I reread the passage, and any irritation I’d felt toward my friend dissipated. Darby had never said anything to me about his desire to have children or the problems he and Charlotte were having conceiving a child. I thought back to what Charlotte had said at the funeral. He wanted other things too . . . but we couldn’t . . .
I closed the binding and gazed around the empty locker room, feeling a sharp sense of sadness. My friend’s journal reflected a life saturated with regret and loss, which he had kept hidden from me.
Finally, I stuck the diary under my arm and grabbed the box. Then, sighing and taking a last look at Darby’s locker, I headed back to the pro shop.
* * *
—
When I reached the door, the young attendant who had taken me to the locker room an hour earlier opened it for me.
“All done, Mr. Clark?”
“Yeah, son,” I said. “Do you think you could have someone run this box out to Mrs. Hays’s house?”
He smiled and nodded. “I’ll do it myself, sir.”
I was turning to leave, the diary in my hand, when the boy’s voice stopped me.
“Mr. Clark?”
I looked back at him, trying not to appear impatient. I was so ready to get out of there. “Yeah?”
“There was a man who came in looking for you earlier . . . while you were going through Mr. Hays’s things. He said he would wait out by the driving range.”
“Did he say what he needed?”
The boy shook his head. “Only that you would want to talk with him.”
I sighed. What now? “Did he leave a name?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “Ben.”
I narrowed my gaze. “Ben? That’s it?”
The kid nodded. “He said you would know him.”
20
I think I knew who “Ben” would be even before I walked out of the pro shop.
He said you would know him . . .
Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of a single “Ben” that I had been acquainted with in my life who would possibly want to talk with me on the Shoal Creek Golf Club driving range at three p.m. on a Friday. As I began to walk down the paved path to the driving range, the feeling of knowing the man waiting for me only intensified. It’s happening again, I thought, as I felt the landscape to the side of me begin to shift and change. Before my eyes, the vast putting green in front of the clubhouse faded into a wide-open expanse. The men I had seen below the clubhouse, playing Shoal’s signature fourteenth hole, also disappeared from view. I wheeled, and the brick façade of the clubhouse was gone too. For a moment, the world turned dark, and then, as if the sun had begun to rise much faster than normal, I saw freshly cut green grass in all directions. There were a few trees, but nothing like the scenery at Shoal Creek. Turning 360 degrees, I felt like I was in a large green prairie. The many elevation changes that were present at Shoal Creek were gone. This ground was much flatter, though up ahead, where the driving range at Shoal had been a few seconds earlier, I saw a small hill. At the top of this crest was a tree.
In its shade a man was hitting golf balls alone.
“Sweet mother of God,” I whispered. The man was slightly built. He couldn’t be more than five feet, eight inches tall and around 140 or 150 pounds. He wore brown tailored slacks, black golf shoes, and a gray cardigan sweater over a white golf shirt.
On his head, he wore a white ivy cap. Some folks called it an ascot, a cabbie cap, or a duckbill cap. In my lifetime, I had simply called it the same thing my father had.
A Ben Hogan cap . . . The signature headpiece worn by one of the greatest golfers to ever live. My father had owned only one golf picture. It was of Ben Hogan, holding his follow-through, after hitting a one iron on the eighteenth hole at Merion. The shot had landed on the green and clinched a playoff spot for Hogan in the 1950 U.S. Open, which he would eventually win. Some called it the greatest pressure shot ever hit in competition.
As I approached closer, I felt my heartbeat racing. I looked behind me and saw part of a fairway and a tee box. In the distance, I saw the top of the flag of another hole. I was on a golf course, but it wasn’t Shoal Creek Golf Club in Birmingham, Alabama. I turned back to the figure hitting balls under the tree. The first instructional book I’d ever read on golf was Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. And now here he was, the man himself, in living color. Or dreamlike color. Whatever. He had taken his stance and cocked his head toward a target in the distance. I followed his eyes, noticing the intense concentration. His peers had given Hogan the nickname “Hawk,” and it was easy to see why. He waggled the club, again peering at the target. Then he swung, and I marveled at seeing his signature flat backswing, the pronounced lateral slide from his right leg to his left and the speed of his hips and hands as he fired through the ball. The pace of his move was brisk, but the confidence with which he brought the clubhead to impact was palpable. When he struck the ball, it sounded like a cannon going off, and I followed the arc of the shot until it landed about one hundred fifty yards down the fairway. There was a chair that he’d set there for a target, and from what I could tell, he’d hit about fifty balls all within five feet of the chair.
As he held his follow-through, I took a step forward and cleared my throat. “Mr. Hogan?”
He continued to look at where his ball had landed, and I felt as if he hadn’t heard me at all. He glanced down at his divot, then back to the target. Finally, he set the club against the tree and lit a cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke out of his mouth and inspected me. When he did, I felt my stomach clinch. I had been in awe of Bobby Jones, but being in the presence of Hogan was different. Jones had been friendly. Approachable. Even amiable.
The man peering at me now with his Hawk-like gray eyes beneath the brim of his cap was none of those things. There was a coldness to the man’s gaze.
“Why are you here?” he asked. His voice was firm, direct, and even cooler than his glare.
I forced a chuckle. “I don’t know. I—”
“Yes, you do,” he snapped, taking a drag from his cigarette. The coldness of his initial tone had been replaced with impatience.
I licked my lips and decided to get right to it. “I was visited by the ghost of my dead friend, Darby Hays, a couple of nights ago. He said I’d be given a great gift. I’d get to play a round of golf with four of my heroes.” I paused, noticing that Hogan’s face remained utterly expressionless. “I believe that each hero has a lesson to share with me.”
For a long moment, perhaps five seconds, Hogan said nothing, and his face remained stoic. Then, finally, he smirked. He dropped his cigarette and stomped it out. He rolled another ball over from the bucket that he’d dropped in front of the tree. He carefully nudged the ball to the front of a divot that must have been two feet long. No telling how many balls he’s hit to produce that long a divot, I thought.
He glanced down the fairway at the chair, waggled the club, and launched another shot. This one clanged off the plastic seat. A perfect shot that might have gone in the hole if there had been a hole there.
“Great shot!” I said.
He held his follow-through and didn’t acknowledge the compliment.
“What club are you hitting?” I asked, trying to break the ice.
Still without looking at me, he said, “Seven iron.”
“You have a beautiful swing,” I said, feeling lame as soon as the words left my mouth.
He smirked again. “No, I don’t. What I have is a functional swing. The only beauty in it is that it works.”
I smiled. “Some folks would call any swing that works beautiful.”
He didn’t smile, but his eyes creased a bit. Could the ice be thawing? “Perhaps,” he admitted.
I took in a deep breath. “So, where are we?”
“Shady Oaks Country Club. Fort Worth, Texas.”
&
nbsp; The name rang a bell. “Is this where you grew up playing?”
“No. I learned how to play as a caddy at Glen Gardens, a little south of here.”
I bit my lip, half wishing my father were here. He knew the Hogan backstory a lot better than I did, but now I remembered. Shady Oaks was the club that Hogan helped found in the late 1950s after the thrust of his playing career was over. “Why here?” I asked.
He pierced me with another glare. “Because I like it here.”
I nodded and steeled my nerves. “So . . . are we going to play?”
“Tell me about your first round.”
“Well . . . I . . .” I wasn’t sure where to start. “It was the craziest thing. I pulled into the old Monrovia Golf Course and when I stepped inside, the place transf—”
“Just give me the lesson,” he snapped. “What did you learn from your time with Mr. Jones?”
I cocked my head at Hogan’s ghost, a bit taken aback by his calling one of his peers “Mr.”
“Self-control,” I finally said. “The point of . . . Mr. Jones’s lesson was that I needed to learn how to control my emotions. My temper. My thoughts.” I paused. “Everything.”
Hogan said nothing. He rolled another ball over and, without any acknowledgment of me, he made his patented swing. The ball again landed square in the seat of the chair one hundred fifty yards away.
I shook my head in awe. “That’s unbelievable,” I said.
“What is?” he asked, his voice harsh, as he continued to hold his follow-through.
“You hit the chair twice in a row.”
“That’s my target, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to upset the man . . . or ghost . . . any further. He seemed on edge, ready to pounce at any wrong word that might come out of my mouth.
“Mr. Jones was a great man,” Hogan said, moving another ball to the front of his divot and gazing down at it. “And he’s right. A person has to stop beating himself before he can win.” He paused and took his stance. “And that starts with self-control.” He swung and launched another shot into the afternoon air. This time, I wasn’t even surprised when the ball clanged off the chair. “But that’s not enough.”
“What do you mean?”
Hogan set his club against the tree and lit another cigarette. After blowing a smoke cloud into the air, he scowled at me. Though I was getting used to the coldness of the man’s gaze, the intensity behind his eyes still caused my stomach to tighten.
“Is self-control going to bring your boy back?”
I felt heat on my cheeks and behind my eyes.
“Is it?”
I swallowed, and, for a moment, I could smell the disinfectant from the hospital room. It was an hour after Graham’s body had been moved out, and we were getting his things. Housekeeping had already been in, and the tile floors and bathroom reeked of the lemony scents of different cleansers. My boy was gone, and that room was going to be occupied by another patient. Some other poor wretch who would live or die based on the judgment of medical providers and the grace of God.
“No,” I whispered.
“You can control your thoughts. You can have complete mastery over your emotions.” Hogan seemed to be talking more to himself than me, but I was now hanging on every word. “But your boy ain’t coming back, Clark. He’s dead.”
Now I felt hot tears streaming down my cheeks, and my hands clenched into fists. Who does this guy think he is?
“You watched him die. You couldn’t do one thing for him.”
“I want you to shut up,” I said, feeling my legs and arms beginning to shake with anger. I forced my feet to move and I approached the tree, glaring at the other man.
“And now you’re going to kill yourself, aren’t you?” Hogan’s cold voice didn’t scare me anymore.
“It’s the best thing for my family.”
Hogan blew smoke in my face and took a step closer to me. “The best thing for your family?” He repeated my words in his harsh, arctic tone. It wasn’t sarcasm I heard in his voice, but something more sinister. Contempt?
“Mary Alice will be able to start over without a mountain of debt. The life insurance money will put Davis through college.” I paused and felt my lip beginning to tremble. I bit down on it. “They’ll both be better off without me.”
“You’re a fool,” Hogan said, and disgust seemed to ooze from his whole being.
Again, I clenched my hands into fists. I didn’t care if this man was a golfing legend anymore. Where does he get off treating me—
Hogan covered my fists with his hands and cut off my thoughts in an instant. I tried to wrangle away, but he was too strong. I remembered something I had heard Lee Trevino say about Hogan. That the man’s wrists were so thick it was like his forearms went straight to his hands. Looking down at the man’s huge paws now, I thought Trevino’s words might be an understatement.
“Look at me,” Hogan said.
The scent of disinfectant permeated my nostrils again. I didn’t want to go back there. Anywhere but that hospital room. I felt like if I looked at Hogan’s gray eyes, I was going to take another trip down memory lane, and I couldn’t handle it.
“Do it,” he instructed, squeezing my fists until I began to lose feeling in them.
“Please,” I begged, but his voice became even harsher.
“Do it.”
Finally, as I felt the bones in both of my hands beginning to give way, I did as I was told. I peered into the eyes of Ben Hogan.
21
It was as if my body leapt right through Hogan’s pupils. I felt myself losing my balance, and I fell forward on my knees. My hands, now free from the other man’s grasp, lurched forward and I caught myself on what felt like plywood flooring. I took a deep breath and peered at my surroundings. I was in the living room of a small house. I saw a man and a woman arguing. The man looked a little like Ben Hogan, though he was stockier, and his eyes were wide with anger. His demeanor was a striking contrast to the icy cool of the man I had just been talking to at Shady Oaks Country Club. What was this man saying? Something about going back to work? Back to Dublin? The words were coming to me as if they were being said underwater, and I rubbed my ears. I rose to my feet and everything came into better focus.
The room was tiny. There were a couple of chairs with a coffee table in front of them. The man appeared to be gritting his teeth, as the woman was saying that they needed to finish out the school year. “For the kids’ sake, Chester! Think of Royal and Ben.”
The man shook his head and gazed down at the floor. I followed his gaze and saw a newspaper lying on the table between the chairs. I leaned down to get a better look and read the words to myself: Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Monday, February 13, 1922.
I glanced back up at the couple. The woman was continuing to argue the virtues of staying in Fort Worth, but the man—Chester—didn’t appear to be listening. He was holding a bag in his hand. Behind the couple, moving his eyes between them, was a young boy.
The man finally sighed and walked away from the woman. She called after him, but he ignored her. The boy followed, and I did as well. The man had entered a bedroom. He had set the bag on the bed and unzipped it. I peeked inside the bag, already knowing what would be there. Still, the sight of the black .38 caliber revolver made my breath catch in my throat.
Ben Hogan’s father committed suicide . . .
It was part of the Hogan legend. No discussion of the quirky champion was complete without a mention of his father’s suicide. Most biographers had included that Ben Hogan witnessed the act. I glanced from the gun back to the young boy, who had stopped in the opening of the doorway. He had a pensive look on his face, as if he wanted to tell his father something but didn’t want to upset the man any further. No, I thought, examining the boy’s T-shirt and tattered slacks. The tennis shoes he w
ore on his feet. How old? I wondered, trying to remember what I had read in the stories on Hogan. Eight? Nine?
I turned back to the man, and he was reaching for the gun. I watched as he gripped the weapon and gazed at himself across the room. There was a mirror, and I could see the reflection of Chester Hogan’s gray eyes. They were the same color as his famous son’s, but I didn’t see the rigid firmness that I’d seen in the legendary golfer. This man looked lost. Whipped, as my father would say.
He brought the gun to his chest. “No!” I yelled, reaching my hand toward him. Then, not wanting to see, I turned to the boy. His own eyes had widened. His mouth hung open. The word Dad hung on his lips as he screamed, but I didn’t hear the boy’s voice.
It was drowned out by sound of the revolver firing behind me. I brought my hands to my ears, which were now ringing. The tone reminded me of the sound of the EKG machine when my son Graham had flatlined. I dropped to my knees, watching the terrified face of the boy. His mouth remained open, but his face had turned pale. Behind him, I saw the woman throw herself into the room and in front of the boy.
“Chester! Oh my God!” She turned around and looked at Ben, who continued to stand in the same spot. His expression had not changed.
Shock, I knew, feeling tears begin to stream down my face. He’s gone into shock.
The woman screamed again and ran out of the room. “Ben, come out of here now. I’m going to call the police.”
But the boy stayed put. He blinked a few times and gazed down at his unmoving father. Finally, the mother grabbed the boy around the arm and pulled him out of the room. I heard more screams and cries come from the living room, but the world was going dark. What’s happening?
I couldn’t see anything at all for a couple of seconds. “Mr. Hogan,” I asked, but then I could see light again. I was in the same living room where Chester Hogan and his wife had been arguing before. I could see the woman standing at the front door. Through the window adjacent to the door, I saw several cars outside. The woman was wearing a long black dress.
The Golfer's Carol Page 10
