“Stay in your truck, Mr. Hackett!” the cop shouted and pulled me backward.
I fell to the ground but jumped back to my feet.
Two officers ran after the guy, who weaved between trees and scaled my fence and turned left behind the neighbor’s home. An officer in the second car bolted past me and repeated the instruction for me to stay in my truck.
I loped back down the driveway to my truck and almost obeyed. Instead of waiting inside my truck, I stood beside the driver’s door, heart pounding with adrenaline, hoping to see the officers drag the guy out of the woods and through my yard and into one of their squad cars. But those woods were thick, and the guy in jeans had a huge head start.
Time seemed suspended. A cop chase on my property felt surreal, nothing like watching a cop chase on TV. Plus I felt violated, even a bit vindictive.
For long minutes I heard nothing, only the inner noise of a speculating, hyperactive mind. Have they subdued him? Has he subdued them?
Then I heard yelling, first behind my house and then behind the neighbor’s. Then, two houses north of mine, the suspect sprinted between hedges, across my neighbor’s front yard, and back down toward the street.
The officers chased after him but this guy was fast. He kept running, extending his lead, and every synapse in my body screamed to join the chase, to seek my own justice.
And I did.
Sort of.
As the suspect ran into the street with long, loping strides, I reached into the backseat to my golf bag, grabbed a handful of golf balls, and quickly dropped them to the ground. The suspect sprinted at an angle for the opposite woods. He never saw me take aim.
Four-iron in hand, I led him by several feet, aiming low, since I didn’t want to hit him in the head. Just like at the range, I told myself.
Thwack. Wide left.
Thwack. Wide right.
Thwack. Wide right again.
Thwack . . . The fourth ball took off in a low, skim-the-grass trajectory, rose as backspin joined forward momentum, and slammed into the guy’s rib cage. Or perhaps just below the rib cage—regardless, he fell sprawling into the gutter some hundred yards away, elbows and knees sliding on pavement. The ball had knocked the breath out of him.
Stunned by what I’d just done, I studied the head of my club as if it held magical powers. Not a bad shot considering I had no time to stretch or warm up.
The three officers ran into the street and pounced on the guy. Handcuffs snapped shut. More yelling. On his feet and writhing, the guy cursed the officers for shooting him in the ribs.
The cop who’d handcuffed him shoved the guy toward a squad car and said, “No one shot you, sir.”
The guy shouted, “You shot me in the rib cage, man!”
Since there was no blood on his shirt—just road rash on his elbows—I wondered if the guy had lost his mind or if he really believed he’d been shot.
The officers loaded him into the second squad car, and that car sped away. That’s when I noticed neighbors old and young gathering in their front yards and peering down the street at us.
I waved meekly. None of them waved back.
Then the two officers who had pulled me from the chase came striding my way, stern looks on their faces. I backed against my truck, wondering if they might arrest me too. I just stood there as if I’d been deputized, my 4-iron held proudly at my side, a sentry with his rifle.
The two officers stopped a couple feet from me, both with hands on hips, both shaking their heads.
The shorter one said, “Mr. Hackett, I can’t believe you just did that. We told you to stay inside your truck.”
Then the two of them burst into grins. The taller one said, “That’s the wildest golf shot I ever seen. How’d you do that?”
I gave them my best aw shucks expression and said, “Just regular practice, sir.”
In a kind of curious silence they stared at my club as if it were some new form of thug-stopping weaponry.
Aware that I had their full attention, I gripped my 4-iron and made a slow, instructive type of swing, offering to these gentlemen of law enforcement a kind of postchase miniclinic. They looked keenly interested in my technique, so I handed the club to the taller one and watched as he pressed his holster back and assumed a golf stance there in my yard.
I reached out to adjust his grip. “Remember, Officer, you are the machine gun; the golf balls are your bullets.”
25
LESSON FOR TODAY
Sometimes people cheat—and many times they get caught.
The guy who set fire to my golf shop was neither Democrat nor Republican. Oddly, he had no voting record at all, no connection to a political party. Randolph Matthew Newbury owned a competing golf range on the north side of Charleston.
From my back deck I relayed this news to Molly via cell phone. It was shortly before midnight, and I’d just finished removing the graffiti from my house. She’d just finished covering the debate and was sitting on the steps of an auditorium in Richmond.
“It’s true, Molly, I helped subdue the guy.”
She laughed. “You’re telling me that you, Golf Man, nabbed the suspect ahead of the cops? What’d you do, wrestle the guy into submission all by yourself?”
“Nope, just used the tools of my profession.” Though that event had lent a small sense of satisfaction, it was Molly’s role that intrigued me. “What Golf Man wants to know is, how did you figure out who to suspect?”
“Just before I boarded the plane in Charleston, I stopped thinking about the shape of the letter B and started thinking instead about the repeated use of the word ‘Bias.’ The arsonist had already used the phrase on your sidewalk with the spray paint.”
“So you’re saying it was repetition? Just those few words burned into the sod?”
“Well, the second usage on your grass meant that he was really overemphasizing the word ‘bias.’ And I knew from my dealings with the political world that anytime a candidate overemphasizes an issue and begins name-calling, it means he’s trying to distract attention from something else.”
“Which was?”
“The fact that the suspect was just trying to use election-year hysterics as cover while he destroyed some competition.”
This took me a moment to process. The same woman who makes the suggestion that fosters the destruction of my business also figures out who did it—from three hundred miles away? “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Her laugh retreated into a stifled snort. “Probably because the whole political angle at your range was new to you. I’ve been around such shysters my entire career.” She stopped talking then, and I heard muffled voices in the line, as if she were saying good night to people at the auditorium. “Sorry, Chris, I had to speak with a candidate’s chatty wife. But I’m back now and need to be up front with you about something.”
“Shoot.”
“I sorta met that Newbury guy once . . . the arsonist. Of course, I didn’t know he was capable of such a crime when I met him. And I’d forgotten all about him until I got to the airport and started dwelling on that sod.”
I mouthed a silent “what?” into my phone. She would have to explain this. “You met him? How could—”
“For maybe thirty seconds, Chris. But yeah, I met him. About a week before I wandered onto your range, I checked out his for the same idea I suggested to you. But I thought his place was too small. Then, when I visited your place and saw what you and Cack had going, well, that was it.”
“Love at first sight?”
“Well, political insult at first sight.”
For a moment I struggled to grasp that Molly had met Newbury. But the more I thought about it, the more I figured if my local grocery store had burned down, I wouldn’t automatically suspect another grocer across town had committed the crime. The whole idea of “eliminate your competition via violence” had never registered with me.
We talked of our recent date and told each other how much we’d enjoyed it. This led qu
ickly to a discussion of when we could see each other again. Her schedule was packed till after the elections; mine was about to be overwhelmed by the rebuilding of the business. We agreed that this was going to be hard. Not impossible, just hard.
Before we hung up, however, I told her how much I appreciated her support and powers of deduction and that this was one time when Adam really did appreciate Eve for her mind.
She replied in much the same manner I expected. “Sure, sure. That’s what all you Adams say.”
Apparently Newbury had developed a possessive crush on Molly, saw her on the news promoting my range instead of his, and deduced (correctly) that the two of us were dating. Jonathan explained this via a morning phone call, describing the motivation as a double dose of jealousy.
“Not one but two scoops of envy, Chris,” Jonathan said. “Money and . . . that woman. Each on its own is enough to make a man crazy.”
Combined, I supposed they could send a man into a fit, but into a fire-setting monster? I shared this thought with Jonathan, and he shared more details of how he identified Newbury. “First we went to his range, checked the soles of a discarded pair of sneakers, and found green and white pea gravel stuck in the treads. He wasn’t at his range, though. He had headed for your house.”
Newbury had a record too—auto theft, breaking and entering, plus two trips to a mental rehabilitation facility.
What stunned me was the guy’s propensity for violence. Not the retaliatory violence that I heard about so often in the news, but the premeditated variety. Not only was he jealous of the attention and monies Hack’s had pulled in during the political cycle, and not only was he envious of my relationship with Molly, he’d figured it would be easy to torch a competing range and make it look like a political operative did it. According to Jonathan, Mr. Newbury’s range was averaging just over eighty dollars a day in revenue during the same time Hack’s averaged over three hundred per day.
Newbury also threatened to sue me for hitting him in the gut with a golf ball. But when the authorities found in his jeans pocket my silver Movado watch that’d he lifted from my office the night of the fire—my initials were etched on the back side of the watch—he reconsidered his threat.
I told Jonathan he’d certainly earned his salary and even offered him free golf lessons after I rebuilt my business. But he didn’t play the game. Said he preferred deep-sea fishing with some buddies from Georgetown.
He explained that the arson committed at Hack’s was one of the easier cases he’d ever investigated. On the day that Newbury had chosen to spray paint my house, Jonathan was checking the last month’s sales for one particular item at every hardware store in the Charleston metro area.
The one item, of course, was plastic gas containers. He’d found that on September 22, the afternoon before the torching, a Wal-Mart in North Charleston had sold five gas containers at 4:31 p.m., five more at 4:38 p.m., and four more at 4:46 p.m. Fourteen five-gallon containers in fifteen minutes, plus a can of blue spray paint. All paid for with the same debit card at registers two, nine, and sixteen. Then, after Molly had called him from the airport, Jonathan checked with Wal-Mart again and found that the same person had returned that morning and purchased two more cans of blue spray paint. At my house, Newbury just wanted to rub it in, we supposed. But as with a golfer who swings too hard too many times, hazards often await. It proved horrible timing as well. Newbury’s triple bogey.
Cack, ever conscious of promotional opportunity, informed our local media of the 4-iron incident. During the following days the publicity garnered from halting a suspect with a golf shot turned out to be greater than the publicity garnered for allowing political parties to whack balls at each other. A local news team even requested permission to come out to my house and have me recreate the shot for their cameras. I thought this a bit much—overkill actually. So I refused.
Besides, I had a business to rebuild. And the only news correspondent I wanted to talk with lived in DC.
26
LESSON FOR TODAY
In Southern states, occasional encounters with wildlife are an accepted part of any outdoor activity.
“Three hundred and twenty-two yards, boss man,” Cack said into his new walkie-talkie.
With proceeds from the insurance settlement we’d purchased the powerful kind, two of them, with a range of more than one mile. Today Cack employed his as he stood on the far end of a rectangular piece of land not far from the Ashley River, separated from me by the distance he’d called out and also by twenty-two acres of weeds.
“Ten-four,” I said into my mouthpiece and walked another twenty paces to the west, along the frontage road. “Now what’s the distance from here?”
He paralleled my movement and stopped again. “Three-nineteen,” he said.
We met halfway across the parcel and compared notes. Cack then handed me my measuring instrument, a device called a range finder, which utilizes GPS to calculate distances to within an accuracy of six inches. Just for fun I pointed the range finder in the direction of our nation’s capital, silently renamed it a “Molly finder,” and waited for it to give me a distance. The tiny screen read, Data Not Available.
“Just what are you measuring now?” Cack asked and tucked his pencil behind his ear. “You were pointing that thing at DC, weren’t ya?”
“Let’s get back to work, pardner.”
I wanted to double-check our figures, especially since at the back of the property, just past the boundary stakes, appeared to be a wetlands area. Cack hurried off in that direction while I remained at the frontage road, range finder in hand.
As an amateur survey team, the two of us concluded within the hour that this land was nearly level and that it also had the necessary depth and width to accommodate a new Hack’s Golf Learning Center. The thrust of the new business, however, was an issue I’d already debated, considered, and resolved. In fact, my plan was to call Molly tonight and tell her about my new idea: to make the new Hack’s more kid-centric and less adult-centric.
Whether the children of Charleston dreamt little “I-just-wanna-hit-the-ball” golf dreams or big “I-wanna-be-great” golf dreams, I wanted to offer them the hope, the fun, and the instruction to help them reach their goals.
When I was a kid, my dream was to play the PGA Tour. The dream first ripened at age ten, just after I’d defeated J. T. Turner for the 10–11-year-old bracket of the city junior championship. Friends since first grade, he and I had walked up the eighteenth fairway that day boasting of where we’d be in twelve years—-traveling the country, heck, even the globe, and competing against the world’s best.
J. T. said he’d live in a big house in Florida and drive a Porsche. I told him I’d live in a big house in Arizona and drive a Ferrari. J. T.’s dream lasted until junior year of high school, when he confessed to me that he couldn’t even beat the kids at our school, much less compete on a national level. Said he was going to play it smart, get a college degree, and enter corporate America, perhaps get married and start a family. And he did exactly that.
My own dream stayed alive through high school and beyond—I won several tournaments and had scholarship offers to play at the collegiate level. I chose Georgia, where my dream grew into an all-consuming, determined obsession.
A math professor warned me of the dangers of an all-or-none life plan, and yet my grades continued to reflect my priorities. I left college midway through my junior year. Oddly, it was math that would have alerted me to reality.
On my own, out of school, and with only my golf game as a source of income, I took stock of the competition. By the time I’d added up all the college seniors who were turning pro, all the foreign players who had come here to live the dream, and all of the twenty-something, thirty-something, and forty-something journeyman pros who toiled on minitours around the country, I totaled some six thousand players who thought they just might be good enough to make a nice living at the game. And since only one hundred twenty-five players become exempt eac
h year to play the PGA Tour, only two percent of those six thousand really make it.
I never made it anywhere near that two percent. However, like the milk offerings at your supermarket, professional golf offers its own skim version, whereby the fat—money—is drained off. These are the minitours, where players put up their own cash, usually five hundred dollars or so per tournament, and hope to finish in the top quarter of the field. Only those few players earn a livable wage. I rarely earned a livable wage. Mostly I packed my clubs in the trunk, drove hours to the next tournament site, and checked into yet another cheap hotel.
At this level the game nearly ate me alive. There was too much alone time, too many hours spent pondering my capacity to knock a ball into a hole with a stick. Moreover, the social network of college was absent, and I became just another young, unmarried player toiling in loneliness and obscurity.
The one piece of advice from my college coach that really stuck with me was this: “Chris, never allow the game to define you as a person. Never allow any occupation to define you.”
I lived that minitour life for four years, until, at age twenty-five, I finally conceded to reality: Chris Hackett was never going to compete against the world’s best, nor was he going to live in a big house in Arizona and drive a Ferrari. He would end up a golf range owner in Charleston, South Carolina, a college dropout making a modest living. He’d teach the proper swing to the after-work crowd, and perhaps, if God smiled, he’d meet “Mrs. Golfer.”
As Cack and I continued to pace the grounds and note the yardages, those past strivings and failures jelled into experience, the kind that excited me and burst forth into a new priority. I wanted to find today’s kids, today’s Chris and J. T., and build into them the hope and courage to pursue their own dreams.
Frankly, I was tired of dealing with a largely adult clientele. That would have its place—Cack could handle the adults and insult them with gusto—but I wanted to feel very young again, to instruct pint-sized slicers and drink purple Kool-Aid and laugh at adolescent humor.
Par for the Course Page 18
