The Legend of Bagger Vance

by Steven Pressfield

  “I didn’t say that,” Michael replied with a glance toward me. “Though I confess, our venerable physician had me going there for a while, coming down the last few holes.” He rose with a great creak and took orders for refills of coffee. “He pretends to modesty but he knows his powers as a spellbinder.”

  I watched Michael cross behind the counter. His hair was close-cropped in the current fashion and his shoulders showed broad beneath his night-rumpled shirt. “I wish that were true,” I said, “but I fear my tale has sputtered out short of the cup, so to speak.”

  “Finish up about Junah then. What happened to him? I ask you too, Irene, for whatever you can add from memory or notes or your mother’s stories.”

  “There’s one thing,” Irene answered. “One item that might be of interest to both of you.”

  She ducked swiftly into the front hallway and tugged open a closet door. It was one of those Fibber McGee closets where kids pack in skateboards and baseball bats, the kind of space where you open the door and volleyballs come tumbling down onto your head. Irene reached deep into the recesses and came out with something. “Have you ever seen this before, Dr. Greaves?”

  In the light she held out Schenectady Slim.

  “My God. Is that what I think it is?”

  She crossed back into the living room and placed the driver in my hands. “My mother had it rebuilt completely a couple of years ago, right down to a new insert handmade from the identical type of hard rubber as the original. It had to be custom-done at Tarry Adair’s shop in St. Augustine, the only place in the country that still does this kind of work.”

  There it was. I could barely believe it still existed. I turned the face over in my hands, astonished at the depth of emotion produced by this simple hickory-shafted weapon. The refinish work was faultless. The craftsman had brought the grain back out, it shone lustrously beneath a dozen coats of clear lacquer; the original soleplate had been rescripted and fitted, even the silk windings around the shaft were threaded impeccably in a duplicate of the original style. I took the grip in my hands and gave the club an easy waggle. There was that same deep face I recalled so vividly, looking as new now with its gleaming clean-grooved insert as it had when I first snatched it from Junah’s hotel room the night Bagger Vance and I walked the course at Krewe Island. I was struck by its lively, almost contemporary flexion. “Funny, it doesn’t feel old-fashioned at all.”

  Irene answered eagerly that she had been struck by the same sensation. “Doesn’t look old either, does it? It’s like that pure classic face has come back around into style.”

  I became aware of Michael’s eyes on the club. I gave him a look. “I’m not sure a nonplayer should be allowed to touch such a legendary instrument.” He snorted; I held the grip out to him.

  Irene and I stood back as Michael, a little hesitant at first, then gaining confidence as the leather settled within his fingers, took the big long-shafted club and let it find its nestle in his hands. I was struck again by the poetry of Michael’s luscious fluid grip, his fine strong fingers recovering the memory they had never really lost. As he flattened his soles into the carpet and settled into an address position between the couch and the fireplace, the flesh rippled electrically up my spine. It was like seeing Junah again, a brother or a comrade-in-arms. I glanced to Irene and felt certain she was sensing some of it too. “I see this one’s a player”—she nodded toward me with a grin—“look at the way he sets his meathooks on that shaft.”

  Michael laughed and gave the stick another sweet, sensitive flex. “Have you ever hit with this club?” he asked Irene.

  “I’ve swung it but never actually hit a ball,” she answered. “Listen to this, though: at Adair’s shop when they were refitting the shaft, they put it on the frequency meter. Know what material it matched up with almost identically? D-composite graphite!” She laughed with gusto. “It had excessive torque, twenty percent more than the graphite. But that was its only flaw. For kick point, flexion and coefficient of frequency, it was identical to the most technologically advanced shaft in the world.”

  That seemed oddly appropriate somehow. Michael was turning the clubhead over in his hands now, admiring the purity of its face in the firelight. His fingers ran lightly down the beveled, beeswax-coated shaft. “Something about a wooden shaft, isn’t there? I don’t know what. Maybe that it was once living. And still is, in a way.” He regripped the club and let the hickory talk to him. Maybe he was imagining, as I was, Bagger Vance alone among some chilly stand of Northern hardwood, seeking and finding this one flawless shaft, still with its bark on, still in its raw state of nature. It wasn’t hard to picture Vance at work in some lamplit shop, shaping and shaving and tapering, rewarping this slender limb to dead-straight perfection. “Maybe something to do with what Bagger Vance said about intelligence and the hands,” Michael said. He pulled up, suddenly awkward and self-conscious. “There’s no going back technologically,” he said, yielding up the driver at last and passing it again to Irene, “but it’s fun to think about sometimes.”

  The children began to stir on their couches, perhaps from the talk and movement in the room or perhaps from the first creasings of dawn showing outside beyond the high windows. We paused in our conversation and gathered up the little ones in our arms, carried them upstairs and settled them into their own beds. I was struck with Michael’s sweetness and moved again by some quality of kinship in his nature, which I had felt so many times since he was a boy.

  Downstairs again we took up fresh stations in the kitchen where Michael insisted, with Irene’s permission, on whipping up a serious biscuit-and-gravy breakfast. He made us both sit while he brewed fresh coffee. The sky was brightening outside. Irene and I settled on high stools around the counter, warmed by the hot mugs in our hands and the rich smells of eggs and sausage cooking. “If you’re not completely talked out”—Michael turned to me—“can you tell us a little more about Junah, about his life after the match?”

  It took a moment to return my mind to the past. Then I began.

  “I still saw Junah quite often as I grew. He was here in Savannah with his daughter, Irene’s mother. He would have supper with my father and mother on occasion; he played in tournaments for charity; I caddied for him a number of times. He liked to play early and late, just himself and Irene’s mother, avoiding the crowds and teaching her the game in his own way. Mostly he was just a dad. What I suppose we would call today a single father.”

  “Did he remarry?”

  “Never. Though I don’t recall him ever lacking for female companionship, that part of his life, the pursuit of romance, seemed to have lost its luster for him. I can tell you that he went from a man in torment and without purpose to one supremely focused, very nearly to the point of obsession.”

  Here Irene put in, “Dr. Greaves is right. I remember not so much stories from my mother as just the essence of my grandfather’s personality. As I told you before,” she addressed both Michael and me, “he was consumed with the coming war and America’s need to enter early and with high purpose. He wrote numerous articles, letters to the editor, that sort of thing. I have some in those boxes, they’re quite compelling. The voice crying in the wilderness.” She paused, recalling something. “There is one piece somewhere. Among his notes.” She stood and took a step toward the living room. “It may be to the point, Dr. Greaves, because it alludes to that ancient battle. Would you like me to look for it?”

  I replied that nothing in the world could interest me more. Please, I begged her, find it. She crossed swiftly to the living room and returned with the boxes; while she began digging, Michael turned to me.

  “How did Junah die?”

  I started to answer, but the words caught in my throat. “Bagger Vance told him his death would follow quickly,” Michael spoke over my hesitation, “which I’m sure must have added urgency to his preoccupations.”

  “It was in the Second World War,” I answered.

  Irene followed quickly: “Before
America got in.”

  She continued to Michael as she searched among Junah’s papers. “He joined in September of ’39, right after the fall of Poland. He could see America’s head was still in the sand, so he took a train to Toronto and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was overage but they embraced him in a flash because of his navigation expertise. He insisted on a combat berth. It took a lot of wrangling, I understand, but England was taking a terrible pounding then from the air, and the Allies were desperate for pilots. He was commissioned a major in the RCAF and assigned to an expeditionary unit but only, according to his orders, in a staff capacity. Apparently it didn’t take long for casualties to obviate that. He took off from Bristol the day he was killed, flying cover for the last of the Lancaster bombers, and was shot up over the Channel. He rode the plane down. Crashed on a golf course of all places. Sainte-Huguette, in Bretagne. My mother played there once in the French Amateur. Not a bad layout, she said. The French had put up a plaque to honor him and one other plane, Royal Indian Air Force, that went down that same day.”

  Meaning still seemed to elude us. I felt Michael’s silent intensity, as if by sheer will he sought to wring significance from the ether.

  Suddenly Irene spoke. “Here they are…the notes I was looking for!” She tugged up several handwritten pages, skimmed them quickly to be certain they were the ones she recalled. “Shall I read them out loud?”

  As she set the pages before her on the countertop I saw again, for the first time in sixty years, Junah’s strong passionate handwriting.

  What no one seems to comprehend is that there is only one battle, and that we are compelled by our nature and the nature of reality to fight it again and again. The war that is coming is but the outer reflection of an irresistible inner reality, a reality shared by the mass unconscious of our time. I will fight in this war and the next and the next, as I have fought in the last, and the one before that, and the one before that. I am impelled to this horror, as we all are and will be, until we transform ourselves at last into the incarnation which lies beyond that of the Warrior.

  Until we enter the Field, not fleetingly and fallibly as we do now, but at will and with full consciousness. Until those acts which to our limited present vision appear as miracles and wonders are called by their right name, which is nothing more than simple reality. Until we become Magicians, as Bagger Vance is. As all gods are.

  The outer world, as he often said and I never understood, is but a shadow play, a dream dreamt not by us but of us. He is dreaming us. And yet he, they, need us to complete the reality we all share, to advance and elevate it into a fuller and greater reality. Continents will shift, as they did after that battle twenty-one thousand years ago. But these are continents not of the planet, but of the Self.

  Why did Bagger Vance, possessed of such irresistible powers, reveal himself to me, a man of no great or especial talents? I cannot answer. Why did he take form as a servant, a caddie? I can’t answer that either. His love for golf was clearly transcendent, plumbing level after level of meaning, which I could only follow to my poor limits.

  During the match at Krewe Island, under that for me terrible pressure, I was unable to assimilate his wisdom or any wisdom. Nothing he said worked, then or later, except one single truth: the fact of his existence and of his love.

  That is all I needed then, and all I will ever need.

  Irene finished. The pages were contained with several tied bundles of letters in a faded manila envelope. She replaced them now and passed the parcel across to Michael. I could see he was utterly absorbed. Something of Junah had reached him at last. He set all breakfast preparations aside and pored for long moments over the handwritten notes, reading them once and again, and again after that. “I’m sorry, Dr. Greaves”—he suddenly snapped from his preoccupation—“did you want to see these?” I said I did. Michael shuffled the papers square and was just about to reslide them into the manila envelope. “What’s this?” he spoke, feeling something. He reached into the parcel, past the bundles of letters.

  Up into the daylight came a golf ball.

  A bright dimpled Spalding, wrapped in tissue and now popping forth still brilliant white and looking brand new. “It’s a Dot,” Michael said, squinting at its cover.

  I felt my eyes blink. “Is there a J on it? A little pen-written J just below the numeral?”

  Irene was squinting now too. “Damned if there isn’t.”

  They both turned to me.

  “It’s Junah’s ball,” I said. “The one he holed out on thirteen. The one Vance holed before him, when he hit those three into the cup.”

  Twenty-five

  WE WERE ON OUR WAY to Krewe Island.

  Irene drove in her four-wheel-drive pickup, which seemed the wisest vehicle in the rain and muck. The children had been left in the charge of the two eldest nieces. Rain sheeted before us; Irene’s wipers beat and the defroster churned out steamy air. I sandwiched myself in midseat with Schenectady Slim tucked between my knees and Michael’s linebacker shoulders propping me on the right. The dawn was showing pearl-gray over the Atlantic. Shredded clouds hid the seaward sun; the road was littered with tree limbs, swamp grass and other assorted storm wrack. “What about Bagger Vance?” Michael addressed me as we took a turn along the waterway, retracing the route we had covered last night. “You said there was one other incident when you thought you saw him.”

  I responded that I was reluctant. To tell it all now would lead into other areas, areas which for me, for their own reasons, were still extremely painful.

  “Oh hell!” Irene cut me off. “Come on, Doctor, you can’t take us this far and then back off.”

  We were searching for the south causeway that once led to Krewe Island. The marshes around us were wild and overgrown, savanna grass higher than the pickup roof and still whipping in the aftergusts from last night’s storm. We proceeded down this tunnel of green. I was losing my sense of orientation. There should be an access road here. Wasn’t the approach to the causeway right around this curve? The sensation was of eerie and disquieting dislocation: to be certain you recall something, recall it with absolute clarity, not to mention deep significance for your life, then to arrive there, at the precise spot, and find it not at all as you remembered. “The Corps of Engineers has done so much dredging and rechanneling through here”—Irene squinted through the streaking windshield—“I don’t know where the hell anything is anymore. Let’s stop and climb up on the pickup bed, maybe we can see something over the grass.” She pulled onto the shoulder; she and Michael swung their doors open. Just as they were stepping out, a figure passed like a ghost behind me, just out of eyeline.

  A man was out there, on Irene’s side.

  I couldn’t see around her but I heard Michael mutter, “Damn.” It was the derelict he and I had almost hit last night! Apparently the fellow made his home somewhere in this wilderness. Michael was hissing to Irene to get back into the truck. But she was already in friendly discourse with the wild fellow who, I could just glimpse around her, was pointing ahead and issuing directions with some authority. “He says the road’s up here another half mile,” Irene called over the wind and storm spray. Michael groaned as the ragged fellow hauled himself up onto the pickup bed behind us. “He says he’s going that way himself,” Irene said, sliding back under the wheel. “He’ll guide us.”

  “Great,” Michael grunted sarcastically, resuming his seat. Our tires hummed out again onto the two-lane.

  Irene recalled aloud some of the patchwork past of Krewe Island. Adele Invergordon had held the land for years; at her death it was donated to the State on provision that it be established as a wildlife preserve. Later the Corps of Engineers had attempted to add a link to the Intracoastal Highway but that was blown to hell in Hurricane Camille, 1969. We could hear the ragged fellow rapping behind us now on the pickup roof. He was pointing ahead. There! There was the causeway. As Irene’s pickup mounted the frond-littered approach, we could see above the wetlands f
or the first time. Sure enough, there was the six-mile vista that had been so packed with the motorcade the day Garland and I rode Albert’s watermelon truck in the wake of Jones and Hagen. Now all had reverted to nature. The causeway itself was half down in places. As we started toward the distant swell where once Krewe Island’s hotel towers had gleamed in the sun, Irene insisted and I began my brief final story.

  Twenty-six

  “WHEN JUNAH WAS KILLED I was nineteen, in my second year of pre-med at Vanderbilt. The war accelerated everything exponentially. By ’43 I was a lieutenant, a Navy M.D. in the Solomons performing ten and fifteen surgeries a day. The closer we got to the home islands, the more ferocious the resistance became. I was on the hospital ship Bountiful off Okinawa when the Fifth Fleet took the war’s worst casualties under the day-and-night waves of kamikazes. But it was all just prologue to August 6, 1945. Hiroshima.”

  The road was getting wilder now. Dense grass closed around us; Irene shifted to four-wheel drive and we punched forward, following our guide’s instructions into another murky, obscuring tunnel.

  “I was assigned to an Emergency Medical Team, sent in even before the official surrender. It was all burn cases. They came in three classes: rare, medium and well done. That was the kind of humor the situation dictated. My point for this story is that I, who had hated the Japanese with a pure and unquestioning passion, now felt the pendulum swing back to include my own side as well. I felt a hatred not just of war, but of mankind in general, making no distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and, on a more secret and vividly conscious level, toward God himself. I hated Him. By now we were seeing wire photos of the bodies stacked outside Dachau and Buchenwald. Then, in the midst of a run of horror-packed eighteen-hour days, I received a telegram from my father informing me that Jeannie had given birth prematurely to our first child. It was a stillbirth. A girl, born dead.