Death from the Ladies Tee

by James Y. Bartlett

  Mary Beth motioned for me to come inside the ropes and walk with her. Since it was practice and no one was around anyway, there was no problem. Between shots, we caught up on old times. Burkey told me she’d been divorced for a few years, but comfortably so. “Hell, poor old Benny was in a lose-lose situation,” she told me. “If he stayed back home in Texas, people would talk about him lettin’ his woman roam the world without her man. If he came out on tour with me, he became Mr. Mary Beth Burke. He spent a couple of years bein’ miserable until I finally told him it was time to do something else. It was like letting a man out of jail, Hacker,” she laughed. “We’re still the best of friends, now that the pressure’s off, and when I’m home in Odessa, we spend a lot of time together. Maybe in a couple more years, when I retire for good, we can try again. He’s a damn good man.”

  “And you’re a hell of a woman,” I told her. She rewarded me with another hug.

  Maybe it was just the pressure-free environment of a Tuesday practice round, nothing on the line, few fans around. Maybe it was the attention she was giving to her student as they played. Maybe it was the fun she was having talking to me about golf and golfers we both knew. Whatever, I certainly didn’t see any erosion in her golf skills that afternoon. Without even trying hard, she was playing a brilliant round. Never one with great length off the tee, she kept her ball in the fairway. Then she rifled crisp iron shots right at the pins. On the few occasions when she missed a green, her short game was flawless, getting her up and down out of bunkers and rough with ease. And her putting stroke seemed tuned in. Burkey was a player.

  On the tenth fairway, we stood together and watched Carol Acorn prepare her seven-iron approach to a well-guarded green. Again, there was the deliberate pre-planning followed by the robotic swing. Again, the results were satisfactory, if not spectacular. Carol’s shot hit the green, but a good twenty-five feet from the pin.

  “There’s a touch of stiffness in that swing,” I commented as we walked out of Carol’s earshot up to the green.

  “Absolutely A-One correct, Hacker,” Mary Beth nodded. “The girl is a golfer. Knew that the minute I laid eyes on her. But I’m having a god-awful time trying to get her to let go and just swing the club. You’ve noticed that she hasn’t said one word to either of us yet. She’s wound up way too tight.”

  It was true. Mary Beth and I had been chatting and joking between shots, carrying on a nonstop conversation. But Carol Acorn had kept to herself, speaking only briefly to her caddie and otherwise concentrating only on her golf game. Her eyes remained hidden in the shadows of her visor. Burke laughed. “Once, on the practice tee, I asked her what she was thinking before and during her swing. Y’know, we all usually have some kind of swing thought. Like ‘Smooth it,’ or “Slow back,’ or something like that?”

  I murmured agreement.

  “Well, this girl starts rattling off all the things she was trying to think about while she swung her golf club. I mean, she was telling herself not to cup her left wrist and to maintain the proper angles with her arms and to feel the clubface open going back and moving her left knee three inches to the right. My God!” Burke shook her head and laughed. “After fifteen minutes of this crap I almost took my driver out and smacked her with it! Good God Almighty…this game is hard enough without cluttering up your head with all that other shit!”

  I laughed. “What was it that Bobby Jones used to say? If he was thinking about two things before every swing, he might shoot par. If he only had one swing thought going, he said he felt he always had a chance to win the tournament.”

  “Damn right,” Burkey said. We reached the green. Carol’s ball was away. She began stalking her putt. First she crouched behind it for a long minute. Then she began walking in a 360-degree circle around the hole, studying the angles, the break, the grain. Then, back at the ball, she took about six practice strokes.

  I heard Mary Beth audibly sigh. “Hey Carol,” she called out. We both looked over at her. Mary Beth cocked her head over, curled her fingers next to her ear as if she was grasping an imaginary drain plug and pulled, making a loud popping noise as she did. She held the drain plug open for a while, cocking her eyebrows at her student.

  Carol Acorn and I both laughed, and understood the pantomime. ‘Empty your head,’ she was saying. This is only a practice round. Stop thinking and just do.

  Carol backed away from her putt for a moment and then, still smiling, laid her putter behind the ball, took one brief peek at the hole and stroked the putt. It rolled, with that uncanny inerrant accuracy that well-struck putts always have, right into the heart of the hole. Mary Beth shouted “yeah!” and pumped the air with her fist. Carol laughed.

  She also loosened up immeasurably after that and began to sharpen up her game. Her swing smoothed out and her shots began to land around the pins as if guided by radar. She even began to walk with an extra spring in her step, buoyant and confident. Mary Beth watched her student relax and play better and glowed with pride.

  It was on the sixteenth hole that I accidently crossed her wires. The sixteenth on the White is a medium-length par-three over a large pond that fronts the green. The green is slightly raised and fronted by a low stone wall that rises out of the water. Deep bunkers cut into both sides, but in the back of the green, and down the entire left side along the pond’s edge, the greenskeeper had planted beds of flowers. The riot of colors softened the effect of the hole, reflecting off the still water of the black pond. But it was still a difficult shot to that narrow green, requiring about a five-iron.

  Carol had just made a lovely birdie on the par-five fifteenth and I walked with her though a pine glade on the way to the sixteenth tee.

  “Your game is looking better by the hole,” I said to her.

  “Thanks, Mr. Hacker,” she said, a happy lilt to her voice. “Mary Beth is a wonderful teacher. When she can get me to relax, I always play much better.”

  “How do you like the life of a professional?”

  She blew out her breath in a whoosh. “It’s been quite an experience,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought college golf was tough, but this is an entirely different level. I’ve played in eight tournaments so far this year and thought I was playing pretty well. Missed the cut in four and my best finish is a tie for eighteenth! But the other girls have been real nice…encouraging, y’know? I’ve had a good time and I think I’m getting better every week.”

  “Have you ever played a round with Big Wyn Stilwell?” I asked.

  She reacted to my question as if I had slapped her full across the face. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me, her face drained of color. Her eyes went suddenly dark and cold.

  “Wh-what did you say?” she asked, her tone dead. “Wh-what do you mean by that?”

  Mary Beth, who had been trailing us by a few steps, came up and we both stared in amazement at the look in the girl’s eyes.

  “I mean, have you played with Big Wyn yet in a tournament?” I said, more than a little perplexed. “Has she seen your swing yet?”

  “No,” Carol snapped and abruptly walked on. Mary Beth cocked an eye at me in silent wonder and hurried to catch up with her protégé. To give them a moment, I wandered over to a water cooler and filled a paper cup.

  Thanks to her birdie on the last hole, Carol teed off first. I could tell she was still upset about something. Her preshot routine was forgotten. She grabbed a club from her bag, teed her ball and took a quick, hurried swipe of a practice swing. Her quick, angry jab dug up a hefty divot. She took two more practice swings. Two more thick divots flew through the air.

  “Hey honey,” Mary Beth cracked. “Leave a little turf for the rest of us.”

  Carol didn’t respond. She looked at the hole, stepped up to her ball and swung. Along with her composure, Carol Acorn had also lost her golf swing. Her backswing was hurried and off plane. She never paused at the top, but rushed her downswing and tried to compensate for an incomplete backswing with a pulling mo
ve. On top of that, her hips were all out of rhythm with the rest of her body, and she ducked her head downwards at the last moment.

  It was an ugly, ugly swing with an ugly, ugly result. The clubhead got hooded, moving from outside-in, and it jammed heavily into the turf. The ball flew sickly to the right at about a forty-five degree angle, carried at most about fifty yards and dropped into the pond with a sickening plop. It was the worst shank-swing of a twenty-eight handicapper, a twice-a-monther. It was the sort of golf shot that occurs almost daily at country clubs and municipal courses across the land, and almost never at a professional event. It was shocking.

  There were maybe six people standing there watching. I heard one universal, sharp intake of breath. The two caddies stared at their feet. I didn’t know what to say. Mary Beth stared at her young student, unbelieving. I know she wanted to say something funny to break the tension, but she seemed to understand that humor wouldn’t work right here, right now. She was shocked into silence.

  Carol held the pose of her finish and watched the ripples spread slowly out from the entry point of her ball. Those terrible, ever-widening circles that were indelible proof of a disasterously bad shot. Then, she slowly lowered her club, walked silently over to a bench at the side of the tee, sank down heavily on it, buried her face in her hands and began, silently, to weep. Her broad shoulders shook.

  Mary Beth hurried over, knelt down, and began to comfort the girl in soft, whispered tones. Carol seemed unconsolable. She couldn’t talk as wave after wave of some deeply buried sadness came bursting forth. That it was all so silent was even worse.

  I was stunned. And I felt terrible. Obviously, something I had said had triggered this. I followed Mary Beth to the girl’s side.

  “Carol,” I began, “If I said something that upset you, I’m really sorry.”

  Her head came up out of her hands for just a moment. I saw the red, angry splotches on her face. And I saw into her eyes. In that brief moment, I saw an unspeakable torment. Eyes from the Inferno. Eyes that revealed a terrible anguish and begged for relief from her private hell. But it was just for an instant, because she buried her head in her arms again, turning away in misery, another wave of silent, shoulder-shaking sobs overtaking her.

  Mary Beth, who seemed as perplexed as I, waved me away. There was nothing I could do. “I’ll catch up with you later,” I told Mary Beth and turned away.

  I felt awful as I trudged back to the clubhouse. I wondered what it had been that set the girl off so dramatically. Had the ugly brutality of that one bad shot been enough to send her over the edge? Did she take the game that seriously? Had our small talk upset her in some way. What had we been talking about?

  Big Wyn. I had mentioned the name and she had received a psychic jolt. Big Wyn Stilwell. There must be something there, hanging between the two. Big Wyn and Carol. Something that would cause the gates of hell to open for the younger girl and let whatever demons she had inside come dancing out with the red-hot pitchforks and fiendish cackles and burning hot eyes and chase that girl’s mind down and down into a region of boiling cauldrons and steaming, unrelenting heat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mary Beth Burke came looking for me later that night

  and found me in one of the hotel’s bars. I was deep

  in conversation with a dentist from Pittsburgh. It was an intellectual discussion involving batting averages, earned-run averages, and slugging percentages of various members of our respective ballclubs. Inasmuch as I’m a golf writer and was deep into about my fourth Scotch of the night, I was proud of myself for holding my own in the conversation, even though I was making things up with both sides of my brain. I was, of course, defending the honor of my beloved Sox, while the dentist seemed strangely attached in a similar way to his “’irates.” From the looks we were starting to get from our fellow imbibers, we might have been getting just a tad too loud.

  When Mary Beth saw me, she came over, took one look at me and then pulled me off my barstool. “C’mon,” she said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  April in Florida is a pleasant time, about the last pleasant time until the end of November. The days are balmy without being overbearing or humid and at night the breeze drifts in off the water and brings with it a hint of a cleansing chill. The worst of the blood-sucking summer bugs have yet to appear. I’ve always figured the most carnivorous bugs go south to Cuba for the winter and fly back across the Straits of Florida in time to enjoy the summer furnace of heat and humidity after having been made especially angry by a few months of life under Fidel’s regime. In another few weeks, say by the middle of May, the air will turn into a solid wall of humidity. Then, all the breeze does is move the wall around slowly and ponderously, forcing it up under your clothing to dark bodily places that begin to prickle and itch.

  But as we strolled aimlessly through the softly lit hotel grounds, that whispering breeze was as caressing and refreshing as a sip of cold blush wine. It took the buzz out of my head. Mary Beth did the rest.

  At first she did a lot of fidgeting and sighing and mumbling to herself as we walked. I let it sit for a time while I enjoyed the night air. On the fourth sigh, I finally turned to her.

  “Okay, Burkey,” I said sternly. “Out with it. What kind of burr is under your saddle?”

  “I need to talk with you – with someone—about Carol,” she said. “But…I’m not so sure you’re the one. You being press and all.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Look, Mary Beth,” I said, “I’ve got enough to write about without laying open some poor girl’s personal problems. My readers really don’t give a crap about that stuff. They want to know who won and why. Now I don’t know what set her off out there today, and I guess you’re fixing to tell me. If it’s something really dark and deep, don’t tell me. Go find a priest or a shrink or something. But if you think I could help with something, I’ll listen. And I don’t have to tell you, of all people, that it’ll be off the record if that’s what you want.”

  She smiled at me finally. “Thanks, Hacker,” she said. “You’ll do just fine.”

  We found a bench and sat down. In the relative quiet of the evening, the incessant sounds of the city invaded the walls of our lush refuge. A siren wailed off in the distance, and a steady thunder built in intensity as a jet from the nearby airport roared its way down the runway.

  “I didn’t know what the hell happened to Carol out there today,” Burkey began. “It scared the everlovin’ crap out of me to tell you the truth. She’s such a steady, serious girl. Works real hard at her game and she’s totally dedicated to getting better. Hell, if anything, I’d say she works too hard at it. But you know me…I’m from the ‘let ‘er fly and have some fun’ school anyway. But she’s always been so level-headed, I’ve never seen any emotion from her at all, on or off the golf course. I thought she was cracking up. I got her off the golf course and holed up in the locker room. Took me a couple hours before I could make any sense out of her.”

  “I mentioned Big Wyn Stilwell to her,” I said. “That seemed to be the trigger. Don’t know why.”

  “Well, you’re close enough to the dance floor to hear the music,” Burkey said. “Do you remember what you said?”

  “I just asked her if Big Wyn had ever seen her swing,” I said, thinking back.

  “No, you asked her if she’d ever played a round with Big Wyn,” Burkey said quietly.

  “OK,” I nodded. “So…?”

  She didn’t say anything. I thought for a minute.

  “Wait a minute,” I exclaimed, turning to look at Mary Beth. “Played a round. Played around. You mean to tell me she thought I was asking if she’d ever …”

  Burke exhaled and nodded. I was speechless. “I know, I know,” she said. “It sounds like a line from about a dozen bad jokes that you and I both know. But there’s a bit more to it. And this is where it gets ugly, Hacker.”

>   She paused and looked out into the night. She chewed on her lower lip and clasped and unclasped her hands.

  “Look, Hacker,” she said finally. “You’re a growed-up man and you’ve been around. I guess it’s no big news to you that there are some girls out here who like to fool around with other girls.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s fairly common knowledge,” I said. “Despite all the official tap dancing about the subject, everyone seems to understand that a group of professional women athletes tends to include a higher percentage of homosexuals than the general population. So what? Aren’t we past all that?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Mary Beth said slowly. “I think most folks believe that what you do at night under the sheets and with whom is pretty much your own private business. And from what I understand, that way of life has existed on the Tour since there has been a Tour. It’s only lately that some of the girls are becoming more comfortable with more overt expressions of their sexuality. But most still keep that part of their lives hidden from the rest of the world. The girls out here may be having sex every which way, but most of them don’t talk about it or flaunt it in public. It’s still kind of taboo.”

  She paused again, thinking.

  “You gotta understand something, Hacker,” she said. “The PR people and the Tour like to tell folks that we’re all one big happy family out here on the LPGA Tour. I don’t think that’s quite accurate. We’re really more of a … a small town, if you think about it. I should know—I’m a small-town girl myself. I mean, there are about 150 players, and our caddies, and our friends and families and business managers and whoever. And we’re all kinda bound up together in what we do. When you think about it, that’s pretty close to what a small town is. Except in our case, instead of being all together in one place, like Podunk, Iowa, we all travel around from place to place every week.”

  “A moveable Peyton Place,” I said, suddenly understanding. “Same people, same life, different locale every week.”