On the tee, Adele Invergordon thanked the galleryites for their patience, requested their forbearance amid the sloppy conditions and introduced Dougal McDermott to reconvene the competition. Junah had reagitated himself terrifically in the previous five minutes. Finishing the warm-up, he tugged Bagger Vance aside. “I can’t take any more of these mental fireworks. You have to give me something concrete. One simple thought, just to get my swing started.”
“As you wish, Junah,” Vance immediately acquiesced. Relief! You could see the tension drain from Junah. He moved in closer to his caddie as they started, amid the gallery, toward the tee.
“Every great player,” Vance said, “no matter how odd or unorthodox his swing, shares one crucial consciousness: an absolute awareness of the clubhead at all points in the swing. Jones achieves this with rhythm, Hagen with his hands and his timing. Your key, Junah, is your arc.”
This was true. As soon as Junah heard it, a tumbler seemed to snick blessedly into place in his brain.
“Under pressure,” Vance continued, “you tend to constrict your arc, as if you imagined that compactness would equate to control. Nothing could be more misguided. Under pressure, extend your arc. Let the clubhead go wide; then you’ll feel it. That’s why I keep telling you to hit hard, hold nothing back. Think of this over the ball, Junah: start wide and stay wide. Extend, extend, extend.”
This was the exact tonic Junah needed. Something clean. Something simple. You could see the confidence flow into him as he and Vance climbed the rise to number one tee.
The gallery was much diminished from the morning. What had been ten thousand, I would guess, was down to a third of that. This was still a prodigious mob to follow only one threesome, but contrasted with the hordes of the morning it felt almost intimate. Faces were becoming familiar. You knew that these, out again in the wet, were the diehards, the true lovers of the game.
This had a decidedly stabilizing effect on Junah. He joked easily with Hagen and Jones, scraping wet clumped grass from his spikes with a tee, then hip-hopping a ball up and down on the face of his driver.
“Gentlemen”—McDermott’s gesture swept down the open fairway—“play away!”
Number one was the straightaway par five that Junah had bogeyed in the morning round. (On the opening four, if you recall, he had fallen five behind.) Hagen was up first and ripped a beauty down the left side that bounced once, flung a plug of wet turf and dropped dead around 245. Jones followed, a little stiffly, with a rolling draw that hit with overspin and squirted forward on the damp grass, stopping close enough to Hagen’s that you could have covered both balls with a blanket. The hole was only 521, well within reach for any of the three, except for a sculpted 30-yard swale that crossed the fairway just in front of the green. Vance had had me trot out earlier to inspect this, so we knew there was runoff in the ditch; it had become a small “burn” as they say in Scotland, a stream crossing linksland to the ocean. In this muck a spoon shot aimed at the green, even after a drive of 260, would have to carry all the way, and that probably from a gloppy lie with mud on the ball.
Junah switched from a driver to a driving iron off the tee. The gallery let out a murmur of surprise and, from the Savannah contingent, disappointment. Their man was playing safe, they concluded. Trying just to hold on, bunt it around, keep within ten or twelve strokes and not disgrace himself too badly. I confess that was what I thought too. There was a collective sigh, and then Junah drilled a conservative shot down the right side, catching a downslope about 220 and skittering forward another 10 yards to a flat dry area on the edge of the fairway. From there a solid mid-iron put him about 80 yards short, on the flat before the ditch. An easy pitch to about 15 feet, a putt that burned the right edge and he had his par. Jones and Hagen took the same.
“Why isn’t he ripping it?” I asked Bagger Vance as we crossed to the second tee. The caddie kept striding. “He’s a shot better than he was this morning, isn’t he?”
Now, slowly, it began to happen. I know you’ve experienced the same, Michael and Irene, on a day when you go around a course twice. At each tee you can’t help but recall your morning score for that hole, and the sorrier it was, the more you’re inspired by the room for improvement. You know you can’t do worse, so you let it rip!
Surely this was what Junah felt on the second tee, remembering his bogey from the morning. He drilled another driving iron, a clean 220 to a dry level lie, then punched a niblick under the wind to six feet. The slower green took some of the break away; the ball tumbled in on the low side. Birdie. He had bettered this morning’s score on the hole by two shots. An improvement of three already, in just two holes! You could see Junah gather yet more confidence. Simply matching the morning round the rest of the way would give him 73. For the two rounds, 76–73. Damn good for a soul thrown at the last instant into a battle of titans. Hagen and Jones had both parred two, so Junah had the honor on three. He had picked up a shot.
Junah parred three and four, with Hagen bogeying the fourth when he left an uphill putt short and lipped out from three feet. Junah had gained another on Hagen, to within four, though Jones was still an insuperable six ahead with fourteen holes left.
And Jones was playing superbly. Well within himself, swinging smoothly and full of confidence. His driver, Jeannie Deans as it was called, seemed incapable of striking a ball off-line, and each time Calamity Jane set down on a putting surface, first before the ball then behind it, you were sure Jones would drain it. On all four holes he had scorched the lip from beyond fifteen feet. These burners were sure to start falling sooner or later.
A break came in the opposite direction at number five when Jones, straining to cut the dogleg, plugged his drive into the face of a bunker and took two to get out. Double bogey to Hagen’s and Junah’s pars.
Suddenly Junah was within four.
I saw him look to Bagger Vance then. We were on the sixth tee and there was no doubt what the glance meant. He wanted to see the Field. Vance grinned, with a teasing glint.
“Think you can handle it now? Yes! Now your will is engaged. Now you want the prize.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to want?” Junah whispered back, somewhat shaken by Vance’s teasing tone. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
“All I want is that you swing your Authentic Swing.”
Junah let out a breath, frustrated. “Please don’t confuse me again, Bagger. I thought you wanted me to win.”
“I couldn’t care less about winning,” the mysterious fellow answered. “I care about you.”
He put his hand on Junah’s shoulder.
Junah knew what was coming.
It did.
This time Vance did not ask me to share the vision; I remained on the outside, watching Junah much as a sober man may observe a drunk.
“We are speaking of a State of Grace,” Vance told Junah as they squinted up this gale-swept 230-yard par three, “which is by definition an aspect of the divine. You have blundered through this portal in the past, by my assistance and by happy accident, as every golfer has. Now observe it with eyes open. Learn from it….”
Junah seemed to stagger under this weight for a long moment; then, slowly, he found his feet and settled in.
Then came the stroke of the match, to that point.
The shot Junah hit, a drilled driver, unteed, cut into that stiff right-to-left gale, was beyond anything any of the players had yet attempted, let alone pulled off. Let me describe it briefly, as it remains one of the three or four greatest shots I have ever seen.
The sixth was uphill, 230 as I said, with the ocean hard by on the right, across the short beach above a bluff. In the morning with the wind behind, all three players had hit driving irons; now, with the gale hammering into their faces, the hole played a full four clubs longer. The cup, which had been recut for the afternoon round, was perched at the extreme right, practically teetering on the bluff edge, with the wind bowing the flagstick thirty degrees over and making the fabric of
the flag snap like a pistol shot. Getting close was out of the question. The only way even to strike the putting surface, if your nerves were steel, was to start the ball twenty or thirty yards out over the breakers and let the wind take it back. The problem was the long carry; it called for a full driver, which couldn’t be spun at all off a tee; by the time the gale-borne shot drifted back, what little spin it had would have been killed by the wind; it would plummet like a knuckleball and bound inevitably over the fast-drying green into the murderous bunker protecting the left—the same bunker Junah had had to play backward out of in the morning round. The smart shot was a bail-out, with a spoon or a driving iron, to the fairway short and left, relying on an up-and-down from seventy or eighty feet to make par. That was what Jones did, playing first. The gallery applauded his shrewd, immaculately struck shot. Hagen had a spoon in hand and was clearly intending to play with the same prudence.
Junah took Schenectady Slim. He set the ball cold on the turf, without a tee, and ripped a screamer that started out for the extreme right edge, the bluff edge, of the green. The wind pounded mercilessly from the right. But Junah had given the shot a hard solid cut, into the gale. The gallery watched, mesmerized, as the spun ball burrowed its nose dead into the wind’s teeth. It rose and held. Straight…straight…with the wind killing its momentum more and more, exactly as Junah had envisioned, till the driver, which without the gale would have carried twenty or thirty yards over, ran out of steam at precisely the right point, dead above the stick, and dropped as light as a leaf to the putting surface. The angle kicked it sideways another ten feet, where it curled to a stop a flag-length below the hole.
Hagen and Jones reacted as if struck a physical blow. This was not the shot of an amateur. Not a Trans-Miss level shot, not a Georgia State champion shot. It was as good as anything the two giants could have hit themselves on their best day, and maybe better. When Junah coolly rolled in his deuce, the match shifted upward to another gear.
Now that driving iron off the first took on a new significance. The gallery sensed it. Junah had not played chicken. It was not a give-up shot but a deliberate play of patience, the confidence of knowing there were plenty of holes left, nothing had to be rushed so early.
Now was the time to make a move, and now Junah made it.
On seven, with the honor, he teed a spoon and drilled a flawless draw a hundred yards past the bunker over which he had sniped his drive out of bounds in the morning round. The ball lit in a neck no wider than eight yards between two strings of pot bunkers, setting up an easy lofter approach which, the spectators sensed, he would stiff for another birdie.
A thrill began to build in the gallery. Junah’s play was a gauntlet thrown down to Hagen and Jones. Still of course they anticipated his collapse. No amateur at his level, however lucky he might be on a given shot or even two or three, could expect to sustain that rarefied plateau over twelve more grueling holes. Junah would crash. He would crumble. But meanwhile, Jones and Hagen had to be thinking, the gallery had witnessed this fellow pull off a couple of blows that were beyond anything they, Jones and Hagen, had so far even attempted.
It ignited them.
Hagen took a driver off seven and powdered it thirty yards past Junah’s brilliant spoon, into a slot even narrower and closer to the green. Jones saved his genius for the approach, drilling a gorgeous side-spinning pitch into the left-to-right slope and curling it down to three feet, dead below the hole.
Vance had now backed away from Junah. His monologue ended; the caddie no longer poured a stream of inspiration into his champion’s ear. They only grunted to each other on the seventh green; a nod from Vance and Junah stroked his twelve-footer dead into the cup.
Who can say by what mysterious process news spreads over a golf course? The battle had been joined, and now the tom-toms began to boom. Fresh recruits swelled the gallery. Cars that had been departing suddenly pulled over along the muddy roadsides, their occupants hiking back to get in on the action. Others who had taken refuge in various grills and dining rooms now forsook these havens and braved the elements afresh. Still others, whose plan had been to stake out premium positions on the closing holes, now rethought their strategy. They abandoned their prize vantages and began trekking the holes in reverse, to intercept the game and roll with it afoot.
How many of these surging reinforcements were there to cheer Junah? Probably very few. Only the Savannah contingent and a smattering who couldn’t resist cheering the underdog.
It was the action.
The battle.
The sense, communicated like quicksilver among the throng, that things were heating up. There was blood in the water.
Junah himself was electrified. Was he seeing the Field? Had he found his Authentic Swing? Yes and yes again. You could see it in his eyes, his stride, in the energy that radiated from him as he strode the fast-drying fairways. Reporters were now pressing closer, pencils scribbling. Cartoon illustrators craned to sketch him.
In the morning round, the galleryites had been a source of terror to Junah. Witnesses to his public mortification, they had only made him want to hide, to recede if he could into invisibility. Now suddenly, now that he was banging the pill, they became his allies. His boosters. His bosom confidants.
As he strode down the fairway, voices rang out. “Get ’em, Junah!” “Knock it stiff!” “Ram it in!” When he struck a drive or an iron, the applause was wild and immediate, followed by yet more fevered shouts of encouragement.
It is something to hear strangers calling your name. Cheering you onward, urging you to triumph. To watch massed formations surge and swell, break into stampedes, jostling one another merely for the chance to glimpse you, to bask in your aurora and, yes (the word is not too strong), worship you.
Junah may have witnessed this before, but he had never experienced it. I of course had done neither. I was astonished at the power, the sheer walloping electricity that surged from the massed galleries. It was palpable. A force as raw and primordial as heat, and all of it focusing like a sun on Junah.
What must he be seeing, beholding the Field? What power and energy were radiating off the auroras of the gallery? Junah ate it up. To be cheered. To be hurrahed and adulated! All fear left his swing. He planted solid and swung from the heels. With each flushed blow, the spectators’ cheers rang louder and lustier.
A wild, insane thought began to percolate.
Junah could win.
He could beat Jones and Hagen!
On eight, a 442 par four into the wind, Junah’s drive finished within a yard of the spot he had played to in the morning. He had hit a three-iron then into an identical wind. I squinted at the flag and was sure it was a mashie. Two clubs less.
Adrenaline. The jolt of power from the gallery and from Junah’s own surging self-confidence. He drilled the mashie stiff. The crowd didn’t so much cheer as stand witness in awe. Junah was intoxicated. Invincible. He began to feel there was nothing he couldn’t do. To stand at 180, knowing the shot was normally a five-iron, and be able now to go long with a seven…all horizons seemed to shoot back to infinity. What couldn’t he do?
He began cracking jokes. I heard him tell someone in the gallery, “Bet on me.” Vance watched in silence. He could see Junah stealing glances at Jones and Hagen. He had them going. They were tempted to press, to equal his stunning shots that were so electrifying the gallery.
They wouldn’t do it of course. Both these champions were far too canny to be drawn into playing an opponent’s game. But Junah was making them think. He was making them resist. They were daunted, reaching deep to summon their full powers.
Then there were the women.
Until now the fair element had clustered mostly with Hagen, with minority enthusiasm following Jones. Now I saw a beauty’s eyes flirt with Junah, and his eyes smile back. Other belles scooted in like quail, their silk-clad hind ends wriggling as they scurried through a fairway crossing in their covey. Junah didn’t gawk but you could see he felt them. At th
e break of each shot, more maidens rallied into view, flitting before Junah’s path on the fairway like eager does seeking the eye of the stud buck.
I felt a terrible chill seeing that. I glanced at Bagger Vance. Before, I had interpreted his silence as his blessing on Junah, like a jockey giving his steed its head. Now I saw a darker light in Vance’s eyes.
He was giving Junah rope.
Junah birdied eight, to draw two back of Jones and Hagen. If he could do the same at nine, eminently possible on this downwind par five, he would make the turn in 31.
His three nines would be 41, 35, 31.
He stepped to the tee and absolutely crushed one. A leviathan that snapped the gallery’s necks as it streaked from the clubhead, roared mightily into the jet stream and pounded down the slot to finish thirty or forty yards past the three hundred mark.
It was the kind of monster that utterly daunts your opponents. Unmatchable. Hagen and Jones were too smart to try; you could see them simply settle, centering themselves in their own games. They both ripped beauties past 280.
In that surge with the massed gallery down the ninth fairway, Junah seemed almost to levitate. The phrase “walking on air” couldn’t be more apt. Members of the gallery, boys and young men, were actually pressing in, just to touch him. All momentum flooded to his side. He had his foes on the run. On the ropes.
Nine was the only hole at Krewe Island that required a carry over water. The shot to the green on this 590-yard par five crossed a small rocky cove, a gorgeous-looking approach to a big green on a bluff. The player going for it in two, as Junah now could after his gorilla drive, was faced with a carry of more than 250 to a wide and deep target that would hold even the hottest, most spinless wood. Jones creased a brassie to the landing area left; Hagen followed with a high cut spoon that rode the wind to the same plateau, about 40 yards short. Now it was Junah’s play.
The Legend of Bagger Vance Page 13
