The Franchise Babe: A Novel

by Dan Jenkins

  We pushed up against the ropes at the tee markers before Suzy Scott and Ginger hit their tee shots, Ginger looking a little shaken by the swift turn of events. Howie and Smacky were off to the side, away from the gallery, discussing various crime sprees.

  The mom was grousing, mainly to herself. “Suzy Scott,” she was saying. “She’s not a good putter, never was, but today—naturally—she starts rolling in no-brainers!”

  “The kid needs to get it over the water,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  Suzy Scott stepped up to hit first. She was a dark-complexioned woman in her thirties. A consistent money winner. She wore Capris. Not the cigarettes, but what I would call bullfighter pants and my mother would call pedal pushers.

  Suzy put a three-quarter swing on a lofted hybrid and played a steer job to the left edge of the green. It was puttable, if a long way from the cup, but safe and dry.

  Truly relieved to have cleared the water, Suzy Scott playfully clutched her throat with her hand. She smiled and did a little stagger at the same time. This was for the crowd as well as for herself. The crowd rewarded her act with applause and laughter.

  Ginger paid no attention to it. She was discussing her club selection with Trey Bishop, looking from her golf bag to the green, golf bag to green, thinking, measuring, trying to eliminate guesswork.

  This day she was wearing a white golf shirt with short sleeves and a flat collar, a white visor, and her short little blue skirt barely covered what it was supposed to cover front and back. For my taste, her legs ran a dead heat with her mother’s for Best Wheels in Golf.

  The look on Ginger’s face was cold, calculating.

  Ginger took out a seven-iron, addressed the ball, waggled the club.

  Thurlene grabbed my arm tightly, breathed the words, “Jesus…is that a seven? It’s not enough.”

  I recalled Ginger in her press conference saying her seven was actually a five and a half.

  “It’s enough,” I said, “if she pures it.”

  Ginger took a smooth cut at it and the collision of clubface and golf ball made that familiar swish-crack sound. Sweetest sound in the game. Golfers know it when they hear it. It’s the sound that says you’ve nailed it, clubfaced it.

  The towering shot seemed to hang in the air forever, but it was headed for the flag—if the distance was right.

  “Go, ball!” Trey hollered.

  “It’s enough!” Ginger said.

  “Sit!” Trey called out.

  “Grab a chair!” Ginger yelled at the ball.

  The ball landed on the front edge of the green, took a big hop, put on the brakes, and spun over to within a foot of the cup. Gimme birdie.

  The roar of the gallery might have made the cacti shudder, but I wasn’t looking at the cacti.

  “Yes!” screamed the mom. I squeezed her around the waist. She gave me an excited kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I overcelebrate?”

  “Was that as good for you as it was for me?”

  She blushed a trifle.

  We watched the kid calmly hold out a palm for her caddie to slap, which Trey did. Then the two of them went off on their triumphant march to the green.

  “The hunt’s over,” I said jovially. “They can piss on the fire and call in the dogs.”

  Thurlene grinned, eyes wide. “My granddad used to say that!”

  I said, “Everybody’s granddad used to say that.”

  When Suzy Scott two-putted the seventeenth green for a par and Ginger tapped in the birdie, it gave the kid a three-shot lead going to the last hole, which was an easy par five. A no-water, no-boundary Burch Webb sack of shit. She put it on in two—driver, five-iron—and made an easy birdie and won by four shots.

  Cake with icing.

  “And to think,” I said. “I could be at Doral this week watching Tiger Woods beating Rod Pampling, Fred Funk, and Tom Pernice by fourteen strokes.”

  “Why does that sound like a recurring theme to me?”

  “It’s one of them. More fun here, though.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Much better scenery,” I said.

  14

  The party Saturday night for the winner of the Firm Chick Classic was in the grand ballroom again, but it was casual attire this time, which was why Connie Pemberton dressed down. In her white silk pants and yellow silk shirt and four-inch-heel sandals, she wore only one heavy-duty emerald necklace, six gold bracelets, her lightbulb-size wedding ring, and her diamond and emerald earrings that didn’t appear to be any bigger than Titleists.

  It appeared that every hotel guest had been invited. Pink blazers and lime slacks bloomed everywhere. Most of the players had left town, the “names” faster than others. They hadn’t performed well. They had split for outings and exhibitions and would eventually make their way to Ruidoso, the next tour stop.

  Debbie Wendell and her mother had departed. Debbie had finished in a tie for fifty-eighth with Hung Ju Kim and Jang Jo Yung and pocketed $3,043.

  The thoughtful Ann Wendell went to the trouble of coming into the pressroom to tell me goodbye. “I gather we’ll be seeing you again in New Mexico?” she said.

  I said they would.

  She said, “Ginger played beautifully, didn’t she? She’s such a lovely girl. I can’t remember. Did she miss a putt all week?”

  The sports agents had vanished.

  Howie the Dart hustled back to New York to be nursemaid for an NFL client—Novocain Washington, the esteemed linebacker for the Giants. Novocain was refusing to sign a one-year contract for $38 million because it didn’t state that he’d never have to piss in a bottle for the trainer.

  Smacky Lasher was off to Sacramento. He was hoping to sign Days Inn Lewis, the seven-foot-two, 295-pound high school basketball player. Days Inn was going to skip college and go straight to the NBA if he proved he could walk through a room without breaking furniture.

  Days Inn’s older twin sisters, Radisson and Ramada, who were six-five and 250, were already playing basketball at UConn. How Radisson and Ramada got from California to Connecticut was a mystery known only to the women’s basketball coach of the UConn Huskies.

  Toppy was already boxed when I bumped into him at a service bar, but he looked dapper in his white Hogan cap, navy blue cardigan, red golf shirt, light gray slacks, and fleece-lined brown suede house slippers.

  Connie was up on the bandstand, chatting with the orchestra leader while Toppy and I visited. At the same time I ordered drinks for Thurlene and Ginger and myself.

  Earlier Toppy had posed for a photograph with Ginger as they stood at opposite ends of a huge replica of the $225,000 first-place check. The amount was still a fair distance from what a winner on the men’s tour receives, but it was an improvement over the old days of the LPGA. In those days, it’s said, Babe and Mickey and Kathy and Betsy and them used to play for pots and pans and cans of peas.

  “Goddamn the goddamn,” Toppy babbled. “The little girlie shoots fifteen under par right here on my ‘championship’ golf course…sixty-eight…sixty-four…sixty-nine. Burch Webb should have put the greens where the tees are and the tees where the greens are. That’s all I can figure. It’s a good thing the asshole’s not here tonight. It would give me a world of pleasure to stick a bamboo shoot in his ear.”

  Toppy closed his eyes for a moment, rocked back and forth on his heels, and came alert again when a young gentleman joined us. A guy about my age. He wore a loud green and gold plaid blazer and tasseled loafers.

  He was Harvin Goodger, the tournament director, a marketing vice president at Firm Chick skin cream. I hadn’t laid eyes on him all week. Apparently nobody else had either.

  Toppy wheezed with laughter as he introduced Harvin Goodger to me. “Jack Brannon, I don’t believe you’ve met our capable tournament chairman, Ensign Pulver.”

  Harvin Goodger didn’t get it. I did—but held the laugh.

  “By golly, we brought it off, didn’t we?”
Harvin Goodger said, smiling, holding a glass of club soda on ice, which had been daringly loaded with a slice of lemon. “I saw a lot of good things this week.”

  “Like what?” Toppy said rudely.

  Harvin said, “Oh, you know…a little of this, a little of that. The fans, the spectacle, how it all came together…the golf course.”

  “The golf course is a sack of shit,” Toppy said.

  “Precisely the point I was going to make,” Harvin said. “It’s been on my mind throughout the week that…”

  I collected our drinks and scurried to the table reserved for the champion. On the way I passed Allison of PR. She was at a table chatting intimately with a handsome new hotel guest.

  I nodded a greeting to her. She ignored me. Must have been that sportswriter’s salary thing.

  Ginger had bathed and slipped into a pair of seven-hundred-dollar jeans and a cropped sweater. She had finished all of the winner’s chores. The press conference. The interview with the Golf Channel. The interviews with radio and TV stations from L.A., San Diego, and Palm Springs. The slow process of autographing programs and golf caps for the tournament volunteers.

  The mom had soaked in a tub and changed. She was now in a pair of dark blue hip-hugging pants, a gray and white striped shirt with a turned-up collar, and a light blue blazer.

  It occurred to me that we should have invited Trey Bishop to join us, but when I brought it up I learned that Trey had already hit the road. He had taken Ginger’s golf clubs with him and was off to Ruidoso. On the drive he planned to stop and spend a couple of days snowboarding in Taos.

  Snowboarding. Another adult sport.

  “Trey will meet us at the El Paso airport Tuesday,” Thurlene said. “It’s a two-hour drive from there to Ruidoso.”

  I said, “Why not Albuquerque instead of El Paso?”

  Thurlene said, “Albuquerque is a four-hour drive to Ruidoso. You don’t know much about geography, do you?”

  I said, “I know Columbia, South Carolina, is closer to Augusta, Georgia, than Atlanta. I know Raleigh is closer to Pinehurst than Charlotte. What else do I need to know?”

  The mom said, “We would have gone to New Mexico from here, but this gig came up in L.A.—in Redondo Beach, really—and it was too good for Ginger to pass up.”

  “What gig?”

  “Ginger’s doing a commercial Monday. It’s for Luxury Palace Hotels. There will be three other people in the commercial with Gin. All are connected to golf. They’ll discuss aspects of the game. Garrett Hicks will be there. He’s the biggest name. Happy Stoddard from the senior tour…and some comedian I’ve never heard of.”

  Ginger said, “Booty Grimmett, Mom! Jesus…he has his own TV show! He plays in the Hope every year.”

  I said, “Garrett Hicks is a big name in golf. He leads the PGA Tour in stupidity. He leads the PGA Tour in eating with his mouth open. He leads the PGA Tour in farting in front of galleries. What agency arranged this?”

  “No agent arranged it,” Thurlene said. “The director—director of the commercial—called me out of the blue two weeks ago. He said they needed a ‘hot babe’ who plays golf for the ‘shoot.’ He wanted Ginger. He offered fifty grand. I said a hundred. He said done…Hey, why don’t you come with us? You might pick up some material for your story. Can you? I’ll tell them to reserve a room for you. You can fly with us to El Paso Tuesday. Does that sound like a plan?”

  I was considering it when Ginger said, “They’re calling you, Jack. They want you up on stage.”

  I hung my head.

  “The orchestra leader is introducing you. The ‘famous golf writer.’ Whoa! All the way from New York City! You have to go up and say something, Jack.”

  I grudgingly shuffled up on the stage. At the mike I congratulated Ginger Clayton on her victory. I congratulated everyone who helped run the swell tournament. And got off after telling the only golf joke I could remember from the past year.

  I said, “So this guy gets in a violent argument with his wife about playing too much golf, and he’s arrested for beating her to death with a golf club. The homicide detective says, ‘How many times did you hit your wife with the golf club, sir?’ The guy says, ‘Aw, I don’t know…let’s see. Four, five, six…seven…Just gimme a six.’”

  Toppy wheezed and coughed. I heard him.

  When I returned to the table I said to Thurlene, “Book the room for me. I’m there.”

  “Will do,” she said, looking pleased about it.

  The evening turned a little rowdy before it ended. Connie Pemberton took over the entertainment. She dedicated a number to “all the boys and girls in uniform who serve our country so proudly and protect us from the foreign slimeballs.”

  With that, the orchestra went into a bouncy number from days of yore. Connie swayed her hips and sang:

  “If you don’t love the stars in Old Glory.

  If you don’t like our red, white, and blue.

  Go down to the dock in a hurry.

  There’s a boat there waiting for you!”

  People in the audience spiraled into roaring applause and shouted and stomped their feet. There were even those among them who knew the words and began to sing along as Connie ripped into several more patriotic verses.

  As we were leaving I stopped off to tell Toppy it was a pleasure meeting him, and not to worry about his golf course. There was nothing wrong with the layout a bulldozer couldn’t fix.

  He shook my hand warmly, and through a wheeze, a cackle, and a coughing spell, he said, “Just gimme a six.”

  PART TWO

  STRONGER THAN LAUNDRY

  15

  Imagine my surprise to find out it takes five thousand people to make a TV commercial. But of course I never could have guessed how many doughnuts would have been required for the crew.

  Joking, joking. A rough guess is there were only two hundred crew members in all. Not as many crew members as there were wires and cables strung everywhere on the hotel mezzanine floor. Most of these wires and cables were outside the conference room where the “shoot” was taking place.

  Shallow World was the name of the ad agency making the commercial. Luxury Palace Hotels was a client of Shallow World. Shallow World was headquartered in Leakage Park, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark. Shallow World used to be headquartered in Manhattan, but Ray Shallow, the man who founded the agency, moved it to New Jersey after a bitter argument with his New York City landlord. Unfortunately, Ray Shallow died last year of a heart attack while watching two liberal midgets discussing politics on CNN. The agency was now owned by Ray Shallow’s widow, Mopsy, who rarely questioned anything to do with the business. She let a group of workers she referred to as “the little people” run the agency while she lived full-time in Nantucket and pretty much kept to herself, her pharmacist, and her deckhands.

  All that pertinent information came to me from Rick, the director of the commercial, and Crystal, the assistant director.

  Rick was in his forties, wore dark glasses, and looked like he hadn’t shaved in four days. Holes were worn in his sneakers, and the message on his soiled gray sweatshirt said:

  Would I Be Doing

  This Shit If I Were

  Steven Spielberg?

  Crystal wasn’t bad-looking, a chick in her thirties. Maybe a tad fleshy. She wore ragged, loose-fitting jeans, a sloppy T-shirt, and a red bandana around her head. Strapped around her waist was a tool belt with cell phones and walkie-talkies and pill bottles clipped on it. She was draped in wires and earplugs.

  Numerous members of the crew, particularly the younger ones, seemed to be afraid of her.

  Under his breath to a coworker, I overheard an older technician say to another older technician, “Look out, here comes Katie Couric again.”

  And a moment later Crystal came storming down the hall, barking into one of her phones:

  “Where the fuck are you, Kevin? Talk to me! How fucking long does it take you to run a fucking errand, you fucking dipshit? You and that cluel
ess little bitch Rachel better get your fucking asses back up here now, do you fucking hear me!”

  The sponsors of the Firm Chick Classic had been thoughtful enough to arrange a limousine to transport Thurlene and Ginger from the Enchanted Villa to the Luxury Palace Hotel in Redondo Beach.

  We didn’t do a motorcade. I left earlier in my rental car and stopped at a deli in Palm Springs to grab a sandwich to go, dictating the ingredients on a foot-long hero. Two layers of Black Forest ham, a layer of thin-sliced soft salami, two layers of provolone cheese, olive relish, green peppers, mayo, sliced tomatoes, and shredded lettuce.

  I ate it in three delicious segments on the way to LAX, where I turned in the Hertz Lincoln, then hopped in a cab for the twenty-minute ride to the hotel in Redondo Beach. Which wasn’t on the beach. The ocean and beach were across a busy thoroughfare from the hotel and beyond a row of restaurants, a string of condos, and a marina.

  But from the balcony of my room I could see a body of water if I looked around the corner of the refinery.

  Thurlene and Ginger weren’t available for dinner. They did room service and worried about what Ginger should wear for the commercial. Besides, the call for the “shoot” was six-thirty a.m.

  This left me to make my own fun in the lobby bar that night.

  I listened to a guy who sold home furnishings tell me his problems with working for an asshole in Torrance. I listened to a man’s problems selling medical supplies while working for an asshole in Long Beach.

  At one point a hot-looking redhead sidled up to me at the bar. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. She mentioned that she was in the “home entertainment” business and would come to my room and do anything I wanted for five hundred dollars, or a thousand for all night.