The Golfer's Carol

by Robert Bailey

  “Damn, Clark. Four in a row. Have you thought about the tournaments you’re going to play on tour next year?” His grin widened.

  “Still got eleven holes left,” I heard myself say, feeling my stomach twist into knots and knowing that this was the real me. I remembered now.

  “The hard part of this dirt track is over,” he said, and now I remembered his name. Dewey Barnett. He’d played the tour for a couple of years and lost his card. He’d regained his form and was well ahead of me by this point in the qualifying. He was all but in, but he knew I was on the bubble. He was a loudmouth who liked to stick around after rounds and wax poetic about his two years playing on the tour and the round he’d played with Arnold Palmer. I hadn’t liked him much, and I remembered being frustrated that there were so many good golfers who seemed to share Dewey’s attributes. Slightly overweight, drank too much, and certainly no rocket scientist or brain surgeon. But the bastard made everything on the greens. If he was ten feet from the hole, the ball was going in.

  “And this hole is a piece of cake,” Dewey added.

  I looked down the fairway and agreed. A straight three-hundred-fifty-yard par four with a fairway as wide as an apartment complex. The only trouble was some trees that lined the left side. Still, I felt my arms tense. I also felt Dewey’s piercing eyes on me.

  I snatched the club back too quick during my backswing. I felt it immediately. Then, as the downswing began, I felt my hands moving in front of me, beginning to roll over too soon. I tried to hold up, but it was no use. When I made contact with the ball, it soared into the air and took an immediate left turn. The ball went deep into the trees on the left, and that was when I saw the white out-of-bounds stakes.

  “Snapper,” I heard Dewey say to the left of me. I glanced at him, and the grin had lessened a little but not much.

  I had hit the dreaded snap hook, sometimes called a duck hook. It was literally the only shot I could possibly have hit that would have gotten me in trouble. I could have missed the fairway by one hundred yards to the right and still been in play.

  “Tough break, Clark,” Dewey said, but there was no empathy in his voice. I thought now of all the men I had played with over the years—in high school and college and on the mini tours—who loved nothing better than to needle you. That was part of the game, and the men on the Twickenham Country Club Big Team were professionals at it. Yet I still acutely felt the embarrassment and shame that I had endured those many years ago. I stuck my tee in the ground and placed my ball on it. I rose up and glanced at Dewey Barnett, bracing for his sharklike grin, but he was gone, and Johnnie was back. So was Bobby Jones. I could smell the scent of cigarettes.

  “Remember it now?” Bob asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What happened next?” Bob asked, speaking in the tone of a high school teacher who already knows the answer.

  “Re-teed and blistered one down the fairway. Hit a wedge to about ten feet and two-putted for double bogey.” I shrugged. “Could’ve been worse. After the penalty stroke, I played the hole in par.”

  “Could’ve,” Bob agreed. “Would it surprise you to know that only three players bogeyed that hole during all six rounds and that you were the only player in the field who carded a double bogey?”

  I gazed down at the ball. “That sounds like something my dad probably said after the round. ‘Randy, how in the world did you manage to double-bogey the easiest hole on the course?’”

  “Well . . . how did you?” Bob asked, and there was the slightest tease in his voice.

  I looked up at him. “Because I let Dewey get to me. I’ve always let the needlers get to me.”

  He stepped closer to me. “I agree, but it goes deeper than that. You couldn’t handle success.” He gave me a kind smile. Unlike Dewey Barnett, Bob’s eyes did hold compassion. “Self-control is more than controlling your temper when things go bad. It’s managing your ego and your anxiety when things go good.”

  “How do you do that?”

  He shrugged. “There is no easy answer to that question.” His voice rose louder. “The bottom line, though, is that people who can control their emotions and anxiety, whether good or bad, happy or sad, have a better chance of success.” He paused and licked his lips. “Otherwise, you’re unstable. A tree with no roots. The least little change in emotional status acts like a gust of wind that knocks you off where you are trying to go.” He took a final drag on his cigarette and tossed it to the ground, stomping on it with his shoe. “Randy, I spent seven years letting my emotions knock me out of the winner’s circle. I was trying to beat the other players, but the only person I ended up beating was me.”

  “How did you overcome that?” He had me now. I was leaning toward him, eager to hear whatever the secret was. “How did you stop beating yourself?”

  “I hit rock bottom.”

  I cocked my head at him. “What does that mean?”

  But Bob had stopped looking at me and was now gazing down the fairway. The third hole at East Lake is a long and treacherous par four. “Birdie man is up,” he finally said, nodding at me to go ahead.

  14

  The next fifteen holes were a blur. I felt like our walks down the fairway and up to the green were accelerated. I knew I should probably try to enjoy the moment or “smell the roses,” as my mother liked to say, but it was no use.

  The eighteenth hole at East Lake is a two-hundred-yard par three that goes slightly uphill and is framed with the backdrop of the historic clubhouse to the left. I asked Johnnie for a three iron and watched as Bob teed his ball. I hadn’t thought much about my score during this round, but I believed I was even for the day. If I had to guess, Bob was around three or four under. The question that I had held under my breath since our conversation after my flashback to Q school finally came out as he was sizing up his shot. “So, we’re almost done here, Bob,” I said, kind of half chuckling in an attempt to make light of things. “Are you going tell me what rock bottom was for you?”

  He looked at me and then back up at the green. Ignoring my question, he approached his ball and, after taking his stance, hit a towering shot. I watched as the ball landed about fifteen feet to the right of the flag and came to rest even closer.

  “Nice shot,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Bob said, gazing up at the green and then letting out a long breath. “Rock bottom for me was 1921,” he said, gazing down at the grass.

  “The U.S. Amateur? Where you hit that lady?”

  He shook his head. “That was the appetizer. The main course was at St. Andrews in the Open Championship.”

  “What happened?”

  He peered up at me and smiled. “Come see for yourself.”

  I hesitated, wondering how it would happen this time. Bob’s smile widened, and he gestured with his index finger for me to approach him. “Nothing dramatic this time,” he said.

  When I was next to him, he put his arm around me and pointed at the ground. “Look down for a few seconds.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Now look up.”

  When I raised my eyes, my breath caught in my throat. Gone were the Tudor clubhouse of East Lake and the trees and undulating green fairways.

  I was standing in the middle of a vast barren landscape. The ground was hard-packed brown sod that resembled dirt more than grass. And I didn’t see a tree in sight. Instead, in the distance, I saw the grayish-blue water of the North Sea.

  “St. Andrews,” I whispered.

  “Aye,” Johnnie said, and I jerked my head toward him. The Scotsman was standing beside me. He hadn’t been along for the ride on the past two flashbacks, but he was for this one. “What are—”

  “There,” he interrupted, pointing behind me.

  I turned and saw young Bobby Jones striding toward us. His eyes were blank, and his face was pale. Sweat stood out on his forehead. When he stop
ped, I realized that we were standing on a tee box. I glanced to my right and saw a man holding a marker that read Hole 11. “That a six on the last hole?” Bob’s partner asked, a golfer whom I did not recognize.

  “Yes,” Bob said, and the irritation in his voice was palpable. As Bob’s playing companion wrote down the score, Johnnie pointed for me to look at the card. I stepped forward and my breath caught in my throat when I saw all the high numbers. “He’s playing awful,” I said.

  “Aye,” Johnnie agreed.

  I peered at Bob, who was now gazing down at the barren sod of the Old Course. He didn’t watch as his playing partner hit his drive. As Bob placed his tee in the ground, his demeanor was even worse than what I’d seen at the U.S. Open. Not only did he appear defeated, it was almost as if he didn’t care anymore. He took his swing and the ball headed right. The groans in the crowd told the story. I saw Bob snatch his tee out of the ground and hand his club to his caddy without looking. Johnnie and I followed after them, as did the hundreds of spectators who lined both sides of the fairway.

  Bob stopped at his ball in a thicket of weeds. Seconds later, he took a mighty swing, but the ball stayed put. Bob took another hack at the ball. This time, it came out of the brush but only a few yards and then disappeared again into the weeds.

  “Good grief,” I said, looking around and seeing the spectators’ eyes all zone in on Bob. Many of them were shaking their heads. There were mostly frowns, but also a few smiles. The smiles weren’t malicious, but rather the expression of someone who had also been bitten by St. Andrews’s teeth. I watched Bob swing his club in frustration at where his ball had just been, sending another clod of weeds into the air. He cursed, and his shoulders sagged. He trudged forward to where the ball had come to rest and then looked across the fairway. I followed his line of sight and saw his playing partner standing next to his own ball with his hands on his hips, clearly waiting for Bob to hit again. Bob had swung twice and not advanced the ball past his partner. He was still “out” and would have to hit again.

  Bob took his grip and aligned his feet. Seemingly without even looking at the hole, he swung and finally hit the ball flush. It arced in a right-to-left curve toward the hole and found the front of the green. Bob handed the club back to his caddy without a word of acknowledgment.

  He’s done, I thought. He’s beaten himself again.

  After Jones’s partner hit his shot onto the green, Bob took a cursory glance at his ball and hit his putt several feet past the hole. Telling his partner he’d finish, he walked briskly up to the ball. Get off the field. I heard my father’s admonition again in my mind, and I could tell Bob was thinking the same thing. Glancing at the hole, Bob lined up his body and putted. He followed behind the ball, clearly expecting it to go in. But instead of falling in the hole, the ball caught the lip and rimmed out. Bob stared at the ball like it had betrayed him in some way. Then, instead of knocking the ball in the cup, he leaned over and . . .

  “No,” I said out loud, but my words were of little use. I stood powerless as the great Bobby Jones picked his ball up. He walked toward his playing partner and extended his hand. The other man hesitated a moment but finally grasped Bob’s hand. The look on his face was one of shock and disappointment. As I looked around the green and down the fairway at the spectators, I saw the same expression on most of their faces. Many of them had also become red-faced with anger.

  “He’s quit,” a man said. “Bobby has quit.”

  Picking up his ball before the hole had been completed served as an automatic disqualification. Bobby Jones had indeed quit. I ran toward Bob as he walked in the opposite direction of the hole. “You can’t do that,” I screamed at him. “These people came to see you play. You’re Bobby Jones, for Christ’s sake.” But Bob continued to walk, his pace even brisker. When we entered the clubhouse, I expected to see the pro shop or a nineteenth hole, but instead we weren’t at St. Andrews anymore.

  We were now in a small room. There was a bed in the middle of it, and I thought of the scene I had witnessed with Darby Hays in the hotel room in Florida the day my son was buried.

  This scene was different. There was no woman in the room. Bob sat on the bed in the otherwise spare room with his face in his hands. He appeared to be crying. When he finally lifted his head and his hands dropped away, I could see another emotion in the man’s sunken eyes.

  Shame.

  “When you quit, regardless of whether it’s a game or your life, it marks the ultimate loss of self-control.” I turned and saw the shadow of Bob in the corner of the room. He had lit another cigarette and his face was illuminated for a moment by the glow of the match’s ignition. “This was rock bottom for me,” he said. “My family and friends were ashamed of me, and the sportswriters crucified me.” He took a drag off the cigarette and cleared his throat. “I quit, and I had to deal with the shame of it wherever I went for the rest of my life.”

  “But you won,” I said. “You won soon after this, didn’t you?”

  “I won the 1923 U.S. Open. That was over two years later.”

  I took a step closer to him and thought of the looks on the people’s faces that I had just seen. The anger and outrage. I couldn’t think of anything worse for a golfer to do than pick up his ball during a round and quit.

  “There isn’t anything worse,” Bob said, again reading my thoughts.

  “How could you recover from that? How did you recover?”

  He took a drag off his cigarette and then pulled back the curtains on the window in the room. “Look.”

  I peered out the window and into the darkness, seeing nothing. “What am I looking for?”

  “Watch,” Bob said.

  I kept my eyes on the glass in front of me. For a full minute, the scenery didn’t change. Then, ever so faintly, I noticed a light in the distance. It started low in the east and slowly began to rise.

  I glared at Bob. “You’re doing it again.”

  “What?”

  “Patronizing me with clichés. What is this one? Even as bad as things were, the sun still came up. Is that the lesson? Did you jump off this bed, throw open the window, and know that you were going to win thirteen majors? Maybe you saw a young man carrying a duck and asked him to cook it for the playing partner and fans you bailed on the day before? Old Ebenezer learns his lesson when he sees the sun?” I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, I headed toward the door. But when I tried to open it, I found it locked. I turned around and pointed at Bob. “I want out of here. I’m tired of this mess.”

  But the ghost in the corner was gone. Instead, the only person I saw in the room was the Bob Jones still lying in the bed. He was gazing out the window with sad eyes. “They’ll never let me live it down,” I heard him whisper.

  Then, from behind me, I heard another match flicker. I turned back to the door, and the ghost of Jones was standing in front of it.

  “The sun came up and I was just as depressed as before, but the cliché, as you call it, still holds true. The sun did come up. It came up each day for the next twenty-four and a half months. I went home. I took the criticism on the chin, but I kept playing. I may have quit at St. Andrews, but I didn’t quit the game. I didn’t quit on life.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I kept trying. I knew that I had to control my temper and my emotions if I was ever going to win, and I eventually did.”

  “How?”

  Bob smiled. “Part of it was maturity. I’m only twenty years old over there. I’d played a lot of golf but hadn’t lived enough life.” He paused and walked around me to the window. “You know that joke you just made about Scrooge calling for the boy with the duck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here,” he said, continuing to gaze out the window.

  I sighed but did as he asked.

  “Look,” he said, pointing down to the street. “What do you see?”
<
br />   I shrugged. “People.”

  “People doing what?”

  “Come on, Bob, this is—”

  “Answer the question.” He cut me off and grabbed my upper arm.

  I again lowered my eyes to the road below. “There is a couple walking with a kid in between them. An old man talking to another old man.” I squinted. “Looks like a store owner is sweeping the walk out in front of his business.”

  “And beyond the street below the hotel. Look over there.” He pointed toward the historic St. Andrews Clubhouse. I saw golf bags being carried by caddies and what looked to be players putting on the practice green.

  “Players and caddies showing up for another round,” I said. “So what?” I asked, ripping my arm out of his grasp.

  “So what?” he repeated, smiling up at me. “So, life goes on, Randy. I quit this golf tournament yesterday, and I’m moping over there on the bed in my sorrows, but those people down there”—he pointed again—“haven’t stopped living. They are going about their business just like they would have if I hadn’t quit yesterday. The golf tournament . . . the Open Championship . . . will also go on, and a local fellow named Jock Hutchison, born right here in St. Andrews, will win it.” He paused and put his strong hands on my shoulders. “The tournament went on. Life . . . did go on.” He turned and gazed at the twenty-year-old version of himself, who was peering up at the ceiling with a blank stare. “But there I am. Lost in my own little world of despair and defeat.” He chuckled. “I’m not sure when I decided that the world didn’t revolve around me. At some point, though, I realized that no matter how bad quitting the tournament had been, it wasn’t near as awful as I had thought.” He stopped and pulled back from me, and there was a glint in his eye. “Things are rarely as bad . . . or as good . . . as they seem.”