by James Dodson
“A what?” Dr. Jupp was halfway through his backswing on the tee of the handsome tenth, a short par-three backdropped by a lovely view of the Hills of Galloway. He topped his ball and glared at his wife.
“He writes about golf!” she said, a good deal louder, to her husband, causing her pearl necklace to hop at her throat. “I’ll bet he knows that big boy you like to watch. You know the one I mean. The one they call Wild Thing. Bad temper. Strange hair.”
“Oh. Right,” Dr. Jupp growled.
A few moments later, I was teeing my ball when Dr. Jupp came and stood a few feet away. He was easily within my peripheral field of vision.
Crossing his arms on his chest, Dr. Jupp clearly didn’t think there was any problem except perhaps that I was dawdling. I could hear air roaring in and out of his nostrils. I glanced up at him and smiled—hoping he’d get the message to back off a bit—but he refused to move, so I swung, pulling the shot and missing the green badly twenty yards to the left.
“That certainly wasn’t your best,” he pronounced. I saw my father, just behind him, quietly laughing.
“So what’s the story on the lad she means? You know the one.”
I admitted I didn’t. Bad temper, strange hair?
“Do you mean John Daly?” Dad suggested.
“Delly! That’s it,” exclaimed Freddie Jupp. “What’s he really like?”
I said I didn’t really know, explaining I’d only “interviewed” John Daly once, if you could call it that—a twenty-second conversation before he stormed out of the locker room at a prestigious tournament in Texas after shooting a 75 and missing the cut. Mostly I knew what everybody knew, that Daly had his problems—a history of alcohol abuse, emotional instability, a barber who seemed to work with pruning shears—but in my view, I said, Daly was the most exciting player to come along since Arnold Palmer. I’d seen him electrify crowds. I liked the way he played fast and never took prisoners in competition. It was his life off the course that was such a mess. Not yet thirty, he’d been married three times, accused of wife abuse (a charge he strongly denied), been banished by the PGA Tour for various offenses ranging from picking up his ball during play to fighting with spectators, nearly lost his sponsors, faced up to his alcoholism, and once considered driving his Mercedes off a cliff. For all that, I had a soft spot for Daly because as a kid growing up in Arkansas, he knew the name of only one famous golf course—the Old Course at St. Andrews. I asked Dr. Jupp what he thought of John Delly.
“I think he’s a big fat git,” Jupp declared, and for a moment I thought he might spit at my feet to emphasize the point. “It’s an absolute dis-grace how that lad behaves.” Freddie rolled her eyes at me.
“If he ever cleans up his act, though,” observed my father, “he could be a real appealing fella. Golf needs characters like him. The public can relate.”
“Wouldn’t wager on that if I were you.” Dr. Jupp shook his head, resuming his aggressive bowlegged walk as we headed toward the tenth green. “I don’t think someone of his doubtful character even belongs in the game.”
“He really loves Wild Thing,” Freddie assured me quietly as we walked side by side. “I do wish he could do something about that funny bit of hair, though.”
I asked if she meant John Delly or her husband the vet. Freddie Jupp burst out laughing and slugged me on the arm with a balled-up fist. She told me I was a “big cheeky lad.” The lady had a good right.
—
It was nice to be in Scotland finally with my father. My son was already talking of the day I would take him there. At the moment Jack was more interested in bagpipes than golf bags, but I could happily picture the day we would hack around the land of half his ancestors on a similar adventure together. The great linkslands by day, the great bagpipe bars by night.
Dad and I drove to the village of Kirkoswald the next morning, a cool cloudy sabbath, and attended services at the little stone kirk where Eisenhower had supposedly worshiped. The minister was a potato-shaped man with wild gray eyebrows. He gave a cracking sermon about the evils of permissive living that had something vaguely to do with telecommunication satellites running amok overhead and polluting impressionable Scottish minds with German porn. Twice he halted the proceedings dead in their tracks and ordered us to sing hymns louder.
After church, as the clouds peeled back and the sun came out, we drove a few miles up the coast road to Turnberry.
To our left, eighteen miles offshore, the Ailsa Craig, where the world’s greatest curling stones used to come from, rose up on a tranquil sea. It was a bonny afternoon with abundant warmth and virtually no breeze. The Turnberry Hotel, when it finally appeared, resembled a wedding cake sitting on a green hill. We checked in and ran into an old friend of sorts in the hotel’s handsomely refurbished lobby.
“Well, I’ll be doggone,” said Dr. Bob Tanner, the Birmingham dentist, pumping my hand like a long-lost cousin from Dogpatch. He wrung my father’s hand, too, and introduced us to one of his traveling pals, another dentist named Bob. The Bobs were dressed in the kind of elaborate multihued golf outfits that made me think that cricket, with its simple white shirts and trousers, might not be such a dumb sport after all.
The Bobs were going down for an afternoon round on the Ailsa course and invited us to join them. “We could have a little best ball match,” Bob Tanner proposed.
I looked at Dad and was pleased when he said, “Sounds fine to me.”
An hour later, we teed off on the Ailsa course. We even had caddies. Dad’s was named John, a scrawny older man with a filterless cigarette dangling from his lips. John mumbled “hallo” and scarcely said another word for the next two hours. Mine was named Mike. Mike was almost mahogany from a fortnight’s vacation on Cyprus. “Why would you want to go to Cyprus in October when the weather here is so lovely and the gorse in bloom?” I asked Mike.
“Because it’s not Scotland, mate,” he replied.
The start of our match was highly inauspicious. I hooked my opening drive fifty yards into the hayfieldlike rough on the left. Dad topped his drive and trickled his ball maybe fifty yards off the tee. The Bobs smashed power fades past the bunkers on the left, finding the heart of the fairway. I required three attempts to return my ball to the short grass. Dad topped his second shot and sent his ball scampering another hundred yards. Turnberry’s opening hole is only 350 yards long, one of the easiest on the course. The Bobs were waiting for us to hit our fifth and third shots respectively and my caddy Mike, perhaps daydreaming of Cyprus, was looking at me with genuine sympathy—though for me or him, it was difficult to tell. I was reminded of the old joke where the American golfer, mentally unglued after a round in which everything has gone wrong, finally lashes out at his Scottish caddy, “Angus, by golly, you’re the worst damn caddy this game has ever seen!” Angus thinks for a moment, shakes his head, and calmly replies, “Oh no, sir. That would be too much of a coincidence.”
By the third hole, we were already three down. The Bobs had made consecutive pars and a birdie and apparently decided we were irrelevant. They were busy talking about a promising timeshare condo project on Marco Island, and I whispered to Dad that my game was about to get on track. Turnberry was the site of the greatest shot-making exhibition in the history of the game, a brilliant duel between Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson at the ’77 Open championship, which Watson won at the seventy-second hole, shattering the old British Open record of 276 in the process. I reminded my father that in the final round Nicklaus birdied the fourth hole to jump out to a commanding three-hole lead, only to see young Tom come roaring back and overtake him at the wire. If Tom could do it, so could we.
The Ailsa’s fourth hole is an aptly named par-three called Woebetide, a fairly short swat of 160 yards to a slightly elevated “pulpit” green.
I’d been to kirk that morning. I’d said my prayers. If God is a just God, I thought, here’s where I’ll finally make a hole-in-one. What an ideal spot! At the Pebble Beach of Scottish golf courses! An ace wou
ld turn the whole match on its ear, vanquish the obnoxious Bobs, and woe betide them.
One Bob’s shot was already in the front right bunker; the other had flown the green. Dad’s shot lay on the apron just in front of the green, I made a smooth pass with my six. The ball drifted up into the air currents, rising from the cliffs to the left, and then dropped on the green. One of the Bobs murmured, “Christ. That’s close.”
“You bet it is, Mate,” said my faithful caddy, Mike.
It wasn’t in the hole—inches short again. My life story. Charter member of the HIN Society. I tapped in. At least we’d won the hole. Mike handed me my ball, and we slapped hands like Greg Norman and his caddy, Tony Navarro.
The Bobs weren’t talking condos anymore, but Dad’s legs, I could see, were already giving out. That was too bad. I was sure I was finding my game and we could beat the Bobs.
But it simply wasn’t in the cards. After the fifth hole, which we halved with pars, I suggested they proceed without us and we’d settle up later. Dad protested, but it wasn’t much of a protest. I could see he felt bad trying to compete with the Bobs. I told them we really wanted to slow down and enjoy our stroll around Turnberry because we were headed to Glasgow in the morning and this was our only chance to see the course. The Bobs said they understood. We shook hands and watched them tee off and head down the fairway after a group of Japanese with bags as big as cruise missiles.
When they were gone, Dad admitted he didn’t feel like playing anymore. The remark set bells off in my head.
“Are you okay? Shall we just head in?”
“Relax, Bo,” he said. “I just want to walk and watch you play.”
Mike reminded me that the halfway house was just up ahead at the ninth, a good spot to sit and have a rest and some refreshment. I thanked him and said I would prefer to carry my own bag from that point on and would settle up with both him and John later, too. “No problem, Mate,” Mike said, waving a hand. Breaking his silence, John said he would make sure Dad’s clubs got cleaned and taken back to the hotel.
On the way to the halfway house, I played the next four holes pretty well—par par bogey par. The ninth is Turnberry’s most majestic hole, with a championship tee that lets you drive from a narrow headland two hundred feet above the rocks and churning surf. I smacked a nice drive over the cairn marker that shows you the proper line and just missed making par. We walked to the halfway house and ordered beers and sat on a bench overlooking the remains of Robert Bruce’s castle. Families were picking whelks off the rock below, and people were out walking their dogs in the balmy evening light.
Dad said, “Doesn’t feel like the end of September, does it?”
“Not September in Maine, Mate.”
“How’s your house?”
“Almost finished.”
He smiled drowsily. “I’ve heard that one before.”
My house in Maine was an ongoing saga and something of a complicated subject between us. It had all started nine years before, when my wife and I got it into our heads that our children should be raised in Maine. The fact that we didn’t even have children at the time didn’t prevent us from packing up, fleeing Boston, and moving a hundred miles up the Atlantic coast.
We purchased five acres on a forested hill, and I cleared land with a chainsaw, learning firsthand why guys who do this kind of work for a living usually have missing body parts and low career expectations. When I informed my father that I planned to build our period-correct post-and-beam house with my own hands, he reminded me that the rough theory behind attending college and finding a good job was that you could earn enough money to pay someone who knew what he was doing to build your dream house. He urged me to seek serious professional help—either a real carpenter or a shrink.
I laughed at him and told him to think of the project merely as a phase I had to go through—my Bob Vila period. I said it was what happened when a yuppie watched too much This Old House. An insatiable hunger to own, to build, to create something in the wilderness took possession! Besides, I’d heard him say many times that he would dearly love to build his own house with his own hands.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “I meant a log cabin somewhere in the Smokies, though. I used to say I wanted a little farm, too. That doesn’t mean I’m going to start raising cows and pigs in the backyard.”
For reasons that now slightly eluded me—but undoubtedly had more to do with my father than Bob Vila—I Sheetrocked the walls, laid the pine plank floors, finished the windows, hung the doors, made the cabinets, laid the tile, varnished essentially everything in sight, and hammered and sawed and power-glued myself into a period-correct state of exhaustion.
Now the house was finished—well, okay, we were about to add two dormers, ever tweaking—and I was in the process of cultivating the estate. I’d basically squandered my children’s college money on evergreen shrubs and perennials, cultivated two acres of Kentucky blue fescue grass, and planted sixty or seventy rosebushes around our New Age homestead. There was no truth whatsoever to the silly rumor circulating in town that I had plans to create my own little nine-hole executive golf course up in the forest. One hole was all I really needed.
Before I could steer the subject safely away from my house and back to the golf in Ayrshire, though, Dad changed it for me.
“You know who would love this place?” he said, as we loitered on the sunny Turnberry bench.
“Jack and Tom?” I said, thinking of Nicklaus and Watson, who were probably too busy that week in ’77 to notice the place anyway.
“No. Bill and Bob.” He meant his old golf pals. “We could really go at each other in a place like this.”
The remark made me think of the match we’d just bailed out of. “We could have whipped the doctor Bobs, you know,” I said.
“Maybe so,” he said, closing his eyes, lifting his face to the breeze. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
No, I thought, it doesn’t. In a year, Dad would be gone. In five years, someone else might own my dream house. This moment, though, however imperfect, would never come again. That larger point was even finally beginning to sink into my head. Opti had a gift for always returning me to the importance of the moment. I made a note to tell Bill and Bob how my father had mentioned them one glorious evening on a bench at Turnberry.
—
From where we sat, I could see that the fifteenth tee was open. I suggested we skip holes ten through fourteen and play in from the fifteenth. Dad seemed a bit reluctant, but being a seasoned holeskipper, I prevailed on him to risk such a cardinal breach of ethics. I birdied the hole, a tough par-three called Ca Canny, and told him the gods themselves approved of a little creative hole-skipping every so often.
Ailsa’s sixteenth is one of the nicest par-fours in creation, a medium-length straightaway hole that challenges you with a steeply shouldered ravine in front of the green. Watson nearly gave the Open to Nicklaus here in ’77 by bravely shooting for a pin cut in front. His ball landed on the hill and for a heartstopping moment seemed about to tumble back into the little burn. Somehow it didn’t, Watson got up and down for par, and both men went to the seventeenth dead even. I played the hole nicely, with a gorgeous drive, a well-struck six-iron approach, and a twenty-foot lag putt that permitted me a safe tap-in for par.
“You did that like a pro,” Dad commented, zipping up his jacket as we exited the green. I saw his leg bag was leaking again and realized he must be getting cold.
“Which pro?”
“Which pro do you like?”
“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll tell you after the next hole.”
Turnberry’s seventeenth, a handsome par-five, was kind to Tom Watson in 1977. A birdie there moved him one shot ahead of Nicklaus—a lead he held to the title. My own lengthy putt for birdie came up three feet short of the cup, and I missed an easy putt for par. I’d neglected to putt like a kid.
“I’m putting like the old Tom Watson,” I said. “Not the young and fearless one.”
“It happens to us all,” Dad commiserated, replacing the flagstick.
“Hasn’t happened to you,” I accused him, causing him to smile.
We stood on the green, and he reminded me of Nick Price’s recent magnificent fifty-five-footer that had crossed the green as if it had eyes and rattled the cup during the final round of the Open in 1994. That brilliant eagle snatched the claret jug from Jesper Parnevik and fulfilled Price’s childhood dream of winning the British Open. No champion I could think of except perhaps Watson was more deserving.
I told my father something interesting that Price had recently told me. His father had died when he was ten. They’d been able to play only two rounds of golf together. Price, a father of two small children, still thought about his father a great deal and obviously wished they could have had more time to play the game. If you asked Nick Price to name his ideal four-ball group, he would tell you Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, and his father.
“That’s lovely,” my father said. “What would yours be?”
“That’s tough. Probably Snead, Nelson, and you, or Palmer, Watson, and Price. You’d unfortunately have to watch. I wouldn’t say no to Crenshaw, Love, and Curtis Strange, either. You?”
“Jones, Julius Boros, and Sam Snead.”
“Some nice swings there.”
“Save one of your own for eighteen.”
As we walked off toward Turnberry’s home hole, I thanked Dad for playing when I was sure he’d rather be resting. He said the pleasure was all his. We went back to our room, and he showered and quickly fell asleep on the bed. I called downstairs to the dining room to confirm our dinner reservation for eight, then hopped into a steamy shower myself. When I got out, I heard the magical skirl of a bagpipe being played. A piper strolls the grounds at the Turnberry Hotel each evening at dusk. It was dusk. I picked up the telephone and quickly dialed home. When my son finally got on, in the midst of having his Sunday lunch, I held the receiver out the window so he could hear it.
