by James Dodson
We said good-bye, and wished them luck, and watched them make their way down the dune-bordered fairway into the gloom. As we stood there waiting to hit, getting colder and wetter by the minute, I asked my father what his father had thought of him caddying at Sedgefield when he was thirteen.
“He thought golf was a game for rich playboys. But basically he didn’t object too much. Golf was entirely beyond his ken. The Depression had just hit. The money in caddying was pretty good. My regular customer, old man Sapp, paid me thirty cents a round plus a dime tip—that was what John D. Rockefeller regularly tipped on the golf course.”
Old man Sapp was a prominent Greensboro attorney named O. L. Sapp. My father liked to say his best customer’s initials really stood for Oh Lookout because he was wild and impatient off the tee, prone to terrorize slow-footed groups ahead of him. It was Sapp, however, who gave my father his first iron, a hickory-shafted seven-iron, which he practiced with in a pasture next to the farmhouse they rented west of town.
I knew my grandfather only as a kind old man in paint-flecked rumpled pants who smoked King Edward cigars and seldom spoke much except to comment about the weather or what chicanery the Republicans were up to in Washington. He’d had no more than a rudimentary education and had done odd jobs most of his life, including tobacco sharecropping, driving a milk truck, and making kitchen cabinets. He’d also worked on crews that raised the first steel electric towers across the South and helped wire the Jefferson-Standard Building in Greensboro, North Carolina’s first “sky-scrapper.” His name was Walter, which was my middle name. He taught me to saw a board properly in a straight line and took me fishing in his flat-bottomed skiff in the bayous of central Florida.
I forget who told me my father’s father lacked “gumption”—possibly my crazy maiden aunt Lily, Walter’s older sister, who lived with us for a time when I was in third grade. By gumption, she meant ambition. When I asked my father if this was true, he smiled and explained that if his father lacked ambition, it was a trait he’d inherited honestly from his own father, Uncle Jimmy Dodson, a prominent Orange County landowner who prided himself, as Dad put it, “on never letting work interfere with the pleasures of life.”
Uncle Jimmy kept a north pasture full of cows and a south pasture full of horses. A family story held that during “the War for Southern Independence,” he creatively sold horses to the invading Yankees and then had them stolen back at night. He was a dapper rogue who wore a white handlebar moustache and a blue felt bowler. A tintype photograph of him, taken on his seventy-seventh birthday, looking as pleased as if he’d just swiped a few Yankee horses, sits on a shelf in my house in Maine.
Uncle Jimmy, I knew, was a revered figure to my father. Dad spent most of his childhood summers at Uncle Jimmy’s farm near Chapel Hill, and long before he was earning Oh Lookout Sapp’s premium wages by looping at Sedgefield, Uncle Jimmy paid him a buffalo-head nickel for finding a lost horse chain in the pasture. Some men remember the first dollar they earned. My father remembered his first nickel from Uncle Jimmy.
Thinking of these things as we stood in the dreary rain on Birkdale’s first tee, I asked my father what Uncle Jimmy thought of golf. He seemed to have had the perfect disposition for the auld game.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know that he’d ever heard of golf. Uncle Jimmy was pretty much a man of the last century. But what a delightful old codger,” Dad remembered, smiling. “He thought of himself as something of a backwoods philosopher, and he used to say to me, ‘Braxton, remember it’s always better to laugh than to cry. You just remember that, son, next time you feel like cryin’.’ You know what? I did, too.”
It seemed like useful advice—especially for Birkdale in the rain.
“We came here for some laughs,” I said, staring impatiently at the group ahead of us. They seemed to be playing Birkdale’s first hole in slow motion. “The problem is, I’m about to start crying.”
“It doesn’t seem very promising,” Dad agreed.
I glanced around. I didn’t see another soul anywhere out in those famous dunes and fairways.
“Come on.” I said, consulting a damp course-routing card. I picked up my bag and grabbed his hand trolley.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the spot where Arnold Palmer saved the British Open.”
—
We hiked down the eighteenth fairway and crossed through some heavily grassed dunes, wandered confusedly around for a bit, then finally came out near Birkdale’s fifteenth tee. A pair of four-and five-pars constituted Birkdale’s home stretch, which was where almost all the history of the place was made, much of it by Americans.
As I hoped, the fairway ahead, and the par-three fourteenth just behind (where Hale Irwin carelessly tried to execute a one-hand tap-in for par in 1983, missed the ball, and was forced to penalize himself one stroke—then lost the Open by a stroke to Tom Watson), were empty.
“Let’s play a four-hole match,” I proposed. “I’ll give you two strokes a hole due to the regrettable playing conditions.”
“Don’t dig yourself too deep a hole, laddie. You’re feeling your oats this morning.”
“Must be all the porridge we’ve been eating.”
Dad teed up and swatted a little fading drive that was boosted by the wind, which was beating over our right shoulders more or less in the direction of the green. I teed up and made a swing that was much too quick, producing one of my patented power fades that usually finishes with the sound of breaking glass and a voice shouting in alarm. I saw my ball vanish far into the dunes on the right.
“Just like Arnie,” I remarked as we walked off the tee.
“Really?” Dad sounded amused. “How’s that?”
I explained that when Arnold Palmer, battling for the lead in 1961, arrived at Birkdale’s fifteenth hole during the Open’s last round, he lost his tee shot to the right. His ball dived into trouble at the base of a grassy bank. There was supposed to be a plaque on the ground somewhere near the spot where he struck one of the most wondrous shots in Open history. His blast with a six-iron dropped the ball on the green and left him an easy two-putt for par. He went on to win the championship, and many felt his victory and personal magnetism revived American public interest in the British Open.
“It’s doubtful there was a man present at Birkdale who wanted Palmer to lose,” Henry Longhurst wrote of the tournament when it was over. “It’s impossible to overpraise the tact and charm with which this American has conducted himself on his two visits to Britain. He has no fancy airs or graces; he wears no fancy clothes; he makes no fancy speeches. He simply says and does exactly the right thing at the right time, and that is enough.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the plaque commemorating the blessed event. Maybe worse, I couldn’t find my ball. I tromped around in the wet knee-high grass while my father struck his second shot, then I looked at the hole and realized something odd. The fifteenth was a par-five of 540 yards. How could Palmer’s second shot have reached the green? Not even the King could wallop a six-iron 300 yards.
“Are you going to play or daydream?” my father called out. He was standing out in the fairway looking at me. The rain was picking up pace. The hood of his rain suit obscured his face. I dropped a ball at the fairway’s edge and smacked a three-wood, catching it cleanly. It wasn’t enough. With the penalty and two poor chips that came afterward, I managed a double bogey—just tying Dad. He was one up.
We went to sixteen, a par-four that doglegged slightly to the right. The rain was hammering us now. “I think we’d better forget this,” I said.
“We’ll play in fast,” Dad said, teeing up his ball. He struck a nice little drive. I put mine in play, too, and we walked off the tee with our hoods lowered, keeping to ourselves.
Watson’s dramatic finish here in 1983 was an important little milestone to me. I’d sat in my little solar house on the banks of the Green River in Vermont watching my favorite player win his fifth Open champions
hip. My television set barely received the Boston station’s signal, and the championship faded out entirely into electronic snow by the end. I had to call up my dad in North Carolina to make sure Watson had won.
Considering the awful weather, we played Birkdale’s sixteenth pretty well. Dad slapped a beautiful third shot off the soggy turf and managed a bogey. I reached the green in two and parred. But with the strokes I’d given him factored in, he was now two up with two left. The course turns back toward Birkdale’s distinctive clubhouse, which is supposed to resemble a ship at sea, after sixteen. Unfortunately, this meant we were now hitting directly into the teeth of the gale. The hole is a long par-five, which played monstrously long in the wind.
“Are we laughing or crying?” I said to Dad, having to remove my glasses because water was trickling down my cheeks.
“I think laughing,” Dad said, wiping his own face. He smiled at me. “I hope so, at any rate.” He teed up and drove his ball about a hundred yards.
“At this pace I should get there about Thursday,” he quipped.
I teed up and set my Big Bertha driver behind the ball. A gust rocked me gently, and my club nudged the ball off the peg.
“That’s one,” Dad said cheekily. “I always heard you were straight but short off the tee.”
“Very funny. Please leave the low humor to a professional,” I urged him.
I reteed and hit a nice drive that flew about as far as I normally hit my seven-iron. We resumed our silent march to the clubhouse.
—
My father had the sweet disposition of his father (and his father’s father), but he also had plenty of gumption, a gift no doubt from his mother’s side of the ledger, the Taylors. The Taylors were from north of Raleigh, an ambitious and upthrusting tribe of good-natured Baptists. They had a lot of natural gumption in them, and my father had a lot of my grandmother, Beatrice Taylor, in him. A native of the plains of West Texas and a distant relation of Zachary Taylor, she was a firm believer in the powers of Holy Scripture, good biscuit-making, and “book education.”
Her advice to my father, dispensed about the time he was caddying for Oh Lookout Sapp at Sedgefield, was that the Lord liked a boy who wore clean underwear, worked hard, and steadily improved his mind, an injunction he clearly took to heart. At fifteen, he played semipro baseball and sold The Greensboro Record on street corners and worked as a copy runner and stringer for the nighttime sports editor. At seventeen, while still in high school, he went to work at a department store in Greensboro, writing ad copy for the newspaper and dressing window displays at night. During his senior year at Greensboro High (my alma mater), he played second team halfback on the football team that went to the state finals in Durham, where his team lost (Dad knocked himself out cold by running into the goalpost), but a businessman who saw him play and admired his hustle offered him a job at a Durham department store and a chance to attend the university in his spare time.
He stayed at Chapel Hill for one year, attending mostly night classes in journalism. He thought he might want to be a political columnist or the next Ring Lardner. Instead, he met an airplane mechanic who agreed to teach him how to fly, and soon after that someone recommended him for a job at a department store in Washington. He dropped out of college and caught the train north, arriving on the streets of the nation’s capital with fifteen bucks in his pocket. The job didn’t pan out and he was down to his last dime when he won a blueberry pie in a raffle. “I was walking out of the store eating the pie,” he once told me, “trying to figure out where I would go next when I physically ran into your great-aunt Edna.” Edna was Walter Dodson’s other older sister (the noncrazy one, I liked to think of her), a government secretary.
Aunt Edna took my father home to Bethesda, Maryland, and installed him in her guest room, and a week later he found a job selling advertising for The Washington Post. That job led to a bigger job at The Cumberland News, where he doubled as ad salesman and aviation writer. One day in 1940 he strolled into McCrory’s Five and Ten to purchase a pocket comb and spotted Janet Virginia Kessell, who was twenty years old, the youngest of eleven kids, and who had recently won the Miss Western Maryland Beauty Pageant. She had been offered either a thousand-dollar prize or an all-expense paid trip to the 1939 World’s Fair, the theme of which was the World of Tomorrow; she took the trip. Now she was back home selling big-band records and wondering if she should marry a local boy named Earl. Though he didn’t own a record player, my father bought a Benny Goodman disk. He went back a few days later and bought an Artie Shaw record and asked the beautiful sales clerk out. She told him she was engaged to marry a guy named Earl.
My father proved his gumption by going back to McCrory’s until she agreed to go out with him. They went to a place called the Crystal Palace to hear Kay Kyser and his orchestra. After their second date, my mother broke off her engagement to Earl. Earl moved to Baltimore. My parents got married less than a year later.
—
After hurriedly putting out on Birkdale’s eighteenth green, Dad and I legged it into the clubhouse, where a kindly steward permitted us to use the men’s locker room to dry off a bit and then showed us into an empty dining room, where he brought us some warm toast and hot tea. Under the agreed terms, Dad had won the match once again but he insisted we call it a draw.
I was sorry Norman Crewe wasn’t around to fill us in more on Birkdale’s evolution as an Open site, and then I realized something a little embarrassing. We’d come a day earlier than I’d informed our missing host we would be there.
This wasn’t my only gaffe. I asked the steward why there was no longer a plaque commemorating Palmer’s masterful recovery shot on fifteen, and the steward smiled. “That’s because it’s on sixteen. Sixteen was fifteen in Mr. Palmer’s day.”
After tea, we snooped around the empty clubhouse a bit, looking at framed photographs of Trevino, Watson, and Miller battling Birkdale’s winds and dunes. I left a five-pound note on the table for the steward, and we drove back to Southport to check into the Prince of Wales Hotel, maybe England’s most famous golf hotel.
There were lots of elderly people scattered about in the Prince’s lobby, most taking naps in chairs. A Welsh businessman was checking out. “Look at this,” he insisted to the clerk, tapping his finger on his bill. “You charged me for a bottle of champagne.”
“Right.” The young lady didn’t seem surprised. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I didn’t order a bottle of champagne.”
“Very well then.” The clerk gave a little sigh. “I’ll remove the charge.”
“Thank you.”
The Welshman looked at us and shook his head. He seemed to be holding out for a more formal apology from management, but obviously none was coming. When the clerk presented him with his revised bill, he slashed his name on the credit card slip and said, “In case you’re interested, the only reason I would have ordered a bottle of champagne is if I’d learned this hotel was going to be torn to the ground. Have a nice day.”
He turned to us and said, “Good luck, you two. You’ll need it.”
My father and I looked at each other. Dad shook his head ever so slightly, a silent advisory to keep my smart mouth shut. I politely gave the clerk our name and asked specifically for Arnold and Winnie Palmer’s regular room. The clerk smiled at me as if she had a gas pain, disappeared briefly into a back room, and reappeared with a large key that looked as if it could open a Spanish galleon chest.
Ours was a dim tower room on the Prince of Wales’s second floor. The ceiling was high enough to permit pole vaulting, and the air was warm enough to bake bread. I tried to open a window, but it wouldn’t budge. The huge windows were painted shut, and the radiator clanked like Marley’s ghost.
How could this dump be the most famous golf hotel in England? I wondered as I sat down on one of the twin beds and sank to the floor. The answer, of course, was that the Prince had once been a superb hotel—maybe even a great one, as its dim elegance suggested—
but was clearly now feeding off its own fame as a place the world’s best golfers stayed when they came to Lytham and Birkdale Opens.
My father entered the room carrying his suit bag and medical case.
“How’s it look?” he asked cheerfully.
“A little tired. Maybe I should go ask for Jack and Barbara’s room.”
“Forget it. At least it’s dry and warm.”
“Very warm.”
While Dad unpacked his medical stuff in the tiny, weird tropical-pink bathroom, I turned on the small black-and-white television and found two guys playing snooker on one station, the early evening news on another. An Arab terrorist group had exploded a bomb on a West Bank bus, killing twenty, and a postal worker in Yorkshire had beaten his wife to death with a rubber mallet. A medical study estimated that five percent of the British population could be suffering from something called mad cow disease, while back home in the land of the free, a poll showed a third of Americans believed they’d personally encountered space aliens; Barbra Streisand had been given a foreign policy briefing. As a poet William Wordsworth said when he passed this way en route to the Lake District, the world was still far too much with us.
“Do you think Arnold and Winnie really ever stayed here?” I wondered aloud. Outside and two floors down, I noticed, a young man was trying to pry open the door of a green Sierra in the car park with some kind of thin metal contraption.
“If they did,” Dad replied, “it was probably before Arnie won the Open.”
After our showers, he suggested we amble across the street for a predinner drink at the Scarisbrick Hotel, which looked to be in an even more advanced state of decay than the Prince of Wales.
“That used to be a swell place to go on a Friday night,” he remembered fondly as we walked down the Prince’s wide staircase to the main lobby, where even more old people were snoozing in chairs and a baby grand piano was pounding out Sinatra’s “My Way” all by itself. “That was a real Air Force hangout in those days,” he said, “with lots of good-looking local girls and great swing music.”
