"Not like that, not like that, not like that." My father liked to repeat himself three times for emphasis, "to possibly get it through your head," he would say, especially on the golf course after one of my topped balls or sliced shots--worm burners or moon probes as he dubbed them. That was part of his relentless effort to make me into a golfer, or any kind of athlete at all. But particularly a golfer, because he loved the game, even though he didn't shoot much lower than the high eighties, breaking a few putters and denting the sides of some wooden rain shelters and toilet facilities around the Army courses in Europe and the lower 48, especially when his game was more in an ebb than a flow.
But this wasn't my father saying it. He's dead ten years, eleven this coming September. This threefold repetition was me, to myself, regressing under stress, showing that the end of this round, my first real shot at breaking 100, with my son alongside me at the 16th tee, was starting to become a race between fatigue and determination.
I had just hit a rocket deep into the bushes on the left of the fairway. All day we'd had clear sailing around the course--late afternoon between the end of the morning crowd and the beginning of the thrifty twilight-rate players--but for these last two holes we'd had to wait and watch a very cheerful foursome fire an array of blasts into the trees, the rough, back and forth across the fairway, on and on. Their comedy had shed its charm and I was trying to pass the time by running my tee across the groves of the club face at a speed most chefs would use to produce hollandaise sauce
Three more holes, average five shots a hole, and I'm in with a 98. I shot 100 even last year, not paying any particular attention but knowing that for me, whose recorded high is 168, it had been an unusually trouble fee round. I gave the game up for many years after the torture of having my father teach me. Whatever relationship we had as much as disappeared when he got me out on the practice range or the course and started telling me things the trick the old time golf teachers used--I was thirteen at the time--to make you keep your head down on the shot, which was to tie a string around your ear, attach a large fish hook to the other end, and imbed the fishhook in the crotch of your trousers so if you pulled up, you would imbed the fish hook in your scrotum or hook into the skin on your penis. We differed on whether this was funny or not, and the perverse result was that I began to wince every time I pulled up, which was eight times out of ten, without there being any real fish hook involved. Everyone agrees that golf is 99 percent between your ears--that is part of how it takes hold of you--and this was my first look in that window. The other 99 percent is in the physics--the objective reality of weight and torque and distance and the math and the exactitude and the large opportunity for error. My dad had no patience to spare, and his career of turning boys into men for Uncle Sam made him feel comfortable using nicknames like klutz and bozo as he pointed out my faults and shortcomings, in golf and otherwise. He may have thought he was being jocular and affectionate, but when I saw his face redden and his eyes roll upwards as I hit yet another screamer into a grove of pine trees I couldn't help but believe that those particular words were the product of frustration born of my personal and irredeemable incompetence.
Fifteen strokes seemed like a pretty decent cushion as we mounted the tee box and surveyed the valley in front of us, the Katzenjammer foursome in front of us still zipping back and forth in their carts. On the previous tee it had been twenty, and I'd been comfortable enough with the way I played that hole to actually record the extra stroke I took to tap the ball in when my four foot putt circled around to the right just as it came within half an inch of dropping into the hole. They taught us in golf school that as the day wears on, a ridge frequently builds up around the hole like the crater of a volcano.
This is from all the golfers who plant a foot six inches from the cup and then put all their weight on it while they reach down to retrieve their ball, or pull up some earth around where the cup is cut into the green as they fish the ball out with their putters. That one two effect can be pronounced, but now at least I know why these putts slide around the target, although I don't always remember it in advance. But since I know it's an unfairness visited on me in the midst of all the other unfairnesses that constitute this strange game, I sometimes allow myself to deduct the stroke, like when I'm rushed by other players or distracted by their conversation or their less than firm grip on the particularities of golf etiquette. No reason to get annoyed with them, just don't pay the price for someone else's act. But this hole was down the home stretch, when I wanted to be scrupulous, and I'd pushed the putt because I rushed it out of annoyance that the twelve footer I had so carefully arced down the sloping green had missed the hole by about an inch and then slid six feet below the pin.
The game we play is casual golf, friendly golf, the kind you play for fun, and make jokes at yourself and your opponent during. Golf with a few mulligans and a little humor. We don't play Bill Clinton level mulligans, very few do and I say that as a lifelong Democrat, but off the tee and very occasionally when you hit a disastrous shot where it will take you eight days to find it, we just drop one and opt for a recount. Not the "Rules of Golf," which are very strict, but close enough for government work, as we used to say, or some such thing.
So I took another tee shot. That was allowed, especially since there is a housing project next to this hole and I once watched a kid steal all four drives from a foursome I was one of by dashing onto the fairway and scooping them up with both hands and then tear-assing off into the woods. Any ball in those woods was ipso facto the property of the housing authority and its tenants. My second shot popped high into the sky on the other side of the fairway, settling near the green of the previous hole, but with the current green in view. It was a shortish hole. I had room to work.
Earlier, when we came to the turn I found I had shot a 48, ten strokes better than usual, and my son was only two strokes behind because, at the age of nineteen, he has a body like a blacksnake whip and can crank the club around like an airplane propeller. Since it's not the length of the swing but the speed of the club head that makes the ball go whoosh and zoom, this means he out drives me by about twenty or thirty yards most holes, smiling as he observes the results. But he putts like he's cross-eyed half the time, so there's life in the contest yet. Today he was having trouble with his old reliable wedge, usually a weapon he can use to get the ball nicely up in the air for a soft landing and even, speaking of physics, hit it crisply enough to get some backspin on it, which requires a matching of microscopic closeness between the grooves on the club and the dimples on the ball. I like to watch him hit these shots. I got him a couple of lessons from a pro when we were on vacation about ten years ago and the rest he's figured out through trial and error and actual athletic ability, a generation skipping trait in my family. I went to golf school a couple of years later so I didn't embarrass myself and so we could play together now that he whips me at tennis unless he happens to be rusty from a long layoff. I try to remember what I've learned and so I shoot under 120 and often under 110. But it's still double bogey golf, two over par on every hole. Take 72 for par, add two strokes for each of the eighteen holes and you come in at 108. Of course you never just go two over on every hole. You par a few, you bogey a few, and you melt down and take the fabled snowman eight, or nine or ten, when the arms tighten up and you skull the ball off the toe of the club at a 75 degree angle to where you're aiming it and the ball ricochets off a limb that looks too thin to stop anything as hard as a golf ball but it zorches right back at you and hits you in the knee and rolls into the exposed root socket of an oak some sadistic course designer had the foresight to plant there half a century ago that would take a chain saw to bust loose from. Averages are deceiving. Just like there is always a shot that brings you back, some eagle flight across water you didn't think you could cross or some roller coaster thirty five foot putt that drops and you knew you had the line right all along, there are meltdown holes where the real score is 13 or 15, when you hack and foozle your way from tee to green in what seems like more time than it took Lewis and Clark to explore the whole Louisiana Territory.
As we approach the green, my son is having one of those holes. The trusty wedge, the one he sometimes slides into his belt like a rapier after dropping one to within three or four feet of the pin, is providing shots with lift but no thrust. He's short with every one. This time he's in a little stand of rough, and it's rained lately and the mower hasn't been this way in a while. It's a public course, so they let the grass grow a little because of the constant beating it takes. Two weeks ago we had a six hour round because there was a company picnic for beginners and the course managers were ferrying new cartons of balls to people on the back nine because they had already lost their original allotment of twelve. He hits three wedges and then three putts, the last putt to finish after he left the second one four inches short. With his drive that gives him a seven. He holds up seven fingers, even more laconic than usual. Last fall when we played another public course he hit his tee shot to the front of the green on a par three. I bounced on and over and it took me awhile to find my ball in the pile of leaves up against the chain link fence that defined the back of the property. I holed out in four and asked him what he'd gotten. "Five," he said, nothing more. How could you take a five, I asked. You were on the front edge of the green in one. He turned toward the next tee, saying as best as I could hear "This is not a good time to talk to me." I was a teenager and I play golf now. It was a sentiment I could identify with, sympathize with, relate to. My second shot hangs up on the edge of the green, I hit my wedge a little short and two putt, but it's still a five, my quota, and I'm on track. I let him tee off first at the next hole and after one complete flub which results in his asking me not to stand behind him where he can't see me he hits a moon shot about 100 yards out, in the right rough, high grass with a fence in the way. I leave my tee shot short--it's a long par three--but I hit it straight onto the front apron of the green. Last week I birdied this hole with a twenty five foot putt that looped in like a Sandy Koufax curve ball. He finds his ball and bangs it off the fence, but it bounces in the direction of the hole, a little too far under some trees on the right up by the hole. The flag is about four feet back from the front of the green, so I don't want to over hit my approach, a bump and run low bouncing shot that I can usually get close to the hole. But just like Tolstoy's brother challenging him not to think about white bears, the thing I focus on, overhitting, is exactly what I do and I end up farther away on the green than I was on the fringe. He hits a beautiful low approach shot out of the woods and saves his five with a fifteen foot putt that gets nothing but the bottom of the cup, a two stroke improvement over the last hole which I congratulate him on before I two putt from twenty five feet. Three putt actually but he's not watching and I got distracted with his problems and rooting for him to get it together so the rule about how I give myself the short putts in certain situations seems applicable, and besides I don't want to come into eighteen, which is a weird hole, under too much pressure, so I write down a four. If I had taken my time I would have sunk it--it's the kind of putt I almost never miss, short and straight, although it's just the same kind I missed two holes ago. But it's getting a little late and I don't want to hold up our play, so I give myself the benefit.
The last time I played number eighteen was right after my birdie, the second of my life as I said before. My first one came during a round of 136 and was almost a hole in one, but it was hard to enjoy fully because it was also the day I got a margin call from my stockbroker on my account and my doctor called and said my cholesterol was over 300. He was with me that day too and we had fun, my fun watching him figure out one aspect or another of the game and get better, almost visibly, hole by hole at the age of sixteen, five foot ten and 110 pounds, and his fun discovering for the first time how far you can really hit it when you're in the groove, and how close you can come to the hole if things are working for you that particular day.
Sometimes I think his hat must weigh more than he does, he's so skinny. Last week after my birdie here I got stuck behind a threesome of giant gym female teachers who must have been specialists at some new sport they didn't have when I was in school. I was alone by then, my partners had called it a day, and while I waited I checked the woods on both sides of the fairway and found 11 balls, most of them fairly new, many with the magic marker emblems the dedicated public course golfer emblazons on his Top-Flite number 3 XL (for extra long) 2000 or his Dunlop 2 to distinguish it from the hundreds and hundreds of other balls that get whacked around any given course in a week's time. I'm convinced they talk to the balls while they imprint their initials or three red dots or a green triangle, like the handlers at cockfights mutter confidentially to their charges before strapping on their spurs and sending them into the ring to win or die. The bird understands nothing and the ball understands less, but human nature is what it is and you use the tools you're given and do the best you can. I play it safe this time, hitting a three wood that soars straight out far enough to reach the end of the bluff the tee box sits on and drop into the valley that leads to the final green. He says nice shot and then launches one that looks like it probably has mine beaten by ten or twenty yards and asks me what I need to break a hundred. Seven or better, I tell him, remind him of the 11 balls I found here last time I played when he was out of town, and head off into the woods, emerging five minutes later with eight shiny white spheres, most of them as good as new. There is no one anywhere behind us, so I'm not holding up play. He smiles approvingly and asks me which club I want, mentioning that he just laid an eight iron up on the green and has a shot at par. Last time after waiting for the gym teachers I bounced my shot onto and over the green, into the pyracantha that divides the hole from the path back to the clubhouse, so I want a low shot that will just skip along and set me up for a nice little chip, two or even three putts and I'm in with a ninety seven or eight, new personal best, and how about that dad of ours, my boy. He'll be impressed. But the first shot squirts right, more parallel to the hole than advancing on it and when I take the club I initially thought to use but didn't, and relax and concentrate on just hitting a nice crisp clean shot, I smack the ball like King Kong and I'm bouncing on and off the green again and into the selfsame thicket. Two wedges and one putt later I'm four feet from the hole. If I drop it, I'm in at 99. He's already parred out with two putts from twenty feet, the second one an eight footer that rolled all the way around the rim before dropping, and he stands with his hands on his hips as I line up my attempt to make history. He's in the books with a 102, his best score ever and a strong finish.
When I was young, my father beat me at all the games we played. It was part of his making a man out of me. He showed me the tricks and the stratagems, along with things about odds in card games, by playing them on me. When we played counting card games and I failed to claim all my points he would declare them as his, and a few of the games I lost were because of those, but more were because he was a better player, something I think was his real message to me. He never knew his father, who abandoned his mom before he was born, so he just applied to me the lessons he'd learned in the service, where he became a man himself. The fact that I was four, or seven, or twelve, when he beat me at one game or another didn't seem to factor into his set of needs and goals. When my son was three, we were playing the card game concentration on the sun room rug at the place we had rented during the summer. In that game if you turn over two cards that match, after you lay out the whole deck face down, you get to go again and whoever gets the most cards wins. When we came down to the end of the game it was very close and I turned over a seven. There were only eight cards left and we both knew where the other seven was, but I picked a different card, which made it his turn, and he promptly scooped in the rest, smiling with glee and completely pleased with himself. My daughter had been watching the game from her perch on the back of one of the sofas.
"Dad." she said. "Dad." What, I asked her. What.
"You never did that for me," she said. I looked up at her and smiled an especially toothy smile. "Didn't I?" I said. "Didn't I?" She knew then, and a message I hadn't known how to convey got passed on and I was so happy I almost cried. I step up and hit the putt without letting myself think too much. In the hands of the gods. It skids right, just like on the last hole and two holes before that and when I look up I see the wolfy glint of a smile on his mouth and in his eyes. I'm better than him by two strokes, that's all. We're not a digit apart, my score in two digits and his in three. And he'll get me next time, I can see his body language saying, youth waiting to be served, and soon. Sure, I say, silently. We'll see, I say, silently, and inside myself on my heart sits a smile as broad as the orbit of Jupiter, the fullness of the circle resolved. I taught him how to win and that is something he will always know, always. And not the best part, but a very good part, is that I know he lobbed a couple of those eight irons into that hedge himself while I was in the woods, before launching his Golf Digest picture perfect shot to set up his finishing par.
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