by James Dodson
“Unfortunately not.”
He told me the tale. One day in the early spring, when my brother was about a year old, my father decided to introduce his firstborn son to the joys of flying. He strapped him into the seat of a Cessna plane and took off to visit an old friend at an airfield near Chapel Hill. The friend was the airplane mechanic who had once given Dad flying lessons while he was briefly a student at Chapel Hill.
“I wanted to show him my brand-new son,” Dad said, “and I thought Dickie would get a thrill out of the ride. The thrill was a bit more than I anticipated.”
After taking off for the forty-mile return trip to Greensboro, the plane suffered a sudden power loss and began to lose altitude—the engine was having difficulty getting fuel. Dad sensed a fuel line blockage and began desperately trying to fix the problem but couldn’t.
“We were barely flying over the tops of the trees,” he remembered. “I was looking everywhere for a place to put her down, but there wasn’t a field or road that looked right. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong.”
“Did you think you were going to die?”
“Sure. That goes through your head. Mostly I was thinking about your brother. How damned unfair it was if we crashed and he died.”
“What’d you do?”
“Flew along trying to avoid treetops and plowed-up fields. A freshly plowed field in the spring, you see, gives off cold air. Old-time aviators were terrified of freshly plowed fields. They can knock you right out of the air. I followed roads and fallow fields. We zigzagged all over the place.”
“Like that time you flew Mom down the New River Valley.”
“Right. I terrified her. This time I terrified me.”
“But you made it back….”
“Yep. That’s when I found the problem. I’d forgotten to switch on the heater that keeps the carburetor from freezing up. It was a beginner’s mistake. But if I was making mistakes like that—risking my own son’s life—I told myself it was time to quit. I thanked the good Lord for getting us back in one piece, took your brother home to his mother, and never flew again.”
“That’s quite a story,” I said. “Did you ever miss flying?”
“Not really.” We walked a few paces, and he added, “Well, yes. I did. But life goes forward, doesn’t it? You trade this for that.” He smiled. “I did fantasize, though, about taking your mother up in a hot-air balloon sometime. I pictured us floating around up there with a good bottle of French champagne. Smooching a bit. Singing old love songs from the war.”
“On behalf of songbirds everywhere, I beg you to leave the singing to Miss Western Maryland. That’s her job.”
“I promise.” He fell silent, then said, “Well, well. Look here, Bo.”
We were standing on the seventeenth tee of the Old Course. The Road Hole.
—
The sun was gone, the air was cold, and the course lay almost fully in the embrace of a blue twilight now. A few faint stars were visible above the clouds, and there were lights on in the Old Grey Toon. The group we’d been following had hit their drives and disappeared rapidly down the fairway.
“This is where I wish we had our real clubs,” I said.
“Aw, who needs ’em?” Dad said. “Let’s play anyway.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “We could play air golf with the ghosts of St. Andrews the way I played air guitar with the Beatles. Please play away, Mr. Dodson.”
Dad teed up his air Top-Flite, took his stance, and swung. “There,” he said. “Right over the sheds. Just like fifty years ago.”
I teed up my air Titleist and asked, “How fast did that fifty years go by?”
“Stick around. You won’t believe it.”
I struck my shot and outdrove him, as usual, by at least a hundred yards.
We walked down the darkened fairway side by side. For a change, I wasn’t really thinking about all the greats who had walked this way to immortality: Old Tom and Young. Taylor and Braid. Jones and Snead. Nicklaus and Lema. Ballesteros and Faldo. Watson, who had crossed this spot with a record-tying sixth Open within his grasp—to just miss.
I was thinking, instead, how simply fine and proper it was that my old man and I were finally playing the Road Hole together. Now came Opti and son.
From the heart of the fairway, Dad used an air three-wood to lay up short of the infamous Road Hole bunker. From the left rough, I swatted a beautiful air four-iron to the lower half of the green. We were playing our own games, if I may say so, magnificently.
He walked up to his air ball, just shy of the bunker, and announced he was using his air sand wedge, then lofted his ball sweetly to the green, stopping it within a few feet of the cup.
“Very nice,” I said. “Before we putt out, though, tell me about your birdie.”
He looked at me, then nodded solemnly at the bunker.
It took a few seconds for me to realize what he was telling me. He’d somehow made birdie from the Road Hole bunker!
“That’s unbelievable,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve never heard of anybody doing that.”
“It came as a major shock to me, too.”
I demanded that he describe in detail this miraculous little feat, on a par in my mind with anything Jones had done at Lytham or Palmer at Birkdale.
He said the details were kind of foggy, but he seemed to think the hole was considerably different back then. “For one thing, the bunker was a lot shallower than it is now. The sod wall was nowhere near as high as it is here. You could escape pretty easily with a decent shot.” He took a step closer, sizing up the wall, which was higher than a man’s head. “I don’t see how anybody could come out of this thing.”
He added that the pin he’d shot at that day fifty years ago was on the lower half of the green. The greens were thicker grass in those days, before modern lawn mowers came along. That made a big difference, too.
“You still made a hell of a shot,” I said to him. “And it wasn’t an air ball.”
“No,” he said a little wistfully, “it wasn’t. Sometimes, though, it takes on the quality of a dream. Perhaps, I simply imagined it.”
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
We putted out rather quickly. I made an uncharacteristically fine air lag from the lower part of the green and tapped in for four—a brilliant air par! Dad sank a clutch five-footer to halve the hole.
“Two air pars on the hardest hole in golf,” I said as we shook hands.
We walked to the eighteenth tee, struck fine drives into the darkness, then moseyed down the fairway of the most famous finishing hole in golf, crossing the little arched stone bridge. For weeks I’d been so fearful of this moment, anticipating how awful I would feel when it finally arrived. But strangely, I wasn’t the least bit sad now. I was cold as blazes but almost unnaturally happy to be finishing a round of golf that only I would ever remember. No card would ever show the score. Our match would vanish into the air.
“Call me sentimental if you like,” my father said, taking my arm as we approached the Valley of Sin, the dangerous swale that guards the front of the eighteenth green. “I think it’s been a hell of a journey.”
“You’re just being sentimental,” I replied. “The showers were much worse than expected.”
“You’re talking about the trip,” he said. “I’m talking about the journey.”
—
The next morning, I drove my father to the airport in Edinburgh for a dawn commuter flight to London. We decided to leave St. Andrews before finding out if we’d made it through the Old Course ballot that third day. Three times might have been a charm, but nothing could have topped the round of air golf we’d played the evening before.
On the way to the airport, my father proposed to me that I finish our golf trip alone, push on to Islay and France to see what I could find. I told him that was pointless without him, but by the time we’d crossed the Forth Road Bridge, he’d persuaded me to change my mind. I agreed to go on for a
nother week or so.
At the airport, a boisterous group of Scottish teenagers were headed for Texas. The scene was one of tearful mayhem. The kids were whooping it up excitedly, and the moist-eyed parents were desperately attempting to check bags, collect hugs, and issue brilliant nuggets of travel wisdom.
It vaguely reminded me of the day my father drove me to the airport to fly to Europe for the first time. Then something else really brought that moment rushing back. I glanced at my watch.
“Son of a gun,” I said. “It’s stopped again.” My watches always stopped when I needed them to run. Perhaps because I always wore fifty-dollar watches—watches you could toss into a golf bag or briefcase and never think twice about losing them.
“Here,” Dad said, unbuckling his, “take mine. I don’t need it anymore. Besides, I’ve been meaning to give it back to you for a while.”
It was the ugly blue Seiko watch he’d given me twenty years before for college graduation. He’d been caretaking it all these years, and I’d never even really noticed. I looked at it now and shook my head. It really wasn’t ugly at all. In fact, it was classy blue and almost elegant. “Holy cow. I was just thinking about that watch,” I told him.
“Well, put it on, dummy,” he insisted. I took mine off and strapped his on.
I kissed my father on the cheek, and he kissed me. We hugged, and then he was walking away, leaving a whiff of his Aramis aftershave, falling in step with a gawky fifteen-year-old girl carrying a Pearl Jam backpack and a small black boom box. I saw him speak to her and saw her turn her head to a friend, a shorter girl on her right. Both girls giggled, and then the shorter girl skipped around to my father’s unaccompanied side and took his arm. I half expected to see her stick out her palm.
Opti was up to his old tricks.
TWELVE
La Forêt de l’Amour
Six weeks later, my father suffered a stroke.
I was seated beside him at the Thanksgiving table in Greensboro, when food suddenly started tumbling out of his mouth. At first I thought it was a messy gag designed to amuse his grandchildren, and obviously they did, too. Maggie and Jack immediately burst out giggling as the adult conversation ebbed away. I remember looking at Alison; she looked so sad.
By the time we got him to the emergency room at the hospital, his blood pressure was two hundred over sixty, a runaway train. They placed us in a curtained alcove next to a man whose girlfriend had stabbed him in the abdomen with a kitchen knife.
“What are we doing here?” Dad quietly asked me. Memory loss often accompanies a stroke.
I took his hand. It was unusually cold. His breathing was shallow and labored, his skin splotchy pink and pale.
“Waiting for a guy to come check out your heart,” I said.
“Oh.” He added, calmly: “Where’s your mother?”
I explained she was out in the emergency room lobby harassing the hospital staff, trying to separate the heart specialist from his Thanksgiving dinner.
“Is it Thanksgiving?” he asked.
“Yep.” I explained I knew it was Thanksgiving because we’d played golf that morning at Sedgefield. Some American males traditionally watch football in a turkey-induced stupor; we play golf on the nation’s turkey day. I was pleased our actual final round hadn’t been at St. Andrews but at Sedgefield, where he’d first walked onto a golf course as a caddy seventy years ago. We’d finished where he’d begun the game.
“How’d we do?”
I said we did okay. The course had been deserted. I shot 79. He’d played every other hole, made some nice putts as usual. We passed some men playing with their daughters and sons. We talked about his work and mine. We saw the Tracy house. It looked much smaller than I remembered.
He asked me where I’d been traveling. Speaking seemed to be a strain for him. I explained that I’d just come from Fort Worth, where I’d spent a nice afternoon talking with Byron Nelson. It was the anniversary of Nelson’s eleven straight PGA wins in 1945, one of which occurred at Greensboro, and I was writing a piece for Golf about that.
“You have a job men would die for,” he whispered.
“Are you trying to get my job?”
He managed a dim smile. “Funny boy. Keep that sense of humor. You’ll need it.” He closed his eyes and then opened them again.
“Tell me about the rest of the trip,” he said, pausing to take a breath. “I mean Islay and France.”
I hadn’t brought up the trip to him while we were playing that day. I pulled up a chair and sat down, still holding his hand.
After dropping him at the airport, I said, I’d driven into Edinburgh and looked up Torquil MacNaughton. Torquil was the son of Kate Bennie’s best childhood chum, Margaret Ann, who now went by Lady MacNaughton because her husband, Calum, a Glasgow University professor and physician, had been knighted by the Queen. Torquil, who worked for the Bank of Scotland and had once played all five of Scotland’s British Open courses on the same day (“It was for a charity fund raiser, we had to use a helicopter, sunrise to sunset. I wish I could remember most of it….”), graciously declared a golfer’s holiday upon my arrival and drove me to the Dalmahoy Golf Club, where the European Solheim Cup squad had recently mashed their American female counterparts into the mud. We played a close but friendly match, our own version of the Solheim-Ryder Cup feud, that fittingly came down to our final shots at eighteen. I laid a pitching wedge shot two feet from the cup on my approach, and Torquil impudently placed his shot a foot inside that. I congratulated him, called him a cheeky bastard, and conceded the putt. He thanked me, said it took one to know one, and conceded mine—nicely reversing the roles of Nicklaus and Jacklin at their famous Ryder Cup finish in 1969. We shook hands and had a beer and agreed to settle the issue on my next trip through town, perhaps even slipping over to the Old Course where Torquil, during his distant university days at St. Andrews, obviously got to play far too much golf.
Next I went to Williamwood Golf Club in Glasgow, Kate Bennie’s father’s club, a middle-class club you entered through the car park of a Shell station. There I hooked up with three older members who squabbled with each other about the big upcoming soccer match between the city’s archrival professional teams, the Rangers and the Celtic. At one point, the one named Billy insisted I turn and wave to a small figure standing at the upper window of a Victorian row house at least a quarter of a mile away. I dutifully waved. The figure waved vigorously back. “That’s ma’ loovely wife Helen,” Billy said proudly. “She always likes to see who I’m playin’ with.” “What Billy means,” chipped in the one named John, “is Helen always likes to see that Billy’s not playin’ with any lay-dee members.” We all had a good laugh.
The next day I’d taken a flight through heavy fog over to Islay and met Murdo Macpherson, a bald, charming hotelier who could have passed for Sean Connery’s younger brother and shuttled his own guests around town in a mud-splattered van. Bouncing through potholes at alarming speed on the way to the hotel, a stark white structure set down among several rustic self-catering cottages on the vast peat barrens of the island’s beautifully stark west side, Murdo explained that Nick Faldo had decided not to purchase the Machrie Hotel and Golf Club, apparently in part because the island’s current air service could accommodate only seventy paying customers a day. According to Murdo, Japanese businessmen—the Japanese owned two of the eight major distilleries on the island—accounted for a large number of the occupied seats in the daily flights, and Faldo obviously had a grander retreat in mind. “Considering all of the rather unfavorable press the man has received, I found him quite pleasant to converse with,” Murdo explained. “We struck no deal, but I think it’s safe to say he found the links out back quite beguiling.”
If he didn’t, I soon found myself thinking, Brother Nick ought to find another line of work. The Machrie course was a rough-cut gem, everything I could have hoped for in an unspoiled seaside links, as remote and challenging as anything I’d ever played, featuring tumbling fairways,
punchbowl greens, and at least half a dozen blind approach shots over heaving eruptions of earth to hidden greens. A place of freedom and solitude but, in a word, the average American country clubber’s living nightmare.
Laid out by Willie Campbell of Musselburgh in 1891 and revised by Donald Steel in the 1980s, the Machrie was once seriously considered as an Open championship venue until it was decided that the two-day journey from the mainland would exhaust players and spectators alike. Overjoyed by my discovery, I played the Machrie three times in two days, through gales of wind and rain and periods of such tranquil sunshine, you could actually see the coast of Northern Ireland rising up like a fairy kingdom thirty miles away.
Being a devoted fan of “blind” holes—no less than Tommy Armour, who once growled that anyone who doesn’t care for them is no true fan of golf—my favorite Machrie test was hole number seven, a 395-yard par-four that almost defies proper description. You tee off in a little dell, aiming for…well, where exactly? An immense dune rises fifty feet above you, and no fairway is visible in any direction. Your target on this masterpiece of mental torture turns out to be a zigzag of overgrown footpaths winding whimsically up the dune. Beyond the shaggy peak lies an uneven fairway that tumbles pell-mell down to a sunken green concealed by a low ridge. A broad dune behind the green provides the only perspective for the scary approach shot. Jim Finegan aptly calls Machrie’s seventh “grand opera, though some may call it opéra bouffe.” The Paps of Jura rise in one direction, the Mull of Oa in another. Most players I know would call it the toughest hole they never want to see again. I call it heaven.
In golf heaven, of course, there are no crowded links, and fittingly, I spotted only two other players on the course during my visit. One of them was a local boy and his dog. The other was Murdo, getting in a quick few holes during an afternoon lull before the hotel dining room opened for dinner. He spotted me and waved. I informed him I was madly in love with his seventh hole. “Glad to hear it,” he said, “but it’s only mine on paper. The links belongs to the game, not to me.”
