Miracle on the 17th Green Read online

  Tick. Tick. Tick. You’re down to fifteen seconds.

  So what will it be? The lady or the tiger? Greed or caution? The chump change in Bob Barker’s sweaty fist, or what’s behind the lovely high-heeled Carol and door number one? So what’s it going to be, punk? Are you feeling lucky? Are you feeling talented?

  There goes the buzzer. Time’s up. Put your pencils down and pass your papers to the right.

  You decided to lay up, didn’t you? The more you mulled it over, the more it seemed like the only thing to do. After all, you thought, you’re already four under for the nine, why push your luck.

  I made the identical choice. So I’ll tell you what happened.

  Since I was only 140 yards from the start of the water, I hit a soft pitch to the water’s edge. Then, wanting to make sure I wasn’t going to get wet—I’m playing this hole conservatively, after all—I hit my second wedge a little strong and rolled it five feet off the back of the green. Then, after a so-so chip, I’ve got an eight-footer to save par.

  I miss the putt and walk away not so quietly with a bogey.

  By playing sensibly and intelligently, I had taken a possible eagle, or very likely a two-putt birdie, and turned it into a goddamn bogey, and completely blown my frame of mind.

  You see, I had practiced and practiced and truly gotten to be a better golfer. Now, I had to learn to get used to the fact, or as the pros like to put it, I had to get “comfortable” with it.

  I mean, why in the world, when the wind isn’t a factor, would you not go for a green that’s only 205 yards away, except for the fact that you’ve suddenly found yourself four under par and are starting to weird out and ask yourself all kinds of irrelevant questions?

  “It’s like you’re embarrassed about being good, Travis,” said Earl after the round. “Almost ashamed of it. And so as soon as you get three or four under, you start waiting for the golfing gods to turn around and punish your ass. Travis, it’s no crime of nature for you to be good at something… particularly something as essentially meaningless as golf.”

  Plus, if I can wax philosophical for a paragraph, there’s an even more fundamental principle involved here, and it applies to everything from what you decide to do for a living, to making an omelette, which is that there is nothing so consistently dangerous, not to mention more likely to mess with your head and leave you muttering into your beer, than playing it safe.

  Of course, I could be wrong.

  Twenty-three

  WHEN I LOOK BACK on what took place at the BellSouth Classic in Nashville, Tennessee, on the first weekend of June, I can see now that Earl was dropping one hint after another about how it was going to end. But fortunately at the time, I was too caught up in the events myself to understand any of them.

  For starters, there was Earl’s slight, but detectable, limp. Maybe I wasn’t looking closely enough, but in seven tournaments, I hadn’t noticed Earl do that before.

  Even more curious, however, was that Earl, who has never exhibited even the slightest tension on the golf course, and after a decade of being shot at in Southeast Asia considers the whole notion of athletic pressure insulting, was more nervous than I was.

  Yes, I had just birdied three holes in a row and, yes, I was tied for the lead of a pro tournament for the first time. But still, it was only Saturday. The way I saw it, I should at least wait until Sunday to start choking my brains out.

  And then there was Earl’s extreme urgency, which seemed a little misplaced under the circumstances. Even after I had birdied 15, 16, and 17, Earl was still riding me like a jockey going to the whip in the homestretch. “We got to have one more birdie, Travis,” said Earl as we approached the 18th green. “We just got to.”

  Now, I appreciate the value of a birdie as much as the next person, and I understand the need for working a hot hand for all you can get, but why, I wondered, was it so important right now?

  And finally there was Earl’s Cheshire cat grin when I did in fact sink that last ten-foot putt at 18 to take the outright lead, and the way he said under his breath, “Pebble Beach, here we come.” Pebble Beach, America’s most spectacular golf course, was going to be hosting the U.S. Senior Open a month later, but the only way I was going to get an engraved invitation to that dance was by winning a tournament before then, and despite my tiny one-stroke lead, this hardly seemed like a sure thing, or even close to it.

  By that evening, all of Earl’s nervousness had vanished, and throughout dinner he barely said a word. In fact, he was so uncharacteristically quiet, I finally had to ask him if he wasn’t going to give me some kind of inspirational pep talk for the next day’s round. “You know,” I said, “something in the guru/sports psychologist vein.”

  “The way you’re putting and swinging, Birdie Man,” said Earl with a smile, “you could win this thing in your sleep.”

  “Oh well, then I’m not too worried,” I said, “al-though I’m beginning to get a little worried about you.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Earl. “I worry about myself every day. That’s what keeps me sharp.”

  Despite being a tad mysterious, Earl’s low-key behavior helped me relax. I had no trouble falling asleep, and once I did, I slept soundly.

  Until three in the morning, when I was awakened by the cataclysmic sound of the sky being ripped open like a grocery bag. I stumbled out of bed and looked out the window. I couldn’t see the terrace, it was raining so hard. And three and a half hours later, when I got up for good, it was still coming down in sheets.

  I’m sure at this point, Ben Hogan would have scowled at the porous sky and demanded in no uncertain terms that it knock the shit off, so that he could go out and win his golf tournament without any damn meddling from on high. And no doubt, Jack Nicklaus would have viewed the prospect of getting his first pro win in anything less than regulation as equally repugnant.

  But I’m not Ben Hogan, and I’m not Jack Nicklaus. I’m Travis McKinley. So if any of you had been in room 1215 at the Nashville Ramada that morning, you would have witnessed the highly undignified sight of a grown man in his baggy underwear falling to his knees on the motel broadloom and embarrassing God with half a dozen fervent prayers sprinkled piously with hallelujahs and amens, to keep that precipitation a-coming… “O mighty clouds,” I’m ashamed to say I said, “please feel free to empty thyselves indefinitely upon these parched parts.”

  Five minutes later, my prayers were interrupted by Earl calling to extend his congratulations on my first… pro… win. Two hours later, I got the call from the tournament office. Would I please come over to the course and pick up my trophy and my check for $165,000.

  Don’t you just love this country?

  I figured this was sufficient reason for waking up my heirs in Winnetka.

  “One hundred sixty-five thousand dollars,” said Simon groggily. “You know what that means?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re yuppie scum.”

  “Can’t you just see me at the helm of a big burgundy Beemer?” I offered.

  “Don’t make me puke,” said Simon. “Congratulations, though.”

  Where did my children acquire these embittered pinko values, I wondered. From me, I realized.

  “You’re not scum, Dad,” said Noah. “You’re just rich.”

  “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking,” I sang, bursting into Gerswhin. “Can I talk to her?”

  “She had to deliver a baby,” said Noah. “You know Mom.”

  “And where is she delivering the baby to?” I asked, success having made me witty enough for your average four-year-old.

  “Stop it, Dad,” said Noah, who is definitely not average.

  “You tell her for me, okay?” I said. “I’ll call Elizabeth.”

  “Okay, Dad,” said Noah. “I’ll tell Mom.”

  After I called Elizabeth, Earl and I picked up the hardware and the software and headed directly to Nashville’s most expensive nouvelle restaurant, where we behaved lik
e any other pair of rich middle-aged friends addled by good fortune. We ate too much. We drank too much, and talked and laughed much too loud. It was wonderful.

  Despite my windfall, it turns out I wasn’t nearly as wealthy as Earl, who revealed for the first time that on a good day his stock portfolio was worth between one and one and a half million dollars. I still wrote him a check for $33,000.

  Maybe it was the wine or the good company or both, but after a while I started to get emotional. “From now on, Earl,” I said, “instead of calling me Travis, I think it would be best if you could just refer to me as the current champion of the BellSouth Classic.”

  “It would be my great honor,” said Earl, who was clearly as moved as I was. “But that’s quite a mouthful, don’t you think? Particularly when you add the asterisk on account of it being a rain-win.”

  “Why don’t you just kiss my asterisk,” I said.

  “Here’s to the U.S. Senior Open,” said Earl, lifting his champagne.

  “To Pebble Beach,” I said, meeting his glass. “I’m going to bring that course to its knees!”

  “Oh, Jesus,” groaned Earl. “May we not live to eat those words!”

  If a bank had been open that late, we would have laughed all the way to it.

  I tried to call Sarah when I got to the hotel, but she still wasn’t back from the hospital, which left me feeling seriously unrequited. To cheer myself up, I went down to the front desk, made a copy of my $165,000 check, stuffed it in an envelope, and had it Federal Expressed to my old pal Mike Kidd in Chicago. Oh, and I added an incredibly catchy little slogan:

  “Kiss my ass.”

  Twenty-four

  “IN ALL MY YEARS,” proclaimed Earl, apropos of nothing, almost as if he were talking to himself or had suddenly decided to initiate a conversation with the setting sun, “I have never observed anything quite so sorry, so miserable, and downright pathetic as a human being in love.”

  After Nashville, the tour had headed to Phoenix for a week, and on our first evening in Arizona, I was sitting beside Earl on the terrace of the Hilton, wondering what Sarah was doing at that moment and where, if anywhere, I stood in her affections.

  “Is that a fact?” I asked my spiritual and physical adviser.

  “Let’s take you, for example,” he said.

  “All right,” I obliged. “Seeing as I’m not too busy at the moment.”

  “What do you see right now?” Earl asked.

  “The sun going down, and the floor of the desert looking as if it’s on fire,” I answered.

  “Would you say it’s a pretty view, Travis?”

  “Breathtaking, Earl.”

  “And how ’bout the weather? How would you describe that?”

  “Pretty damn pleasant,” I replied.

  “Pleasant my ass,” said Earl. “It’s perfect. Christ, it’s so perfect, I can’t even feel the air on my skin. And what’s that in your hand?”

  “An ice-cold Budweiser. Can I get you one?”

  “I’m fine, but thanks. How ’bout your bank ac-count? How’s that doing?”

  “I don’t mean to be crass, Earl, but it’s six digits healthier than it was three days ago.”

  “Thank God for rain,” said Earl.

  “Crops got to grow,” I agreed.

  “And what is it exactly that you do for a living?”

  “Earl, I play golf.”

  “Let me get this straight. You get paid—handsomely apparently—to play golf on the most beautiful courses in the country.”

  “It’s the damnedest thing, isn’t it?”

  “So here you are nursing a cold one, taking in one of the more spectacular vistas on the planet, one hundred thirty-five gees accruing interest daily, following an improvement in your circumstances so extreme some might suspect God is playing favorites, and how do you feel?”

  “Miserable,” I said.

  “I rest my motherfucking case. And yes, I will take that beer now.”

  Twenty-five

  FOUR WEEKS TO THE DAY after my terrace chat with the duke of Earl, I stepped up to the first tee at the Nationwide Championship in Alfaretta, Georgia. I was a changed man.

  How could it be otherwise? In a matter of months, I had shed my old life as an advertising copywriter and been reincarnated as a pro athlete. First, I made the Senior Tour. Then I won on it. I earned more money in two days than I had in two years. In the process, I had all but assured myself a second year on tour, earned an invitation to the U.S. Senior Open, and given myself a chance to vie not just for dollars but for a small piece of history.

  Let me tell you the effect of all this fine fortune on my game and head.

  I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t putt. I couldn’t hit my irons. And I couldn’t chip. If I left anything out, I couldn’t do that, either.

  In a month, I went from consistently breaking 70 to religiously topping 80. My previous three finishes were last, last, and last—detect a pattern?—and my scores at the Cadillac NFL Classic—83, 86, 89—may long live in infamy as the highest three-round total in the fourteen-year history of the Senior Tour. After my win in Nashville, I didn’t suffer a letdown or a slump, I went into free fall.

  My state of mind was about the same—a Molotov cocktail of depression and anxiety. If the yips is the nervous affliction that undermines the putting stroke, then I was suffering from a much more lethal and pervasive condition that sabotages every mental and bodily function. I started shaving with an electric razor for fear I would accidentally do myself serious harm.

  All the most noted swing doctors paid house calls. David Leadbetter, acclaimed for his work with Nick Faldo and Nick Price, prescribed a complete overhaul by which I would come to make my torso and not my legs the “engine” of my swing. Butch Harmon squinted at me on the range. Jim McLean analyzed every millimeter of my swing on videotape. And the Irish mystic Mac O’Grady gave me a two-syllable mantra to repeat at the top of my backswing. I’d tell you what it is, but I paid two thousand dollars for it.

  Every day I began to feel more and more like the label I had been given in that article Trevino had referred to—“the Miracle of Q-School.” A sham. This year’s impostor. A party crasher. I thought I might become the first professional golfer to ever leave the tour—out of embarrassment.

  No doubt I was mentally exhausted and overgolfed. Try playing golf forty-five days in a row, after playing twice a week for thirty years. But more than anything else, I was homesick. I missed my family. I missed Noah and Simon and Elizabeth. I missed Pop and my tick-infested pooch. And I missed Sarah more than I ever had in my life, because, by this cruel twist of fate, I seemed to have lost her just as I’d found something to share with her.

  Yet as much as I had wanted to go home, I had also been dreading it, because I feared that the only thing Sarah had to give me was even more conclusive bad news.

  What if after thinking it over quietly and objectively for a few weeks, she had come to the inescapable conclusion that she was better off without me? If that was her decision, I wasn’t sure I would ever recover from it. On the other hand, my fears were so bad, reality couldn’t be any worse.

  It was time to talk to Sarah, no matter what she had to say. It was more than time to hug my kids. It was time to go home, even if in some way it turned out to be for the last time.

  Twenty-six

  ON MONDAY MORNING, as I drove my rental car out of the airport, from O’Hare to Winnetka, there was no giddy sense of excitement and anticipation.

  There was no Sinatra in the tape player singing “Come Fly with Me.” There was only silence and dread.

  Sometime that evening I was going to have what might end up being my last genuine conversation with Sarah, and that possibility was too awful to consider, let alone accept.

  As I pulled onto my street, Old North Winnetka Road, I felt like a fifty-year-old Adam, sadly looking over his old neighborhood one last time. Every familiar detail, from the circular driveway on the Lampke house to the speed bump in
front of the Crasswellers’, felt like something I was about to lose.

  When I called Saturday night and told Sarah I was coming home for a visit, she was hardly enthusiastic. She had to work Monday, she said, and wouldn’t be back till late—but Elizabeth, who was visiting for the weekend, immediately decided to stay a couple of extra days. And Simon and Noah announced that they’d gladly skip their soccer practice and day camp.

  Nevertheless, on my flight and drive home, I thought mainly of Sarah. I can’t explain why, unless it was because I had come to feel as undeserving of the kids as of Sarah, but I didn’t believe that my children were going to miss me that much. Like a lot of fathers, I had begun to see myself as the family’s one weak and dispensable link. I half expected to walk in my door and find every trace of me removed from the shelves.

  Instead I found Simon, Noah, and Elizabeth waiting in the front yard, holding a sheet with painted letters reading “Home of Travis McKinley, BellSouth Classic Champion!!!”

  Man, what a cool sight that was. And when I stepped out of the car, Noah jumped into my arms and wrapped himself so tightly around my neck, I could barely breathe. Even Simon and Elizabeth hugged me in a way they never had before.

  But it wasn’t just the physical wave of affection. It was the way they looked at me. They were trying to make something so goddamn clear that even a fool like myself couldn’t misread it, or turn it inside out. They loved me. They missed me. They were proud of me.

  I was proud of what I had accomplished, too, but lately I’d been so desperate about Sarah, it had lost a lot of its meaning. But to them, this whole thing had been a pure kick and more. “Dad, I always told my friends you were this stud athlete,” said Simon, “but no one believed me. Now it’s not up to them whether they want to buy it or not.”

  Even Elizabeth was gushing. “I swear to God,” she said, “you’re the hero of the entire faculty of the Yale Medical School. You’d think you’d won the Nobel Prize for medicine the way the head of the department treats me now. In fact, that would be a big step down in his eyes. Maybe it’s because they all play golf, and they suck, but all they do is ask about you.”