The Downhill Lie

by Carl Hiaasen

  “It’s still you,” Wakulsky said. “It’s just a better you.”

  Deepak himself couldn’t have put it better. I was still slicing the ball, but, by God, my posture was superb.

  Flipping to split-screen, Wakulsky pasted my old swing up on the left side (in Ernie’s spot) and my new swing on the right.

  “Night and day,” he declared, adding, “It’s probably better-looking than it feels right now.”

  No argument there. The new swing was about as comfortable as bowel cramps. Wakulsky assured me that I’d get used to it.

  Off we went to the putting green, where he placed eight balls twenty feet from one of the holes. I sank four in a row before he even got the camera warmed up. It was ludicrous.

  “I couldn’t do that again in a hundred years,” I said unnecessarily, and proceeded to pull the next three dozen putts.

  As a kid, I’d used a blade putter that allowed me to switch from right-handed to left-handed on a whim. Wakulsky said he didn’t recommend that system, and instead proposed that I stand farther away from the ball and stop breaking my wrists.

  We finished with bunker shots and greenside chips, Wakulsky providing a few simple tips that produced immediate results. I allowed myself to feel guardedly optimistic.

  After a final video recap, Wakulsky burned a DVD of Ernie and me so that I could study it at home. He said that I had the ability to be a good golfer, that I shouldn’t let myself get discouraged, and that I definitely shouldn’t quit the game again.

  I thanked him for his help, and then selected my complimentary David Leadbetter cap, shirt and lesson book.

  On the trip home, one thing that Steve had said stuck in my mind:

  “You want this game to be fun.”

  Sure, I want this game to be fun.

  I also want peace in the Middle East, a first-round draft pick for the Miami Dolphins and a lifetime of reliable erections.

  Wanting, however, won’t necessarily make it happen.

  Day 444

  On my first day back from the Leadbetter Academy I am sideswiped by the most dreaded disorder in golf—a shank. Aborting my round on the eighth hole, I hurry to the range, where the condition proceeds to worsen with each swing.

  After fifteen minutes I give up in despair. For the first time since I started golfing again, I am seriously considering heaving my bag into a canal.

  Everything I know about shanks is black doom. There are several theories about how a golf ball comes to be impacted by the stem of a club’s shaft—the hosel—instead of the face of the blade. Whatever the cause might be, the result is sickeningly unmistakable: The shot flares radically to the right.

  Worse, shanking is like the hiccups; once you start, you never know when you’ll stop.

  Many players are so fearful of the shank that they refuse to utter the word. Harvey Penick, the fabled golf teacher, preferred to call it the “Lateral Shot.”

  The shank is to hackers what the clap is to porn stars. Unfortunately, penicillin won’t cure a shank. The condition abates only when the gods of golf take mercy on your soul, so from now on all references to it will be masked with dashes.

  Day 446

  My first full eighteen in almost four weeks, again in a blustery wind. I complete the first hole without a single sh_ _ _, so I’m practically euphoric despite the triple-bogey.

  The highlight of the front nine is a curling twenty-footer to save bogey on the fourth. On the back side I’m in the water twice, and for good measure stack on a couple of listless three-putts.

  But, for once, I finish with minor heroics and a smile. After my worst drive of the afternoon—possibly of the year—on the lengthy and difficult 18th, I rally from the boonies by scorching my rescue club about two hundred yards. Then I pitch a wedge to within six feet and drop the putt for a par.

  The final damage is 93. If I’d scored that high after shelling out $10,000 for a private day with David Leadbetter, I’d probably be homicidal. Now I figure I got off easy.

  Later, Mom calls and asks, “How’s the golf going?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Aren’t you finding it at least a little relaxing?”

  “It’s not relaxing, Mom. It’s a diversion,” I say. “There’s a difference.”

  “Diversions are good, too,” she says.

  “That’s true.”

  “Even if you can’t relax.”

  “It’s just the way I am.”

  “I know, son,” Mom says fondly. “I know.”

  Day 448

  A friend and biologist, Derke Snodgrass, tells of a recent adventure in Senegal, where surly monitor lizards kept mistaking his golf balls for stork eggs and snatching them off the fairways.

  If the PGA had any imagination, it would release large, aggressive reptiles during all major tournaments. Talk about boosting the ratings! Who wouldn’t tune in to see Phil Mickelson wrestle a Burmese python in Rae’s Creek at Augusta, or Vijay Singh jump a komodo dragon on the island green at Sawgrass?

  Day 451

  A late nine holes with Leibo, Lupica and Al Simmens, who are all in jolly form. Meanwhile I’m playing as if I’ve never touched a golf club before.

  It’s the perfect time to test my new RadarGolf system. Each ball comes equipped with a microchip that transmits its location to a handheld receiver. The closer you get to a lost ball, the louder the receiver beeps.

  According to the infomercial, Radar Balls send out a signal up to a hundred feet. In my case, a hundred yards would be more useful.

  I tee one up on the fourth hole, enduring a fusillade of mockery from my friends. Every Radar Ball features the image of a hunting dog on point, yet nobody seems to think this is particularly clever.

  When my drive obligingly disappears over a hill, I feel a misplaced rush of anticipation. As Lupica and I speed toward the area where the Radar Ball exited the fairway, I activate the receiver, which starts beeping frenetically. That’s because five other Radar Balls are stowed in my golf bag, and I’ve neglected to secure them in the factory-provided satchel, which is specially insulated to block the homing signals.

  As a result, the ball-detector gizmo is now tweeting louder than the smoke detector in Willie Nelson’s tour bus. Leibo shouts something crude in our direction, but I can’t hear him over the noise.

  Cresting the hill, I’m dismayed to find my Radar Ball in plain view near the eighth tee—there’s no need to track it electronically.

  Lupica orders me to turn off the frigging receiver. “This is so embarrassing,” he mutters.

  I dash down the slope and whack my ball in the imagined direction of the pin.

  “Did you see where it went?” I ask.

  “No, I did not,” Lupica says.

  “Perfect!”

  At greenside, three balls lie within ten yards of each other on the fringe. I bound from the cart, point the handheld unit and follow the beeps straight to my ball.

  “See, it works!” I exclaim, provoking a fresh wave of derision.

  Leibo asks how much the RadarGolf kit cost.

  “Two hundred bucks,” I tell him.

  The consensus is that I’ve been ripped off. Leibo warns me not to bring the gizmo to the Member-Guest tournament because we might be disqualified, or possibly assaulted by our opponents.

  “Just wait,” I say. “Someday Tiger’ll be using these.”

  Finally, on the ninth, I sh_ _ _ a beauty out of bounds, into some heavy vines along the shore of a lake. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the microchip-equipped Radar Balls that’s gone MIA. It’s a brand-new Pro V1, which I’d teed up by mistake.

  Another four bucks down the crapper.

  Day 453

  Election Day. Golf is rained out, but Bill Becker stops by for a field demonstration of Radar Balls.

  He lobs one into a neighbor’s yard and we advance as meticulously as prospectors, sweeping the receiver back and forth. It doesn’t make a chirp until we’re twelve feet from our target, which is sitt
ing up smartly and quite visible on a tuft of sod.

  A glaucomic Pomeranian could find a ball at a distance of twelve feet, which is exactly eighty-eight feet shy of the advertised range of the patented RadarGolf homing device.

  Bill says a refund is in order. I say the golf industry shamelessly traffics in false hope. First the Q-Link, now the Radar Balls…even a sucker like me gets wise after a while.

  Day 467

  America’s most despised casual golfer, O. J. Simpson, is making headlines again. A New York publisher has scotched a book in which Simpson re-creates the stabbing murders of his former wife and a male friend, crimes for which he was famously acquitted.

  The tome was to be titled If I Did It, to which informed readers might have replied: What does he mean “if”?

  Simpson was said to reimagine the vicious attacks through a hypothetical character named “Charlie,” and editor Judith Regan had breathlessly promoted the book as a virtual confession.

  Its release was to be timed with prime-time interviews on Fox TV, but the public reacted to the hype with such gastric revulsion that even cold-blooded media baron Rupert Murdoch (who owns both Fox and HarperCollins, the publishing company) was compelled to kill the project days before the big launch.

  Characteristically, Simpson is shrugging off the fiasco. Today he told a Miami radio interviewer that he’s already spent the book advance, a high six-figure sum that he sensitively described as “blood money.” Meanwhile, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are still awaiting the $33.5 million that a civil jury ordered Simpson to pay.

  The ex–football star insists that If I Did It was not a confession, and that he didn’t murder anybody.

  So now he can resume his lonely but intrepid quest, searching every golf course in South Florida for the real killers.

  Day 468

  As if we needed more proof that golf is a pandemic disease, today a Russian cosmonaut used a gold-plated 6-iron to hit a ball off the International Space Station.

  It wasn’t a scientific experiment but rather an exorbitant commercial stunt. A Canadian golf equipment manufacturer, Element 21, paid the Russian space agency an undisclosed sum to stage the shot, which was filmed for use in future advertising.

  Unfortunately, the swing thoughts of cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin were agitated by a kink in a cooling hose that caused his space suit to overheat before he could line up the shot.

  “Oh rats,” grumbled Tyurin, upon withdrawing to an airlocked chamber for repairs.

  More than an hour later he tried again, this time laboring in his weightlessness to achieve a proper stance over the ball. At one point he was actually floating upside down, a sensation not unfamiliar to gravity-bound golfers.

  Eventually the Russian was able to hold steady long enough to make a one-handed swing. The ball—weighing only three grams, and unapproved by the USGA—departed with a pronounced slice into the cosmic void. The script allowed for a mulligan, but the frustrated cosmonaut called it quits.

  A spokesman for Element 21 boasted that Tyurin’s shot will travel for billions of miles and circle the earth for years—a typical golfing lie. NASA engineers calculate that the ball will orbit for two or three days before dropping into the atmosphere and burning up.

  We should all live long enough to see a slice go up in flames.

  Day 474

  Tomorrow begins the Florida leg of the book tour for Nature Girl, a new novel of mine. I’ll be accompanied by Paul Bogaards, a vice president of the publishing company, who’s coming not to chaperone so much as to escape the current inclemency of the Northeast.

  A boisterous golfer, Bogie has booked tee times at several tough courses along our route, and I’m already a mental wreck just thinking about it. He’s a much better player than I am, and the fact we carry comparable handicaps is a testament to the inscrutable rating system employed by the USGA.

  To prepare, I’ve scheduled a lesson at Quail Valley with our unflappable Director of Golf, Steve Archer, who is familiar with my multiple swing glitches and free-floating neuroses.

  I’m on the way out the door when the phone rings. Bad news: The only paved road to the course has been closed for emergency repairs by the Department of Transportation. The lone alternate route is a long dirt road, which, it turns out, has been transformed by heavy rains into a muddy roller coaster. A few cars have gotten stuck, and several others have turned back.

  In my case, retreat is not an option. This is my last chance to pick up my clubs for the road trip.

  Soon I’m skidding through a spitstorm of bile-colored mud. Fishtailing in front of me are two battered, enormous dump trucks, one of which offers a warning in crude block letters on its tailgate: uninsured.

  I struggle to keep a safe distance from the trucks, which isn’t easy in the absence of traction. At such moments I feel no guilt whatsoever about piloting an SUV. If I was in a Prius, I’d need a snorkel.

  Twenty minutes later, I arrive at Quail Valley, where I’m greeted with stares of incredulity in the pro shop. No other golfers have made it to the course since the road was shut.

  “How did you get here?” Archer asks.

  “Four-wheel drive,” I say.

  He laughs. “You still want your lesson?”

  We spend an hour on the range in a cool drizzle. Then I stow the clubs in my splattered ride and plow back down the highway of mud.

  Master of Disaster

  A common golfing myth is that the more frequently you play, the better you’ll get. Often the opposite is true, as anyone who lays off for even two or three weeks can attest. Over a seven-day road trip I was facing five rounds, all at unfamiliar courses. Bubbling with optimism I was not.

  Bogie flew in from Newark and met me in Orlando, where he’d booked us at a Marriott that advertised, among other amenities, a Nick Faldo golf school. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), it was located very near the ChampionsGate facility operated by the teacher whom Faldo had made famous, David Leadbetter. I wondered if Nick, too, got $10,000 for a personal lesson. Having won so many tournaments, he could probably charge more.

  However, Bogie and I were avoiding all instruction. The morning after my first book signing, we drove to a course called Grande Pines. There he announced that we’d be playing from the green tees, just one box short of the dreaded tips. Surreptitiously I previewed the scorecard, which listed a sobering Slope Rating of 135 and a distance of 6,612 yards.

  Trouble commenced immediately, a flurry of three-putts and triple-bogeys. Before we reached the third tee, I’d lost two balls and Bogie had lost four. A vocal and exuberant competitor, he made no effort to suppress his disgust.

  The fellow who’d been assigned to play with us, a taciturn radiologist we shall call Doc, seemed entertained by my companion’s purple eruptions. Doc was a good player and a nice guy, offering yardage readings from a handheld range finder. The way I was swinging, it didn’t help much.

  While probing the underbrush for one of my errant drives, Bogie let out a cry and nimbly bounded away from what he claimed was a “huge” snake. It turned out to be a harmless black racer no more than three feet long, evidently a monster by New Jersey standards.

  On another hole, I rescued a large slider that was crossing a dirt road used by utility trucks. While I was carrying the turtle to a safe location, it ungratefully peed all over my golf shoes, a fitting commentary on the day.

  The course had been laid out to accommodate one of those typically charmless golf developments, boxy condominium buildings extruding within easy range of my banana slice or Bogie’s towering hook. On a couple of occasions it seemed certain that one of us had sent a flier into somebody’s boudoir, but there were no telltale sounds of breaking glass or human moans.

  I believe it was the fourth or fifth tee where Bogie pointed down the fairway and made a sour yet profound announcement: “There ought to be a rule that you can’t put a golf course within sight of a theme park.”

  There, rising forty stories in
perfect line with the flagstick, was a garishly painted spire called the Sky Tower. It’s the main visual landmark of Sea World, home of Shamu the Killer Whale and other trained sea mammals. Visitors ascend the Sky Tower in elevator capsules that, according to the attraction’s Web site, offer a grand view of “downtown Orlando”—the highlight of any vacation, to be sure.

  On the same day Bogie and I played Grande Pines, a killer whale at the San Diego Sea World got mad at his trainer and twice dragged him to the bottom of the tank, fracturing the man’s foot. No such drama broke out at the Florida theme park, where eagle-eyed tourists high in the Sky Tower had to settle for the sight of a middle-aged fool mangling a nearby golf course.

  Bogie rallied for a 90, while I heroically parred the final hole for a 101. Trees were the problem. There aren’t that many at my home course, which has been shredded by recent hurricanes. If you miss a fairway at Quail Valley, you’re usually in the drink, the gnarly rough or a stand of saplings—but never, ever lost in a forest.

  As the name implied, Grande Pines was muy grande with pines, not to mention palmettos and oaks. By the end of the round, the combined tally of lost balls was eleven—six for me, and five for Bogie. Our golf bags were noticeably lighter when we loaded them in the car.

  Two days later, a Saturday morning, we were staring down the wooded maw of the impressive opening hole of Copperhead, at the Innisbrook resort north of Tampa. The course was packed, carts lined up at the first tee like buses at the Port Authority in Manhattan.

  It was my first round on a course that hosted a regular PGA event, the Chrysler Championship, which K. J. Choi had won a few weeks earlier with a score of 13-under. Choi had made brilliant use of his driver, but mine would be staying in the bag. To minimize misadventures off the tee, I’d decided to borrow a page from Tiger’s playbook and stick with the 3-wood.

  Bogie had been heavily lobbying to play from the tips, the same as the pros, but I told him to forget it.

  “Okay, we’ll go from the golds,” he said.

  The scorecard showed 6,725 yards. It promised to be a long, long day.