so I don’t have much choice for
putters to play with,” Melanie explained. “One guy suggested I putt
with a hockey stick. Be a real Canadian. I tried that – was not too
bad. But this other guy wrapped his putter around the only one big
tree on the Folly, on number six, and broke it in half. So I just
put an old piece of PVC piping over the top of the shaft for a grip
and it seems to work real well. I don’t think there are any rules
about using a short putter are there?”

“No. Not that I know of. But you would
certainly set chins wagging at the Regina Golf and Country
club.”

Halfway through the round both Bob and Helen
realized they were witnessing something special. Melanie’s shots on
the first hole were not an anomaly. She consistently hit shots
exactly where she wanted with the ball flight she imagined. The
only way a player could hit the par three, sixth hole that ran
along the river was to play a high fade around the only big tree on
the course, and to approach the green from the left side. Any other
ball would never hold the green and end up at best in a greenside
bunker and at worst bouncing its way along the bottom of the North
Saskatchewan River towards Edmonton. Bob’s $6 balls – he tried
twice to hit the green, ended up in the river. Melanie’s shot was a
perfect fade that landed in front of the green and bounced up to
the hole.

By this time Helen was just simply enjoying
the spectacle of her sanctimonious golfing husband being severely
trounced by farm girl with a mix and match set of clubs, a two feet
long, PVC grip putter and the ‘give away’ balls.

Bob offered one of his good balls to Melanie
once and all she said was “I don’t hit the ball, I swing the club.”
He and Helen looked at each other and shrugged since neither had
any idea what she meant.

Helen announced once at the end of a hole
that Melanie had beaten Bob and Melanie just looked at her in a
strange way and said, “I what?”

The only crack in her golf game showed up on
the seventh hole. The Folly stretched down two sides of the North
Saskatchewan and the seventh hole was the one that took players
from one side to the other and it required an in air flight of 200
yards to carry the ball to the small landing area and two more
shots to make the 300 yards to the par five green. Melanie made the
first and second landing areas but her third shot landed in the
longish grass beside the green. Bob had been missing the tiny
greens all day but this was the first one she had missed and it
took her three shots to get the ball up to the pin. Bob was puzzled
by this until he realized she rarely missed a green and apparently
had no experience at ‘around the green’ play. He was sure she
rarely had to hit a shot from a sand trap for example.

Whatever it was, it did not seem to bother
her and she happily bounced over to the next hole, her one
decorative tongue on her worn out golf shoes bouncing up and down
with her stride. By the end of eighteen holes, even Bob was more
intent on watching Melanie play than playing his own game. He was
both intrigued and puzzled. Intrigued that a young girl could
actually be so good and intrigued as to how she learned such an odd
swing. It also puzzled him as to why no one in the golfing world
knew her. He was already working in his mind how he would address
the latter. It was only at the end of the round that he started to
learn how she came to be good.

It was just after lunch when the three of
them finished their round. Despite it being a beautiful prairie
summer’s day – clear blue skies, a gentle breeze, low humidity and
moderate temperature, they had had the course and Melanie totally
to themselves.

“Are you very busy here in the summer
Melanie?” Helen asked.

“Not much during the week days,” Melanie
replied. “We get the odd tourist passing though. The odd campers
like you folks. On the weekend, though, we get groups that come up
from Regina or down from Saskatoon. They seem to have a lot of fun
here. They certainly hit a lot of balls into the fields!”

“Do you ever play with them?” Bob
inquired.

“No. I only play by myself. Or maybe once in
a while with some of the guys that have been coming down from
Saskatchewan once a year since. They are the ones who give me old
clubs and stuff.”

Bob hesitated for a moment and then asked
what he had wanted to all day.

“Are they the ones that who taught you to
play?”

“Not really. Most of them are pretty bad.
One guy taught me how to hold the club and he also brought me a
sawed off 7-iron he had made for me to play with. He used to come
every year but I haven’t seen him for a few years. But he left some
golf magazines for me to look at so I learned from them. One had a
bunch of pictures of a guy named Hale Irwin swinging so I tried to
look like him”

“So, you think that you look like Hale Irwin
when you swing?”

“Yeah, or maybe that guy Andy Bean. He is
tall like me and he’s only six years older than me!”

“I’m sure that they would both be flattered
by your mimicry,” Bob suggested. “But surely someone else helped
you with your swing?”

“Doesn’t your Dad play golf?” Helen
inquired.

“Nope. He hates the game and golfers.”

Bob and Helen gave each other a surprised
look. Bob interjected.

“But he built this golf course? It must have
taken years? And you say he still takes meticulous care of the
greens? We don’t understand.”

“He hates golfers because my mom ran away
with a golfer. Some guy who managed to get lost looking for Regina
and ended up at the Bumstead Hotel where my mom worked as a
waitress. Mom and Dad were pretty poor before Dad got Grandpa's
trust so when they were first married I guess Mom needed to work. I
don’t remember much since I was only four years old, but I’m told
that this guy got real drunk and started hitting golf balls down
the middle of Main Street. My Mom dragged him back into the Hotel
before the Mounties came and then they ran off together. So my Dad
hates golfers.”

“But why did he build the course?”

“Well, if you’ll excuse the language, as my
Dad would say, to piss of every golfer who ever thinks he can play
the game. He went to the Regina public library and studied pictures
of golf courses all over the world and then built the hardest
course he could come up with simply to piss off and embarrass
golfers.”

“Well it certainly did that for me,” Bob
admitted.

“Yup. Except, as you have learned, the
problem is, it just might be too difficult, or at least too
unusual. I remember we had some pros come in the early years to try
it out and most left shaking their head and never came back. The
RCGA would never certify it as a real golf course. So now it is
mostly locals and tourists and the odd city hacker who come for the
scenery as much as the golf.”

“Didn’t you learn anything about golf from
any of these pros?” Helen suggested.

“Nah, not many of them had any interest in a
skinny kid. Except Moe. He helped me.”

Bob immediately perked up “Moe who?”

“I don’t remember his last name. Dad met the
Moe guy when he chased my mother down to Regina to that golf
tournament the pro was looking for. He was the only guy at the
tournament who would talk to Dad and they became sort of friends I
guess. Moe lived in his car and Dad said he didn’t eat very well so
Dad bought him dinner and Moe listened to dad’s story. But that was
1963 and I was very little, so this is all hearsay for me. Dad will
never talk about it.”

“Yes...Ok, but what did you mean when you
said “all except Moe?”

“Well, I guess it was there at that
tournament when Dad thought up the idea for his revenge golf
course. Moe told me later that Dad drank way too much Canadian Club
and Dad announced he would build this course. And Moe announced
that he would come and try the course when it was built.”

Melanie continued to silently clean their
clubs.

“What happened?” Bob urgently prompted.

“Moe won the tournament. Dad built the
course. When it was done four years later Moe came and visited for
a week. Even though I was only eight years old, I played with him
every day,” Melanie replied in a curt fashion, suggesting the story
time was over. And she walked towards their car with their clubs on
each shoulder, done with the story and finished for the day with
them.

Bob was not finished however and started to
ask another question, but Helen pulled him back.

“Enough, Bob. She’s told us more than I
think she has told anyone for a long time. Let’s leave it there for
another day.”

So Bob left Melanie with a generous tip and
they drove away. But, for Melanie the story was far from over. Bob
Philips – and soon Clapshorn – had “discovered” Melanie
McDougal.