The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life

by Steven Pressfield

  I couldn’t stop staring at him.

  Despite the high romance ensuing in the lights at the front, my glance kept returning, furtively I’m sure, to glimpse his powerful presence, which radiated some…I don’t know what…some consciousness which I couldn’t grasp or define but which I was certain was of utmost importance.

  The best I can describe the effect the fellow produced upon me is to say that that night, watching the way Vance watched, was the first time I had ever glimpsed my surroundings with something like objectivity.

  Till then I had inhabited my boy’s world as a fish inhabits the sea, taking it utterly as a given. As the only world that existed. The only possible world. Now for the first time I grasped the existence of this world apart from myself. Do you understand, Michael? Like a fish suddenly made aware that it is swimming in water, I found every aspect of my perception changed.

  Not for long, of course. The drama up front was too compelling. There, by the grand piano, beneath the great wall of books, Judge Anderson was treading the boards like a tentshow revivalist. Invoking Savannah’s pride, her chance to place a mark upon the consciousness of the nation, and so on. The elders (twelve, including my father) reinforced the Judge like a phalanx of Pharisees. Before these, Junah stood, listening patiently with a wry twist on his handsome features. I saw his hand raised for respite, the Judge ignoring it, Junah smiling, lowering his eyes, then announcing in a soft but clear voice that there was no possibility that he would participate in the golf match.

  The elders didn’t hear.

  Or if they did, the words slipped past in a willed blast of disbelief and denial. “Of course you will,” Judge Anderson continued without hesitation. “Now: have you the proper clubs and equipment?”

  “I said I won’t play,” Junah repeated softly.

  “Don’t trifle on a matter of such import.” Anderson began losing patience.

  “Please don’t make me repeat myself,” Junah said. “I do not wish to participate. My decision is final.”

  The Judge’s face went plum-red. The man beside my father staggered, faint. Several of the others stiffened, seemed poised to step forward and actually thrash Junah. Others simply gaped in disbelief. As for myself, you could have scraped me off the floor with a spatula.

  “You cannot be serious, sir,” my father addressed Junah. “The city must have a champion, and no one but yourself is worthy.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. I have given up the game.”

  Blank silence. I could see my father steady the man beside him, who now appeared close to a coronary. “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” Junah said, “but now I put away childish things.” His voice was soft with sorrow. “Besides, I’ve lost my swing.”

  “Oh, balls and nonsense!” Anderson thundered. “No one ‘loses’ a swing, and if you have, by God, you’ve got seventy-two hours to find it!”

  A chorus of assent seconded the Judge. The elders surged forward, swamping Junah. I could hear his voice proffering the names of other candidates, the ones previously suggested at the town meeting, who he declared would uphold the city’s honor every bit as well as he.

  “Balls again!” Judge Anderson’s voice boomed. “We don’t need some damn sawed-off Scotsman or some local pea-shooting pipsqueak to be pooping drives forty yards in Jones’ and Hagen’s wake. We need a man with thunder in his fist. A hero, to boom that pill out past these golfing gods, to make galleries gasp and journalists rend their thesauruses seeking new adjectives of wonder! We need a knight, sir, and that can only be you!”

  Junah remained unmoved. I could no longer see him, he was so surrounded in the crush, but I could hear my father’s voice, speaking calmly, trying to restore reason. He knew, my father said, that Junah had suffered greatly during the War and afterward. The city was aware, however dimly, of Junah’s wanderings over the globe, his quest for some redefinition of meaning in his life….

  At this point, unable to see and not at all clear on what in the world my father was talking about, my eye lit upon the writing desk beside me. Here were scribblings, a journal of some sort, apparently in Junah’s own hand.

  Odd-looking volumes spread across the desktop. Titles that meant nothing to my boyish eyes, though in later years I came actually to inherit these same books. Sartor Resartus, The Way of Chuang-tzu, the Kybalion, Life of Paracelsus. Some texts were in Chinese or Japanese, others in Sanskrit or Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi, alien tongues that I couldn’t even begin to guess at but that I knew no God-fearing Christian would have a dime’s worth to do with; and then, in the center of them all, scrolling obscenely from the center binding of some Hindu text, was a color illustration of such pornographic intensity that I literally feared for my soul, just for having glimpsed it. Its image burned into my brain no matter how tightly I shut my eyes: scores of snakily intertwined bodies, writhing in a mass of elbows, knees, nipples, buttocks and lips to form some kind of pan-erotic architectural column that looked like nothing quite so much as the bottom of a bait can. And this, it was clear, was something religious! Poor Junah. The man had clearly taken leave of his sanity.

  It was then that I became aware of Bagger Vance’s presence beside me. I could smell him. He had come over in the crush, apparently deliberately. I looked up at his towering form, the veined muscles of his arms, his thick sinewy wrists. His hands gently closed the book, refolding the illustration. He smiled an inscrutable smile. The odor that came off him was not like that of other black men, or other field men white or black. It was deeper, more pungent. It reeked of Life, of the earth, of something wild and pure, like an unbroken horse or a wild elk, and yet at the same time it went beyond animal, into something consummately human and complex. I was held as if by a spell. My sense was that he could have killed me in an instant, snapped my neck like a wishbone or crushed my skull with one hand, and yet, inexplicably, what came from him was a sense like what the Hindus call ahimsa. Harmlessness. In the intentional sense. Not that he couldn’t harm, but that he wouldn’t. In fact he would protect.

  I realized that he liked me. In a flash I liked him too.

  Up front, the mob was backing before Junah’s now-impatient surge. He was telling them no, and no again. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I wish you luck in securing the champion you seek but I must repeat, with finality, that it will not be me.”

  The crowd rocked rearward; they believed him now; for the first time, true despair began to grip the assembly. I could feel Vance’s hand nudge me gently.

  “If I may speak, sir,” Vance’s voice broke the silence, addressing Junah.

  “We don’t need any more damn coffee!” Judge Anderson roared at the interruption. All eyes spun toward Vance, thinking him one of Junah’s servants, and a damn fool one at that.

  “Go ahead, Bagger,” Junah said gently.

  “I was thinking, sir, of our discussions.” Vance spoke to Junah, stepping forward to stand beside the desk with the volumes and writings. “Do you recall what we spoke of, regarding entering the spirit by way of the flesh?”

  “I do,” replied Junah.

  The elders stared, baffled and dumbstruck.

  “I was thinking,” Bagger Vance continued, “that if you’ll change your mind and play, I’ll be happy to carry your clubs.”

  A laugh burst from Junah.

  “You? You’d be my caddie?”

  “I’d consider it an honor.”

  Every eye in the room now wheeled from Vance to Junah. No one knew what the hell to make of this mysterious black man, who he was or what sway he held over Junah. All they knew was Junah was listening, Junah’s refusal was wavering.

  Judge Anderson swept forward, seizing the moment to step beside Vance, who in seconds had vaulted from the gutter to the jurist’s most lofty esteem.

  “What do you say, sir?” Anderson addressed Junah. “The man, by God, is talking sense.”

  Seven

  JUNAH WAS IN.

  Hagen and Jones would arrive the day after tomorrow; there would be
a practice round that afternoon, banquets at Krewe Island in the evening, then the actual match the day after. Seventy-two hours to marshal an operation on the scale of the siege of Vicksburg.

  The city’s madness expanded exponentially. Special trains had to be added, then more and more after that, to handle the multitudes arriving, not just for the match but to serve those arriving for the match. In those days, Michael, the wealthy didn’t travel on their own, lugging their carry-on bags through airports and heading to Hertz for a rental car. They traveled with entourages, all of whom needed rooms and food and towels and hot water. Now entourages were arriving to serve the entourages. Freelance cars and drivers flooded in from Atlanta, Columbia, Mobile; men hired themselves out as chauffeurs, footmen, guides, bodyguards, porters and bellmen. Waiters and chambermaids poured in; every able-bodied man, woman and boy was pressed into service. I remember my friend Billy Utaw’s mom’s cook, Addie, being chosen by lot to be chambermaid for the suite that Bobby Jones would share with O. B. Keeler. It was like they’d all just been called to the head of the line for heaven. Billy’s head swelled so you couldn’t talk to him, and his mom began putting on airs like the Queen of Sheba.

  My brother Garland was out all that first night cornering the market in grape snowball syrup. I myself was held down almost literally by my mother, who insisted that I get my sleep before I took sick and ruined my own and her chances to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I would never have forgiven her except that, that morning, I encountered greatness for the first time face-to-face.

  Arnold Langer took a room with us.

  Mother had agreed finally to allow some of the descending locusts, as she called them, to stay under our roof. She refused however to accept compensation, insisting on giving the space, plus breakfast, dinner and supper, as a pure gesture of hospitality. One thing she insisted upon, however: that her home would not be open to mere rubbernecking tourists, but only to working people with a legitimate purpose for being in Savannah. As luck would have it, that included journalists. Sportswriters.

  Langer covered sports for the Atlanta Constitution. My dad had taught my brother and me to read by poring over the great wordsmith’s columns. Langer came with a friend from Boston, a former classmate from Harvard who was an actual book writer; they took over both spare rooms upstairs as office space, plus Garland’s room which he vacated, moving in with me.

  It was barely nine in the morning when their cab arrived from the station, and they were already lathered in sweat, their white shirts sticking to their undershirts, which were wringing wet beneath their wool jackets. They stunk of cigarette smoke and sweat and pure literary glamour. Both of them chain-smoked and coughed and hacked and when I carried their coats up to Garland’s room which would now be theirs, I felt the weight of whiskey flasks in the pockets.

  Sitting to breakfast, Langer’s friend asked for his eggs softboiled, the first time I had ever seen eggs cooked any way but scrambled or sunnyside up. I watched mesmerized as he set a steaming uncracked egg upright in its little porcelain cup, rapped it sidewise with a butter knife to knock its crown off, then spooned the gooey innards right from the shell, to vanish with a worldly slurp beneath his mustache. It was the most glamorous sight my eyes had ever beheld.

  Over coffee, the journalists regaled my mother with tales of Jones and Hagen. How Jones never traveled to a tournament without his friend and Boswell, O. B. Keeler, who was a newspaperman himself, covering sports for the Atlanta Journal, and a true scholar of science and history, almost mystical in his study and appreciation of the game. Jones, in fact, gave Keeler half the credit for the 1930 Grand Slam and insisted when posing with all four trophies (and the Walker Cup, which the Jones-captained team had won that same year) on Keeler’s standing beside him as an equal.

  Hagen traveled with a staff of five, headed by his caddie-cum-valet Spec Hammond, whose responsibility it was to supervise the shining of the Haig’s thirty-eight pairs of shoes and the pressing of his seventy pairs of slacks and plus fours. Hagen habituated the Savoy in London, dined on oysters and champagne for breakfast, and never had his hair cut except by his own personal barber from the Detroit Athletic Club, whom he either flew personally to visit or had flown in, worldwide, at his own expense.

  In the cool of the screened rear patio, Langer lit a Chesterfield and began to turn the subject toward Junah.

  Did we know of Junah’s exploits in the Great War? That he was a bona fide hero? Of course, my mother replied; our city had produced numerous men of valor, and certainly no less could be expected of a man of Junah’s background and breeding. Langer smiled as my mother recited the names of Junah’s forebears and their heroism at Antietam and the Wilderness, Shiloh and Bermuda Hundred. Langer acknowledged appreciatively the South’s long record of bravery and the fine fighting men she had produced. But, he said, he had never heard a story quite like Junah’s. Did we know what happened to him in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, and how he reacted afterward? Langer’s memory was fresh because he had looked up the accounts and dispatches in the news files before leaving Atlanta. He thought they might somehow work in to the reports he would file on the coming match.

  My mother declared that she—all of us in the city, in fact—were familiar with aspects of those wartime events, but the full picture remained rather mysterious and unclear. Something about a French wife who died and Junah’s daughter, now being raised by grand-mère in France.

  The journalist corrected her: it was a German wife. And a queer story behind it.

  It seems Junah, at some desperate point during the battle, faced with being imminently overrun by the enemy, had called in artillery fire on his own position. He and one machine gunner were the only two still alive, cut off from their unit, behind their single gun whose barrel had actually warped from the furious fire it had put forth. They were in fact overrun, Junah and his gunner surviving only after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle with bayonets and entrenching tools. Junah himself was gravely wounded and required nearly two years in the hospital, in England and the States, to recover.

  Junah’s heroism involved killing eleven Germans in this encounter; they were found dead around his position when the attack ended. He and his gunner were awarded the Medal of Honor, which Junah, for himself, refused to accept. His brigade commander was compelled to claim it for him, with Junah intractable in his hospital bed.

  After the armistice, Langer continued, Junah was transferred stateside to a veterans hospital in upstate New York. Upon his release in 1920, he chose not to return to Savannah, or even to remain in America, but took ship immediately for Germany. There, in the ruins of that shattered nation, he sought out all eleven families of the soldiers he had killed. Most had suffered terribly. Some rebuffed him, some slammed doors in his face, others broke down and embraced him with appreciation for his gesture and his courage.

  “Of all things,” Langer addressed my mother, “Junah wound up marrying the sister of one of the soldiers he had slain. Apparently they were very much in love, had a daughter within a year, and were planning on returning to the States. Then Junah’s bride herself died tragically in an outbreak of typhus. It’s not clear exactly what happened with Captain Junah over the next several years. Apparently this final death was more than he could bear. Something broke inside him. He turned over his infant daughter to the care of her Bavarian grandmother and vanished into that seething ferment that was postwar Europe. Reports placed him in Paris for a time, among expatriate artists and writers, then traveling by ship, working his way it seems. He was in the East, India, Ceylon, the Himalayas. He returned briefly to Savannah in ’27, as you know, and tried to pick up the threads of a normal life, even campaigning with some success on the amateur golf circuit. But this attempt apparently failed to quell his restless questing. He set out again two years ago, traveling, reading, studying, seeking heaven only knows what.

  “Throughout these peregrinations, Captain Junah, it seems, has been accompanied by a my
sterious servant who, though technically in Junah’s employ, is said to exercise tremendous influence over him. The fellow appears and reappears at random intervals; no one knows when or where he and Junah first became acquainted, or even the man’s name….”

  “You mean Bagger Vance!” I blurted. “He’s here now. He’s caddying for Mr. Junah in the match!”

  Both Langer and his friend reacted with instant interest. “You mean the fellow really exists,” Langer queried, “and is still in Junah’s employ?”

  I confirmed this with vehemence. “Heck, if it wasn’t for him, Mr. Junah wouldn’t even be playing tomorrow! When I got out to his house last night, he was dead drunk. Two in the morning and couldn’t hardly stand….”

  I became aware of my mother clearing her throat rather dramatically. Both scribes’ eyes were wide open now, bony shoulders thrusting forward like vultures. I saw at once my faux pas. My mother’s hands were tugging me from my chair, explaining to my interrogators that her son must study (even though school had been let out for the rest of the week) and how they, as experienced interviewers and journalists, must know never to put credence in a young boy’s tales, which are so notoriously exaggerated. Langer, ignoring this, was just framing his next question when the screen door banged open and the day was saved by my brother Garland, bursting excitedly in.

  “Get your shoes on, boy! Jones and Hagen, they come in early!”

  “What? How…” I stammered.

  “They’re sneaking in on an early train, to duck the crowds. Come on now or we’ll miss ’em sure!”

  With my mother pushing, we bolted straight outside, smack into the Messner twins’ dad’s hired man Albert whose ancient Ford stakebed was creaking by with a load of green melons. Garland shouted to him if he’d give us a scoot to the station. Albert laughed and told us they already was about sixteen million folks jammed in there, packing the streets and spilt over onto every porch, stoop and rooftop. “Y’all boys won’t see jack squat a-racin’ there. Climb on the truck with me, for the motorcade.”