Miracle on the 17th Green Read online

  If my relationship with my father, who died three years ago of a heart attack, was always complex and unsatisfying, my relationship with my grandfather has always been blood simple. I adored him, and he got a kick out of being adored. I loved everything about him and still do. His laugh, his scent, the touch of his skin, that he was a carpenter and a mechanic and never graduated from high school, and that he loved to fight.

  The oldest brother and de facto bodyguard for an enormous farm family of eleven kids, my grandfather is both the toughest and the gentlest of men. Although in his later years he began shrinking and shedding pounds in bunches, as if his body, guided by an intelligence of its own, were streamlining itself for old age, in his prime he was about five feet nine and weighed 235 pounds and was the strongest man in Winnetka.

  My younger son, Noah, has a fixation with action figures, particularly X-Men like Cyclops and Wolverine and Metalhead, and as a young boy my grandfather filled a similar need for me. I can describe in great detail each of his unscheduled bouts in a pugilistic career that started when he was eleven and ended in his late forties, but a characteristic tale was when as a young man on his first foray into Chicago, in his brand-new Model A Ford, a cabbie, irked by his hesitant driving, yelled at him, “Go back to the farm!”

  Since that was exactly where he’d come from, and where he would soon return, the suggestion was particularly nettlesome, although the driver would probably have met the same fate had he shouted something as generic as “I haven’t got all day, pal!”

  You see, not only is my grandfather a terrible driver, he brooks no criticism of it, from anyone but a blood relative.

  So Pop put his car in park, walked back to the cabbie, and knocked him out through the window.

  As a rail-thin, bespectacled, almost emaciated little kid, whose distant father seemed to have no discernible connection to the physical world, I latched on to these stories like a precious inheritance, often prompting him to retell this one or that one, and after every retelling my grandfather would tilt his head back and laugh, with a delight that was as pure and righteous and essentially modest as the snow that still covered this course in patches.

  As a golf teacher, Pop was demanding. He introduced me to the game at eight, but wouldn’t let me play my first round until I’d spent three years hitting balls on the driving range, and practicing on and around the putting green. And he always began our literally thousands of rounds together with the same terse but merry challenge—“No gimmes. No mulligans. No bullshit. Let’s play golf.”

  But he always made it clear that his stringency was based on respect for both the game and me, and that if we went about it in the right and thorough manner, there was no limit to what I might be able to accomplish.

  I suspect that whatever confidence I have as a person in this world is based directly on what, as a very young man on this very course, he gave me the opportunity to earn.

  “The third shot is easy,” he said. “Just hit the ball over the goddamned tree.”

  For a second, I was so overcome with affection for this nerveless old coot, I couldn’t see the ball. How many more of these playing lessons would I have? Would this be the last? Time, as I said, was getting more and more precious. Although I can’t say that’s why my 2-iron crashed into the upper branches.

  “Pop,” I said, “I got fired yesterday.”

  “Well, you better learn how to hit the ball a little higher then.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said, “because I’m going to try to play the Senior Tour. You don’t think I’m fooling myself, do you?”

  “I think you’ve been fooling yourself for thirty years,” he said. “I always thought you should try to play the tour, but your parents thought I was crazy. Too risky, they thought, so I stayed out of it.”

  “You don’t think it’s too late?”

  “Christ, no. It’s about time you try to make an honest living.”

  “Things haven’t been too good with Sarah either,” I said, figuring I might as well get it all out on the table.

  “Could be related,” Pop said. “A guy who hates his job isn’t going to be too charming at home.”

  PART TWO

  The Miracle Tour

  Eleven

  IF THIS WERE A MOVIE, and hopefully it will be soon, the producers would buy an uptempo song like “Takin’ Care of Business” and show a two-minute montage of me practicing furiously, progressing from utter ineptitude to a very tentative competence, as I prepared myself and my game for the Senior Tour Q-School. Sort of a charmingly geriatric version of Rocky sucking eggs and running the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  I didn’t have time for that.

  Two days later, I threw some clothes into an old suitcase, along with my birth certificate and a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. I grabbed my sticks and golf shoes and a handful of Sinatra and Tom Petty tapes.

  Sarah drove me to O’Hare, and even gave me a kiss (on the cheek) before I passed through the metal detector. The night before we finally had an actual conversation, and I tried to explain how important it was for me to try this. I can’t say she was happy about it, and she clearly wasn’t enthused about the prospect of supporting our family if it didn’t pan out, something she essentially felt she was doing already.

  “Why couldn’t you have tried this twenty-five years ago?” she asked at one point, and I didn’t know quite how to tell her. Twenty-five years ago, even if I could putt, there was no way on earth I would have left Sarah and Elizabeth for a life in hotel rooms, but now, in a strange way, I almost had no choice.

  “Good luck,” she said. “You’re going to make it, Travis.” That was all. It wasn’t exactly Casablanca, but it was more than I expected.

  A few minutes later, I folded myself into a cheap seat for a night flight to Tampa. As I sat with my feet up against the droning bulwark and peered out the window at the lights of Chicago passing below, I thought of something my most precocious friend in high school liked to say: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

  Maybe I was a self-deluded fool, who would soon be looking back on his three decades in the velvet yoke of advertising with nostalgic longing, but in the last couple of weeks things had certainly gotten a lot more interesting, and stranger, and I was about to turn pro.

  In Tampa, I rented another cramped seat, this time in a very compact Chevy, and with Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” and “Imagination” serving as twin anthems, I made the three-hour drive to Tallahassee, arriving just after midnight.

  Q-School and the final round of the Eastern regional, which had also been wiped out by Hurricane Eunice, were being held at a large resort complex called the Tallahassee Dunes, and since I was still too worked up to sleep, I headed over to take a look.

  The parking lot was enormous, and except for a row of tarp-covered golfing carts, completely empty. The lot’s vast black landscape, cracked and potholed and greasy, seemed as lunar as the three-quarter moon.

  I parked the car by the clubhouse, and walked over toward what I assumed was the 18th green.

  I took in its tranquil amoeba shape. In the moonlight, the undulating short-cropped surface looked like a pond, and behind it the rest of the course receded beckoningly into semidarkness like a dream.

  Without consciously deciding to do so, I wandered out into the dream.

  Maybe it’s because my grandfather wouldn’t let me play my first round for three years, but for me a golf course has always been a kind of sacred roped-off place, where outside concerns are permitted to intrude only on my own terms. Ever since I was a kid, I have always felt like something of an outsider, but on a golf course I feel the opposite, the energy of the land itself coming up through my feet.

  For the next hour and a half, I walked the entire course. There was just enough light for me to see that there was nothing plush or country-clubbish about this layout, just a threadbare tract of overplayed and underirrigated Florida scrub pine, but it had good bones, and I took an instant liking to it.

  I liked the way it felt underfoot. This is where I make my stand, I thought to myself.

  When I reached a wide-open stretch in the center of what I later learned was the 16th fairway, which like all the parts of all the other holes at the Dunes would become as intimate and crucial a part of my personal history as the street I grew up on, and the Chicago motel room in which I lost my virginity, I lay down on my back and stared up at the star-filled sky. I was searching the constellations for some portent of what was to come.

  Would I be forgiven my still-unspecified sins, or was my marriage busted beyond any hope of repair? Was I about to lose the luxury of my delusions and come up hard against the limits of my talent and guts, or was a new and entirely better stage of my life about to begin?

  As usual, the stars weren’t giving away any plotlines.

  When I started getting drowsy, I dusted myself off and headed back to the car to find a cheap place to stay. The first one I came to was a Motel 6, but that sounded way too much like a double bogey, so I registered instead at the Ben Franklin Motor Court, where I got a bed, a towel, and a bar of soap for twenty-one dollars a night.

  Suddenly, my life seemed very simple. I was doing what my heart told me to do, and that couldn’t be all wrong.

  Twelve

  SIX HOURS LATER I was back at the course.

  I wanted to have plenty of time to register and check in, scope out the practice range and the putting green, and then play a calm, relaxed practice round.

  But at 7:45 A.M. the huge parking lot was already packed and pulsing with electric pre-game anticipation and jittery nerves.

  The sprawling scene looked like something be-tween a swap meet and the tailgate parties before a Chicago Bears game, a sheet-metal portrait of Amer-ica itself. There were gleaming Caddies and Lincolns, and beat-up old trucks, late-model Benzes and Porsches, custom vans and motor homes. There was even an old Harley with a bag of clubs sticking out of the sidecar.

  The lot made me think of those muddy, brawling Wild West towns that sprang up overnight around a saloon-brothel in the gold rush, and as I hunted out a space I felt more excited and alive than I had in years.

  There is nothing elitist or exclusive about Q-School. Anyone with a birth certificate and three thousand dollars can tee it up. According to the entry form, you also need a letter from someone in “the golfing community” verifying that you know how to play, but what assistant pro is going to refuse to write a note for someone who has bought thousands of dollars of lessons from him or the head pro?

  As a result, the range of skill and qualifications at Q-School is about as broad as any Sunday at your own course. That morning, there were golfers who had been on and off the PGA Tour for twenty years; there were former college stars and teaching pros and amateur state champions; and others who had never broken 90 honestly in their life.

  As for myself, I am not officially even a scratch golfer. My lowest handicap, posted when I was nineteen and then again when I was forty-eight, was a 1.

  While that may seem impressive to most golfers, it’s diddly-squat on tour, where, if calculated on an average course, the actual handicap of a solid touring pro is a −3 or −4.

  Statistically, of course, all but the very best of us were on a fool’s mission—or in search of a miracle. We had no more likelihood of success than an old forty-niner panning for gold in a Montana stream. The golfers crowding the parking lot that morning weren’t even there for the final stage of Q-School. This was just the regional qualifier.

  The next day 240 golfers would play one round, with the top twenty-four spots getting added to the other 160 golfers who had already made it through regional tournaments held earlier in California and Texas.

  Then those 184 golfers would shoot four rounds for exactly eight one-year spots on the Senior Tour.

  With so many golfers and so few spots, the pressure was absolutely insane.

  It was far worse than even the regular tour Q-School, where forty spots are up for grabs, and those who don’t make it can consider the Nike, Asian, or satellite tours, and if all else fails, can at least look forward to Senior Tour Q-School down the road.

  But for most of us, this was it. The last chance to dream. The final court of appeals.

  Over the next five days, I got to witness the devastating effect that so much pressure can have on such delicate mechanisms as the golf swing and the human psyche.

  Over the next four days, I saw and heard things on a golf course I hadn’t experienced in four decades. It seemed that at any moment, half the field was muttering to themselves and pacing back and forth like expectant fathers in a maternity ward, and they were the ones with their shit together. Health nuts, who hadn’t smoked in their lives, were inhaling two packs a day.

  Playing in Q-School is like running a gauntlet. There are no winners, only a handful of scarred and bloody survivors.

  Just thinking back on it gives me the yips.

  Maybe it was because I didn’t know any better that I found the pressure bracing rather than debilitating. Yeah, I was nervous and could barely sleep or keep down solid food, but never for a second did I second-guess my decision to try to qualify.

  I was doing what I wanted to do. Finally. After all these years.

  My streaking golf game seemed to have survived the trip intact, including my newfound and all-important ability to read the line on my putts. I was still playing the best golf of my life.

  I shot a 67 in the qualifier to comfortably make it to the final stage, and when I opened with another solid 69, a local reporter wrote a story about a “jilted adman who may have saved his best lines for the Senior Tour.”

  Thirteen

  YOU KNOW HOW some people are terrible to eat with? The food arrives and they attack it with such naked fear and longing that the sight of them makes you embarrassed to be a human being. It’s the same with golf. Some people are fine to play with. Others exude such an ugly paranoia that just standing next to them can cost you three strokes a side.

  And that’s why in the early rounds of a tournament, particularly a tournament like Q-School, nothing is more crucial to your chances than the person you’re paired with.

  That’s why I was lucky to be paired in the second round with a guy who introduced himself as Earl Fielder.

  At five foot seven and 220 pounds, Fielder had the same brick shithouse physique as my grandfather when he was younger. According to a story I read in the local gazette, Earl Fielder was a retired army captain. After surviving four highly funky tours in Vietnam, he’d spent the last decade living in the woods outside Monroe, North Carolina, hunting, fishing, and overseeing his stock portfolio. Or, as he described it, “living off the fat of the land.”

  He’d also been honing his game. Although he didn’t pick up a club until an R&R excursion to Thailand at twenty-five—“When I was a kid, the nearest public course that allowed black people on it was three hours away”—he had won the Carolina amateur three times in the past five years.

  After a half-dozen holes I could see why. Earl Fielder could play the game. His swing may have been a little fast and short, but I had never seen anyone stand up to the ball so solid and strong. He looked as if he were rooted into the ground. And he was ridiculously straight off the tee, splitting the fairway drive after drive with a machinelike rhythm.

  But it wasn’t just his game that was solid. In the four-day freakathon that is Q-School, where even the most level-headed competitors are just a spike mark and a lipout away from a psychotic incident, Fielder was an oasis of serenity. After a three-putt on the second hole, for example, the other member of our threesome, a Venezuelan teaching pro named Hector Fernandez, had taken to crossing himself before every swing.

  But Fielder actually seemed to have some kind of perspective on this whole affair. Before I had said a dozen words to him, I liked him, and felt nearly as comfortable around him as with my closest friends.

  On the front side that day, Earl and I were steadily rolling along. We both made the turn at one under par.

  But when we reached the tenth, a long, dangerous par 3 with water to the left, right, and behind the hole, there were already two threesomes backed up at the tee, which meant at least a fifteen-minute wait.

  Under the circumstances, extra time to think is the last thing you want, but while Fernandez stood off to the side, flagellating himself in Spanish, and the other golfers squeezed in some last-minute work on their putting and chipping strokes, Earl just sat down—as if on a park bench—and lit up a long dark cigar.

  “It’s like an insane asylum out here,” I said as I joined him.

  “Yeah,” said Fielder blowing out an aromatic stream, “after they cut back on the medication. It always pisses me off when people who don’t know what they’re talking about compare something to Vietnam, but in a weird way this really does remind me a little of Nam.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  “It’s got the same spooky sunlit vibe, people tiptoeing on eggshells and squeezing their little good luck charms, hoping to God they won’t fuck up and will somehow get through this thing.”

  “Sounds like the advertising agency where I used to work,” I said. “Everyone walking around pretending they were invisible, hoping to survive another day. After twenty-three years they finally got me two weeks ago.”

  “Oh yeah, they ambushed your ass,” said Earl.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Greased me right by the water cooler. So where do you stand in this thing?”

  “One under,” he said.

  “Even,” I said.

  “So we’re both still in the hunt.”

  Finally, the green opened up in front of us. Earl gingerly stubbed out his cigar, and after carefully wrapping it in tinfoil, returned it to his nylon club bag, which, like me, he was carrying himself.