My putting warm-up is less encouraging. Both the pace and the line are vague and the stroke feels squirrelly as hell and after a while Simon steps in and has me practice three- and four-footers so I can at least see the ball going into the hole.
Even after dragging out every part of our routine to within an inch of its life and throwing in a dozen bunker shots from the nastiest lies and stances I can dream up we still have sixty minutes before our tee time, and Simon suggests we head back to the bench we visited our first evening. Because most of the golfers are already on the course and the rest have moved to the putting green, the range is empty enough to safely cross and reclaim our front-row desert seat.
“I wonder how the coyotes are faring,” says Simon. “I’m kind of worried about them.”
“Me too.”
“It’s got to be rough out there for a single mom with three mouths to feed. Not as brutal as Q-School, of course, but tough nevertheless.”
While Simon surveys the unforgiving landscape, I narrow my focus on the round ahead. I remind myself that it’s going to be a struggle. No one gets to traipse through Q-School like it’s a walk through the park. Bad things are going to happen and there will be blood—mine, type 0+—and I have to be ready to hang tough and apply a tourniquet when it does. The basic idea is to be prepared for the worst and pleasantly surprised by anything less, and I’ve been giving myself a version of this preamble with some success since my first peewee tournaments. I’m wrapping things up, getting to the part where I tell myself not just to anticipate a struggle but to embrace it and try in some twisted way to enjoy it, when Simon asks, “Okay if I give her a quick call?”
“Knock yourself out,” I say. I wait for him to take out his phone and call his mom or Jane Anne, apprising them of our imminent tee time and offering them one last chance to wish us good luck. Instead he throws back his shaggy head, does something funny with his mouth, and howls into the desert sky. Then he does it again. Simon’s calls are still reverberating in the desert air when a third howl, a lot like the first two but even more convincing, comes back.
“Sweet,” says Simon, “at least we don’t have to worry about her. We can focus on the golf.” And although I don’t let myself say it aloud, I’m thinking a send-off from a coyote before the last round of Q-School has got to be a good omen. I mean, come on.
Despite the prep work and feral salutations, the last round is a struggle from the moment I plant the first tee in the ground, and surprisingly, considering how it went on the range and the practice green, it’s my putter and short game that keep me afloat, not my ball striking.
On the front nine, I don’t record a single routine par. Every one is a struggle, a mini-psychodrama. On the first, it takes a breaking downhill nine-footer to save my par and on the second, a thirty-foot chip. Through six holes, my shortest putt for par is five and a half feet, and on 7, when I finally hit a green in regulation, I’m a field goal from the pin. Call me Travis “Houdini” McKinley because I get down in two and on 9 escape the bogeyman again, this time from a fried-egg lie in a greenside bunker.
My scorecard—nine straight pars for a 36—should come with an asterisk and a five-page footnote. And when I walk off the 9th and nearly trip on a blade of grass, I realize how much all that grinding has taken out of me. Holes like those are like dog years. Each one is the equivalent of three or four, and although I’m only halfway home, I feel like I’ve already played thirty-six.
Actually, I’m a lot less than halfway home, because the next nine are going to require that much more. When Simon and I take the gravel path that snakes through the desert to 10, it feels like we’ve crossed the border into a different country. In this new realm, aka back nine on Sunday, the air is thinner and the light warped and the most rudimentary aspects of the game—swinging with rhythm, taking the putter back smoothly, following through—require inordinate concentration.
On 10, I sink another six-footer for par, but there is only so much pressure a fifty-four-year-old central nervous system can withstand before it springs a leak. On 12, I lip out a four-footer for par, and on 13 and 15, fail to get up a down. After three bogeys in four holes, I feel like a retiree dipping into his IRA way too soon. The precious hard-earned birdies I spent three days hoarding are flying south for the winter at an alarming rate, and with a sickening feeling of inevitability, I’m slipping down the leaderboard from fourth…to fifth…to sixth, and, after an excruciating three-putt on 17…to seventh. Now I’m hanging on to my card by my fingertips and my momentum is all in the wrong direction. Forty lousy minutes have undone three days of hard work and my margin of error is down to one stroke.
Don’t act like this is some kind of surprise, I tell myself. You knew a test was coming, so let’s see what you can do. Q-School is officially in session.
14
SIMON AND I CLIMB onto the last tee box and squint into the late-afternoon glare. To our left is the Sonoran Desert and to the right a much smaller man-made facsimile in the form of a long deep bunker. Between them a narrow fairway doglegs right and slightly uphill to an undulating green 420 yards away.
“Everything that’s happened in the last four days is ancient history,” says Simon. “Everything that’s happened in the last hours is medieval history. The tournament starts now. Let’s be clear on how we want to play it.”
The 18th at Tucson National is a perfectly adequate finishing hole, but nothing to write home about, and bear in mind I don’t need to bring it to its knees, earn its respect, or even get its attention. For the pearly gates of the Senior Tour to creak open one more time, all I have to do is slink off with a bogey, something half of you could do with a little luck. But if you play this cursed game for a living and understand the innate perversity of the golfing brain, you know that sometimes, when you absolutely need one, a bogey can be harder to attain than a par or even a birdie.
Among pros and high-stakes hustlers, there are two schools of thought on how to play a 4 when all you need is a 5. The first says play it start to finish as a 5. Leave that corny head cover on the driver and tee off with a 7-iron that leaves you well short of the trouble. Then hit another 7 well short of the green, then wedge it on in three, two-putt, and walk away quietly. As its adherents put it, “golf is not a game for heroes.”
Option #2 is to play for par and even birdie, and if necessary settle for a bogey. Followers of this point of view concede that heroism is overrated but that’s no reason to be a pussy. Besides, playing too safely can often be hazardous to your health. Play for a 5, they say, and realistically that’s the best you can hope to score, and if anything goes awry, say a botched wedge or three-jack from thirty feet, all you’ve done is outsmart yourself. Because it feels more positive and still leaves you that extra stroke in your back pocket, I’ve always leaned toward the second option, but then again, I may be back at Q-School for a reason.
“What do you think?” asks Simon.
“I like driver,” I say.
“Me too,” says Simon. “You hit driver the first three rounds and made par every time. Even with the tees back today, it’s only two-oh-seven to carry that bunker and you’ve been carrying it two-sixty all day. All we need is one more decent swing.”
Simon hands me the driver and as I did the first three days, I aim just right of the bunker and play for my draw to pull it back to the middle, or ideally to the left side of the fairway for a better line to the green. Maybe it’s those four bogeys in the last eight holes, or that little voice that waits till the very top of my backswing to inquire as to why I’m not playing the 7-iron, or maybe the simple fact that I’m choking my brains out, but I don’t put nearly as good a swing on the ball Sunday afternoon as I did Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Funny how that happens, and instead of gently curling in at about 235 yards, it hangs a sharp left at 195.
“Please,” I whisper, “carry that gorgeous bunker.”
Despite my smarminess, the ball dives into the sand, and when it clings to the bank just sh
ort of the lip, I utter an even more desperate follow-up.
“Don’t plug! For God’s sake!”
Whether it’s the power of prayer or gravity, my Titleist topples from its little self-made indentation and trickles down the slope. Now my concern is that it roll far enough, but since two prayers for one shot is pushing it already, I hang on to what’s left of my dignity and Simon and I hustle to the bunker to find out exactly what we’ve got.
15
WHAT WE’VE GOT IS a situation. The good news is the lie is perfect, not surprising considering the ball has just rolled half a dozen feet. And according to Simon’s yardage book, we’re only 157 from the front edge. The less good news is the lip. It’s high and fat and looming and as they whisper ominously in the broadcast tower, it’s definitely a factor.
But how much of a factor? To reach the front of the green, I need a 7-iron, and the 7 should give me the loft I need to clear the lip. As long as I catch it right. I remind myself it’s not too late to retreat to option #1, golf is not a game for heroes, etc., wedge it out of the bunker and then wedge it onto the green in three, but for the same reason I was reluctant to tee off with the 7, I’m not disposed to hit the wedge now, not when a well-struck mid-iron will put me on the dance floor in two and give me the luxury of three-putting for my card.
Simon pulls the 7, and I descend into my adult sandbox.
From behind the ball I pick a target twenty feet left of the flag and picture the ball comfortably clearing the lip and arcing toward the green, but as I take my stance and hover the club face above the sand, the demons of Q-School must smell blood, because they are circling overhead like buzzards and flapping their furry wings. I block them out as best I can and remind myself I don’t have to hit it perfect, but under no circumstances can I catch it thin. My miss has got to be on the fat side. To err toward fatness, I dig my feet into the sand a titch deeper and choke up on my 7-iron a fraction less.
My last thoughts before my waggle are reasonable and generic—keep your feet quiet, swing within yourself, and maintain your balance—but when you add the crucial earlier exhortation to if anything hit it fat, that’s a compendium of swing thoughts, and as soon as I make contact, I know I did precisely what I told myself I mustn’t do. The shot I envisioned does not come to pass. Instead, the click of club face and ball is followed almost instantly by the thud of ball striking turf.
Rather than bounding forward some piddling distance, the ball rockets straight up into the Arizona sky like Old Faithful, or maybe more like a towering spring training pop-up. As it reaches its apex, I note the disconcerting fact that it is directly over my head where the buzzards used to be, and when it begins its descent, my heart plummets with it and the panic in my chest congeals into nausea when I realize that if I don’t move, the ball will hit me, and if that happens it’s a two-stroke penalty, I’m lying four in the bunker, and whether the ball actually kills me or not, you might as well take me off the respirator, because I’m as good as dead.
As the ball drops, I scramble to get out of its way, but I can’t get any traction. In my desperation to reach higher ground, my FootJoys struggle for purchase and then give way and slide out from under me. With my eyes locked on the ball, which is still bearing down on me with what feels like highly personal and malevolent intent, I fall straight back, and as I do I lose sight of the ball in the blinding sun.
16
MY VERTIGINOUS FALL SENDS me reeling backward in time as well as space, and the days and months and years spool past in a furious blur. When the footage skids to a halt, I’m on another golf course on another Sunday afternoon and I’m seven years old, playing in my third peewee event on a par-3 course in Kankakee, Illinois. After seventeen holes, me and Richie Makepeace, my archrival, are all square, and I guess I’ve been fighting a hook under pressure since the beginning, because my drive has nestled into the thick rough left of the 18th fairway just short of a large tree.
My predicament in Illinois was not all that different from the one I just faced in Tucson. Except that rather than having to get the ball up quickly over a lip, I needed to keep it down and under the limb of a knotty pine. Even at seven, I knew enough to position the ball back in my stance, but despite my best efforts, the ball popped up on me, clipped the underside of the branch, bounced hard right into the trunk, and caromed straight back at me so quickly I barely had time to duck out of the way. And when I turned to see where the ball had landed, I inadvertently stepped on it.
As freakish bad breaks go, it was right up there with this one, but forty-seven years would have been enough to put it behind me forever if not for what I did next, or didn’t do, which was assess myself a two-stroke penalty, take off my cap, concede the hole and the match, and shake Richie’s hand. Then wait until I was safely in my mother’s car to start bawling. Instead, I looked over my shoulder, saw that Richie hadn’t noticed, and played on.
Yeah, I was only seven, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone on tour who as a junior never succumbed at least once to that same temptation, but that didn’t make it any better. I cheated plain and simple and the worst part is I went on to “win” the tournament. It got a certain amount of attention—photograph in the local paper, congratulations from friends and relatives, and it was the emptiest feeling, far worse than losing, and hung over me the rest of that summer. From that moment on, I was cured and never considered cheating again, not because that one incident turned me forever into an upstanding young man, but because it felt so crappy, and wasn’t the whole point of practicing and getting decent at something to feel good about yourself?
17
“DON’T MOVE,” SAYS SIMON.
Simon’s voice brings me back to the present, but the loss of balance, blinding light, and jarring impact, not to mention the intergalactic time travel, disoriented me sufficiently that it takes a few seconds to realize that I’ve been delivered back not to a beach, but to Tucson. Only after I’ve connected a few additional dots do I realize that I’m in a fairway bunker, which is on the 18th hole of Tucson National Golf Course, and that it’s the final hole and round of Q-School. Oh, yeah, and I’m flat on my back.
As instructed, I lie frozen in the sand, little black circles floating in my eyes until they readjust to the light. When I finally turn my head, I’m staring eyeball to ball at the black script logo of my Titleist 3, which rests in a perfect lie on top of the sand two inches below my outstretched arm. It’s great to see my ball again but the crucial question is “What do I lie?”
Very carefully, so as not to touch it or cause it to move, I lift my arm and roll away from the ball and onto my stomach and then up to my knees. Then Simon pulls me out and brushes off the sand and squeezes my shoulder. “You all right?”
“That depends. Did the ball hit me?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“It was very close but I didn’t see or hear anything. Did you?”
“No.”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No.”
“Then we dodged a bullet and we’re still in the hole. Take care of this next shot and we can get out of here in one piece.”
Adding to my good fortune, the ball is now at least a yard farther back in the trap, which makes the lip less of an issue, and considering all my gyrations and flailing, the lie is a minor miracle. Although I’m still a bit wobbly, my 7-iron clears the lip with room to spare and rolls onto the front edge twenty-two feet below the ball. It’s the perfect leave, straight and uphill. Even in my discombobulated state, I know I can two-putt from there, and I do, but rather than relief and elation, all I feel is the red-hot shame from forty-seven summers ago.
“Dad, you just got your card back. What’s the matter?”
“It’s that lie in the bunker. It was just too good. On a ball coming straight down from that height, the ball should have plugged or buried, but it was sitting up like someone had placed it there. I don’t see how that could have happened if I hadn’t broken its f
all.”
“Dad, the ball didn’t hit you. You would have felt it.”
“Probably, but between the fall and sun and impact”—I don’t mention my round-trip flight to Memory Lane—“a second or two are unaccounted for. Plus, my shirt came untucked as I fell so the ball could have hit my shirt without me feeling it.”
“The ball didn’t hit you.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not completely sure of that, and neither am I.”
What I didn’t do forty-seven years ago as a seven-year-old marred what should have been a wonderful carefree summer. I’m not going to get melodramatic and say it robbed me of my youth, but you get the idea. If I get this wrong as an adult, it could cast a shadow over the rest of my days, and between Simon’s potential pro career, Sharoz and Elizabeth’s biscuit in the oven, Noah’s decade or so left at home, and what I hope will be another wonderful quarter century or more with Sarah, I have way too much to look forward to to risk that.
“Simon, I got to take a seven.”
“Suit yourself, old man.”
18
SIMON’S FLIGHT FOR CHARLOTTE leaves in less than two hours, which is probably just as well, because it gives us less time to dwell on my debacle in the bunker, which Simon is taking even harder than me. After I sign for my card and pick up my check for my twelfth-place finish, we hurry to the car, where Simon’s backpack is waiting in the trunk, and head to Tucson International.
“Dad, I still can’t believe you did that.”
“It was the lie. It was too good. There’s just no other explanation for it.”
“It’s called luck, Dad. You got lucky. The universe smiled on your sorry ass down there in the bunker and threw you a bone. And instead of saying thank you very much, I really appreciate that, you threw it back.”
Miracle at St. Andrews Page 4
