Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  “Were you okay?”

  My father gave me an anguished look. Dumb question, I realized.

  “Hell, no!” he snapped. “How could anybody be okay after something like that?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I meant physically. Were you injured…”

  “Yes…no…my hands were burned a bit. Wore bandages for a while. No big deal. I was fine…but I didn’t feel up to going to the funeral. They brought Bing Crosby in to sing to the people of Freckleton. I couldn’t even stand to go hear him sing. I think I went somewhere and tried to play golf. Burned hands and all. I just wanted to be alone.”

  “Do you remember the little girl’s name?”

  Dad, better now, considered the names on the grave.

  “Harrington. Maybe it was Annie Harrington.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Lady Sunshine,” he murmured.

  I took my father’s arm, and we left the burying ground, slowly closing the iron gate behind us. Two boys on bikes were pedaling furiously up the alley and swerved to avoid hitting us. One of them turned his head and gave us a dirty look. My father, rubbing his eyes, didn’t see it. The air was cold. The moon was already out. It was going to be a beautiful night.

  “I’m surprised you never told me this story,” I said when we reached the car.

  He paused and looked back at the church, a looming shape in the early shade of evening now. I saw a single small light burning somewhere inside.

  “The war ended for me right here,” he said. “I promised myself I would never speak about it again.”

  —

  Sometime in the early morning hours at the Clifton Arms Hotel, I woke to the sound of my father’s voice barking angrily from the twin bed just beside me.

  “I want you men to get back Get back now! We need help here. Can’t you see that? Get going now. On the double…”

  He was having a bad dream.

  “Dad?” I said quietly, reaching over to touch his arm. He was rigid as a board. “You okay?”

  There was silence, then he calmly answered, “Yes, Jim. I was just…go to sleep now, son.”

  I waited till his breathing told me he was asleep again. He slept peacefully, but I lay there for a long time watching the moon over the Irish Sea, trying to decide if I felt better or worse about having exhumed this devastating event from my father’s past.

  My father’s world had forever changed one rainy August morning fifty years ago, and in thinking about this unspeakable sadness, I could no more believe God had caused a tempest to hurl a B-24 fully loaded with a ton of petrol fuel into the ground killing ten American servicemen, four sergeants from the R.A.F., thirty-eight children, and nine citizens of Freckleton—darkening the soul of a town and an incalculable number of innocent lives—any more than he had made my golf game fall apart that first round at Royal Lytham. It was just something that happened, probably for a variety of reasons no one could ever comprehend.

  It’s strange how clear some things seem at the bottom of the night. Suddenly, I now fully understood why my father had been so adamant about me attending Kristin’s funeral—willing to wager everything on the outcome of a silly golf match.

  It wasn’t, as I’d first believed, a gesture intended to simply honor Kristin’s memory and lend support to her grieving family. It was a way of prying open a door to liberate something deep in me. In the years that followed Freckleton, he’d obviously learned the importance of surrendering everything to grief, even though his strongest impulse after the bomber crash had been exactly the same as mine: to run away and hide.

  Listening to my father’s calmer breathing, another powerful insight came to me: Had the cocky young sergeant died in the wreckage at Freckleton and Opti the Mystic been born right then and there? That would explain so much—why he seemingly never let life knock him off stride and went about afterward spreading good cheer like some self-appointed Appleseed of joy. Life promises us sorrow, he’d said the night before. It’s up to us to create the joy. Mims, Opti’s oldest golf pal, once said to me, “No matter what he shoots, your old man never seems to have a bad day on the golf course.” Perhaps a bad day period—after Freckleton.

  I thought about these complicated things for a while, lying on my side watching the moon spilling its light over the tranquil sea. I thought about my own young children somewhere on the other side of that light, preparing to go to bed about now, perhaps saying their own prayers.

  They were growing up in a world full of shadows, a place where children like Lady Sunshine vanished too soon and for no acceptable reason. My own Christian tradition held that God’s greatest gift was hope. As I lay there in the untouchable moonshine, I told myself it was enough for me to hope that my own children would someday find God, whoever and wherever God was, or that God at least would simply somehow find them.

  I hoped they’d never knew the kind of pain my father had known at Freckleton and I’d known with Kristin—or maybe, if they must, that the pain would simply serve to pry open their hearts and wake them up to become Appleseeds of joy. My own prayer was simple: Please make them little Optis.

  I don’t even remember falling asleep.

  SEVEN

  Return of the Slammer

  A few years ago, I spent a day with Sam Snead. We met at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, where he’d just returned to serve as Pro Emeritus, and teed off to do a playing interview on the Old White Course, where he’d once given Dwight Eisenhower golf lessons.

  In his inimitable fashion, Snead regaled me with tales about playing golf with hacker movie stars and pigeon millionaires and presidents he’d known (and in Richard Nixon’s case, caught cheating—moving his ball in the rough), and somewhere in this movable jamboree of memories, I asked Snead if he fully comprehended what he’d done for golf—not only won more tournaments than anybody else (81 by the PGA Tour’s count, 86 by the Slammer’s own) but also been the first true media “star” of the postwar generation that produced the biggest popular golf boom in the history of the game. Snead, Ben Hogan, and Byron Nelson had set the stage for the grand entrance of Arnold Palmer, who paved the way to superstardom for Jack Nicklaus, who handed the mantle to Tom Watson, who presented it to Greg Norman and Nick Price.

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that from time to time,” Sam admitted, giving me a sly granddaddy-catfish smile. “That’s not bad, I reckon, for an ole country boy who taught himself to play with a stick in a cow pasture.”

  I suggested we play a match, but Snead declined, explaining that he never wagered on a match “until I see a man play.” So we played along, content to chase the pill and have a friendly chat. At eighty, Snead’s butter-smooth swing was still a marvel to behold. Both of us hooked drives deep into the oak trees on the first tee, and my host suggested we take mulligans. We tied the first hole with bogeys. Snead went out in 35, while I managed 38. On the tenth tee, he spotted a problem with my setup and gave me the same advice he’d once given Ike. “Stand up straighter, and stick your butt out more.” He noted how that would promote a better shoulder turn and a straighter shot.

  I asked the Slammer how the commander-in-chief had responded to being told to stick his butt out more.

  “He kind of laughed—I reckon he wasn’t used to people talkin’ to him that way. Nice fella, though. Real serious about his golf. Wanted like hell to be good. Ike’s real handicap, you know, was a state secret,” Snead explained. “They didn’t want the public to know because if he was bad, they might wonder why he was bad, and if he was good, they might think all he did was play golf all day.”

  This begged the logical question from an old political dog like me: How good was Ike?

  “Not that bad, ’bout a ten or twelve handicap, I reckon, at his best. Never seen a fella more crazy about a game, though.”

  Off Old White’s sixteenth tee, Snead showed me where he often hunted four-leaf clovers. As luck would have it, I was one stroke up on him for the back nine. Snead birdied seventeen, and we arrived at Old White’s eightee
nth dead even on the home nine. “How ’bout a little match?” my host said, grinning again like a granddaddy catfish. “Let’s say the winner buys lunch.”

  From the rear tees the eighteenth, an unusual finishing par-three hole, played just 165 yards. My host had the honors but invited me to shoot first. Just then a golf cart with two old leathery-faced geezers rolled up, and one of the men drawled, “How much money’s that crook taken from your wallet, son?”

  “Y’all shut up and clear off,” Snead growled at them, winking at me.

  They turned out to be two of Snead’s regular victims, a couple local men who’d known him since he was pounding drives onto 350-yard greens as the young head pro at the Greenbrier fifty years before. One of them proposed joining us for the final hole, and Snead asked me if that would be all right. I sensed a setup. We agreed to play the hole straight up for ten bucks a man. I invited the two newcomers to shoot first. The first man’s ball flew to the rough behind the green. The second, with a quick stab, plopped his ball on the steep bank just below the green. I made a decent swing with my six-iron and landed my ball 15 feet to the right of the pin, certainly within range for a birdie.

  Snead teed up his ball and took his stance.

  “How many times you reckon you’ve aced this damn hole, Sam?” one of the geezers needled him, obviously trying to break the Slammer’s concentration. The man bit his tongue, grinning.

  “I’m gonna send you boys back to your naps,” Snead said, then swung.

  His ball landed a foot above the hole and spun back a bit. No chance of an ace, but Snead turned, looked at him, and said, “Almost one more.”

  The geezers picked up. I conceded the five-inch putt to Snead. He watched me take my position over the ball, a smile playing faintly at his lips. I was tempted to ask him for a read but decided against it. My nerves were taut, and the resulting stroke was poor. The ball leaked two feet left of the hole.

  “Let’s go have lunch,” Snead declared, picking up my ball and tossing it underhand to me. He finished with a one-over 73, while I cobbled together a quite respectable 76. I watched the great man collect a tenner from each of his pigeons, and then we walked into the Greenbrier’s clubhouse grill, taking a seat at a rear table away from the glare of the windows. He refused to let me pay for lunch.

  Snead ordered a chocolate ice cream and a whiskey and asked me, with a suspicious squint, for the second time that day, if I was sure old Linwood Dodson wasn’t my deddy. “That ole boy used to hustle the pants off me,” he remembered, shaking his head at the memory. He said my golf swing reminded him a little of that sorry sumbitch Dodson.

  I assured him there was no connection. I said my father was an adman from Greensboro who’d taught himself to play golf with a stick in a pasture.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Snead said with a genuine smile. “Greensboro was always special to me. It’s where I won my last regular tour event. Won that sucker eight times, y’know.” I said I knew. “That last time made me the oldest man to ever win a regular tour event.”

  I said I knew that, too, because I was there.

  I explained how my father had taken me to the Greensboro Open in 1965, the year I was twelve. I explained about Aunt Polly living on Sedgefield’s seventeenth hole, and how I’d carried around a copy of Snead’s memoir, Education of a Golfer, hoping to get his autograph, for the entire weekend.

  “Did I sign it?” he wanted to know, shoveling a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth.

  “No. I lost the book. By the time I got another, you were busy making history. I couldn’t get close.”

  Snead found this story amusing. He asked me if my father was “still kicking around.” I said he was indeed, still working and still occasionally lightening the pockets of his own regular golf pals at his new golf club just outside of Greensboro.

  “Good for him,” Snead said. “Tell ’im ole Sam Snead says hello. Us country boys, ya know, stick together.”

  At that moment, ironically enough, a waitress came up to the table and asked if Snead would mind signing an autograph for a little boy. He told her to have the boy come over. The boy’s father walked him over. The boy was eight or nine. He had no clue who Sam Snead was. The father smiled nervously as Snead signed the boy’s napkin and patted the kid affectionately on the head. “You love to play golf?” he asked the boy. “No,” the boy said. “I like soccer.” The father grinned sheepishly.

  When they were gone, I pulled out my beaten-up copy of Education of a Golfer, which I’d brought with me in anticipation of this meeting, and asked him to autograph it. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I love to play golf?” I said as he flipped through the pages.

  “Hell, no,” Snead snapped. He wrote in my book, To my good friend, Jim. Always, Sam Snead. He handed it back with a lopsided grin.

  “I still think you must be related to ole Linwood Dodson. Man oh man, that sucker used to rob me blind.”

  —

  Dad and I drove down the coast to Southport, England, the next morning, hoping for a chance to play Royal Birkdale, the course where Arnold Palmer revived the languishing British Open by winning during a week of tumultuous winds and rains in 1961—establishing himself as the dominant player of his day and ensuring the best American players would always come to Britain thereafter. Birkdale, with its rugged high dunes and penal bunkers, came late to the ranks of Open championships (the first one to be hosted there was in 1954, won by Peter Thomson), but in the past thirty years no British club has hosted more major events. The pros like it because its fairways are essentially flat valleys between high dunes, producing fewer of the quirky and unpredictable bounces than at most seaside courses. With roughs that can be freakishly difficult due to thick native grasses, buckthorn and willow scrub, Birkdale rewards the straight driver.

  The rearing sand hills also make Birkdale an ideal venue for spectator viewing, and several of the Opens there were ones I would have loved to witness in person. Peter Thomson’s and Tom Watson’s victories here (in 1965 and 1983 respectively) marked the climax of two outstanding careers, and Lee Trevino (1971) and Johnny Miller (1976) played the golf of their lives in order to subdue the field at mighty Birkdale Opens. For the likable Aussie Ian Baker-Finch, who won after a sensational finish in 1991, Birkdale remained the site of personal glory that must now have felt as distant as the moon. For reasons no one could clearly fathom, including himself, Baker-Finch’s splendid game had fallen to pieces after his brilliant Birkdale Open. He’d made only a handful of cuts in the five years since that moment. It was the kind of precipitous fall-off all tour players fear, and the kind of abyss from which few players ever reemerge.

  Unfortunately, as our Omega rolled into town, the rains that had kindly held off at Lytham roared back with a gusty vengeance in Southport, which calls itself “Sunny Southport” and “Montpelier of the North.” With a forecast calling for even heavier weather by midafternoon, we decided our best hope for playing Birkdale would be to make a beeline straight to the course and save checking into the Prince of Wales Hotel, our planned stop for the night, for later.

  I drove slowly along Lord Street, Southport’s normally bustling main drag, allowing Dad the opportunity to reacquaint himself with a town where fifty years ago he had come to play golf on nearby linkslands (Formby, Southport, and Ainsdale are both close) and to listen to live big band orchestras in the famous seaside hotel ballrooms. Unfortunately, Sunny Southport was wearing a gloomy face that morning and looked like any other slightly down-at-the-heels holiday town at the end of the season in the rain. The arcades along the beachfront were gated and padlocked, and the few people who were out hurried along Lord Street’s ornately canopied sidewalks with somber urgency, fighting gusts of winds with their umbrellas.

  “Good thing you bought that new rain suit,” I commented, and then thought about my mother’s worries in this regard. The temperatures were supposed to reach only the high fifties at best. The weather was what my grandmother used to call “pneumonia wea
ther.” “Sure you’re up to a hike in this mess?” I asked.

  “I am if you are,” he replied, as we passed through the town proper and started toward the southern outskirts, where Birkdale’s stark white art deco clubhouse sits dramatically among the sandhills.

  At the pro shop there was a bit of a snafu. Norman Crewe, Birkdale’s hospitable club secretary, whom I’d written to in advance and later spoken to by phone, was off for the day and had apparently left no instructions for the young assistant pro on duty. This was too bad. I’d hoped we might have a proper visit with the secretary, following our round. The assistant, who didn’t look any older than my daughter’s baby-sitter, said he would attempt to call the secretary at his home, but my father intervened, saying that wasn’t necessary—we’d better play on before the weather got worse. The young man collected our fifty-pound green fees and explained that another group of Americans had just gone off ahead of us.

  Dad deposited his bag on a trolley and I slung mine on my back and, sure enough, we found a trio of Americans who’d brought their own caddies—their teenage sons. “We’ve come this far,” a paint contractor from Pennsylvania assured us with a stoic grin, “damned if we’re going to let a little liquid sunshine ruin it for us.”

  The rain was slanting sideways, coming off the ocean at a pretty good clip.

  We watched the fathers hit their drives, all three missing the first fairway by wide margins. Their caddy sons exchanged smiles. “C’mon, Dad,” a tall one in a Cornell cap with a prominent Adam’s apple encouraged his father, “when the breeze blows, nice and slow.”

  “Right,” the paint contractor said. “Remember that so I don’t have to remind you tomorrow.” He teed up and hit a provisional ball even farther wide of the fairway and, smiling sheepishly, explained that tomorrow the roles would be reversed: fathers would be caddies.