Slim and None

by Dan Jenkins

  “I don’t Know,” he said. “The invitation come in the mail one day to Goldsboro, to where we live . . . to the mail box at our house.”

  I dropped the subject. We stood quietly for a moment, until Ace asked the Belgian a question.

  “You ride a bicycle?”

  The Belgian stared at him. “I am to do what?”

  Ace said, “I was wondering if you ride a bike. You small and wiry . . . like them other Frenchmen who ride in the Tour de France. I’ve watched it on TV.”

  “I am from Belgium, not France.”

  Ace said, “Yeah, that’s what I hear, but y’all are Kind of pushed up against one another over there, aren’t you? Maps I’ve seen, anyhow.”

  The Belgian patiently said, “Many cyclists of many different nationalities race in the Tour. Evidently you have not noticed this on your television. But it is the answer to your question that I am not a cyclist myself, nor have I ever been a cyclist.”

  “What’s a cyclips?” Ace asked.

  “The word is for you, cyclist—c-y-c-l-i-s-t, as in cycling, which is how the sport is Known to those who understand it.”

  Ace said, “Well, I hope nobody raises too much hell if I Keep on callin’ it the Tour de France bicycle race.”

  I walked across the tee to stand next to Mitch, leaving the Belgian looking less patient than he had a moment earlier.

  Excellent timing on my part. Up against the ropes looking at me was none other than Gwendolyn Pritchard.

  “You’re four-under,” she said. “Great.”

  “Fate don’t have a head,” I explained.

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “You OK?” I said. Probe deal. Meaning had she recovered from my behavior last evening?

  She said, “Yep.” Her eyes confirmed it, I thought.

  Today she was wearing long, snug slacks, the Kind you see on lady golfers, a pair of Nike sneakers, and a pastel blue shirt with the tail out and a turned-up white collar. Her hair was pulled up under a white baseball cap with the Masters logo on it.

  “This is Roy Mitchell,” I said, remembering that Mitch and Gwen hadn’t met. “Mitch is my caddie, my swing guru, my sports psychologist—what else?”

  “Nurse,” Mitch said.

  “Hi, Mitch.” She smiled at him.

  He smiled back.

  She said, “I’ll watch you hit and go catch up with Scotty. He should be coming to eight.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He was one under through six. I think he’s doing great, but that’s a mom for you. He looks upset with the greens.”

  “We on the tee,” Mitch said.

  Mitch offered me the three-wood, suggesting a steer-job.

  “Gimme the Show Dog,” I said. He handed me the driver. The latest in the line of Bertha weapons. I teed up the ball, took my stance, waggled the club twice, three times, and with all systems go I took a big swing and put a full load of clubface on the ball.

  I wouldn’t say I was completely showing off for the lady, but the drive was perfect, a long fade around the dogleg and into the center of the fairway. I’d have only a short stick left to the green.

  Gwen let out a little whoop and applauded. I acted like I’d expected no less of a tee shot, like it was the same drive I was accustomed to hitting my whole life.

  “Good lick,” Mitch said. “That ball got some hurt on it.”

  I smiled. “It’s the equipment.”

  I bagged an easy par and checked and signed my card in the scorer’s tent. When I left I was met by a young girl sportswriter.

  She was in her late twenties, I estimated. She said they didn’t want me in the press center for an interview. Most of the writers were out on the course following Tigers and Cheetahs—there wasn’t anybody down there right now who’d want to ask me anything. She was the pool reporter today for the print media, she explained, which meant she was in charge of getting the birdies and bogeys on my 68, and a quote or two.

  She was close to cute despite her outfit—she wore a retro Chicago Bears football jersey that drooped outside a pair of loose-fitting denims, and a red golf visor. Her brown hair was in a ponytail, and a press credential hung around her neck on a chain.

  “I’m Ellen Wheeler,” she said, shaking my hand. “Houston Chronicle.”

  “I haven’t seen you around, Ellen. You must be new.”

  “I got the golf beat this year. I’ve been covering the NBA.”

  “Is that a good job?”

  “If you like flying in blizzards at night. Fun.”

  “Think you might like golf better than pro basketball?”

  “I already liKe golf better.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ll give you two reasons right away. You play in the daytime. You go better places.”

  “We do try to avoid night golf.”

  I gave Ellen Wheeler the birdies and bogeys and said my round was lacking in drama. The course was playing relatively easy today, no wind, no unfair pins.

  She said, “They want me to ask everybody about the female protest coming up. Do you have a comment?”

  I said, “Frankly, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why anybody wants to disrupt an event where the athletes wear fewer tattoos, do-rags, and earrings than they do in any other sport.”

  “I’m not sharing that with anybody,” she said grinning. “Thanks—and nice meeting you.”

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  That was my brush with the media on Thursday.

  For the rest of the afternoon, when I wasn’t hitting practice balls, working on my putting, or hanging around the contestants’ lounge, I watched my 68 get laughed at.

  The scoreboard told me Elvis shot a 65, Madonna and Britney shot 66s, and Cheetah Farmer and some guy I’d never heard of shot 67s.

  In other words, I watched so many guys blow past me, I might as well have been a dead man lying by the side of the road.

  11

  My even-par 72 on Friday put me in a tie for eighth at 140, five behind Tiger-slash-Elvis, the leader. I was still in the hunt, but I needed help, like a couple of low rounds from my own game, and some oil leaks from the immortals up ahead. Grady Don saw it as no problem. “Hell, it’s nothing old Harry Vardon couldn’t handle,” he said. “Just straighten your necktie, and give ’em a taste of the hickory.”

  My round wasn’t exactly routine when you consider I was still paired with Ace Haskell and the Belgian dwarf—Blisters, Flackers, Flanders. I was forced to do a considerable amount of waiting while they took their exciting routes to the 80s again.

  It got pretty thrilling for both of them down at Amen Corner.

  The first bit of drama involved Ace Haskell. His seven-iron to the 12th barely cleared Rae’s Creek, but it trickled back down into the water. However, the ball was visible. He could get at it if he wanted to try.

  Ace studied the situation and decided to try to play the ball out of the pond with his wedge.

  The crowd applauded as Ace took off his shoes, rolled up his pant legs, and stepped down into the pond. Crowds love a gamble—when somebody else is the gambler.

  But something happened when Ace planted his feet. He sank into a black hole, is what he did. Clear over his head, out of sight. I didn’t Know the pond was that deep.

  The crowd shrieked in horror when Ace submerged.

  For a moment you could only see his white visor floating on the water, little ripples around it.

  All of us rushed to the edge of the water and looked down to see where he was, see what we could do. From across Rae’s Creek, over where the crowd was, we could hear Jewel—the short and wide Mrs. Haskell—screaming above the fans.

  Mitch said later she may have been screaming at a worker in the concession stand for only giving her two pimento-cheese sandwiches when she’d paid for three.

  Ace Haskell came up out of the creek before any of us were moved to jump in and try to rescue him.

  There was a foolish grin
on his face as he said, “Dang, I’m glad there wasn’t no alligators in here, I’d have come up short again. Guess I better take an unplayable.”

  Next came the Belgian’s drama. On the following hole, the par-5 dogleg left 13th, he hit a flaming hook into the pines, dogwood, azaleas, and underbrush on the left side of the fairway. The hook sailed far to the left of Rae’s Creek as it runs along that side of the hole and eventually crosses in front of the 13th green.

  I’m talking deep in there. Midnight in Augusta, Georgia.

  Everybody looked for the ball. Blisters-Flanders himself finally found it. We took his word that it was, in fact, his ball. Then he went about the business of trying to play it out of the jungle.

  Bad idea.

  After fussing around with his stance and club selection, he took the club back to swing, but it never came down. At which point we began to hear noises. Whining, yelping, whimpering.

  What it was, the Belgian and his golf club were caught—hung up— in vines, thorns, and stickers, and he couldn’t pull himself loose.

  Mitch and the other two caddies untangled him. You’d have thought he might have been grateful, but no. The Belgian turned into a rabid dog. He started swinging wildly at the ball with what I think was his eight-iron.

  Tears ran down his cheeks. There were splotches of blood on his neck, arms, and shirt. But he Kept swinging, moving the ball only three feet, two feet, hacking through the limbs, leaves, brush, flowers, vines.

  There was no way to Keep up with how many swipes he took at the ball. We let him settle for a 19 on the hole, but it may well have been twice that many.

  I still remember the sound of it all.

  “Grrrr-yuh!” he’d yell, taking a slash at the ball. “Eeeyiiih-yug!”

  Grady Don was at 142, same as Scott Pritchard. They’d both shot a pair of 71s. Grade, as I sometimes call him, was happier about it than Scott, who stomped around the locker room, calling Augusta “a dumb zoo.”

  I asked Scott to have a drink and a snack with me. Thought I’d try to get to Know him better, perhaps give him some tips on his demeanor. Like maybe around Augusta he shouldn’t say such things in public as, “Shove an azalea bush up Bobby Jones’s ass.”

  Scott said he’d give me a moment, but he couldn’t sit long—he wanted to go to the range and work on “shaping” his short irons.

  It didn’t seem like that long ago that golfers only hit shots, they didn’t “shape” them. I didn’t shape anything. I didn’t Know how you could “shape” anything with the hot ball we were all using. Today’s golf ball wasn’t built for anything but distance. But maybe this was why Tiger Woods was Tiger Woods, and Scott Pritchard was Scott Pritchard, and I was the nonshaping Bobby Joe Grooves.

  Not much was said as we ate club sandwiches and I sipped a beer and Scott drank two Sprites. It was while Scott’s mouth was full of potato chips that he said, “Are you tapping my mom?”

  It wasn’t a question I was prepared for. But before I could say what did he mean by that, or could he repeat the question, he said, “It’s OK with me if you are. She needs to be uncorked.”

  While I Knew that the tapping and uncorking of women was a fairly commonplace occurrence in most parts of California, I guess I didn’t Know that most nineteen-year-old California Kids assumed it applied to their moms as well, but this didn’t mean I was going to confess over a club sandwich that I was tapping or uncorking his mother.

  “Why would you say that?” I said, skillfully ducking the question.

  Scott said, “You’re a golfer. That’s good. Ever since she dumped my dad she hasn’t gone out much, and when she has gone out it’s been with bankers and other jokers like that.”

  “Your mother is about the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Scott. I’ve enjoyed having dinner with her. I assume you Know what a great-looking lady your mom is.”

  “Yeah, I guess . . . if you like ’em old.”

  Some remarks require a momentary throat-clear and a look-off.

  I returned to the present. “Has your mother been serious with any of the bankers or other jokers?”

  “None that I Know about. She never goes out with ’em more than once or twice. She says they always wind up being from SC or Stanford, and she’s done that.”

  “She needs to move out of the Pac-10.”

  “What for?”

  “Nothing. Not to pry, Scott, but were you aware that your mom and dad were having trouble in the marriage? Did you have any idea that your mom was gonna hit your dad O.B. two years ago? Divorce him?”

  “Geeahh, I never paid much attention to what was going on around the house, as long as it didn’t screw up my practice or my tournament schedule. My mom never let it interfere with that.”

  “You never noticed any trouble between them?”

  “There sure could have been. I used to hear loud voices. You Know what? I’ll bet it had something to do with the fact that my dad likes strange ass better than just about anything in the world.”

  “He never got his share in high school, I guess.”

  “His share of what?”

  Somehow or other, I got out of the conversation without the question coming up again about whether I’d tapped or uncorked the mom.

  Our buddy Jerry Grimes shot 72–74 and missed the cut by one, which is the worst way to miss a cut. Nothing can make you hotter than missing the cut by one stinking shot. You think of all the places where you could have saved a stroke—if you hadn’t been, in Jerry’s words for himself, “a gutless, spineless, curled-up turd.”

  Jerry was in a mood to go home fast to Ponte Vedra, Florida, but not to Janeen, his wife. Janeen had never been to a golf tournament. Janeen refused to go anywhere. Janeen said travel was too dangerous. The last time I’d seen Janeen was during the Players two years ago, when she made Jerry rush her to St. Luke’s Hospital for a brain tumor. I visited her shortly before she was released with what had been a mild headache. Jerry mainly wanted to get home to Maggie and Emma, his dogs.

  Jerry made an elegant departure from Augusta.

  Grady Don and I walked out to the parking lot with him. We watched him kick the door of his tan Toyota Sienna three times, sling his golf clubs in the back end, then go over and pick a handful of dogwood petals off a tree and put them in his pocket.

  “What are those?” I said. “Souvenirs?”

  He said, “They’re to wipe my ass with when I stop to take a shit between here and home. A remembrance of this glorious week.”

  Missing a cut is never good for a man’s disposition.

  12

  Grady Don and I met for breakfast Saturday morning at the IHOP. The one on Washington Road near the Augusta National’s main gate. The IHOP that was only three hundred yards from the five acres of crabgrass and small oaks that had been designated by the sheriff’s department as the official site for the protest sillies.

  We got there early to grab a booth for our eggs over easy, sausage patties, hash browns, biscuits, and bowl of cream gravy to pour over them. Early was important because that particular IHOP, I’d been tipped off by Gwendolyn, had become the unofficial hospitality suite for the plethora of news people in town to cover the valiant protestors who were gearing up to follow Anne Marie Sprinkle to hell and back.

  Grady Don and I were there because of our acute interest in American history. Although we’d be playing in the third round of the Masters later in the day, we wanted to be able to say we watched free speech in action.

  I’d said to Gwen that while it had happened often enough in the privacy of the home, I wanted to observe it in person when women screamed at men about golf in public.

  “That’s almost amusing, Bobby Joe,” she had said. “Really and truly . . . borderline humorous.”

  Grady Don and I talked about the tournament for a moment. How the leaderboard must make the fans happy. The scum was at a tolerable level.

  Elvis was at nine under, one shot ahead of Madonna and Britney and Cheetah. Julius Claudius was i
n there at seven under, that being the nickname Grady Don had given Davis Love III in honor of the Roman numeral chasing after his name.

  Three others were at six under. Two of them were Knut Thorssun, my old Swedish buddy, and Sergio Garcia, the nerve-ends Spaniard. They were Known to Grady Don as “Mule Dick” and “Desi.” The third was Stump Bowen, who didn’t require a nickname. He’d been called Stump from childhood, apparently because of his withered arm.

  Knut Thorssun had once been a friend. He was a no-clue Swede when he first came on the Tour. I befriended him, helped him find his ass with his other hand. I never could do much for his hair. It’s still white-blond and hangs down to his shoulders. And I never could do much for the tight pants he wears—he still likes to show off his crotch bulge.

  I did make the mistake of introducing him to Cynthia, a fun-loving stew friend. Plenty cute. They married and she became the mother of his two boys. Knut thought so much of Cynthia he fucked his way into a costly divorce, and she’s now happily married to a close pal of mine, Buddy Stark. Buddy’d played the Tour for ten years, he’d always had an eye on Cynthia—he used to date her—and when she not only became available but rich after the divorce from Knut, Buddy left the Tour and went about capturing Cynthia’s heart.

  My friendship with Knut dissolved after he won two majors. With two majors to his credit, he got vaccinated with the asshole needle and decided I wasn’t important enough to deserve his close friendship or even his occasional companionship at dinner.

  Knut’s best friend was always his dick, Bobo. He talked about Bobo as if Bobo was a person. Over the years I’d accidentally Known the names of other dicks that belonged to guys. I’d heard references to a Wilbur, Sir James, Old George, Herschel, Tonto, and two Leroys, but I’d never Known a Bobo until Knut Thorssun.

  There were ladies who were acquainted with Bobo, I learned. Back when we were pals, Knut used to show me notes that chicks would write him. Notes that said, “Give my best to Bobo,” and, “How is my friend Bobo?” and, “Please tell Bobo I miss him more than anything.”