Walking with Jack (37 page)

“I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me. You ran that first putt nine feet past the hole, and you were spooked the rest of the round.”

“It’s pathetic. Really stupid.”

“I know. Your mother could have putted better, but, Jack, look, you had one easy par all day. You were getting hammered out there, and you could have hung your head and missed the cut.”

“I should have been one under after four. I mean, easily. I’m seventeen feet from the hole in two on the par-5, and I make a bogey because of a stupid first putt?”

“I know all that, believe me. I know. But you fought hard. I’ve never seen you fight harder. You made the cut. We live to fight another day. So tomorrow go out there and play the best round of your life. Shoot under par. Climb back up. We’ll eat our Chicken McNuggets if we can ever fucking find them, then we’ll watch the Celtics and it will be okay.”

“I’m hitting a hundred lag putts tomorrow before we start.”

“Fine, we’ll pull your truck up to the practice green and putt in the dark with your headlights if we have to. I don’t care. Whatever you want to do. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You made the cut, Jack. You didn’t give up. You didn’t make any excuses. One of the guys in our group was throwing his clubs all over the course. The other guy gave up. But you held on. I was proud of you. Round two tomorrow. Bring your ‘A’ game and let’s see what happens.”

We have the same tropical conditions on the putting green at 9:30 as I encountered five hours earlier when I stepped outside the hotel. Hot and humid, with a dull and steady rain falling. Jack and I watched the Celtics game last night in a kind of stunned silence. We are both sick and tired of getting kicked around. This morning every golfer is wearing the same mask, hoping to conceal that he is praying to God or whatever he believes in that today, for just once, he might have a stress-free round. And what is that in precise terms? Hitting the fairways off the tees. Hitting the greens in regulation, then rolling the first putt close enough to tap in for a par and move on to the next hole, or if you should miss the green, finding your ball in benign ground so you can fly a wedge close enough to the hole to make your par that way. Yesterday we hit fourteen fairways with splendid shots from the tees. One missed fairway cost us a stroke. The others, Jack found a way to scramble for pars. We missed six greens and lost two more strokes to poor wedges. These three mistakes should have given us a round of three over par, right at the top of the leaderboard. But Jack left twelve putts short. I mean ten feet or eight feet short. He sank six of these for rather heroic par saves. The other six cost us another seven strokes. I have been wondering if perhaps the small greens threw off his perception in some way and this is why he left so many putts short, because he never lost his putting stroke or he would not have been able to sink those six long putts to save par. He was shy and putting scared. On the practice green this morning he rolled the ball hard. I watched while sitting in a buggy, drinking coffee. For the record, we will be riding in a buggy for a while. My stupid knee popped out of its socket during my practice round on
Saturday. It did this once before, but this time it took me a long time to snap it back where it belonged. In all the other tournaments there were only two or three golfers walking along with us. Everyone else was in buggies. I left it up to Jack this morning.

“Let’s ride,” he said, more for me than for himself.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

I know he prefers to walk, to impose his own pace on the game. He’s making this concession for me. There wasn’t time for me to feel lousy about this. I took a seat and felt a little grateful to be able to get out of the rain. Everyone is concealing something in this world, and I suppose we can be defined more by what we hide than what we reveal. In my case I have worried here in Texas about looking so old that it might frighten Jack, sort of like the daughter whose mother has one of those giant double butts—one in back and a matching one in front—because the daughter knows that this may be her fate. Here, living in the same room with Jack since late October, I have been careful to dress and undress only in the bathroom so he doesn’t have to see my pathetic potbelly. And I can hide my stupid bald head under a baseball cap. But now I have the limp, and I can’t hide that. I am really turning into an old man now, and if Jack hasn’t already acknowledged this, he will before we are finished here this winter. He will glance at me and say to himself, my father is an old man now. And with that acknowledgment, a certain immunity will be lifted from his head because he will know that he is next, that no matter how much time he has ahead of him, one day he will look as old as his old man.

Enough, I thought. Enough of that.

Jack finally began a round with an easy par after hitting a beautiful drive and a fine eight-iron to the green, the ball coming to a stop seventeen feet below the hole. Just what he needed for his first long putt after yesterday. And he put a good roll on it and then tapped in for a par. I saw an ironic little grin on his face. “Much better putts today,” I said. “Just follow through right to the hole.”

He hit a decent three-wood off the tee on the short par-5 2nd hole. Rather than trying to reach the heavily bunkered green in two, he laid up wisely with a punched five-iron. So he was left with 85 yards to the hole, an easy wedge. He put a good swing on it, but to our astonishment the ball airmailed the green and also the big bunker behind the green. The ball went so far that Jack had to hit a provisional in the event that it ended up out of bounds. “What was that?” he asked me. “I don’t know,” I said. He asked me if he had hit it thin, and I said, “No way. It didn’t sound or look thin at all.” So he ended up taking a stupid double bogey on an easy hole. And then the battle was on, and I don’t mean the battle for golf; I mean that same old grinding battle to try to keep believing in himself enough to play the next shot well. Though he was disgusted, he made a solid par on the next hole, then made what I thought was just a harmless mistake on the par-3, by flying the ball ten feet past the hole into the Bermuda rough. When we got to his ball, it was clear that this mistake was anything but harmless. His ball was sitting down in deep rough, and he was looking at a green sloping steeply away from him right to the edge of the pond he had just carried on his tee shot. A mistake here and he was in the water. “Keep your head down, Jackie boy, and put a good swing on it,” I said. But he couldn’t advance the ball more than two feet. Then he left the third shot short of the green as well. We took our second double bogey in the first four holes. I could barely breathe. All I said to him was “Keep fighting, man. Don’t give up.”

That same damned fight, that same battle to believe in himself, was right in front of us now. And let me say this: for the next three hours I never saw a golfer fight harder than Jack did. After losing one more stroke on the next hole, Jack played the remaining thirteen holes at even par to post a respectable 77. That’s not the whole story, though. In those thirteen holes, he made such splendid drives and such solid iron play that he set himself up for seven birdie putts inside ten feet. Only two of them fell for him. He should have made five. Hell, he could have made all seven. Still, he was holding his
head up the whole way in, and he earned back just enough to face the Bentwater Open in two days.

I will be waking Jack at 6:00 a.m., and we will be driving an hour north in the dark for our 8:40 tee time in round one of the Bentwater Open this morning, and somewhere along the way I will tell him that those six poor wedge shots he hit yesterday in our practice round with Barry and two of his mates from the tour were all caused by fear. At first I thought he was just hungry; I had forgotten to pack our peanut butter and jam sandwiches. But it was fear, and each shot had cost him a stroke. I am going to tell him that when he strides defiantly up to his next shot, he always nails it. But when he is tentative, and timid, the wheels fall off. This Johnny Miller–designed course is what you would expect from Johnny, who could never putt terribly well but who had some of the most brilliant iron play ever. Flat, simple greens, accessible only through narrow passageways between towering pine trees and big bunkers. If you want to land these greens, you must be precise. Fall short and you might lose your ball in a ravine. Push your shot even slightly left or right and you are in the trees or, at best, looking at one of those delicate wedge shots from the Bermuda rough, which has been so ruinous for Jack, who never laid eyes on that type of grass before we arrived in Texas. I believe that today’s round will come down to how Jack can play those shots. Unless of course
he doesn’t need to play those shots
—because he hits every green in regulation like one of the fellows whom Barry brought with him to the practice round yesterday, a young Canadian golfer, winner on both the Nationwide and the Canadian Tours and
a consistent money winner on our tour this winter. He played a flawless round of seven under par. Barry almost caught up to him on the 15th but finished two strokes behind while he and I talked about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which he was too young, at age twenty-eight, to recall. I told him that here in Houston and in every American city now, all the young black men walk with their heads down and their shoulders pitched forward in defeat, like the young Catholic men I’d seen in Londonderry who could be hauled off the street at any time simply because they had the misfortune of being Irish. Barry misses the old country, but he has made his home in the States since he arrived here when he was eighteen and found work as a caddie at the St. Louis Country Club to earn his way through college. The pro there spotted his talent and encouraged him to play for St. Louis University. Six years later, he is here now trying to take his game to the next level. He told me that he dreams of returning to Europe to play on the big tour and to one day play in the Irish Open. I told him that this was as fine a dream for a young man to be chasing as I’d ever known of.

Round one today began unlike any other tournament we have played here. Jack birdied the par-5 1st hole (after hitting his second shot, a 254-yard hybrid over trees eighty feet tall just off the green, and then a beautiful wedge to four feet) and then birdied the second as well after hitting a 143-yard wedge to three feet. When he followed those two birdies with two strong and easy pars, it suddenly felt as if we were in this match not just to make the cut, or to post a respectable number, but to try to win. But in time those little wedge shots from the Bermuda rough that I had feared caught up with Jack, costing him two double bogeys. He fought hard and birdied the par-5 16 after reaching the green in two with a brilliant four-iron, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for his mistakes, and he finished at a six-over-par 78. When it was over, he was as disgusted with himself as I’ve ever seen him. Let me just say that it was a rough ride back to the hotel. A wall of silence. And the whole way I was wondering how Jack was going to resolve this. When we reached the parking lot,
instead of getting out of the truck with me, he took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to the range to hit two hundred wedges from the rough. I’ll be back later.”

Fair enough, I thought.

In the room I read an e-mail that had come from Barry in response to my asking him yesterday if he had ever considered playing on the EuroPro Tour in Great Britain as a way of breaking into the European Tour. These lines really broke my heart: “That would be a dream. I would like for my father to see me play in one professional tournament because I know he has never believed I can make it to next level, unfortunately.”

I read those two sentences over and over before I fell asleep.

Round two. We drove in darkness again for an 8:40 tee time this morning. While Jack was on the range, I spent some time helping one young man change the spikes on his shoes. At age thirty, after chasing the dream for nine years, he is under pressure now to prove it for his sponsor, who called him last night wondering how he managed to post an 80 in round one. “Hit my drive into the water on number 4,” he recounted grimly. He was teeing off just before us. The whole time we worked on his shoes I kept wondering why it was taking us so long. Then I looked down and saw that his hands were shaking badly.

There is pressure in this game, to be sure, pressure in every variation. But Jack looked very calm as he made his way up onto the 1st tee and hammered his drive 347 yards up the left side into perfect position to hit a high cut over the trees on the left and land the par-5
in two. An eagle putt of forty-seven feet. Not a strong lag putt, but the birdie putt was solid, and the ball dropped into the cup and then danced out. A par. I expected him to be disgusted with himself again, but for some reason he was smiling when he handed me his putter. “Did you see that?” he asked.

“A three-putt?” I said sarcastically.

“No, man, I ripped my pants, bending over to read the first putt.” The only black trousers he’s ever owned, the ones his mother bought him during his sophomore season in high school.

“If I wasn’t so damned broke, I’d buy you another pair,” I told him.

“No problem,” he said.

As we headed to the 2nd tee, I said, “I mean that, you know? I’d love to be able to buy you a new pair of trousers.”

“Why trousers?” he asked. “What happened to pants?”

“In Scotland pants are underpants.”

“Hey, man, you’re not in Scotland anymore. Remember?”

I apologized, then watched him hit his second drive just like the first one. Yesterday he hit every fairway but one from the tees. It has been this way for the last six tournaments. Now we were left with just 85 yards to the green on this par-4. I can’t explain how he could have airmailed the green with his wedge. But he did. And then it was another ruinous wedge left short in the Bermuda rough, and another wedge bladed across the green and two putts. “You can’t make double bogeys when you’re 80 yards from the middle of the green,” he said, disgusted now, as he should have been.