The Franchise Babe: A Novel

by Dan Jenkins

  “You look familiar,” I said to Mason Norris.

  “Oh, you’re catching that, are you?” he said with a smile. “I was in films for years. One of those chaps you know the face, but the name escapes you. I was sometimes Best Friend, but most often I was Casual Acquaintance of Best Friend. I was known in the industry as ‘the poor man’s Cesar Romero,’ which I found rather flattering.”

  I asked, “Have you always been a golfer?”

  “Goodness, I don’t play golf,” he said. “I wouldn’t go near it, but I do like the real estate end of it. By the way, you must come to my hospitality tent. It’s the big one on the right side of the eighteenth fairway. The food and drink will meet with your approval, and you’ll see a lot of old familiar faces.”

  I said, “Most of the old familiar faces will be alive, will they?”

  “Oh, that is funny,” Mason said. “I must pass it on.”

  Marsha Wilson gazed at the statue and said, “My first thought was to have a horse on one side of Francois and a dog on the other, but my deputy said it would be over the top. Claudia also brought up the point that no matter which breed of dog the sculptor might choose, the owners of that breed would be offended.”

  “Excellent point,” Thurlene said.

  I said, “I can only speak for myself, but I would have hated to walk in here today and see Maggie sitting next to Francois.”

  Mason Norris said, “I agree wholeheartedly with your deputy. I have two Yorkies—Hedda and Louella—and the thought of them being minced and sitting in a can on a shelf is unbearable.”

  I said we had to be going. Time to watch a little golf.

  The biggest surprise of the day was Ginger Clayton shooting a miserable 76. Thurlene took every bogey personally.

  It was a six-over-par round that left Ginger in a three-way tie for twentieth place, nineteen players and six strokes behind Lorena Ochoa’s even-par 70, which led the Horse Dog.

  There was no big mishap for Ginger in the round. More a day of slow bleeding. A missed putt here, a bad bounce there, a questionable club selection somewhere else.

  We talked to Tyler Hughes while Ginger was in the scorer’s tent.

  The caddie said, “When she three-putted the first two greens, it put her in a bad frame of mind. She never got out of it. It didn’t help that Suzy Scott got off to a great start and shot seventy-one. When Suzy birdied two of the first three holes, Ginger spent the rest of the round trying to catch Suzy instead of playing her own game. She forced things, and the golf course bit her back.”

  Thurlene said, “She’s not blaming you, is she?”

  Tyler said, “No, she’s just hot at herself. It was one of those days. We’ll get it together. She hasn’t lost her swing.”

  Ginger was still furious when she came out of the scorer’s tent.

  “I made six mistakes today and paid for every damn one,” she said. “I even bogeyed the lollipop.”

  A reference to the fourteenth hole, “Shirley Temple,” the ninety-nine-yard par-three with no water and no sand. Ginger had three-putted it.

  “How can I three-rake that hole?” she said. “The green is totally flat, it’s slow as mud, but I miss it from two feet. Two feet! Jesus. Talk about a sanitarium case. Lock me up, man.”

  We tried to console her.

  Thurlene said, “It’s only the first round, Gin. There’s a long way to go. Lot of golf to be played.”

  I said, “Your bad round is behind you, Ginger. The course is playing tough. Every player’s gonna take some lumps.”

  Ginger shook her head. “I don’t make a single birdie all day. Is that lame or what? How ’bout my first putt at the seventh? I’m looking at a fifteen-footer for birdie and all of a sudden I’m looking at a ten-footer for par! What was that all about?”

  “It was about chasing Suzy Scott,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, “but I couldn’t stop myself. Idiot. Jesus! I’m gonna go putt. I gotta work on the harpoon. You guys go on back…and don’t wait on me to eat. I may be here till dark.”

  She stalked off.

  Thurlene relaxed at a table under an umbrella on the veranda and smoked while I went in the pressroom to grab a score sheet. This being a major, it was more crowded than most LPGA pressrooms. There must have been twenty writers on hand. Three times as many as there were at the Firm Chick or the Speedy Arrow.

  I visited with a couple of pals from the lodge. Cy Ronack with Golf World and Smokey Barwood, who was once a sports agent and was now an editor at First Glimpse Publications.

  The three of us were among the scant few golf writers today who don’t wear short pants. We discussed that issue. We also discussed the fact that we were rooting for a heterosexual to win the Horse Dog.

  Burch Webb, the famous architect, was in the interview area. By way of explaining the improvements he’d done to Hollywood Dunes, he was taking his listeners on a journey through the history of golf course design.

  He was dressed in a heavy jacket, vest, necktie, knickers, and a wool golf cap, doing what he could to look like Alister MacKenzie in 1927.

  I listened to Burch say that the biggest change in course design—until his work—occurred when the gutty airmailed the featherie. The improved golf ball. Which hastened the widening of fairways in the middle 1800s.

  I left when Burch went into the old lie of how golf courses began to consist of eighteen holes instead of three, six, twelve. It was when someone realized that a bottle of Scotch contained eighteen jiggers, therefore…

  The score sheet wasn’t a pretty sight if you were a Ginger Clayton rooter. The top twenty after one round read like this:

  1. Lorena Ochoa

  70

  2. Suzy Scott

  71

  T3. Annika Sorenstam

  72

  T3. Jan Dunn

  72

  T3. Morgan Pressel

  72

  6. Penny Cooper

  73

  T6. Linda Merle Draper

  73

  T6. Paula Creamer

  73

  9. Tricia Hurt

  74

  T9. Sophie Gustafson

  74

  T9. Marian Hornbuckle

  74

  T9. Angela Stanford

  74

  T9. Peaches Crowder

  74

  T9. Juli Inkster

  74

  15. Suzann Petterson

  75

  T15. Natalie Gulbis

  75

  T15. Nu Sung Kim

  75

  T15. Brittany Lincicome

  75

  T15. Mandy Park

  75

  20. Ginger Clayton

  76

  T20. Cristie Kerr

  76

  T20. Michelle Wie

  76

  “It’s not the six strokes,” Thurlene said. “There are too many good players ahead of her. How in the world is she going to jump nineteen good players?”

  “Shoot lower,” I said.

  “Terrific idea. I’ll tell her that.”

  I said, “There was some good news today. Debbie Wendell shot seventy-nine…Tang Chen shot eighty-six.”

  “Two short of wonderful,” Thurlene said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Tang had shot eighty-eight, she would be off this tour for a year—and out of our lives. It’s an LPGA rule. It was put in place to eliminate players who don’t deserve to be out here. Shoot an eighty-eight or worse and you’re history.”

  “I’ve never heard of the rule, but I like it. The golf course is playing hard. Maybe Tang Chen can shoot an eighty-eight tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I can help her.”

  36

  We took the night off. Well, more or less. There was groping and kissing and tangling and untangling, but sheer exhaustion kicked in and we were better off for lapsing into seven hours’ sleep, both of us drifting off in the middle of the same sentence about life, health, divorce, romance, marriage, daug
hters—or it could have been golf.

  Thurlene dashed to her cabana Friday morning to be doing one thing or another when Ginger woke up. I met them for breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. We read newspapers as we ate.

  Ginger said something that sounded like “Ug” when she read the short piece about herself in USA Today, a story saying the Hollywood Dunes course gave the “child star” and “one of the championship favorites” her comeuppance in the first round.

  “This track owes me one, I’ll tell you that,” Ginger said.

  The three of us rode out to the club in a courtesy car driven by a volunteer lady in her seventies. She wasn’t wearing a volunteer’s polka-dot blouse and skirt, but she was wearing what Thurlene estimated as $150,000 worth of jewelry. She was bronze as a casket, and she took the liberty of telling us that she was a member of both Eldorado and Thunderbird country clubs and had no idea Hollywood Dunes existed until this week.

  “I’m sure Ike or Jerry never played here,” she said as we neared the front gates and the same dozens of demonstrators from the day before.

  As the courtesy car glided slowly through a path of demonstrators that was cleared by the police, our lady driver wearily said, “Isn’t this a shame? There’s never a suicide bomber around when you need one.”

  “I like this woman,” I whispered to Thurlene.

  “What a surprise,” she whispered back.

  The first thing we did was survey the big scoreboard on the clubhouse veranda near the statue of the Frenchman. We were curious to see if the golf course was giving up any low rounds among the early starters. It wasn’t. Everybody was over par.

  Ginger went off to practice. She wouldn’t be playing for three hours.

  The thing that delighted Thurlene the most on the scoreboard was Tang Chen’s first nine holes. She was out in 45, ten over.

  “Let’s go,” she said, giving me a tug. “We have nothing to do for a while. We can catch up with Tang on the back.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I’ll get a chance to step on her ball in the rough.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  We were already walking toward the back nine.

  “I wouldn’t, huh? She poisons my daughter and nobody does anything about it. She physically attacks my daughter and nobody does anything about it. You don’t know how many letters I’ve written to Marsha Wilson. All I get back is ‘It’s something we’re tracking,’ ‘It’s on our agenda,’ ‘Perhaps an overhaul of our invitation system should be examined more thoroughly,’ ‘It’s not a branding issue’…What a commissioner.”

  I said, “I wonder if Ginger has talked to any of the other players about Tang and Debbie. Do you know?”

  “I know she hasn’t…and I know she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t want to stir up a shitstorm. She thinks winning is the best revenge. That’s what she’s about, and I’m proud of her for thinking it.”

  “But you’re the mom and you have an obligation to protect her—in whatever way you can.”

  “Damn right I do. So if the little chink gets close to an eighty-eight out here, and I’m standing near her golf ball…turn your head.”

  We found Tang Chen on the fifteenth hole, “Ginger Rogers.”

  “Her real name was Virginia Katherine McMath,” I said.

  “Whose real name?”

  “Ginger Rogers’s, for whom this hole is named.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I know it because she was raised in Fort Worth. We take pride in these things…Ginger Rogers, Ben Hogan, and yours truly all went to the same high school…but not at the same time, of course. Dear old Paschal High…purple and white, fight, fight.”

  “You and Ben and Ginger, huh? That must explain your occasional arrogance.”

  “I’m only arrogant when I’m around arrogant people. I can tell you something about your old high school you can be proud of: Woodrow Wilson in Dallas is the only public school in America that’s turned out two Heisman Trophy winners. Davey O’Brien in thirty-eight…Tim Brown in eighty-seven.”

  “I know that. Everybody who went to Woodrow knows that.”

  “A lot of sportswriters don’t know it, but they know not to jack around with me on that kind of stuff.”

  Tang Chen was in a twosome with Fujita Izama of Japan, who spoke no English and was almost as bad a golfer as the Chinese girl. It was what the pressroom wits call a “U.N. pairing.”

  Tang was now fourteen over par and had driven into the rough at fifteen.

  I was relieved that her golf ball was on the opposite side of the fairway from us, mainly from Thurlene.

  I enjoyed watching Thurlene delight in the sight of Tang chopping around in the rough and taking a double bogey on the hole. Which put her sixteen over with three holes to play.

  Tang could afford one bogey. One bogey and two pars and she could make it to the house with an 87—and escape banishment from the tour.

  Good thing there was no gallery. Thurlene let out a groan when Tang sank a thirty-foot putt for a par at “Mae West,” the sixteenth hole. She had put her tee shot in the bunker and played a poor sand shot, but the putter saved her.

  One hole later, at “Sam Goldwyn,” the par-four seventeenth, Thurlene let out a louder groan when Tang sank a twenty-foot putt for a bogey five when it looked certain she’d make another double bogey after hacking around in the rough again.

  “I’m announcing this is no longer fun,” Thurlene said.

  Now the Chinese girl was at “Tinsel Town” the eighteenth hole, an easy par-four if the golfer could keep it in the fairway off the tee. There were trees on the left and out of bounds on the right, due to the row of hospitality tents.

  A par was a must for her.

  “I promise you she doesn’t know what’s riding on this,” Thurlene said. “She has no idea the eighty-eight rule exists. None of us knew it until the Tricia Hurt thing last fall.”

  “What Tricia Hurt thing?”

  “Something else our earnest commissioner covered up. Last October at the Hootinannie Classic in Nashville, Tricia withdrew in the second round with a sudden ‘wrist injury’ when she was two holes away from shooting an eighty-eight or worse. We weren’t there. Gin was still recovering from being poisoned, but Linda Merle Draper filled us in. Linda Merle, as a matter of fact, was paired with Tricia when it happened.”

  It was Tricia’s agent at ISC, a man named Bloody Tillis, who saved her butt. Bloody Tillis jumped in a golf cart and rushed out to the sixteenth hole and told Tricia to WD right now. If she didn’t, the eighty-eight rule would kick her off the tour for a year, and this would cost her—and the agency—a great deal of endorsement money. Tricia withdrew on the spot, claiming an injured wrist. What made the incident more scandalous was that two hours later Tricia was seen hitting balls on the range. Most of the players went nuts, but Marsha Wilson convinced them that keeping the incident “in house” was for the good of the tour. Tricia Hurt was a lovely young girl and a stellar gate attraction. The commissioner thought they should keep those things in mind.

  “You people sure have a lot of things out here nobody can write about,” I said.

  That statement had barely come off my lips when Tang took a swing at her drive on eighteen and sent a wild slice into the sky that appeared to be heading over the boundary fence toward Mason Norris’s hospitality tent.

  As the ball curved through the air, Thurlene said, “Aw, gee…heck…darn…she’s going out of bounds.”

  Then when the ball landed on the patio and bounced around looking for a plate of smoked salmon to settle on, Thurlene yelled, “Yes…yes!”

  I said, “I’m very pleased she did it without your help.”

  “Come on,” she said excitedly. Another tug. “Maybe I can be the first person to tell her she’s pork-fried rice.”

  37

  Much to Thurlene’s pleasure the Chinese girl struggled to a quad on the hole, a pitiful eight, which gave her a round of 91 for the day. Three over the rules
limit.

  It was hard for Thurlene to hide her glee.

  I said, “I can’t help noticing. You haven’t had this much fun since, when? Two nights ago?”

  She may not have heard every word of that. Tang Chen was coming out of the scorer’s tent and walking over to us.

  “I play so bad,” Tang said. “I miss cut.”

  “It’s a little worse than that,” Thurlene said.

  “What worse for me?” Tang said.

  Thurlene said, “A little thing about the rules. The LPGA rules state that if a player shoots eighty-eight or higher, that player is barred from our tour for one year and must go through the qualifying process to return. I’m sure you will be informed of this officially.”

  “Oh, no! No more play golf in States?”

  “You…are…out…of…here, my dear. History. Beijing bound. And I can’t say I’m sorry. Not after what you and Debbie did to my daughter in Oklahoma and New Mexico!”

  “I do nothing. Debbie do nothing.”

  “You know damn well what you did.”

  “No, no, please. I do nothing. I make joke is all. Play tricks.”

  Tears came to Tang’s eyes. I almost felt sorry for her, but of course she was a Chinaman.

  Thurlene said, “You make joke? You put rat poison on Ginger’s popcorn in Oklahoma City…in Ruidoso, you sneak up on her and knock her down in the trees, try to cripple her so Debbie Wendell can win the golf tournament! Those were fucking jokes?”

  “How you know this?”

  “How I know this? I know this because I’m not stupid, Tang. Now I want the truth out of you and maybe there’s something we can do about it.”

  “You can help me?” Tang sniffled. “No go back China?”

  “Maybe,” Thurlene said.