The Sand Trap (7 page)

Rebecca once asked Melanie what she does to
hit the ball so well and Melanie simply replied that, “I see the
club head as it meets the ball.” Rebecca had no idea what she meant
since the club head is probably moving in excess of a hundred miles
and hour as it meets the ball. By the end of the first week of try
outs, while newcomers still gawked at Melanie’s swing and
precision, most of the other players were leaving her alone and had
moved on to working on their own games. There had not been any
tournaments yet, so most still viewed her and her golf in a
freakish way, like they would watch a sword swallower at the
circus, or someone who does trick shots on the basketball court.
Few viewed her as a serious threat to their own golf position. Most
of the college players, men and woman alike, had all come from
country club backgrounds, schooled in the science of the golf swing
from an early age. How could anyone with a swing like that, not to
mention the clothes, ever be a serious golfer? But they did play
some matches that week. Her scores were impressive and no one ever
beat her at either match or medal play. At the end of the try outs
the coaches announced the team. Melanie was named to the women’s
squad. At the same time, Rebecca announced that she was quitting
the team. She did not need the scholarship and she had discovered a
new interest in life.

Rebecca and Melanie spent most waking hours
with each other during those two months, far more than Rebecca’s
buddy assignment called for. People were already starting to call
them the odd couple. The truth was they simply liked each other. At
the start Rebecca was simply fascinated with this strange young
girl. She started to like spending time with someone so confident
and apparently stable and who did not care much for social
niceties. Though she seemed to have a thing for Chad, she did not
drool over every boy that walked by. She cared nothing for the
sorority group and in fact severely ticked them off by not
accepting a single invitation to pledge. But Rebecca's interest in
her returned to an intense fascination as she started to realize
that Melanie was athletically unique.

The instances where she saw this would not
be obvious to observers who were not looking for them. The first
was just a pick up, mixed gender, soccer game in the residence
quad. Melanie informed them that she had never played the game
before. Apparently in 1977 it was not a big sport on the Canadian
prairies. With various resigned grunts they let her go in goal. For
the first twenty minutes she stopped every shot that came her way.
Impossible shots. Great curving penalty shots. Shots by the most
skillful of the men, including a penalty shot by a new student from
Brazil, recruited to the school specifically for soccer. It all
appeared easy to Rebecca who was watching from the sidelines and
avoided participating in any sport that required her to sweat. But
that was not the only interesting part to Rebecca. Just when it
appeared to the others that Melanie was doing something different,
the goals started to go in. Shots that she had stopped with ease a
few moments ago started to go past her into the corners, the top,
and one even went between her legs. The great stops of the first
twenty minutes were soon forgotten and the players focused upon
their own great goal scoring athleticism. As Rebecca watched the
rest of the game it suddenly struck her like a lightning bolt that
Melanie was carefully selecting the saves and the goals so no one
would notice either that she could stop anything she wanted, or was
purposely letting people score. Rebecca looked around her at the
others watching the game to see if anyone had seen what she had,
but there was no buzz or looks of shock or awe, so she was careful
to hold her blank expression.

The second instance occurred the evening
after that pick up soccer game when most of the residence students
swarmed at Mart’s bar and grill. Rebecca had to talk Melanie into
going, telling her that there will be men there that she should
meet. In actual fact there were men there Rebecca wanted to meet
and she just felt she had an obligation to drag Melanie along.
Although it was against her nature and her experience, Melanie
reluctantly agreed. She had started to trust Rebecca. At first she
was just glad to have a friend to show her around the campus and
the golf scene. As confident as she was on the course, she knew she
was not socially aware. She had few girlfriends growing up and even
fewer boyfriends. It was not unwillingness on her part. It just
seemed that as soon as she played hockey, or baseball, much less
golf, people left her alone. She was not naturally talkative, and
she lived either with her Dad on the farm or her grandmother in the
city, so she eventually became content with the company of her golf
and herself. On the other hand Rebecca was outgoing, friendly, knew
everyone and did not seem to care if Melanie could beat her at
golf. In fact she seemed to revel in it.

So off they went to Mart’s together.

The gathering was a typical first year
student social, with its mix of adventure seeking frosh mixed with
a smattering of upper year students looking for an opportunity to
help initiate young students into the complex social life of
college. These events were supposed to be dry but “Mart” the owner
(he was actually named Richard and Mart was his long dead
grandmother) tactfully turned a blind eye to the myriad of flasks
and bottles that stayed for the most part under tables and chairs
and inside jackets. Melanie did not drink. Not just because of her
age; most young people in k what they wanted from twelve years old
onward, but because she did not like what it did to her sense of
her surroundings. After only one drink she became ultra sensitive
to the sights, smells and sounds around her to the point where it
was uncomfortable. So while she would learn to manage these
feelings later in life, as a teenager she just left the stuff
alone. Rebecca had neither such sensory problems, nor any such
inhibitions, and she poured liberally into her coke glass from her
flask of bourbon. Melanie just drank straight coke and no one
really knew the difference between what they were drinking.

Everyone was friendly but distant to
Melanie. The golfing group still did not know what to make of her
even though most of the girls by now had at least one round in a
foursome with her. Rebecca was well known and was clearly popular,
at least with the men of all years. Melanie wondered if she had
dated every man at Clapshorn in her first year.

By the time the restaurant bar was ready to
close, Rebecca was quite drunk, although she could still manage a
reasonably straight line as she and Melanie walked out of the front
door. A group of the guys from the men’s golf team were hanging
around outside, talking golf and leaning on shiny new cars that
came with their family pedigree. One of them, Burt Van Royan, a
junior champion from California, was the first to see them.

“Hey there Rebecca,” he yelled! “How about
you and your new friend joining us for some fun over in the men’s
dorm?”

Rebecca knew all too well what “fun” meant
to these guys and while she had taken liberties with most of them
at one time or another she was not interested tonight with Melanie
walking beside her.

“Get lost Burt,” she slurred. “Your driver
isn’t straight enough for me!”

The others thought this was hilarious and
all pointed at Burt’s crotch. Burt did not seem to have the same
sense of humour as the rest, and from less than ten feet away fired
an empty beer bottle directly at Rebecca’s head. Rebecca saw the
action but had no time to react and subconsciously waited for the
bottle to hit her forehead. It did not get there. When she opened
her eyes, Melanie was holding the bottle in her hand and the guys
were looking at each other, all a little relieved that a beer
bottle had not rearranged Rebecca’s forehead, but clearly surprised
at where the bottle ended up.

The first to say anything was Chad, the
men's golf team captain.

“Nice catch kid. Maybe you should try out
for the powder puff baseball team instead of golf.”

That produced more laughter as the guys
walked away to their cars and a tottering drunk Burt glowered back
at both of them.

In her inebriated state, it took a moment
for Rebecca to realize what had happened. “How did you do that?”
she asked. “You caught the bottle!”

Melanie still had the bottle in her hand. “I
just caught it that’s all. Come on. I’ll get you home.”

Even in her drunken stupor, Rebecca was
starting to put some things together about Melanie. Later, in her
life as a Psychology professor at Harvard, she and some other
sports researchers would identify what they would call “spatial
awareness” and deduce that many great athletes had a degree of
awareness greater than normal. Babe Ruth was one. The hockey great
Maurice Richard was another. Pele from Brazil. Jerry West. Wayne
Gretzky. The list went on. These researchers studied playing
footage of many athletes, and listened to recordings of their
comments on their abilities, like Wayne Gretzky’s observation that
he skated to where the puck was going. Or Ted William’s observation
that he could see the seams on a ball as it was pitched to him.
They determined that heightened “spatial awareness” turned ordinary
physical specimens into extraordinary athletes. But, in 1977, a
sophomore Rebecca Fried had only deduced that her new best friend
simply had reflexes that were faster than her own or most other
people she knew.

By the end of the first two weeks of school,
Melanie had met one of the few people in her life she could talk
to. And Rebecca had decided she had a new role in life – the care
and feeding of Melanie McDougal. Rebecca concluded that Melanie was
going to be a golf star and she was going to be her caddy. And now
they found themselves, a year later, heading for the National
Collegiate Golf Association, the NCGA championship in California.
They were a golfer and caddy team who had never been beaten in over
thirty rounds of golf.

Their only deviation was when Melanie lost a
match play event against Chad when Coach put her into one of the
men’s regional NCGA match play events. There had been quite a fuss
at the state golf association level when they realized that M.
McDougal was a young girl, but as hard as they searched they could
not find any rule prohibiting her playing on the men’s side. At any
rate, they did not suspect she would get far against the top men of
the state so they avoided the kind of nasty protest about women’s
equality that was springing up all across the country and let her
play. The format was match play and concerned officials watched as
Melanie and Rebecca walked over every man they came up against. The
worst trouncing, or best, was against a private club champion from
somewhere in New York State who knew Rebecca’s history and made
some remark about her giving the whole New York contingent a
“putting” lesson back at the hotel. Melanie smashed him eight for
ten. As he gave up and walked off the tenth tee Rebecca yelled some
insult to his manhood that made statewide television. By the time
Melanie and Chad met in the one day 36- hole match play final,
sportswriters were writing descriptions of the eighteen-year-old
with the unusual swing, the odd clothes and the fowl mouthed caddy
who together had beaten every man they had taken on.

Chad won on the final hole when Melanie hit
her approach into a sand trap and took two shots to get out.
Rebecca knew that Melanie had purposely hit into the trap, had
purposely taken two shots to get out and had thrown the match so
she confronted Melanie. It had been perhaps the only really serious
fight that they had over the past year.

“You threw that match didn’t you?" Rebecca
angrily charged after they returned to her car. “You don’t have to
answer that. I know you did. But you do owe me and the other young
women in the state of Montana, maybe North America, some sort of
explanation!”

Melanie said nothing. Just stared at her
hands in her lap. From where they were sitting they could see the
crowd of reporters and well-wishers surrounding Chad by the
scorer’s tent. The initial flurry of press interest in Melanie
quickly disappeared after she lost and she and Rebecca had the
parking lot pretty much to themselves. Melanie did not care.
Rebecca did most of the talking to the press anyhow.

“You know they are now going to say this
just shows that woman shouldn’t compete with men?”

Melanie stared out the window at the crowd
of reporters.

“I wouldn’t care if someone actually beat
you!” Rebecca yelled this time. “It might even do you some good to
know you aren’t so high and mighty.” It was an odd and cruel thing
to say to Melanie since there was no one Rebecca had ever met who
was so modest and so less self interested. The constant press jibes
about her swing, her clothing, even the digs at being a hick from
nowhere Saskatchewan never dug far under her skin. Melanie just
cared for her own world of golf and not what anyone else
thought.

Melanie looked at Rebecca and said in a
quiet but firm voice, “I like him.”

“What did you say?” an incredulous Rebecca
yelled. “You like who? Or whom? Or what the fuck are you talking
about?”

“Chad. I like Chad. It would have really
hurt him to lose to a girl or to lose period.”

Rebecca paused to collect herself before she
responded. “Have you ever talked to Chad?”

“No. But I know he knows who I am.”

“Shit girl. Every golfer in the State knows
who you are now.”

“No. I mean he knows who I am as a
person.”

Another pause.

“And how would that be?”

“He has spoken to me several times; asked me
where I was from, where I found my clubs, how I learned my swing.
He wants to know me.”

Rebecca did not have the heart to tell
Melanie that whatever she confided in Chad became the substance of
locker room jokes. Like, “What do you get when you cross Melanie
McDougal with a Vampire? Frostbite!” The guys would joke about
whether she wore men’s underwear under her men’s golf pants.
Whether she used her short putter for other things in her bedroom
since she would never go out with any of them. The jokes grew
nastier and nastier the more Melanie beat them all, both men and
women, on the golf course.