Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  On that first pilgrimage twenty years ago, I’d set off to Europe with my old Hogan golf clubs, my dad’s “emergency money,” and a lot of impossibly high expectations that a journey to the birthplace of golf would somehow clarify my thinking and rekindle my zest for the game of my youth. In the process, it would repair whatever was deeply broken in me, cure cancer, and bring about lasting world peace. Was that too much to ask for one four-week trip abroad?

  Apparently so. The Old Course had been a dud, and just the opposite had happened: I returned home and abandoned golf, took a reporter’s job in Atlanta, and spent the next seven years interviewing convicted murderers and traipsing after presidential hopefuls, never playing golf once inside the city that produced Bobby Jones, the greatest player in the game’s history. During my self-imposed “exile from the game,” as I preferred to think, I played Green Valley exactly twice, on Christmas Day sometime in the late 1970s, and another time when I stopped over on my way home from Washington, where I’d just interviewed Jimmy Carter’s media guru. Jimmy Carter was having a difficult summer. The press was murdering him. The age of pack journalism had arrived, and my sights were already set on working in Washington. I was sure I wanted to be one of the pack.

  Now, a biblical generation later, was this trip I was dragging my dying father on simply an eerie shadow play of that former failed odyssey and its doomed expectations—some foolish and vain attempt to finally get things right? Was there still something missing I hoped to find or reclaim or perhaps simply exhume by dint of another trip to the sacred turf of the Old Course? If so, what? I’d been to the Old Course many times and grown to love it and even understand a little bit of its brilliant subtle contours; I knew people in the town and even counted a couple local players as golf buddies.

  That first trip was simply a bad memory, I told myself. Though I was once again heading to the Old Grey Toon with a lot of high expectations, this trip had a different set of dynamics, problems, and challenges, not least of which was the fact that my mother was sitting at home six thousand miles away worrying her brains out about what calamity might befall her husband.

  Days before we left she called me to say my father had just bought a new rain suit because, he had informed her, we would be walking several golf courses in Britain as few places had motorized golf carts. She said this surprised and worried her. I explained that it was merely one of the timeless charms of British golf—you had to walk, and as a result, you could play in just about any kind of weather. “That may be,” she observed feistily, “but I don’t think your father’s legs are up to walking any golf courses, especially in the rain. He won’t tell you that, but I will.”

  She gave me her list of worries about the trip: Dad would probably skip taking the various pills designed to ease his pain or reduce the swelling in his legs and ankles; he might drink too much alcohol for a man under such medication; he might suffer a stroke or simply collapse under the strain of such travel. Someone in her church circle told her the health services in Britain were “appalling.” The doctors were all underpaid socialists. True, Dad’s (overpaid capitalist) physician had “tanked” him up with several fresh pints of blood before we left, but what if his bleeding returned?

  I tried to assuage my mother’s worries, explaining that since the days of Maggie Thatcher, all the doctors had become strict Conservative monetarists with bulging offshore accounts in Jersey. “This isn’t a joking matter,” she replied, unmoved by my speech. She said she hated to think of us driving along all those “scary little roads where people drive on the wrong side.” I told her not to worry because most of the roads in Scotland were so damned narrow it didn’t matter which side you drove on. I assured her we would be fine. I would monitor everything Dad did. I wouldn’t take any chances. I would drive slowly on the wrong side of the road.

  “I hope so, darling. Your itinerary sounds ambitious.”

  The itinerary I’d finally settled upon was a bit ambitious: The day after we arrived in London, we would drive three hours due west to Royal Lytham, then dip south to Royal Birkdale before heading up the west coast of Scotland to Turnberry, Prestwick, Royal Troon, Muirfield, Carnoustie, and St. Andrews. If Dad’s strength was holding up after that, we might drive up through the Highlands and angle back to catch a commuter flight to Islay—where Kate Bennie’s father’s ashes were scattered near a golf course—then grab a flight down to France, finishing up in Paris and driving out to Compiegne, where Dad ran a prisoner-of-war camp briefly after the liberation of France. In the beech forest next to Napoleon’s old summer palace at Compiegne, my father had carved his and my mother’s initials in a tree. I had this crazy idea we might search for the tree, assuming a shopping mall hadn’t been built on the spot.

  “Call me an old romantic,” I’d said, after explaining the whole thing to my mother.

  “I’ll call you a lot worse than that if anything happens to your father,” she said.

  Now, while my father slept, I sat by the window in the deeply upholstered silence of the Berkeley, brooding on these matters and feeling the first genuine pangs of worry creep in as I recalled our first day’s minor catalog of delayed arrivals, wrong turns, canceled rounds, and general miscues—to say nothing of the bad sandwiches and the fitful showers that undoubtedly awaited us down the road. Perhaps I hadn’t fully appreciated the magnitude of what I had promised my mother until I saw my father stripped down and vulnerable in the Berkeley’s bathroom. He looked so frail and thin—not at all like a man who was expected to walk seven or eight golf courses in the autumn elements.

  Once again, I was dangerously traveling with a golf bag full of hope. But hope for whom? This trip was my dream, but was it my father’s as well? I knew in my heart there were things I wanted to say to Opti, but I couldn’t think what they were. There were things I also hoped to hear from him, though I couldn’t at that moment imagine what.

  Being from good Southern Baptist stock, I sometimes conjured up a “Dixiefied” Greek chorus of my long-gone Carolina kin, who helpfully gathered upon my summons, a la Marley’s ghost, to give me the benefit of their collective wisdom from the Great Church Supper Beyond. Considering they were a bunch of no-nonsense, Scripture-quoting pinewood teetotalers, they were usually a surprisingly friendly and supportive bunch, often telling me exactly what I needed or wanted to hear. The group I conjured up now from the Berkeley’s rarefied ether, though, gave me only a strong whispered rebuke: Take no more, let this good man go home and die in peace. You have no more claim on his precious time.

  For a few minutes, I honestly sat there in a panicky little sweat trying to figure out what the hell to do—proceed into the scary unknown or cancel yet another of my dumb little pilgrimages before my mother’s worst fears came to pass.

  Luckily, there were sudden footfalls on the carpet outside the door, followed by a woman’s stifled laugh. A late-rising deb and her beau were no doubt fleeing. The sounds receded. The Greek chorus packed up and vanished. My panic eased off a bit.

  I suddenly realized why we were there. We were there, by God—and maybe even by the grace of God—to play golf. To have a few laughs, to see some old familiar sights in each other’s company, to take each other’s pocket change. That had been Opti’s own list of terms. And whatever unexpected difficulties faced us, that was good enough for me.

  I got up and walked to the bedroom, paused, and peeked in at my father. He was lying perfectly still on his back, his face a serene pale mask, with his hands perfectly crossed over his chest like a Westminster poet laureate in repose.

  For a second or two, I thought I’d already lost him.

  Then he cracked open an eye and smiled up at me.

  “How about a nice little putting match?” he proposed, already beginning to rise. “Loser buys supper.”

  FOUR

  Putt Like a Kid

  The unshaven attendant at Hyde Park looked up from his book. He was a good-looking kid of about twenty with a lime-colored streak of green running throug
h his hair and one perfect small gold earring piercing the flange of his left nostril, a heartthrob yob. I wondered if he might be John Major’s son. He was reading a book called How We Die.

  “That seems to be a pretty popular book,” said my ever-cheerful père. “I’ve seen it around a lot of places. How do you like it?”

  Major minor offered an indifferent shrug. “Kinda technical and dull, like, to be honest.”

  Dad smiled. “Dull? Death? Wasn’t it Saint-Exupéry who said death is a thing of grandeur because it rearranges the world?”

  “Please don’t give away the ending,” I insisted. “I always like to wait for the movie version myself.”

  The clerk stared at us as if we were a pair of escaped lunatics, two Yanks armed with putters and dressed as if we were on the first tee at La Costa Country Club instead of a windblown corner of Hyde Park. The edge of his mouth tilted up slightly. When faced with potentially dangerous foreigners, his employment manual perhaps read, always humor the rotters.

  “Right, gents. One pound fifty. Each.”

  We paid our fee and walked out to the first tee. It wasn’t much of a tee. In fact, it wasn’t much of a putting course—a woefully neglected collection of putting greens set down by some cricket fields, just off Rotten Row near the Alexandra Gate.

  I reminded my father that people no longer read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince and the best books ever written on flying.

  “I know. That’s too bad,” he said, dropping a Top-Flite ball. “I carried Wind, Sand and Stars all over Europe with me when I was here. I think that book was one reason I was so anxious to become a flier. I even gave it to my mother one Christmas. She kept it right beside her Bible for a long time. She was crazy about flying, which is pretty funny when you realize she was a woman who came east on a flatbed wagon from the plains of Texas the year they captured Geronimo in Arizona.”

  I remembered how my father’s mother, Beatrice, had loved to fly; how after my grandfather Walter’s death she’d come to live with us and was always flying off to visit one of my father’s younger brothers at the drop of her pillbox hat. She always insisted on having a window seat in an emergency exit row, so she could look out the windows and have more leg room. I did the same when I flew. Like pioneer woman, like grandson.

  Dad pulled out a pound coin, to flip for honors.

  “How’d she get the flying bug, anyway?” I asked him.

  “One year when I was about twelve or thirteen, we rented a farm out by the Greensboro airport—just an airstrip in those days. Amelia Earhart came through town, doing exhibition flights. I believe she might have had a Ford Trimotor plane. At any rate, your grandmother won some kind of drawing and got to go up with her for a short spin. Amelia Earhart was just about the most famous woman in the world at the time. I think that was the beginning of it, really. Mom used to joke that she never got to fly again until she was an old lady. We were pretty poor in those days.”

  “What a great story,” I said, pleased that the trip had already yielded one juicy morsel of unknown family history. “I just saw a documentary on public TV that said Amelia Earhart was a terrible flier who never bothered to learn Morse code.”

  “Really?” Dad thoughtfully wiped a speck of mud from his putter face with his thumb and shrugged. “Well, she was a hell of a heroine to your grandmother. Frankly, I don’t know why people are so anxious now to tear down historical figures like Amelia Earhart. The people who complain the loudest that kids don’t have role models anymore seem to be the worst offenders.”

  I agreed with him, saying at least we had Arnold Palmer. The day public TV did a documentary trying to smear the King, I said, was the day I either hung up my clubs or destroyed my TV with a golf club.

  “I agree,” my father said. “Shall we play?”

  We flipped the coin, and Dad won. He always seemed to win our coin tosses. For that matter, he always seemed to win our putting matches, too.

  He dropped his ball and putted. Watching his ball scamper along the sparce turf, my eyes were drawn to a man and two small children ahead of us on the putting course. The man was about my age, and the children—presumably his, a boy and a girl—were about my own children’s ages.

  It pleased me to think that nothing about my father’s putting stroke really ever changed. He was a deadly putter, wasted precious little time over the ball, and used the kind of gently stabbing wristy style that modern instruction gurus deplore. Bobby Locke, Billy Casper, and Gary Player putted this way in their prime; as did Arnold Palmer, to some extent, the blade almost always passing his wrists at impact in the old films of his early career. The modern player who perhaps comes closest to this technique is John Daly, who slightly bends his wrist during the takeaway portion of his stroke. The vast majority of modern players, good amateurs and pros alike, work hard to remove any trace of “wrist” from their putting strokes.

  Like his famous contemporaries, though, my father’s putting stroke was always his salvation. Over the years I’d seen him make some awesome putts, but the one that still stood out in my mind was one he made just a few years before, during a small Atlantic gale on the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island. We were playing a par-five on the closing nine with an assistant pro and my old pal/nemesis Patrick McDaid. Pat had just wedged up a shot within five feet of the hole, to lie three. As was his custom, he immediately began harassing me about my wayward wedge shot, which flew the green and took my hopes for a tie with it. The pro was also in decent range of birdie—a birdie that would seal the match in their favor. Dad had limped his fourth shot to the front of the green but faced an impossible eighty-footer uphill for par. As near as I could figure, his ball would have to pass through several small swales and break at least three different directions.

  “C’mon, Brax,” Pat needled him. “Let’s see you make one of those patented giant killers of yours.”

  “You really want me to?” Dad calmly gave it back to him.

  Pat smiled. “Sure. Otherwise you guys are dead. We need to keep this match interesting.” I saw him give his partner the pro a confident wink. Then he stuck out his nasty little tongue at me.

  “Very well, then.” Dad stepped up to the ball, looked at the hole, and popped it with his wristy stroke. The ball seemed to take forever rising and crossing the green. It turned left, then right, and then seemed to gather speed as it came off the slope and raced toward the hole. The ball thumped the back of the cup and dropped in. After everybody stopped laughing, both Pat and the pro missed their birdie putts. We halved the hole and went to the eighteenth still one hole down and there lost the hole and the match, but Dad’s brilliant putting had once again made it interesting.

  Now in Hyde Park, though, his putt was poor. He would have called it a Little Mildred. It bounced weakly along the sorry turf and plunked into a little sand trap fifteen feet short of the hole.

  “Tough break.”

  “I’m just getting warmed up, Sport.”

  I dropped my ball and lined it up. Putting is the weakest aspect of my game. Basically I am a longball striker who can slug the ball to the next zip code, occasionally even the correct one. Like lots of Americans, I grew up admiring the social grace of Arnold Palmer but copying the playing style of Jack Nicklaus, whose power fade, according to John Jacobs, the famous British teacher, turned America into a nation of slicers. The main difference between me and Jack Nicklaus, I sometimes tell myself—aside from the fact that he is (a) rich, (b) famous, and (c) the most successful golfer who ever lived—is the fact that, unlike me, the Golden Bruin can really putt.

  This time my ball rolled past my father’s ball and dropped into the hole, proving golf really is a riddle wrapped in a conundrum.

  I announced: “I think maybe we’ll go to Rules, for bitter and steak with onions.”

  “Don’t order your steak and kidney pie just yet, sonny boy.”

  After just nine holes, I was already two down—our usual depressing pattern. It was yet to be dete
rmined if my father could walk an entire golf course, but he undoubtedly could still putt one. In a few minutes, we caught up to the father and his two children. The father’s name was Tom Neek. He was an actor, with a face like a pugilist beneath a flat wool cap, a natural Iago. Tom was reading a newspaper as his children, Sarah and Andrew, took turns slugging balls at the cup. I wondered if they were named in honor of Britain’s second most famous battling royal couple.

  “Daddy,” complained Sarah, in her shiny yellow rain slicker, “Andy keeps knocking my ball away. Tell him it’s not fair, please.” I liked the way she said Daddy: Dod-day.

  “Andrew, that’s not fair. Let your sister putt unhindered, please.”

  Andrew said, “She’s a sack of hammers.”

  “Daddy, please tell Andrew not to call me a sack of hammers.” Dod-day.

  “Andrew, please don’t call your sister a sack of hammers.”

  “Tell her to putt, then.”

  “Sarah, dab-ling. Please putt.”

  Tom glanced at us. “I’m afraid it’s American TV, where they get that sort of thing,” he explained, a bit defensively I thought. “Rather a silly little game, don’t you think? Knocking little balls in holes and such.”

  “Probably true,” agreed Dad. “But that’s why we love it so much.”

  I saw my father smiling goofily at Sarah. He sometimes went goofy around small children, especially little girls. Perhaps this was the result of having had two sons. When my daughter Maggie was born, he insisted on calling her “Magic,” and I never heard a recitation of Mark 10:14—the bit where Jesus says “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of God”—without thinking of my father’s goofiness around small children. Kids turned him into a cartoon character.

  Tom Neek and his children stepped aside and allowed us to play through. “You remind me of my granddaughter,” Dad said to Sarah, mussing her hair gently as we passed; I saw Sarah slide Andrew a look and roll her eyes. What a sack of hammers, eh, Andy?