Walking with Jack (39 page)

“I’ve been trying,” he said. “Why are you awake?”

“I was worried about the extra putter in your bag.”

“I would have remembered.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

When he got back into bed, I asked him if I’d ever told him my theory about life.

“Which one?” he said.

“Funny,” I said. “No, this is important. When I was about your age and I was finally beginning to figure out how the world worked, I realized what a man needed to be content in this world. Whenever I’d drive by these tar-paper shacks in Maine, you know, the desperately poor people who somehow survive, I would remind myself that all a man needed in that shack was some work to occupy his mind and a darling girl who desired him more than her next breath. If he had that, he had enough.”

“What about his health?” Jack said.

“Yeah, okay, three things then,” I said.

I didn’t say the next thing that was on my mind—how I probably wasn’t going to get all three in my little room at the end.

———

We were in trouble in the first round of the Cypresswood Open today before we even reached the 1st tee. I watched Jack laboring through his swings on the practice range. His back was too sore for him to make his turn. All his shots were bleeding to the right.

It got worse out on the course. I honestly don’t know how he made a single par, but we didn’t say anything about his back until we walked off the 16th green. “I’m sorry,” I said to him.

“No excuses,” he said. “People play this game in pain all the time. I haven’t executed a single shot today.”

So there we were with two holes left to play and knowing that we had to birdie both of them to make the damned cut.

We were paired with Gabe from Iowa again today, and he came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder while Jack walked onto the 17th-tee par-5. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said. “He’ll make it.”

And somehow he did. A birdie on 17, and then another birdie on 18. Not the prettiest birdies you’ll ever see, but good enough to make the cut and live to fight our way back tomorrow.

After a year of almost no rain in this part of Texas, the long drought came to an end at just the wrong time for us and washed out the second round at Cypresswood. Jack and I showed up for our 8:00 a.m. tee time only to be sent home an hour later with no hope of finishing the tournament. The bright side of this was that Jack had the day off to rest his back. But I needed a long walk, and I was pretty sure that
I knew the one person in Texas who would play eighteen holes in the rain with me.

Barry was just one of a number of players whose chance to finish the tournament in the money had been washed away. But he was in good spirits, even though his $500 entry fee had turned out to be a very expensive round of golf. “Five hundred dollars for eighteen holes,” he said. “Just like Pebble Beach, I guess.” He had been a tour player long enough, selling his old equipment on eBay for gas money to drive to the next tournament and doing whatever was required of him to keep going a little further, to take all setbacks in stride. “Ah, you get used to it,” he said. “But it’s a struggle.”

I joked with him that if he’d been a struggling writer instead of a struggling golfer, all he would need was some paper and a pen.

Our shoes and pants were spattered with mud, there wasn’t another soul out on the course (just my kind of golf), and as soon as Barry walloped his first tee shot way the hell out there, we started talking about Jack. “He’s told me that you’re a dreamer and he’s a realist,” Barry said.

I caught the trace of irony in his voice when he said this, and then the look in his eyes told me that there was something more he wanted to tell me. And he was willing to tell me, but he wasn’t so sure that I was willing to listen. I jumped in rather desperately and said, “You know if Jack decides he wants to go further after this tour, I’ll work seven nights a week stocking shelves at Walmart for the money if I have to.”

“I’m sure you would,” Barry said. Then he patiently laid it out for me while we walked side by side up the fairway. Jack could play on these tours for another year or two, working harder on his game than he ever had before, and with his natural ability he might make it through Q school. “But I don’t think that’s what Jack wants,” he said. “I think maybe you want that more than he does, Don. And I’m not blaming you. What Jack wants is to love his girl and hold down an honest job. That’s his dream now. It’s not a bad dream. Every day
I think that should be my dream. I shot five over par the other day at Cypresswood, and then I’m in my car asking myself why I ever believed that I could make it. What kind of fool am I? This game breaks you in pieces, Don.”

“You’re not a fool,” I said. “It goes with the territory for dreamers. Most of the time you don’t feel real. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years, every day, seven days a week, and I’ve only had maybe twenty days when I’ve ever felt real.”

“Exactly,” Barry said. “You see what I’m saying then about Jack? Maybe he saw that, and he wants something different.”

“I see,” I told him. And I really meant it.

We played our way around, talking about Ireland and how I was going to try to raise the money for him to make his run for the European Tour. I told him that all winter in Texas, I had been trying to come up with a metaphor to explain the mental torture of golf. “Tell me what you think of this,” I said. “Let’s say you rode your bicycle every morning to the little corner store for a newspaper and then you rode back home. And every single day you knew with absolute certainty that somewhere on that little trip you were going to be thrown over the handlebars. Without exception. That’s golf.”

He laughed. “Yeah, pretty good, Don,” he said.

I had to break both of Barry’s arms to let me fill his car with gas on the drive back to the hotel. “You can get to the next two events on me,” I told him.

“I’m really grateful,” he said.

“I know you are,” I said.

He was going to try to make ten or fifteen birdies this coming week so that he could start chipping away at his credit card debt. On May 1, his visa expired, and he would have to leave America and Denise, the girl he loved. She called him while he was driving me back to the hotel. I could tell by the way he spoke to her that she believed in him. “That’s the truth,” he said. He recalled the first time he’d won some decent money, in an event on the Hooters Tour. “I’ll never forget how it felt when I called her and told her,” he said.

“It was one of those twenty days,” I said. “You felt real.”

“I guess that’s true,” he said.

I told him that he couldn’t stop now. “When you have someone who believes in you, you have to keep going even when you don’t believe in yourself.”

I’d had that with Colleen for all these years. And that was probably the only reason I hadn’t quit.

Back in the room Jack asked me to help him write a letter to Sherwin-Williams in Cleveland, where he and Jenna wanted to live so they could be near her family. Someone had told him about a management training program, and he wanted to try for it.

As evening came on, we worked on the letter while we watched golf on TV and I complained when CBS turned the tournament into the Tiger Woods Show again. He was in third place, but there was almost no coverage of the two golfers who were ahead of him because CBS knew that America wanted to see only Tiger. “How can he even show his face in public after what he did to his wife and kids?” I yelled at the screen. “And not only that, Jack. Take a look at the big-shot bankers who get invited to play. They’re the same morons who fucked up the economy and cost your grandfather every penny he worked all his life for. No one bailed him out when he lost everything. But look at these guys, they’re back on top, playing golf on TV again.” Jack turned it off and got up. He grabbed the putters, and I followed him out into the hallway. “Let’s go,” he said.

We are scraping the bottom of the barrel now, and so, after playing a practice round at half speed yesterday afternoon to rest Jack’s back,
we swung by Walmart and loaded up on enough fifty-cent chicken pies to get through our final five days. I’ve been awake for hours listening to the rain this morning and thinking about the road through Q school for the PGA Tour. You pay your $4,600, and then, with the prequalifying and qualifying stages, you basically have to shoot sixteen rounds of under-par golf under extreme pressure to have a chance. It’s like someone saying to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Okay, you’re a great writer, but in order to earn the chance to become a
real writer
, first you have to stand up on a stage under a spotlight and correctly spell every single word in the dictionary.”

Fine, I thought. Bring it on.

Then Jack’s phone rang with word that we were on a four-hour delay for round one of the Lakes Classic, waiting for heavy thunderstorms to pass through Houston. “Are you going back to sleep?” I called to him across the dark room.

“I guess so,” he said.

“I hope you get the job at Sherwin-Williams,” I said.

“We’ll see,” he said.

“And if you decide in a year or two that you want to give golf another run, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You never know,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said.

I wanted to raise the stakes a little, maybe say, “If you shoot a round under par in one of our final two tournaments this week and win some money, then you were meant to make a run for the PGA Tour.” But I didn’t.

We were set for a 1:30 shotgun start after the rain fell off this afternoon. But the course was too wet, so we were sent home and will now play both rounds tomorrow. The ground will be so wet that balls will disappear in the fairways, and I am planning to go out ahead to watch Jack’s shots land. If you lose a ball, it’s a stroke penalty plus distance, and we can’t afford that. There is one ruling that could make things easier tomorrow. It is rule 25-1, “Abnormal
Ground Conditions,” which stipulates that if a ball disappears under these conditions, the golfer gets relief and can drop a ball, no closer to the hole, at the outermost limits where it entered the abnormal ground. I will have to speak with the tournament director about this before we tee off.

I got a text from Colleen early this morning wishing me a happy Valentine’s Day and telling me she loved me. You can’t ask for more than that. Well, you can ask, I suppose. But I’ll take it with gratitude.

As we were driving to the course today, I told Jack about Barry’s father, who had worked most of his life as a glassblower at Waterford Crystal only to have the company go belly-up before he could retire and claim the pension he’d paid into for four decades. “I guess that’s why I was never able to hold down a real job,” I said. “I must have lacked the faith or something. Maybe I just never believed in the system, I don’t know. But I always had the greatest respect for people who just wake up each morning and go to work. They’re the people who keep this world held together. Your mother will tell you how I always said I wished I could be a mailman who carried his work in a sack each day. When the sack was empty, he could go home and feel good about himself. I just never had what it takes. I never had what Barry’s father had.”

Jack didn’t say anything for a while. Then, as we pulled in to the parking lot, he said, “When this is over, you need to finish your mom’s screenplay and get that movie made, man. That’s your Q school.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I suppose that is my Q school.”

All the brilliant young boys on this tour looked weary this morning
after being sent home in the rain the last two rounds. I was hoping that Jack would find some inspiration and jump out to a lead while the rest of the players were trying to find their legs.

As we made our way to the 1st tee, I called to him. “Jack, I was thinking early this morning about your philosophy: ‘It is what it is.’ I’ve never agreed with that, but I never really knew why until just now. I don’t think in this life
it is what it is
. I think it is what you make it. So why don’t we try to make this a special day for your mother.”

“All right, man,” he said.

I am going to write down every shot today and send it to Colleen for Valentine’s Day.

Jack has the honors, and he rips a three-wood up the left side of the fairway into perfect position. A hundred and forty yards left on this 414-yard par-4. If his back is sore at all, he won’t tell me, but it will show eventually. He hits a lovely wedge that lands softly six feet from the hole. A great birdie chance. We both see the same break, one cup right to left. But the green is wet, and the ball doesn’t break at all. It’s a tap-in par.

Hole 2. This 521-yard par-5 requires a perfect drive through a narrow opening between the trees to reach the right side of the fairway so you can fly the corner of the dogleg on the second shot. We’re up the left side instead with 240 yards to reach the green. It’s an impossible second shot, and I’m hoping Jack will lay up and go at the green in three to try to make a birdie. But with only 240 yards left, he won’t hold back. He nails a three-wood and is calling for it to draw as it races across the sky. It falls short about forty paces from the green. We need a good wedge here to set up the birdie putt. And he hits one. Six feet left. It’s an uphill putt. The ball drops into the center of the cup for a birdie. One under par after two holes.

Number 3 is a narrow 414-yard par-4. Uncharacteristically, Jack’s drive bleeds right into trees. He can only punch out from there and scrap together a bogey. We are even after three holes. “We’ve had worse starts,” I tell him as we walk to the next tee.

“I have to play better,” he says.

Number 4. A 212-yard par-3, all carry over a small lake. He lands a six-iron twelve feet from the hole, and after his birdie putt falls short by three inches, it’s a tap-in par. Even after four holes.

Number 5. A 545-yard par-5. The course opens up here, and it’s “bombs away” from the tee. A lovely big drive up the left side. The sun is finally out now, a good sign after all the rain. It’s 11:45 and I hand Jack his first peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the day. We have another six and a half hours out here today before dusk, and I’ve packed him four sandwiches. After the big drive he has only 220 yards left, but he puts a poor swing on it, and he’s short of the green. From there he hits a nice wedge to set up a five-foot birdie putt. He wants this one. He’s fought for it. But the ball stops one revolution short of the hole for another tap-in par. “How do you leave a five-foot birdie putt short?” he says when he hands me his putter. “Patience,” I tell him. “We’ll have our chances.” Even after five holes.