Cliff O’Donnel sprang up, haggard with despair. He glanced across the ward at Debbie, but her face was hidden against Bill’s shoulder, and Bill was holding her as if he meant never to let her go.
Erica Garson was staring at O’Donnel, not in disbelief but with an expression which seemed to mirror further acceptance of the bitterness of life as she had known it.
Cunningham screamed a little.
O’Donnel thrust me aside and leapt for the open window. But Big Sam and Aidan were already on their feet, and with Blackstock they barred his way. For a moment he struggled, trying to fight. Then, quite suddenly, the third-rate actor sank to his knees, all bluster and energy gone.
“I didn’t mean it!” he whispered. “I didn’t mean it! He tried to kill me first!”
“The usual guff,” said Big Sam. “Take him away.”
Sergeant McCrimmon came with the hand-cuffs.
*
Leading scores, after the final round of the Open:
Tony Lema, U.S.A. 73 68 68 70--279
Jack Nicklaus, U.S.A. 76 74 66 68--284
Roberto de Vicenzo, Argentine 76 72 70 67--285
Bernard Hunt, England 73 74 70 70--287
Bruce Devlin, Australia 72 72 73 73--290
Christy O’Connor, Ireland 71 73 74 73--291
Harry Weetman, England 72 71 75 73--291
*
Transcript of a television Sports talk by Jock MacVicar, written in collaboration With his father:
Have you ever thought — what makes a Champion? Physical strength? Physical courage? Of course he must have these. But what else? What about the moral booster-fuel that sends him rocketing to the stars?
Take Tony Lema, the Champion Golfer. Champagne Tony, the tall American with the lovely swing and poise and elegance of a dancer.
At St Andrews he saw the Old Course for the first time and must have felt a little afraid, for the Old Lady of Fife was windswept and cantankerous, in a really difficult mood. Power-men like Nicklaus and de Vicenzo fought ruggedly to try and impress her — and impress her they did, de Vicenzo with a score of 76 at the height of the gale and Nicklaus with a record-equalling 66 in the third round. But Lema treated her in a different way — quietly, respectfully, with steadfast gallantry. And in the end — the Old Lady being entirely feminine — it was the handsome, stylish Lema who stole her heart.
He stood outside the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse holding the trophy. “Last night,” he said, “I went down on my knees and prayed — and God has been good to me, because now, for the first time, I can call myself a Champion.”
He’d come a long way from his orphan boyhood in California, from jobs in the shipyards, in the steelworks and canneries, from spare-time work as a caddie to help the family income.
At twenty he turned pro, and life became a gay adventure — too gay, maybe, for a young man travelling from town to town on the tournament circuit — a young man with the warm blood of Portugal in his veins, friendly and sociable by nature.
He won very few prizes. In his own words, his golf was lousy, but he thought a hectic social life would make up in some ways for his golf.
Then suddenly, as he says himself, he got to thinking there must be more to golf — more to life, in fact — than chasing broads and liquor. With cool courage he imposed on himself a hard course of self-discipline. To a man of his temperament this couldn’t have been easy, and nobody was surprised when occasionally he still panicked in a crisis and was inclined to live it up as an antidote to failure on the golf-course.
But he stuck it out. In 1962 he found himself leading the field after the third round of the Orange County Open in America. Pressmen offered him glasses of beer, but he waved them away. “If I win tomorrow we’ll drink champagne,” he said.
Well, he won all right, after a play-off with Bob Rosburg. He kept his word about the champagne, and the gratified pressmen christened him Champagne Tony.
In 1963 he married, and with marriage his confidence grew — not the confidence that comes out of a champagne bottle but the confidence of self-knowledge and self-respect. He began to take the really big prizes — one of 20,000 dollars in the Cleveland Open early in 1964. But though he didn’t know it, the ultimate test of his inward discipline was still to come.
After two rounds of the Open at St Andrews, he was in front by nine strokes from Nicklaus. A cake-walk, it seemed. But on the morning of the final day the Old Lady of Fife withdrew her smile. Lema reached the sixth hole two over fours and saw that across at the twelfth, on the same big green, Nicklaus’s board was showing minus five in red chalk — four under fours. No less than seven of his nine strokes had already gone. It must have been like a red-hot knife in his stomach.
What was his reaction? Panic? A smile and a gay shrug to camouflage despair? None of these. Calmly and faultlessly, Champagne Tony played the next five holes in level threes — three under par.
Here was a man who admitted being born on the wrong side of the tracks, but who now showed that his natural grace had been steeled and dignified by patiently acquired self-control. The Old Lady smiled again. She knew a Champion when she saw one.
*
On Friday evening, when the hurly-burly of the Championship was over and we went strolling out over the quiet course, I asked Aidan a question.
“The rone-pipe clinched it,” he said. “It led down to Debbie’s window from the room in the attic occupied by O’Donnel. That was the first good putt we sank. Afterwards — when it became clear that O’Donnel was a kind of common denominator, the only suspect who could have been responsible for every suspicious act — putts started dropping in from all directions.”
“That lawyer from New York,” I said. “Bill met him at Prestwick and brought him here. What’s he doing about the merger, do you know?”
“It’s all laid on, I believe. There’s a general background of ‘wedding bells across the meadow’ — or in this instance, across the Atlantic. Debbie and Bill are not quite ready as yet to bother much with detail, but one thing has been decided — Erica Garson is staying on as general secretary of the company.”
I was happy to hear it. I hoped Erica Garson would be happy, too. Champions deserve a break.
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