Miracle on the 17th Green Read online

  “You’re cool, Dad,” said Noah into my neck. He had still barely loosened his grip, and in two days would let me put him down for a total of ten minutes.

  That day was one of the best of my life. It made me realize that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to lose them. It was also a revelation. I’d never understood how desperately kids want to feel proud of their father. It made me think my little run could have a bigger impact on them than me, by letting them know it’s all right to do what they want. They don’t have to resign themselves to some soul-destroying nine-to-five they hate. There are possibilities. I know they’ve learned some of this from Sarah already, but they had to see it from me, too. It’s hard to explain.

  I don’t know how aware they were of the troubles between Sarah and me. Elizabeth and Simon must have known about them. Maybe they all did, because the push for us to do some kind of family activity came as much from them as me.

  That’s how we ended up going swimming at the gorge, one of those perfect anonymous little swimming holes at the end of a country road on the very outskirts of town, where I’d taken Elizabeth and Simon at least once every summer, and which had assumed a mythological status in the big bright dome of Noah’s.

  We got to the gorge at three on a perfect July afternoon, and for about two hours we had it completely to ourselves.

  The water was chilly and quick, but the sun on our backs, as we sat on the half-submerged boulders strewn across the thirty-foot-wide stream, was strong enough to keep us from getting too cold.

  Simon, wearing his beloved Oakley shades and the light bouncing off his earrings, crouched on a stone the farthest out.

  A couple yards away perched Elizabeth, like some brainy Ivy League mermaid, her beautiful brown hair pulled straight down her narrow back.

  Noah sat on my lap in his life preserver, on a wide stone ten feet from the shore. For one memorable stretch, we just smiled at one another, and no one said a word, the only sound was water rushing over flat stones.

  Twenty-seven

  “SO HOW’S that baby doing?” I asked Sarah. She had just arrived home from the hospital. I was waiting nervously in the kitchen.

  “Which one?” asked Sarah, only meeting my gaze for a second. She dropped her things on a chair and poured herself a glass from the half-empty bottle of white wine in the refrigerator.

  “The first baby born in Winnetka this year,” I said, “the New Year’s baby.”

  “Oh, she’s doing fine,” said Sarah. “She’s got this tiny pierced nose. She’s Indian.”

  Noah had finally passed out at 10:00 P.M., Elizabeth and Simon at about 12:30, but Sarah didn’t arrive home until almost two in the morning. Although it was possible some hospital emergency had kept her that late, it seemed more likely that she had stayed at work so long because she was dreading this conversation as much as I was.

  At some point close to a year ago, Sarah had mostly stopped talking to me. In the beginning she insisted that nothing was the matter, then eventually conceded there was. And now in the past couple of months, she was talking about the possibility of a divorce. All without really telling me why.

  Eventually, I had no choice but to conclude that the reason Sarah had no interest in talking was that, in her mind, it was already over.

  “Why does this have to happen, Sarah?” I asked her now.

  “I don’t know, Travis. I’ve asked myself the same question.”

  “Well, when did it happen?”

  “Travis…” She began to say something, then looked down at the counter and started to cry.

  “I’ve changed,” I said. “I couldn’t change before, working at Burnett. I didn’t even understand why. All I knew was that it felt all wrong.”

  “Oh come on, Travis.”

  “Sarah, I know I’ve been a drag for a while. I know I let you down sometimes.”

  “After we had Noah, and even that didn’t cheer you up, I figured we never meant that much to you all along.”

  “Sarah, until that night I got through Qualifying School, I didn’t know myself how unhappy I was. But it’s not because I didn’t love you and the kids. I’m sure I seemed like this ungrateful wretch, but unfortunately having a great wife and wonderful children doesn’t make you love yourself any more. It just makes you love them.”

  “It’s too late,” she said. “I’m really sorry. Anyway, I’m not sure I would know what to do with this new Travis. Maybe I’m setting you free.”

  “Sarah, I don’t want to be free. I want a ball and chain, and a pick-proof lock.”

  “You’ve always had such a romantic notion of marriage, Travis,” said Sarah, half smiling through her tears.

  “Sarah, you’re it for me,” I pleaded. “You always have been. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t watch you get old and wrinkled.”

  “I’m already old and wrinkled.”

  “Like hell you are,” I said. “I want to be able to look over at you and remind you how beautiful you are, knowing I’ve been through the whole thing with you.”

  “You don’t always get what you want, Travis.”

  “Can’t we try something, Sarah?”

  “It’s just too late, Travis,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t. I really do.”

  And then Sarah went up to bed alone.

  Twenty-eight

  LATER THAT MORNING, my ninety-three-year-old grandfather—he had celebrated his birthday two weeks before by shooting a tidy 98—stood in the middle of the 12th fairway of the Creekview Country Club and dropped three Titleists onto the rich, green sod.

  There may be nothing much worse than a Chicago winter, but there’s nothing much better than a Chicago July, and that morning was a fine example of the species, with the temperature in the low eighties and just enough breeze to keep the air on its toes.

  So much had changed since I’d been here before, and perhaps to remind me of that fact, Pop had walked me out to the very same spot we had visited on our last playing lesson. The fairway that had been hard and muddy back then was now covered with thick, luscious grass. The huge oak some forty yards away, which had served as a leafless obstacle, was now full and green and shimmering.

  “Pop,” I said, “Sarah wants a divorce.”

  “Well, Travis, what do you want?” he asked, as if I still had a choice in the matter.

  “I want us to stay together.”

  “You tell her that?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’ve done about all you can, then. How love gets doled out is one of the great mysteries of the planet, but one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t force someone to love you. It’s a little bit like chasing birdies. Wanting them too much only makes it worse.”

  “Pop, I’m feeling like a fraud out there on the tour,” I confessed.

  “Travis, where does this come from, this picking at everything until you find the tin under the gold? There’s nothing fake about you, Travis. If anything, you’re too goddamn real for your own good.”

  “So what do you want me to hit, Pop?” I finally asked, looking down at the three balls he’d dropped.

  “I don’t want you to hit anything, Travis,” he said, his eyes sparkling with a light that remains utterly impervious to his years. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got nothing left to prove to me or Sarah or your father or anybody fucking else. All I want you to do is pick up those balls, and play with them at the Open next week, and I want you to enjoy yourself for Christ’s sake, because I’ll tell you one thing, I’m going to enjoy watching you. And by the way, Travis, there isn’t a goddamn thing wrong with your swing.”

  “Pop, you haven’t even seen me hit a ball.”

  “I don’t have to.” And with that, Pop turned and headed to the clubhouse. “The lesson’s over, Travis,” he said. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  Twenty-nine

  THREE HOURS LATER, I was standing at the corner of Commonwealth and Baxter in Chicago, my hands trembling like an old rummy, and a ridiculous smile p
lastered across my face.

  Although the evidence was overwhelming, I could still barely believe what I had just done.

  As always, my visit with Pop had greatly improved my frame of mind, but as hard as he’d tried, he had not come close to steering my mind away from Sarah. And on my way back to O’Hare to catch a flight to San Francisco for the U.S. Senior Open, I made a slight detour, and did something that under the circumstances might reasonably be interpreted as legally insane.

  And yet for some reason, as I stood on the sidewalk in the lovely afternoon sunshine, elegant shop-pers trotting briskly past me in their designer dresses and suits, I had no desire to undo it. In fact, what I had done was so over-the-top that it gave me a kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing you’ve done about all you can. After all, as both Pop and Sarah had pointed out, “not everything is up to me.”

  So what exactly had I gone and done that left me feeling so out of my element on that Chicago street corner that I might as well have been naked?

  I’d like to tell you. I truly would. But I just can’t.

  It’s too embarrassing.

  PART THREE

  Miracle on the 17th

  Thirty

  THE FULL, OTHERWORLDLY, music-of-the-spheres significance of being at Pebble Beach and playing in the U.S. Senior Open didn’t sink in until moments before the first round on Thursday.

  That was when Earl slid up behind me on the mother of all practice greens, slapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Travis, let’s go to work.”

  Till then, I had been distractedly lagging forty-footers across the huge lightning-fast ellipse, as mesmerized as any tourist by the rugged coastal grandeur of the place, and the brilliant godlike Northern California light that gave every surface a metallic sheen.

  Now, as we worked our way through the crowd, my legs forgot how to walk, and as I frantically tried to remaster the basic right-foot, left-foot concept, I thought of James Cagney being led on that long last walk from the Big House to the gas chamber in Angels with Dirty Faces.

  I’d only been more nervous on a golf course once. That was the afternoon, forty-two summers before, when after three years of beating balls, my grandfather finally decided I could play an actual round, and took me to Hubbard Heights, the more threadbare of Winnetka’s two public courses.

  At the Heights, the first tee is set up alongside a large Italian restaurant-bar that the blue-collar regulars have turned into their own country club, as exclusive in its own way as Augusta National, and that afternoon the large concrete terrace was filled with a rowdy crowd of plumbers and carpenters that suddenly quieted as I stepped up to my first real golf shot. I took a shallow breath and poured my cut-down driver straight as a die 140 yards up the rocky fairway, eliciting appreciative hoots and whistles from the peanut gallery, and a warm “I guess you’re ready” from my grandfather.

  I guess I could have used Pop’s soothing influence once again, because on my first official drive at Pebble Beach, all I could muster was a weak push that left me in the first cut of rough, 185 yards from the green. But I was just as thrilled with it as with that first drive at Hubbard Heights.

  My playing partners the first two days were Jim Colbert and South Africaner Simon Hobday. Colbert, who has never been out of the top five on the Senior Tour money list, is a granite-jawed, flat-topped ex–football player, whose on-course demeanor falls somewhere between chilly and downright grumpy. Hobday, who wears a huge black Crocodile Dundee hat and a Yosemite Sam mustache, is warm and outgoing. But they both play Big Guy macho golf.

  “Look at those two crackers strutting up the fairway,” said Earl. “They think their balls are made out of brass.” I know it’s not the fault of Colbert and Hobday that they happen to have been brought into this world big, beefy, and bouncy, but as someone who at six two has never weighed in at more than 151 pounds, I’ve always competed my hardest against wide-bodies. As Earl suggested, I went to work.

  The Open is one of only four Senior events that have a halfway cut, so the pressure is on from the first hole. At the start of the week, my only goal was to play all four days. “Pars will do just fine,” Earl kept reminding me, and although I was all over the place with my driver and irons, I just kept grinding away.

  All the hours I’d been putting into my short game were starting to pay off. I missed ten greens, but I got up and down on eight of them. Offsetting the two bogeys with one birdie gave me a one-over-par 73. That was one better than Colbert, one worse than Hobday, and right about the middle of the field.

  The best news of the first day was my putting. I was seeing the line again, and it helped me sink a handful of nasty six-footers to save par.

  After the round, I went to the range and tried to straighten out a tee-ball, whose unguided flights had taken me to some of the least scenic parts of America’s most scenic golf course.

  “I can’t believe people are actually going to stand and watch me hit balls,” I told Earl as a large crowd began to form behind me.

  “Don’t worry, Hogan, they’re not here for you,” Earl quickly informed me.

  I looked over Earl’s shoulder and saw Herman, Lee Trevino’s enormous caddy, setting up shop in the spot next door, and then Mex himself, his huge grin bursting his tanned, leathery face into long straight lines.

  “How you hitting ’em, Travis?” Trevino asked.

  “Not too bad, Mr. Trevino,” I said.

  “Cut the crap, McKinley,” said Trevino with a cackle. “If he’s so goddamn respectful,” Trevino asked the crowd, “why’s he trying to take food out of my kids’ mouths?”

  By now the sun was going down and the range was filling with warm, golden light. Although I was worried about why I couldn’t hit the ball straight, and if I would still be seeing the line tomorrow, and if I’d ever be seeing Sarah again on a regular basis, I was suddenly overcome with a sense of well-being I hadn’t felt since I was a kid.

  To put it simply, I felt happy. Whole.

  Hitting balls on my left was Hiroshi Ishii, a really fine Japanese player from a little fishing village outside Tokyo, who barely speaks a word of English. On my right was the legendary Trevino, a former driving-range hustler who has won seven majors and untold millions.

  But on that beautiful late afternoon our vast differences seemed beside the point. We were all doing exactly what we wanted to do, exactly where we wanted to do it. We were professional golfers and immensely proud of it.

  Thirty-one

  THE SENIOR DAMN Open at Pebble Beach.

  Friday was a slightly tenser, more nerve-racking version of Thursday. Kind of like a bicycle tire with ten pounds more air in it. I hit a few more greens, sunk a couple more putts, and shot a one-under par 71. That got me through to the weekend, six strokes behind leader Bob Eastwood. I wasn’t tearing it up, or doing anything even remotely miraculous, but I had survived the cut.

  It was on Saturday, another perfect California morning, that I made my move.

  The strange happenings began on the par-4 3rd hole, when I got a little too jacked up on the tee and snap-hooked my drive into the deep, gnarly U.S. Open rough.

  Three shaky shots later, I was looking over a circus sixty-footer with more breaks, dips, and rises between me and the hole than between me and Sarah, and as I stood over the ball, I was just hoping to somehow two-putt and escape with my mental health. Dialing in about sixteen feet of break, I sent the ball on its way, and after what seemed like about ten minutes the ball slid into the back of the hole, like a dog that had found its way home. “Now that’s what I call a world-class five,” said Earl.

  With the near disaster behind me, my round turned as if on a hinge. From that point on, I felt so incredibly serene and quiet inside, it was as if I were sleepwalking, or standing outside myself altogether. Either that or someone had spiked my Gatorade with Prozac.

  I didn’t make another bad swing all day. I didn’t have another negative thought. I was in every fairway, on every green, and hitting my irons
so stiff I was looking over makable birdie putts on every hole.

  With a clear white line once again showing the way, I rolled in nine of them, five on the front, four on the back, for an eight-under-par 64.

  Jim Colbert passed me near the scorers’ table and didn’t say a word.

  And so that evening as Earl and I sat quietly in my hotel room, me nursing a beer and trying to reread a two-month-old airline magazine, and Earl smoking one of his beloved Cubans and perusing the Wall Street Journal, I was the sole leader of the U.S. Senior Open.

  Tied for second two strokes back were a couple of fellows you might have heard of—Raymond Floyd and Jack Nicklaus.

  Thirty-two

  EARL AND I SPENT Saturday night trying not to freak out. We couldn’t watch television because I was on every channel, and it was hard to do much else, because the phone never stopped ringing.

  First it was ABC, CBS, and NBC. Then CNN, ESPN, and the Golf Network. I even got a call from Radio Free Europe, but the one call I wanted, from Sarah and the kids, never came, and every time I called home all I got was that cold-blooded answering machine.

  As far as my interviews went, I pretty much told them all the same thing. “I’m not insane yet,” I said. “I know there’s no reason to expect I can hold off two of the best golfers to ever play the game on one of the hardest golf courses in the world in the final round of a major. I just don’t want to embarrass myself in front of fifteen million people.”

  After about six of these sound bites, Earl couldn’t take it anymore. “I hope you don’t really believe all that modest politically correct bullshit you’ve been serving up for mass consumption,” he said. “You shot a sixty-four today, and now you’re going to roll over?”

  Earl finally unplugged the phone and was about to leave me to my anxiety when there was a light knock on the door.