Par for the Course

by Ray Blackston

  This fact was affirmed by a member of Lin’s gallery, who held up the homemade scoreboard and waved it for all to see. She had just updated the scores in black Magic Marker.

  On the way to the second tee, Lin strode ahead of me and spoke over her shoulder. “You’re now eleven strokes behind.”

  “I know that.”

  During the next five holes, her effort at conversation remained nil. I gained back two strokes in this stretch, though I was still nine behind when we teed off on #7. Thus after six holes the mobile scoreboard looked like this:

  #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9

  The Great Eve: 4 4 5 6 3 4

  Passive Adam: 5 4 5 4 4 3

  With the chants growing louder in between shots—Lin’s gallery seemed to sense a struggle—we matched scores on the next two holes.

  “Wonder what they’d call me if I were competing?” Cack asked as he toted the golf bag to the ninth tee.

  “Passive Adam’s crazy sexist uncle?”

  His reply was purely Cackish. “Just hit your little white ball, Adam.”

  By the time we reached the fairway on the ninth hole—a longish par five—I had labeled Lin’s game decent in some aspects and good in others, such as putting and driving accuracy. But she had yet to hit a ball into a sand bunker, and when finally she did this on her third shot to the green—plunging her ball deep into a cavernous half acre of sand—her gallery gasped.

  Inexplicably, Lin took six strokes to get her ball out of that bunker. Sand flew everywhere. She chopped at that ball as if it were the poisonous male cousin of the talking snake. She’d taken three shots to get into the sand, six to get out, and then two putts on the green. I made a birdie. Thus as we completed the first nine holes, the scoreboard looked like this:

  #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 Total

  The Great Eve: 4 4 5 6 3 4 5 4 11 46

  Passive Adam: 5 4 5 4 4 3 5 4 4 38

  Her blunder had allowed me to make up eight strokes of the ten-stroke deficit, which gave me at least some degree of confidence. Now, halfway into the match, Passive Adam felt he could show some initiative in this garden of Bermuda and salt marsh.

  Or could he?

  What happened next can only be blamed on the serpent’s visit to the Carolina low country. Here the talking snake had reconnected with Eve and imputed into her his favorite agenda—personal gain and blatant manipulation.

  The TV reporter stopped me beneath a mammoth oak, somewhere between the ninth green and the tenth tee. She was a blonde in an electric blue skirt, and I had not noticed her in the gallery. Her bright outfit and long blonde hair would surely have stood out among all that black. But there she came with microphone in hand, slithering tongue in mouth, saying she wanted to ask me a few questions. At first I figured the assistant pro, Joey, was just having some fun and had called a friend from the local news.

  But the lady’s first question told me I was wrong about her motivation. She pulled the microphone to her lips and made an “okay” signal with her left hand. That’s when I noticed a camerawoman had crept up behind us.

  I elbowed Cack, who was standing beside me with the golf bag still on his shoulder, trying to make sense of the media invasion. Channel 8 News? There was no Channel 8 News in Charleston.

  The reporter smiled at the camera and said, “I have with me one Chris Hackett, owner of Hack’s Golf Learning Center here in Charleston.”

  I nodded, appreciative of her identifying my name and business early in the interview. Great for advertising, I figured.

  But then her tone changed.

  “Is it not true, Mr. Hackett, that once a week you encourage your customers—including many teenagers—to strike golf balls with the intention of hitting someone in a moving golf cart?”

  Beside me holding the golf bag upright, Cack cocked his head to the side, eyes wide with surprise. I looked at Cack and did likewise before turning my attention back to the reporter. “Well it’s not quite like that, ma’am. You see—”

  “The cart is moving, is it not, Mr. Hackett?” Her expression was stern. Her camerawoman moved closer.

  “Um, yes. Yes it is.”

  “And teenagers are involved in this violent behavior?”

  “Yes, they are,” I stammered, trying to summon sarcasm within what used to be shade. “There are definitely teenagers involved in this very, very violent behavior.”

  The reporter was crafty. “You mean you agree that you promote violence?”

  Cack to the rescue. He leaned in between us and turned to where the camera would catch his unshaven profile. “Oh yes, ma’am. In fact, you should also include in your report a warning to alert animal rights groups to the fact that innocent earthworms are savagely cut in half by the descending blows of 5-irons swung violently on the golf range owned by the radical capitalistic bigot, Chris Hackett.”

  She actually took out a pen and scribbled notes. “Was that 5-irons or 6-irons?” she asked without looking up.

  “Actually, both,” Cack replied and mugged for the camera. “Both a 5-iron and a 6-iron will rip the body of an earthworm clean in half.”

  Still jotting, she shuddered, perhaps to return the sarcasm.

  Cack shifted the golf bag onto his left shoulder and moved closer to the reporter, invading her personal space. In an ultraserious voice he said into her mic, “Ma’am, I’ve seen so many decapitated earthworms on golf ranges that I fear the viewings have dulled me to the harshness of death itself.”

  I pinched my nose to keep from snorting out loud. Sometimes the only way to deal with a manipulator is to play the part of a smart aleck—and the Cackster deserved an Emmy.

  Lin and her gallery had gathered around the tenth tee, and most of them were laughing. This should not have surprised me, this so-called interview and the attempt at gamesmanship, er, gameswomanship.

  Sweaty and disgusted, I remained under the oak and glared at the reporter. “You were hired by Lin? A paid distractor?”

  She turned and walked away, her camerawoman right behind her. Under the moss and limbs her reply was weak. “I cannot reveal my employer,” she said.

  After a pit stop for cold Gatorades, Cack handed me one of the bottles and slumped toward the tenth tee, the bag heavy on his shoulder. He twisted off the cap of his bottle and gulped with a Southern tenacity that I tried to copy but could not.

  “C’mon, Chris,” he said, “let’s go win one for American manhood.”

  More determined than ever, I strode into the sunlight and eyed the fairway of the tenth hole. At the tee box the pro-Lin spectators parted and let us through. A few giggles lingered around us, and warm whiffs of fertilizer rose from the turf of Yeamans Hall Club.

  Before I teed off on the tenth hole, I glanced at Lin and pointed with my club at the tree where the reporter had interviewed me. “Nice try.”

  Her gaze never left the ground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Chris.”

  That was the last thing she said to me for a long while. Her minions, however, were a different story.

  For the next hour and a half Cack and I endured taunts, wild speculations about our love lives, and, on three occasions, lipstick tubes flung at my golf ball as I prepared to swing. The worst breech of etiquette occurred in the long grass alongside the fourteenth fairway—after we’d helped Lin look for her ball, Cack returned to my golf bag only to discover that someone had squirted liquid hand soap down the shafts and onto the grips of my clubs.

  Retaliation was not an option—no way was I getting into a mudslinging war with all these women. Plus, I had no way of knowing if Lin had ordered such misconduct or if a member of the gallery had acted of her own accord. So Cack and I took the high road. We found a water cooler behind the next green and spent ten minutes cleaning the grips.

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered and dried the last club with his towel.

  To her credit, Lin had avoided hitting into more sand bunkers and made a couple of long putts, which were greeted with mass hysteria, not to ment
ion some manic scoreboard pumping by the scorekeeper. After I holed a twenty-foot putt at the seventeenth—which was greeted with pure silence—the updated scoreboard read:

  #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 Total

  The Great Eve: 46 5 4 6 4 5 5 3 4

  Passive Adam: 38 4 5 6 3 6 4 3 3

  So far, Lin had taken a total of 82 strokes, and I had taken 72. Minus her ten shot allowance, we were now tied, with one hole left to play.

  Cack hoisted the bag over his shoulder and mumbled something about wishing we would have rented a cart. I could tell he’d grown tired of being in the sun—and being harassed. Together we walked a distance behind the women toward the eighteenth tee.

  “Chris,” he said between breaths, “I know if you lose this match you have to attend Lin’s class, but tell me again what happens if you win the bet?”

  I pulled a golf glove from my pocket and slipped it onto my left hand. “If I win, I get half the stage time in her class, a chance to share the male perspective on getting along with the opposite sex. And I regain my dignity.”

  He trudged on a few steps before whispering, “Just how much do you know about getting along with the opposite sex?”

  “Not a whole lot really, given my track record. I blurted out the challenge after Lin ticked me off with her antimale comments.”

  Another few paces—it was a long walk from the seventeenth green to the eighteenth tee—and Cack stopped on the cart path. “Let me get this straight. No matter what happens on this last hole . . . whether you win or lose, you’ll still end up in a class with that caustic woman and her soap-squirting cronies?”

  Cack had a way with words, and I could only grin and say, “Never thought about it quite like that, but I suppose that’s the gist of it.”

  He strode ahead and mumbled, “Pitiful bet, just pitiful.”

  The last hole at Yeamans Hall is a par five of more than 500 yards, long and flat and bisected by a grouping of sand bunkers which cut into the fairway. We arrived at the tee box to boisterous chants of “Yeah woman! Yeah woman!”

  Despite the lack of originality—the same chant had burst forth at least thirty times during the match—the enthusiasm and bias never wavered. As had been the case all day, I would play from the blue tees, then Lin would play some forty or fifty yards ahead, from the red tees.

  Except when I stepped up to the teeing ground to hit my first shot, I saw no red tees. I just saw a second group of women standing along the cart path on the left side, at least a hundred-fifty yards away.

  I hit my tee shot well, a hooking ball that landed in the rough but bounded back into the fairway. Satisfied, I handed my club to Cack, who stood on his toes, his eyebrows raised in concern.

  “What’s the matter, Cack?”

  He pointed in the distance with my club. “The red tees . . . they’re not just fifty yards ahead like the other holes, they’re more like a hundred-fifty yards ahead.”

  That was way too much of a distance advantage for my opponent; she could easily win the hole from up there. “Think her gallery moved the tees up while we were back there talking?” I inquired.

  Cack rolled his eyes. “Duh! After they’ve thrown lipstick tubes at us and filled your golf bag with Dial antibacterial, you think they’d hesitate to move the tee markers?”

  I cupped my hands over my mouth and yelled ahead. “Lin, did your gallery move the tee markers?”

  She had already hit her first shot and was striding down the fairway, her ball some ninety yards ahead of my own.

  Ten minutes later I holed a short putt for a 5. She holed her own putt for a score of 4.

  Women hugged and women yelled. Women cheered and women clapped. A gnawing, hollow feeling overcame me. Not so much at the score, but at how badly the game had been disrespected.

  I was fine with a few natural serpents slithering around a golf course—lizards, gators, even a few moccasins—but this self-absorbed, manipulative type had no place in the sport.

  I waited beside the green to speak to Lin, who at the moment was engulfed by her yes-women, reveling in yet another round of “Yeah woman.” She broke through her supporters, eyed Cack and me standing on the fringe of the green, and promptly gave us both the briefest of handshakes.

  All she said was, “See you Tuesday night in my class.”

  And all I could reply was, “I’ll bring my bulletproof vest.”

  Now beneath the oak and striding for the parking lot, she spoke over her shoulder. “Wear whatever you like. You can even sit wherever you like. I won’t mind if you’re not in the front row.”

  In seconds she and her supporters were gone, and the Yeamans Hall Club returned to its natural state—calm and genteel.

  Cack and I spoke little on the drive back to my range, though I managed a smile when I checked my lesson book and saw that Molly was due back the next afternoon.

  4

  LESSON FOR TODAY

  During a round of social golf, especially when the round involves a man and a woman, the man will frequently get distracted and hit an awful tee shot. The wise female (if interested in the male) will then call out, “mulligan,” a phrase which allows the man a second chance, an opportunity to begin anew.

  *Note: The rules of golf make no mention of mulligans. Allowing a partner to hit a second tee ball is strictly social etiquette.

  On the private acre of grass at the end of my driving range, Mrs. Dupree paused from her lesson to offer a snack to her pet. This tiny canine she referred to as her “one-brick dog.” She had explained upon arrival her definition of a one-brick dog: this is a dog so tiny that if you tie a few feet of string from its collar to a single brick, it cannot run away. Thus anchored, her pet sat patiently on the grass, tethered to a red brick and nibbling at the corner of a doggie biscuit.

  Mrs. Dupree had shown moderate improvement in her golf game, though she lacked power due to an improper weight shift. I stepped back to watch her alignment, knowing that she was trying to hit the 100-yard marker. “Just how well do you know Lin Givens?” I asked between shots.

  “Not well,” she said and exchanged her 8-iron for a 7. “I only met her once, at a Labor Day party a week ago.”

  She hit three more shots, and we watched them all slice to the right. Her one-brick dog yelped after each swing, desperate to chase the golf balls.

  “Did you not know that she’s a radical feminist?”

  “Lin?” Mrs. Dupree asked, frowning at yet another slice. “I suppose she can be a bit intense. But if you didn’t like her class, you certainly don’t have to go back.”

  Mrs. Dupree then hit two more slices and frowned in disdain as the balls dribbled to a stop on the grass.

  I used the grip end of a 5-iron to nudge her feet more in line with the target. “And I suppose you had no idea about the content of her class?”

  Frustrated at her slice, Mrs. Dupree plunked her 7-iron back into her bag and drew out a 5-wood. “All I knew was that the class was about understanding the opposite sex. Are you saying it wasn’t about that?”

  “More like humiliating the opposite sex.”

  She looked shocked. “Well, like I said, you certainly don’t have to go back.”

  “Yes, I do. I lost a golf bet.”

  She paused from swatting golf balls and rested her club across her shoulders. “You lost to Lin-the-feminist . . . at golf? You, the great instructor?”

  “I gave her too many handicap strokes. Plus, she and her friends cheated.”

  Mrs. Dupree shook her head in disbelief and returned to her slicing. During the next half hour I did my best to cure her slice, though she did not seem overly interested in improving; apparently, golf lessons were just something to bide her time while her well-connected husband campaigned for state office.

  My policy was to avoid political discussions with students, and with a check of my watch I had the perfect excuse. “Mrs. Dupree, I’m afraid I have another lesson to give in two minutes.”

  She stuffed her 5-wood bac
k into her bag, pulled a towel from a side pocket, and dabbed her forehead “Is she female? Single and cute?”

  “How’d you ever guess?”

  “I saw her as I was leaving the other day. You looked quite interested, more like a suitor than a teacher.”

  I faced the sun, hoping it would help hide my blush. “She has potential,” I said, “and so does your golf game.”

  Satisfied with her modest improvement, she left the range with her dog in tow, offering up a promise to return again next week. Golf bag over her shoulder, she departed through the pro shop. I heard her walking across the pea gravel—crunch, crunch, yelp, ruff ruff—and I looked back through my chain-link fence and saw her pop the trunk of her Mercedes.

  Mrs. Dupree set her golf bag inside along with her single red brick, then she put her featherweight dog in the backseat. She also pulled out a folded T-shirt and waved it at me. She raised her voice across the parking lot, across the fence, and twenty yards of Bermuda. “Chris, if that Lin person really is a feminist and cheats at golf, then you should go to her class in this shirt. It’s my husband’s, but go ahead and take it. He has three.”

  From the hitting mats I waved okay, having no idea what she was talking about. “Just leave it there on the fence, Mrs. Dupree. I’ll get it shortly.”

  She flung it across the fence, hurried back to her car, and sped away. My gut told me Mrs. Dupree was a woefully bored member of the wealthy elite, albeit a generous one. As she roared off in her Mercedes, another woman pulled into her vacated parking place.

  Molly opened the car door and stood slowly in her white shirt, yellow golf skirt, and matching yellow visor. Yowza.

  I hurried to my shop and filled a jumbo-size bucket with golf balls.

  “How did the bet go?” asked Molly, already forty minutes into her one-hour lesson.

  It was five forty-five, and she had brought for a second time her enthusiasm for learning the proper swing, not to mention her flirtatious manner. “You won, didn’t you?” she continued. “You won five hundred bucks from the man-hater and donated it all to something manly like the National Rifle Association?”