Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  “You must be flattered. You’ve gone far in your journalism career for such a young buck.” He smiled.

  “I guess so. But here’s the deal breaker. I can’t see spending the next two years of my life living, eating, and dreaming about serial killers—or hanging around Jesse Helms, for that matter.”

  “Then don’t do it,” my father said. “Other opportunities will come along. Maybe you’re just writing about the wrong subject. What would you like to write about?”

  I sighed and glanced around at the photos on the walls. My eyes fell on several great golfers in their prime. Nicklaus. Snead. Hogan. Nelson. Palmer. Floyd. They’d all been through Pinehurst; through my own life, too, in a sense.

  “In a perfect world?”

  “ ’Fraid there’s no such thing, Bo.”

  “I dunno. You’ll laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  “Golf, maybe.”

  My father didn’t laugh. He took a thoughtful sip of his tea.

  “In that case, maybe you should become a golf writer.”

  I laughed at his suggestion, pointing out that I didn’t know a soul in the golf world, didn’t even belong to a club, didn’t even own clubs, wouldn’t know how to begin to crack into the fraternity of golf hacks, hadn’t played in years, and couldn’t keep my balls out of the woods in any case. It would be easier, I said, to start a career as an astronaut.

  “If you believe that, it probably won’t happen. On the other hand, I’ve found that anytime I followed my heart, good things almost always happened. It may not be what you think will happen, or even what you think should happen. But the heart can open doors. I really believe that. Thing is, you’ll have to walk through them on your own. You may be surprised at the possibilities.”

  I smiled at him, choosing not to think too much about what he’d just told me. So often his words took time to sink in.

  “Thanks, Opti.”

  That’s how we left it, as simple and direct as always. He drove me to the airport in Raleigh, and we said good-bye. I remember looking out the window at a golf course as my plane lifted into the sky and thinking that at least I could finally play golf again. It was almost as if some kind of permission had been given from on high. I still had a journalism career to try and untangle and a life’s direction to figure out—not to mention a new set of clubs to buy—but I felt a lot better.

  A short while later, against the advice of several colleagues, I took a job at an old established New England magazine called Yankee, telling myself, rather self-importantly, that I was granting myself a working hiatus from the “serious” journalism of the Beltway press corps, a year to “cool out” before I got on with my career. (Besides, it was an off-year election.) A critical shift in the axis of my world had already taken place, though, and in my heart I knew I would never go back to that world of cynical press pools and candidate image-makers and antacid-eating homicide cops.

  I moved to a small solar house on a river in Vermont, got a retriever pup, took up fly fishing, and chiseled down my golf handicap to a respectable double digit at an old club where Rudyard Kipling was supposed to have once chased the pill while finishing The Jungle Book. My pieces for Yankee Magazine still occasionally canted toward the criminal and politic, but mostly they had a “kinder and gentler” tone to them, as one of my better-known profile subjects might have said.

  One day Tim Clark, the magazine’s managing editor, who knew of my revived ardor for golf, came to me and asked if I’d ever heard of someone named Glenna Collett Vare. “Sure,” I said. “She was called the female Bobby Jones. Won something like five or six national championships. Died several years ago.”

  “Somebody evidently forgot to tell her,” he deadpanned with perfect timing, handing me a small clip from a Rhode Island newspaper. Glenna Vare was not only alive but about to play in her sixty-second Point Judith Invitational. He wondered if there was a nice little story in that.

  I drove down to the town of Narragansett on a sunny morning and walked across an immaculate lawn to a huge shingled ark of a house. No one appeared to be about, but I heard a strange thumping sound. I knocked on the screen door and was commanded by a stern voice within to enter. I pushed open the screen and eventually discovered, up on the second floor, a stocky, heavily sun-tanned and wrinkled elderly woman up a stepladder, giving the ceiling sturdy cracks with an ancient brassie club.

  “Have you ever had raccoon piddle on your ceiling?” she demanded.

  I admitted I hadn’t. “I’ve got a whole family of raccoons vacationing in my rafters,” she explained. “I’m trying to urge them to leave before I have to call some dreary man who will come with a gun.” Eventually, she came down from the ladder and we shook hands. At eighty-one, Glenna Vare still had a grip.

  “So what is it you want, young man?” she asked testily. “I was about to make some soup.”

  I explained that I’d come to talk with her about winning six U.S. Women’s National Amateur Opens. The LPGA’s Vare Trophy, handed out annually to the player with the lowest scoring average, bore Glenna’s name.

  “Oh, nuts. Nobody cares about that,” she said, dismissing me with a wave of her hand, marching down the stairs and tossing her brassie into an umbrella stand that held, among other things, an intriguing collection of vintage wooden cleeks and spoons. She rambled toward her kitchen with her small dog Jimmy frowning at me from her heels, and snapped over her shoulder that nobody had written about her “in at least twenty years.” I got the sense that the female Bobby Jones felt rather forgotten by the golf world, but perhaps thought that’s how it should be.

  I followed her into the huge sunny kitchen and tried to explain the point of doing a story on her. She instructed me to “pipe down” and chop some carrots. I chopped carrots and then onions. She poured me a glass of sherry while the soup cooked, then told me that since I’d helped make the soup, I’d better eat a bowl of it.

  We ate soup at a small table on Glenna’s big porch overlooking Narragansett Bay, and I asked if she would permit me to caddy for her at the Point Judith. “Absolutely not,” she replied quickly. “Nobody should watch an old bird like me play golf now if they don’t have to.” My penance for making this ludicrous request was not terribly severe: She made me get on the stepladder and whack the ceiling with the golf club while she went to change into her “driving shoes.” She invited me to ride with her into town to “start the mail delivery,” which I did, holding Jimmy on my lap, as she gunned her Cadillac through the thickening tourist traffic.

  We talked about contract bridge, her grown children Ned and Glenny, the nuisance of summer tourists (she was one, too, though I didn’t point that out), Gene Sarazen’s shoes (“That man always had the spiffiest shoes”), shooting skeet (Glenna was a former champ back in Philly), the new generation of LPGA stars (“some most attractive young women, though some of them could do with a bit of makeup”), and other things that got lost in the roar of the Caddy’s engine and Glenna’s gently muttered oaths as we ran a gauntlet of luggage-loaded station wagons and sunburned pedestrians. When I finally had the nerve to nudge the conversation back around to golf, Glenna made me swear I wouldn’t show up to watch her in the Point Judith. She let me off beside my car, smiled sweetly, and said, “You’re a nice young man. You should get married. Come back sometime, and we’ll have soup again.”

  The next day, I sneaked out and watched her play from a safe distance in Point Judith’s thick yew bushes, and I was gratified by what I witnessed. Her driving touch turned out to be as solid as her grip. I went back to have lunch with Glenna, as she preferred me to call her, every spring upon her annual return from Florida for the next four or five years, until her death in 1989, We became friends and exchanged Christmas notes, and she took me for several nerve-wracking spins in her Cadillac, but she never agreed to let me watch her play golf. She said her golf game was “dead.” She was happy to learn I was getting married. “It’s about time you did that,” she said. “Who’s the lovely bu
t unfortunate victim?”

  I explained her name was Alison. She was an editorial assistant at my magazine. Her parents were real Scots. She’d gone to Harvard. She looked like the actress Ali McGraw.

  “Does she play golf?” Glenna demanded.

  “No.”

  “Probably just as well. Too much in common, you know, can kill a marriage. Always leave some mystery.”

  The story I wrote for Yankee Magazine, about making soup with Glenna, was read by the editor of Golf Journal, the periodical of the United States Golf Association, who purchased it for his magazine. The editor of one of Britain’s top golf magazines read it there and mentioned it to an editor at Golf Magazine, who called me up exactly eight months after I’d met Glenna. He asked if I would care to write a profile of a promising young player named Davis Love III.

  Just like that, the door my father had talked about that day at Pinehurst had unexpectedly opened. I effectively stepped through to a brand-new world, a place I felt comfortably at home.

  The golf gods giveth. They taketh away, too.

  A week after I met Davis, my father called to tell me Green Valley Golf Club was closing its doors. A parkway and medical arts complex were soon going to occupy the spot. It was stunning news. I immediately flew home with my fiancée and dragged her out to the club for the final day.

  There was a festive wake going on, lots of old stags and their wives wandering about the clubhouse with Dixie cups of Jim Beam. Groups of men and women were headed out onto the course in boisterous sevensomes to abuse the turf one last time. I found Aubrey Apple in the sadly empty pro shop, pleasantly yelling at somebody, with the same old stogie jammed in the corner of his mouth. I introduced myself and asked if he remembered me.

  “Hell, yes!” he bellowed. “You’re old Brack Dobson’s boy. How the hell is old Brack?” Nobody ever seemed to pronounce my father’s name correctly, least of all Aubrey Apple.

  I said Dad was fine and asked if we might take a cart and play a few holes for old times’ sake. I wanted to show Alison hole number three, my favorite par-five in the world, the place I’d made my first birdie.

  “Damn right.” Aubrey smiled at Alison. “Your boyfriend, honey, used to be a Valley Rat. That’s what we called all the snot-nosed kids that hung around this place.”

  Apple asked me what the hell I was doing now to stay out of jail. I told him I’d just written a story for one of the big golf magazines.

  “No joke? Well, how ’bout that.” He took the stogie out of his mouth and aimed it at the bridge of my nose. “I got a great story for you, by God. You ought to write about the time you beat the crap outta one of my greens with your putter and I kicked your little fanny off the course for a solid month.”

  “It was just two weeks. It only felt like a month.”

  “Helluva story,” Apple assured me, plugging the stogie back into its socket.

  —

  I walked back to the members’ porch and found Dad and Tony Nickson flipping through a large scrapbook filled with black-and-white photos from Lytham’s war years. As Tony slowly turned the pages, I saw lots of photos of American servicemen, muscular American faces, lopsided farmboy grins, master sergeants and staff sergeants. Golfing sergeants.

  “You seem to have attracted a lot of sergeants here in those days,” I said, searching for a face that could have been my father’s.

  “Yes, it seems so,” said Nickson. “No one knows why that was, exactly. But we certainly had lots of American sergeants round the area. See that fellow posing with the sergeants in the picture? That’s Tom Fernie, our pro here then. Absolutely marvelous chap, Tom.”

  “Fernie,” Dad murmured, nodding. “I knew him. He wanted to make me a set of clubs, but I was very fond of a set that belonged to a member who was away.”

  “My goodness. Perhaps you used my clubs.” Tony Nickson blushed at the possibility. “I was away exactly then, you know. The infantry in Burma.”

  I was still scanning the book for a staff sergeant who looked like a young Alan Ladd, but I couldn’t find him.

  “Whosever clubs they were, I tried to take good care of them,” said my father. “I remember they were very fine clubs.”

  “Yes,” Nickson said, “I do hope you enjoyed them.”

  “Very much. Thank you. Wouldn’t it be funny if they were really yours?”

  “A lovely coincidence,” Tony said with a broad smile.

  SIX

  Lady Sunshine

  In the morning, while Dad rested his legs, I took another shot at Royal Lytham. I wore my best khaki pants, a white polo shirt, and my new Lytham sweater vest, and just to be on the safe side, I carried my lucky Pebble Beach ball in my left rear pocket.

  I tell myself I’m not really superstitious on the golf course. But most golfers really are. Were it not for the indisputable fact that I always play better when I wear my lucky khakis and a white polo, use an odd-numbered Titleist balata ball, make sure I have only white golf tees in my left pocket, wear my lucky Footjoy teaching shoes, eat a Granny Smith apple on the way to the golf course, and carry my lucky Pebble Beach golf ball (a time-ravaged Spalding Dot, circa 1950, that I plucked from a hedge on Pebble’s fifth tee, shortly before miraculously going par-birdie-birdie-par)—if it were not for these field-proven aids to scoring, I would probably be the first to tell anybody who is genuinely superstitious on a golf course that they have, a la Glenna Vare, raccoons in their rafters.

  My luck at Lytham, not surprisingly, was better this time. I shot a respectable 82, playing alone until the back nine on a somewhat raw and windy morning, which gave me time to work out my swing flaws and reflect on events of the preceding afternoon. Our golf scores hadn’t been pretty, but everything else had worked out so beautifully, and it was possible to take the suddenly improved mood of the trip as a sign of good things to come. Dad had thoroughly enjoyed his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding feast at a local pub afterward and was sleeping like a babe by ten that night. All in all, a perfect reunion. A nearly perfect day as well, flawed only by my sorry 92.

  At Lytham’s intriguing short ninth, the par-three where I’d brazenly predicted my first hole-in-one but taken five, I watched an elderly man tidy up his putting business on the green, pick up his ball from the cup, and stroll off. Pausing to watch me play, he waved stiffly, and I waved back, trying to convey the message that I was in no hurry to play. He waited, so I played.

  This time, for a change, I wasn’t thinking about making an ace. Perhaps since that day on the seventh tee at Green Valley with Kristin, I quietly obsessed about making golf’s perfect score, no doubt in part because everybody I knew seemed to have at least one ace. The list included my regular golf pals, other golf writers, and every other stranger I hooked up with at a golf resort. The elderly mother of one of my best friends, for Pete’s sake, had four of them! She’d taken up golf at sixty. Sometimes I comforted myself with the knowledge that Ben Hogan, maybe the best ball-striker who ever lived, scored only one ace in his competitive career, but then I’d sit down on a plane next to some three-hundred-pound guy named Chuck with forearms like Hormel hams, and the conversation would inexorably drift toward golf and the touchy subject of holes-in-one. Chuck, flagging down the flight attendant for more peanuts, would casually mention that he’d just aced the island hole at Sawgrass or Cypress Point sixteen or some other murderous par-three gem on the PGA Tour. “That makes eleven aces,” he’d grunt, tossing a handful of nuts down the little red lane, then sliding a sidelong glance over at me—“You?”—seemingly under the impression I was a member of life’s roving freemasonry of acers. “None,” I’d say modestly, offering a strained little smile. An embarrassed silence would follow, followed by me asking Chuck his handicap. “Hell, I don’t know,” Chuck would chortle, waving for more nuts. “Last time I had the nerve to look, it was twenty-five!”

  Every now and then, I toyed with the idea of starting up a grassroots organization for ace-challenged golfers like me, a place where good-intention
ed, fate-wounded, mid-to-low-handicap golfers could turn for a little comfort and understanding in a world overrun by insensitive ace-makers. I would call it the Hole-in-None Society, and we would share horror stories of lipped-out seven-irons or balls that traitorously struck the hole in flight and popped out. We would work through our collective angst over the patent unfairness of a game that permitted the undeserving Chucks of this world to skull shots that raced through ravines or ricocheted off lake surfaces and somehow wound up in the hole, whose balls caromed off trap rakes or the sides of golf carts and indecently came to rest in the cup. If nothing else, we would count our blessings that we would never stoop to bragging about a lucky ace, that we had never had to go broke buying the entire Nineteenth Hole drinks after a round in which an ace was foolishly scored. Any member of the society who was caught making a hole-in-one would immediately be required to tender his membership card and forfeit all society benefits.

  For the second day in a row, I failed to score an ace at Lytham’s ninth. (Surprised, huh?) My ball flew toward the pin but landed on the front of the green and stayed there, leaving me 15 yards shy of expulsion from my own society. As I walked up to the green, the elderly gentleman was still watching from a few yards off the back of the putting surface. “Quite an unlucky break,” he commented. “You seemed to be headed to the flag nicely.”