The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: A Novel

by Dan Jenkins

  I said, “That’s true. You’re probably playing USGA rules—and I’m not positive those rules are the same as ours. Anybody have a rule book?”

  “I do,” Terri said. She went over to her golf bag, pulled out a rule book, came back, and handed it to me. She said, “The reason I know it’s a penalty is because Mrs. R. K. Fowler called it on me in our quarterfinal match. I couldn’t find a coin in my pocket and marked my ball with my cellphone and she called it on me. I learned a lesson real good.”

  It took me a few minutes to find the rule and longer to make sure I understood the language. I learned that the USGA would indeed allow you to mark your ball with car keys, a hotel room key, the toe of your putter, or several other things. However, the rule went on to say that the object had to be placed precisely behind the ball before the ball was lifted. If not—and I read this out loud—“the player cannot be considered to have marked the position of the ball with sufficient accuracy and shall incur a penalty of one stroke.”

  Terri said to Alleene, “You just plunked your car keys down somewhere near your ball. I watched you do it, and I don’t call that marking your ball with sufficient accuracy. You lay three.”

  Alleene turned to me. “Are you going to let her hold me to this crap?”

  “The rule book’s on her side,” I said. “You can take it to court, but she’ll win.”

  Alleene angrily two-putted the hole. Then Terri two-putted the hole, Alleene refusing to give her a six-inch tap-in.

  Walking off the green, Alleene said to Terri, “So you made a net four with your phony handicap and I made a five with my penalty stroke, is that it? You’re one-up?”

  “Yes, I am,” Terri said.

  Alleene slammed her putter down in her bag on the cart, saying, “Boy, is that some kind of chickenshit deal or what?”

  ALLEENE PLAYED extremely well, only two over par through the tenth hole, but Terri was still one-up. Getting a stroke a hole, it only took bogeys for Terri to tie Alleene’s pars, and when Terri made a couple of doubles, those were the holes where Alleene bogeyed, so she gained Xerox.

  The next incident that required a ruling came at the eleventh, the outstanding hole on the course in my book. A par five.

  Mira Vista is a par 71 course and it was designed by Jay Moorish and Tom Weiskopf back when they were partners. The eleventh was their signature hole. The drive takes you to the brink of a creek. The hole then doglegs sharply to the right and you have an option. The fairway is split by trees and a gully. You can play up the left side or up the right side of the trees and gully. Both are slender openings. That leaves you with a difficult pitch to a slightly raised green that’s guarded by bunkers. Great hole.

  The ladies skillfully avoided all the trouble—the trees and gully—and reached the green in what was regulation for them, Alleene on in three, Terri on in four.

  They were a good distance from the cup, which was back right. Alleene’s ball was on the front left of the green, about fifty feet away. Terri’s ball was on the front right, a little closer, maybe forty-five feet away.

  I was tending the pin when, to my complete surprise, they both putted at the same time.

  I was still tending the pin when the balls started to break inward and roll toward each other.

  This can’t happen, I thought. Couldn’t happen but it did. About eight feet short of the cup the balls collided with each other, one going this way a few feet off line, the other going that way a few feet off line.

  Alleene yelled at Terri, “What in the name of Christ were you doing? I was away!”

  “I thought I was,” Terri said. Then she looked at me, and said, “What do we do, Bobby Joe?”

  I said I’d need the rule book again.

  It took a while but I found the answer under Rule 16. Terri, who was closest to the hole, incurred a two-stroke penalty for putting out of turn. After three-putting the green, she ended up with a nine. There was no penalty for Alleene in the collision. She was permitted to replace her ball and putt again. She three-putted for a bogey six but won the hole.

  “We’re all even,” Alleene said to Terri as they left the green.

  Terri frowned and muttered something under her breath. Something from the Scriptures, I gathered.

  THE MATCH was still square going to the sixteenth, and that’s where the last ruling came into play.

  The sixteenth is a short par four that runs through a tunnel of trees and ravines. If your tee ball can thread the needle, it’s only a drive and a flip, even for the short hitter or the good lady player. A crooked tee shot and you could be looking at a double bogey or worse—something they haven’t found a name for yet.

  Alleene steer-jobbed her drive down the fairway—no nerve ends showing—and then played a little run-up shot onto the green, giving herself a birdie putt of fifteen feet. Terri skied her drive but it found the fairway. She topped her second but it went straight and left her short of the green by about fifty yards. Next she bladed her pitch, but the ball ran straight again and rolled up on the green, leaving her about twenty feet from the flag.

  I knew what Alleene must have been thinking as she watched Terri do all that. Three bad shots but the lucky bitch will probably halve the hole anyhow—she has a stroke.

  They marked their balls and began circling the green slowly, kneeling, squinting, reading their putts from every angle. Female Greg Normans.

  It was Terri’s turn to putt first, but I noticed her looking around on the ground for something in the vicinity of where she’d marked her ball.

  “Terri, are you going to putt today?” Alleene asked.

  “I can’t find it,” Terri said.

  I walked over to Terri. So did Alleene.

  “You can’t find your ball marker?” I said.

  “I don’t believe this,” Alleene said.

  “It was right here,” Terri said. “It’s gone. It’s just gone, that’s all.”

  “Look on the bottom of your shoes,” I said. “Maybe you stepped on it by accident.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Terri said.

  “Can we look?” I said.

  Terri raised up her right foot—and there it was, a penny. Somehow stuck to the sole of her golf shoe.

  “This has to be a violation of something,” Alleene said.

  “Why?” Terri asked, putting the penny back on the green, the spot where she thought it belonged.

  “Why?” said Alleene. “Because it does, that’s why. Right, Bobby?”

  Another rule-book deal.

  Five minutes later I found the answer. Terri’s ball marker had been moved after she had “completed the marking process.” When this happens, says the USGA, even if it’s accidental, you suffer a one-stroke penalty.

  The penalty cost Terri the hole. She was now one-down to Alleene with two holes to play, and Alleene knew she had her. Time for a little lip.

  As Alleene addressed her ball on the seventeenth tee, waggling her driver, she said to Terri, “How do you like your rule book now, honey?”

  And with that, Alleene solid-nailed a solid drive. Center-cut job.

  I was kind of proud of Terri for not dying easy. She dug out bogeys on the last two holes, forcing Alleene to make pars to hold her one-up lead and capture the coveted championship.

  They shook hands politely on the eighteenth green.

  “You’re a lot better golfer than I am,” Terri said to Alleene. “You deserved to win.”

  “I know,” Alleene said with a straight face. Then laughed.

  I gave both my ex-wives a hug and said, “You adorables played a hell of a match. I saw a lot of good golf shots today.”

  Alleene said, “It’s a good thing you were here to interpret the rules, Bobby. If we’d been by ourselves, we’d still be somewhere out on the course scratching each other’s eyes out.”

  Alleene, the winner, insisted on buying the drinks in the clubhouse.

  I had too many, according to Cheryl Haney later.

  29

&nb
sp; AS IT RELATED TO MY MEDIOCRE career and stagnant personal life, I asked Buddy Stark, “What the fuck am I doing?”

  This was the first week in June and I was down in Austin playing in a two-day charity event as a favor to Buddy. We were having breakfast at Barton Creek Country Club.

  “I haven’t done anything but stick my pick in the ground for two months,” I said. “I’ve slid three places in the Ryder Cup standings. I’m hanging by a thread in ninth place with a whole pile of Steve Pates snipping at my heels.”

  “What?” said Buddy. “You don’t like a challenge?”

  “All I need is one more top five finish to nail down a spot,” I said. “I’ve got time. Three more majors . . . and as many tour stops as I can squeeze into my busy social life, what with all these charity events.”

  “This one is special,” Buddy said. “It benefits the local Hispanic community.”

  Repeating a line I’d heard from Willie Nelson the previous night at the tournament party, I said, “Yeah, well . . . remember what Jesus said to the Mexicans—y’all don’t do anything till I come back.”

  Buddy said, “Who’s already locked up a spot, besides Tiger, Phil, Davis, and Duval? Cheetah, I guess.”

  “Right. Cheetah . . . and Rickey Padgett . . . Justin . . . Hal Sutton.”

  “It’s already a hell of a team.”

  “We’ll need it,” I said. “Europe’s looking sturdy. Knut the Nuke, Sergio, Colin, Jesper, Ollie, Westwood, Clarke . . .”

  “Rommel . . . Goebbels . . . Himmler . . .” Buddy said.

  I said all I could do from here on was drop a little “hello, golf” on the case. If I made it, I’d be the proudest guy in a USA logo. But . . . if for some reason it didn’t work out . . . I’d just have to flop down on my sofa and say, ‘Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?’ ”

  One distraction I hoped I’d gotten out of the way, I said to Buddy, was the book thing. I admitted I’d secretly been intrigued with the idea at first, if it sounded like me and if it was a real book—not one of those instruction deals with dots and arrows crawling all over the photographs.

  Buddy said, “My 20 Ways to Make You Sneaky Long, Even After You’ve Had a Big Lunch.”

  “Something like that,” I said. “I called Smokey. I told him to put the book idea on indefinite hold. Irv Klar wasn’t working out. Maybe I hadn’t mastered Ronald Colman yet, but why let the world in it? Smokey called Irv, and Irv called me. Irv said he was just trying to write something people would read. I said what people—the devoted fans of Minnie Pearl? He said he was only trying to give it a ‘hook.’ I said hook this. That’s pretty much the way we left it.”

  Buddy said, “Maybe Emily could write the book for you. My scholar’s not too busy. She’s not fucking anybody right now but me and some guy named Dostoyevsky.”

  ONE NIGHT after I got back to Fort Worth my folks invited me over to have dinner, ride the elevator, and hear about their aches and pains. My mom knew I couldn’t refuse if she promised to cook hamburger steak with brown gravy and onions, pinto beans, and mashed potatoes.

  In the department of aches and pains, my dad revealed that he now had “one of everything” and “two of some things.”

  He couldn’t see out of his left eye or hear out of his right ear. Both of his hips hurt so bad most of the time they ought to be donated to the Museum of Natural History after he was gone.

  His left knee still popped on a regular basis and took it upon itself to swell up and go back down for no reason, and there was no telling what that muscle on the right side of his neck was up to.

  He was also suffering cramps in his calves in the middle of the night. They were so painful, it was all he could do to roll out of bed and walk around to make them go away.

  “Old Pavarotti don’t holler that loud,” he said.

  And it wasn’t helping George Grooves that all of the local pro teams were letting him down. He’d spent years being faithful to the Texas Rangers, Dallas Cowboys, and Dallas Mavericks, but now look what they were doing to him. They were throwing off, losing games to gimps, and they didn’t care because they were too rich. It was a better world once.

  He said we used to have athletes on the planet who took pride in winning for the sake of winning, but those heroes were gone now, replaced by sissies who ought to change their names to “Dow Jones” and “Salary Cap” and “Stay Hurt.”

  He said, “Bobby Joe, I guarantee you, if I was one of them rich team owners, I’d fire every overpaid joker who pulled a hamstring or a groin or a quadriceps in any way other than in a violent collision on the field.”

  I assured him a great many Americans felt the same way.

  I PRACTICED for two hours at Mira Vista the next day and afterward, like I was the Manchurian Candidate and somebody suddenly showed me the queen of diamonds, I hopped in my car and drove straight to Alleene’s Delights.

  I might have been fooling myself but I didn’t fool Alleene.

  When I found her in her office doing paperwork, she looked up and said, “Let me guess. Cheryl still hasn’t come around, you’re lonely, and you have this idea that I’m lonely too, right?”

  “You are very quick,” I said.

  “Poor cupcake,” she grinned. “Come on, I’ll take you to lunch.”

  In separate cars we drove out to Cousins on McCart for barbecue. My choice because the odds were a thousand to one we wouldn’t see Cheryl Haney out there—and didn’t.

  We ate chopped beef sandwiches and cole slaw and lingered over coffee for an hour, Alleene saying that if we both still smoked we could turn it into an all-afternoon, student days, cigarettes-and-coffee session.

  I said I’d heard college kids didn’t do that anymore—sit around in daytime and smoke and drink coffee and talk about stuff, either their woes or the world’s. What they did do now, I’d heard, was study five days a week and reserve the weekends for getting shitfaced and fucking people who didn’t have last names.

  I asked Alleene if a motel was out of the question this afternoon.

  She patted my hand and said it was too bad she hadn’t liked golf when we were married, but we didn’t need to complicate our lives now.

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  She insisted she liked her life nowadays. She loved her work, loved playing golf, loved her dog, Cary Grant, and she’d begun to like living alone. Cheryl must be a dynamite babe, she said, or I wouldn’t have been fooling around with her for two years. Surely I could repair the damage with Cheryl eventually.

  I said I was looking at another dynamite babe right now.

  Alleene said thanks, but she was working so hard these days she wasn’t feeling much like a warden’s daughter.

  I said I’d be the judge of that.

  Outside, before going to our cars, we gave each other a wet kiss, and I said, “We’ll always have herb-crusted salmon.”

  30

  MOVIES AND BOOKS AND TV ARE always telling you how a man will do strange things when he believes he’s in love, but sometimes even real life proves it. Take the deal I made with Cheryl Haney.

  She agreed to take a vacation and go with me to New York for two whole weeks—for the Buick Classic at Westchester Country Club the week before the U.S. Open, and for the Open itself at Winged Foot—but only if we could stay at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

  That way we could go to some Broadway shows and eat at some of the “chic” restaurants in the city that she’d marked in a guidebook, the kind where it was a

  good guess on my part that a plate of pasta would cost more than a person could spend on clothes in a year.

  “This will make it fun for me, too,” Cheryl said. “I’ll be in the city with things to do while you’re playing golf every day. I won’t be stuck in a hotel up in Westchester County . . . in some dirty, polluted little town where the rivers catch on fire and there’s nobody to talk to but Tony and Connie in the local diner.”

  I went for it. I didn’t even bother to mention what a hardship it was go
ing to be on me to have to make the round trip from New York City up to Westchester County every day to play golf—one hour each way without a traffic jackpot or getting lost.

  I made it as easy on myself as possible. I hired a limo and driver for the whole two weeks. Found me a cordial Russian in the yellow pages who owned his own company and worked for half the fee of any other company. He was a nice-looking young guy named Dimitri.

  Dimitri had only been in the country two years, but he spoke English better than most people in Louisiana.

  He greeted me every morning outside the Plaza at dawn with a poppy-seed bagel and cream cheese, an apricot Danish, coffee, and the newspapers.

  On the way to the courses each day we’d stop at the Rye Hilton and pick up Mitch and my golf clubs. Some days Dimitri would watch golf and try to understand it. Other days he’d drive back to the city, take Cheryl wherever she wanted to go to shop or sightsee, and return for me. He even insisted on driving us in the evenings when we went to dinner and the theater. At the end of the two weeks Dimitri’s bill was only $7,000, but I forced him to take $10,000 and considered it the best money I’d ever spent. It would have been twice that much if I’d gone with a brand name.

  I wouldn’t have seen much of Manhattan in the daytime if two practice rounds hadn’t been rained out at Westchester Country Club. The limo whipped me back into the city and Cheryl made me go see some stuff I’d never have gone to see on my own.

  Modern art, for instance. I got dragged to this museum and this gallery to look at paintings of blue, yellow, and red crisscross stripes, and white on white, and maroon bubble on green bubble, and men and women with big orange bodies and little pink heads, and the other way around, and men and women where the artist either intentionally or accidentally left off the arms and legs.

  That was about all the culture I could handle without putting on a beret and growing a beard.

  Cheryl led me to two department stores that were supposed to be well known for one thing or another. In Bloomingdale’s I was privileged to observe dozens of skinny saleswomen with black shoe polish hair and arrogant expressions who wouldn’t let you buy anything if you put a knife in their ribs. This was opposed to Bergdorf Goodman, right near our hotel, where I found helpful salespeople who were eager to sell you a box of mints for only $65 or an antique silver tea service for only $150,000.