Walking with Jack (24 page)

We discovered last night that with Southwest Airlines offering $89 flights from here to Boston and Detroit, it is cheaper for us to check out of our room and fly home for the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks in Toledo and Maine, just as the golfers do on the big tours. So we can now divide this journey into three parts. The first three events, then Thanksgiving break. The next three events, then Christmas break. Then the long stretch of six events through January and February. Jack feels good about this, and it will give me a chance to try to shoot a goose out on the marsh for our Thanksgiving dinner now that I have my first hunting license. It will also make it a lot easier for Teddy. And I am going to try to persuade Jack to spend a few days in Maine over Christmas so I can meet the promise I made to his mother.

The Adams Tour flags were flying at the course today, and all the slots at the range were filled with studs. Among them the son of
the great PGA golfer Bob Tway. I watched and no one hit the ball any better than Jack with his compact, homemade swing. In eighteen warm-up holes today he mis-hit only two shots, and with his compressed swing, even when he’s off line, he doesn’t miss by much. We made a bunch of birdies (five by my count), reached two of the par-5s in two, and felt a little less tentative on the greens. They are big greens, and our main task tomorrow in round one will be to go right at the pins and get as close as we can. It is still amazing to both of us how the ball sticks on these greens that have been baking in the hot sun, with no rain for ten months. Even little wedges, twenty feet from the hole, can stop ten feet short if the ball is rolling against the grain. We agreed that rather than picking a landing area short of the hole, we would use the hole as our target. Try this on the Old Course and you’ll run every shot 40 yards past the hole. Not here.

While Jack was on the range, hitting through his irons, I was walking around the practice putting green with his iPhone, experimenting with the compass. It seems to work; you find west and you know that the grain is running in that direction. I never could have imagined that Jack’s iPhone would be so vital to us here. Without it we are blind men on the concrete freeways and on the Bermuda greens.

For the first nine holes today I was writing down the direction of the grains in my notebook for tomorrow so we would know how the ball will roll on our approach shots. But after Jack and I discussed this, we decided that it was unnecessarily overcomplicating things. We’re just going right at the pins, period. If the ball rolls forward, so be it. Today we had only two approaches release and roll forward, and we were only ten feet beyond the hole on both.

At noon Jack got an e-mail on his iPhone from the tour, notifying us that we have the last tee time tomorrow at 9:40. We lucked out. We won’t have to vary our schedule too much. We can leave the hotel at 8:00 and have plenty of time for traffic and a little practice. Jack is not a big range golfer. He warms up quickly. I saw no sign of nerves in him today. He lopes his way around the course like a big, tall Texan. He takes everything in stride. Coming into the par-5 number
9 today, he pulled his second shot from 230 into the water hazard, left of the green. It was a red-staked hazard. He dropped a ball, stuck it to five feet, and drained the putt to save par. “No worries,” he said as I put the flag back into the hole.

No worries. It made me wonder if he was trying to give me a message. Maybe I look nervous. I prided myself on always keeping a calm and composed countenance in Scotland. I remember being out one day with Glen and one of the real veteran caddies at the Old Course. After the round he told Glen that I was the most relaxed caddie he’d ever worked with. I admit I don’t feel calm now. I feel a disconcerting weariness. But all that matters right now is that Jack not see this. We never know how much our children see in us. Maybe we delude ourselves about this because when they are small it is so easy to trick them. Today, when I walked onto the 4th tee box, I saw a woman reading a book on her porch, and my mind went off the rails. I lost sight of Jack’s drive because I was thinking about my new novel, which has just been published, knowing that it isn’t going to do well enough on Amazon or in the wider marketplace to keep us from losing our health insurance. I can’t tell Jack that in another two weeks he won’t have health insurance, and if either one of us gets sick out here, we’re going to be at the mercy of the system, driving up and down the freeways following the refugees from Hurricane Katrina to a free clinic. Just thinking about this paralyzed me all the way to the green. I was there beside Jack, but really I just wanted some way to hide my fear from him.

I need to find my defiance somehow. Only defiance can banish the fear. Two weeks ago I was sailing my small boat through a storm. Black skies, wind whistling through the shrouds, every wave breaking into the cockpit, and even though there were eleven ways I could have fucked up, I was calm. Tomorrow in round one of our first event, I need to find that same calm.

Jack is across the room as I write this. I just told him that as far as I’m concerned, he’s a solid enough ball striker to hold his own here. “We’ll soon find out,” he said.

Game Day. Jack is sleeping like a bear at 4:00 a.m. I remember when he was little and we would stay at hotels, there always had to be a swimming pool, and he would wake me holding his blue blanket, his swimming trunks always on backward.

At 5:00 a.m., I went downstairs and rode the exercise bike a few miles to get the stiffness out of my knee. Condi Rice was on the TV news trying to justify the Iraq war. I thought of all the dreams that had been shattered there. And the dreams that had turned out to be only lies. I thought of the fathers who had lost sons and daughters there. For what, I do not know.

I woke Jack at his requested hour, 6:45, with news that somehow overnight some good, cold weather had moved in on racing winds. “It will be like Scotland out there today,” I told him. I couldn’t have been happier.

“Sounds good,” he said.

While he took his shower, I counted the clubs in his bag again to be sure that he had taken out the extra putter and the five-wood to meet the fourteen-club limit and that we had plenty of balls. Since awaking, I’d been thinking about what I could say this morning to get us both in the right frame of mind for our first event. I thought back to Scotland during the week of the Open, when I did four days of doubles in a row, most of that time in freezing-cold rain, starting each day by hitchhiking to the Castle Course before dawn with Glen, then marching for ten hours with rainwater sloshing in my shoes. Whenever I felt as if I couldn’t take another five minutes
of it, I would say to myself, “It ain’t Normandy.” That might work here, it might place things into perspective, but I feel as if I owe Jack something more personal. Since making my coffee this morning, I have been running through my memory of our recent history, and I can’t remember the last time I praised him for anything. I wonder if it is possible that I am still disappointed in him for failing to win a scholarship. For fathers, it always comes down to fear, I suppose. You’re alone in the world and doing fine, and then before you know it, you’ve got a wife, and kids, and a mortgage, and the fear mounts silently like falling snow. I walked almost a thousand miles that second season in Scotland to get the anger and the fear out of my system, and it was in the past now. But why hadn’t I found some way of telling my son that it was in the past?

And this morning I began to wonder if Jack had put it in
his past
or if it was going to be waiting for him at the Hearthstone Country Club, on the 1st tee this morning. We bring children into this world, and from time to time they disappoint us, and we have to forgive them and bear no grudges. It has been this way since the beginning of time, and if you can’t accept these terms, you shouldn’t have children. Until this morning it had not occurred to me that our children have to strike terms of their own to get out from underneath the ways they have let us down. And maybe they need our help to do this.

Considering all that, I didn’t think that a reference to Normandy would cut it today. It wasn’t until we were walking onto the practice range to take our place among the other young men lined up there inside their solitary worlds of dreams and doubts, worlds their fathers could no longer inhabit with them, that it came to me. “No matter what happens out here today, Jack,” I said as I stood beside him cleaning the grooves on his irons, “thanks for bringing me along. Of all the cool things I’ve had the chance to do in my life, this is the coolest by far.”

“Okay” was all he said.

———

I watched him take his place on the range, and though he looked as if he belonged there and he seemed at peace with himself, I was thinking about what Colleen had said to me a hundred times across the years: “Why didn’t you encourage him to play a team sport? He was so good at baseball.” Yeah, I thought, baseball would be nice today. A dugout filled with teammates to console him.

I walked off to the men’s room to soak my towel. We had forty minutes. I could picture the first three holes clearly in my mind and the shots we were going to have to execute in order to get off to a solid start. One shot at a time, I said to myself. Driver on number 1 straight into this thirty-knot wind. We’ll be taking a seven-iron to the green instead of the wedges we’d hit in our practice rounds. The change in weather had made it a new game today. On number 2 we had hit three-woods in our practice rounds to the narrow landing area with another 40 yards to spare before the ground fell into a ravine that would be death. Now the wind was going to be behind us on that tee, and I made a note to tell Jack that a three-wood would be far too much club. No more than a five-iron this morning, I wrote in my notebook. On the 3rd hole, a 210-yard par-3, we had hit rescue clubs into the wind in both practice rounds. Today a six-iron would be plenty.

On the putting green Jack looked handsome in his black banker’s trousers he had worn since his sophomore year in high school and royal-blue jacket, the biggest guy out there and a dead ringer for Jack Nicklaus when he first broke onto the tour. I told myself that these other boys, no matter how good they were, would not be our opponents today. In golf, you have no teammates to console you, but you also have no opponents; it’s just you against the golf course. A perfect equation. I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured Jack in his first NCAA tournament in North Carolina, when he was up against many of the top Division I players in the country and he had
shot one under par. That was his high point, and as I watched him on the practice green, I was hoping he could remember that. And not that his first tournament had turned out to be his last.

On the 1st tee, the Adams Golf tent was in a heap on the ground, battered by the wind. “Nice and smooth,” I said to Jack as I handed him his driver. He striped it up the middle, a mile out there, but when we got to his ball, we discovered that it had kicked left off a mound and was lying directly behind a tree. “That sucks a little,” he said with a short laugh. We were only 140 yards to the front of the green, but the best we could do was punch a five-iron below the branches of the tree, into the green-side bunker, blast out with a wedge, and two-putt for a bogey. I gave him my standard Scotland line—“We’ll get that stroke back”—and we walked on to the next tee box. Jack played the tee shot on number 2 perfectly, riding the wind 253 yards with a five-iron straight up the middle. He made a solid par there and another solid par on 3, then, as we were walking to the 4th tee box, he said, “This has to be a birdie hole today; with all the wind behind us, we’ll get there in two.”

“It is a birdie hole,” I said. I handed him his driver and watched him hit it dead center, sawing 327 yards off the 502-yard hole. With the wind still right behind us, he knocked an eight-iron the rest of the way, and we were lying four feet off the right side of the green, seventeen feet from the hole in two. The perfect birdie chance we were both hoping for.

Everyone who has ever tried to play golf with some degree of perfection knows that there is a point in every match where you have the chance to set the tone for the round. This was our point. Make a birdie here, and we will be on our way, I thought.

Jack took a couple of practice swings, then settled into the shot. He looked relaxed and confident with his knees flexed, but just before
his club struck the ball, he raised his head, and this prevented him from accelerating through the swing, and the club face stuck in the Bermuda grass. The ball moved forward only two feet. I watched his shoulders slump, and then he hurried the next shot and bladed the ball, sending it twenty-five feet past the pin. From there he made a bad putt and then a good one that should have fallen in. Instead of a birdie, we made double bogey.

As we walked to the next tee, he muttered to himself, “So stupid. So stupid.”

Maybe I should have played the optimist here as I always did with my golfers in Scotland. I almost said something upbeat, but Jack was angry at himself and I felt as if he needed to be angry just then, so I let it go.

On the next hole, a 192-yard par-3, Jack hit a terrific six-iron to twelve feet right of the flag. “We’re all right, Jackie boy,” I said. He was silent all the way to the green. And then he three-putted. I got only a quick look at his eyes, but it was enough for me to see that he was no longer angry. He was scared now. He could feel the despair that Vardon feared, and there was nothing I could do for him. Which really pissed me off. Four years ago a college in Maine invited me to donate all my manuscripts to its library. I turned in forty thousand pages from thirty-four years of writing. Since then maybe another five thousand pages. All those pages, all those words, and there I was standing right beside my son without even a handful of words to make him feel better about what was happening. I heard a dog barking across the fairway, and all I wanted was to be at home with Teddy. How are we going to get through the winter? I thought.