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

by Steven Pressfield

  “The Navy couldn’t release me. I worked on for another seven months, finally receiving my Discharge and arriving home in Atlanta in March of ’46. How can any of us know another’s grief? I dwelt in a twilight state beside Jeannie with the act of suicide never more than a membrane away. I couldn’t work. Couldn’t resume my studies or start a practice. I couldn’t read, not even the finest modern authors. Only the ancients. The Iliad and Odyssey, Shakespeare’s sonnets and parts of the King James Bible. I read Ruth’s speech to Naomi over and over, weeping every time.

  “The only physical activity I could bear was golf. I started just putting. I would pedal out to East Lake alone—the Atlanta Athletic Club had generously given provisional memberships to all returning officers—and putt in the dark, sometimes from two in the morning till dawn. I would slink off in the fog when the first foursomes arrived. Gradually I began to go out, alone or taking just a caddie, very early or very late like Junah used to. I was playing, as Bagger Vance always said, without fear and without hope. Not surprisingly I began to play pretty well. I had never been below a legitimate two, going around in 74 or 75. Now I was rarely over 70 from the extreme backs. Jeannie entered me in tournaments, which I refused to show up for. Finally the Georgia Amateur came to East Lake. There was no escaping. ‘They’re closing the course for ten days for the tournament,’ Jeannie said, ‘so if you want to play at all, you have to compete.’

  “In my state of somnambulance I breezed through the quarters playing well over my head, squeaked out a one-up nail-biter in the semis, and came up in the thirty-six-hole final against Temple Magnuson, the defending champ. Magnuson was a lawyer from Marietta, a former colonel in the Supply Corps and arrogant as hell. He had me four down at the turn and added two more by lunch. I remember the scorer tugging me aside on the nineteenth tee to ask if I would be kind enough to play the bye holes out. In other words, keep playing for the gallery’s sake even after Magnuson had whipped me.

  “Up to that point I don’t think winning had even entered my mind. I didn’t care. Now suddenly I did. The thought that this Supply Corps sonofabitch, this slick barbered bastard who had skated out of the war the same man he was when he entered, who had not endured one millionth of what real soldiers and sailors had, had not even witnessed one millionth of it, that he would beat me, and forget me, which seemed even worse, was more than I could bear. I felt in some fevered and no doubt quite deranged way that I was standing in for all those who had suffered, who had been maimed or perished, and that my game must speak for them. This was preposterous of course, but there it was. I felt as if I must win or die, and I no longer wanted to die.

  “Whereupon my game utterly deserted me. Like Junah’s early collapse. I choked. I clutched. I lost all sense of plane or rhythm. Only by the maddest of scrambling did I stay even through the third nine, and in fact pick up a hole on the thirtieth. I came to the thirty-first five down with six to play. I had the honor and promptly bombed one into the deep timber. The ball was wedged under a root, unplayable. Magnuson strode in midfairway, already accepting congratulations. I had reached my end. I know it sounds silly but this, in some unspeakable way, was the annihilation of my life. I felt my vision swim before me, my eyes began tearing as the waters of despair rose to overwhelm me. I had not thought for months, maybe years, of the match at Krewe Island. Now, as clearly as if he were speaking the words into my ear, I heard Bagger Vance’s voice: ‘A day will come when you will be drowning. In that hour remember me. I will preserve you.’ I knew without a shred of doubt that this was that moment. And I knew exactly what to do.

  “I still had my ball, my Spalding Dot, this very ball here in my hand now. It was at home in my dresser. I turned to my caddie, a redheaded urchin named Terry Tucker, whose little brother Mike was tagging behind us. I sent Mike streaking off in his PF Flyers. I had to stall, composing myself and going over my options. Then Mike came huffing back with that Dot. I showed it to the scorer, let him know I would be taking the unplayable-lie penalty, that this was the ball I would be dropping.

  “By now of course the whole stunt seemed utterly preposterous to me. What did I expect, some magic from this fifteen-year-old golf ball? The cover would probably peel off the damn thing the second I hit it. I stepped to the shot. Two-ten to the flag, a knockdown hook off half an inch of pine straw that would have to be drilled between two trees no more than four feet apart and somehow stop on a shallow green with deep-lipped bunkers front and rear. How should I hit it? I hadn’t the faintest idea even as I settled the two-iron in my grip and sunk my spikes into the crusty, needle-strewn dirt. Something made me look up. There stood Mike, my caddie’s kid brother, still gasping for breath after his valiant run. ‘Hold nothing back,’ his voice said out of nowhere. ‘Knock the shit out of it.’”

  At this precise point in the story, the road before us ran out. We were well off the causeway now, having four-wheeled past several abandoned gates, followed a number of ancient Corps of Engineers signs, but primarily groping by instinct and the directions of our tattered navigator in back toward the brightening sky over the ocean. Our original dirt two-lane had devolved into a pair of muddy rut tracks. Now suddenly these ended too. “Where the hell are we now?” Irene squinted right and left amid the high, rain-soaked grass.

  “Turn left,” our guide called from the pickup bed. We looked. There was no road there. No track. No nothing.

  “This is crazy,” Michael said, his big shoulders broadening with anger. “I’m going to get out and talk to this sonofabitch.” His fist was on the door handle.

  “Please turn left through here,” the derelict man repeated firmly from behind. “I know the way.”

  The ring of conviction in the man’s voice and the surprising forcefulness with which he expressed it silenced all protest, at least for the moment. Irene shrugged and cranked the wheel; we yawed left into raw grassland. “Well, don’t stop now.” Michael turned to me, no doubt deflecting some of his anger toward our guide in back. “You holed the shot, right?”

  I nodded. “I birdied the two after that, winning them both. That was too much for Magnuson. He handed me the thirty-sixth with a bogey and the match was mine, one-up on the thirty-eighth.”

  I could see Michael frowning. “That was the least of it of course,” I said before he could speak. “What changed everything for me, what brought me out of my personal crisis, and what has stayed with me without a moment’s failure ever since, was my utter conviction that it was Vance speaking through young Mike. As he had spoken through me on the eighteenth at Krewe Island.”

  “In other words, you felt…”

  “I felt what he always made me feel: a sense almost of shame, of awe and mystery and humility. The sense that life was operating by laws of such depth and profundity, and on so many levels that we mortals were ignorant of, that I or Junah or anyone was the meanest form of arrogant fool to yield to the conclusions of despair we invariably allowed ourselves. ‘Stand up! Stand up and act!’ Vance’s voice always insisted.”

  Michael was eying me dubiously. “And what did young Mike in his PF Flyers have to say about this?”

  “I asked him of course, as soon as the match was over, because I knew a boy of his age particularly in those more proper times would never use profanity in front of his elders. I tugged him aside gently, where no one else could hear. ‘Mike, I have something very important to ask you. Why did you say “Knock the shit out of it” back there?’ The poor little fellow apologized profusely, pleading with me that it was an accident, he had never spoke nothing so frightful in all his life. ‘The words just jumped outa my mouth, Doctor, I swear it!’”

  Suddenly the track ahead of us opened. What had been blind overgrown jungle widened out onto a dry dune road. There before us shone the Atlantic, crackling gray and wind-lashed as the last battalions of the storm clashed in battle before the pale sun. “There, see? Along the ocean?” Our ragged navigator pointed. “That’s the old eighteenth hole.”

  Michael and
Irene squinted through the wipers. Sure enough, you could make out the long dogleg, the seawall and even the shreds of the bunkers where Spec Hammond had waded into the surf to pass a four-wood to Walter Hagen atop his caisson. Michael stepped out of the pickup and turned back to the derelict, who now stood with impeccable posture and composure peering out over the ancient linksland. “How do you know all this?” Michael demanded of the man. “How can you be so damn sure?”

  “Because I own this land,” the fellow answered with utter understated self-assurance. “Everything you see from here belongs to me.”

  Twenty-seven

  “YEAH SURE, PAL.” Michael paced angrily along the truck rail. “Sure you own all this.”

  The stranger was climbing down from the pickup bed. Irene was already out beside the driver’s door; I was stepping down on the passenger side. Michael had turned away. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This was a crazy idea, we only did it cause we’re all so punchy from lack of sleep.” He stepped toward Irene, holding his hand out for the keys.

  “You came to play this final hole, Michael,” the stranger continued in his cool but emphatic tone. “Don’t you think you should do so?”

  I still had not seen the man’s face. The collar was up on his ragged poncho; the storm hood had obscured my view, nor had I really even tried to look at him, behind us in the pickup bed. Now he stepped down. The rain fell, misting my glasses. I blinked and strained through the beading droplets….

  “This is nuts.” Michael had turned to Irene, who was gazing curiously, held by something in the strange man’s presence. “Who is this guy? How does he know why we came here…and how does he know my name?”

  “I have known you under many names, Michael.”

  I tore my glasses off. The man turned. I saw his face.

  “Are you all right, sir?” He reached to take my elbow. Apparently I had staggered. I blinked and stared into the stranger’s bottomless eyes….

  It was Vance of course.

  As part of me had known as early as last night on the road, and surely had known now for the past twenty minutes.

  “Let him alone, you!” Michael shouldered the lean stranger aside, moving in to support me. Michael turned to Irene. “I’ve had enough of this business. What are we even doing here? We’re certainly not marching down there in this muck!”

  Michael’s angry gesture took in the ragged line of Krewe Island’s long-neglected eighteenth. The hole, what remained of it, was literally a pasture. A field. My gaze stayed riveted on Vance. He had not changed one iota nor aged one degree. His eyes glowed just for a moment with a private light for me. Then he turned to Michael. “The hole looks fine to me,” he said.

  We all turned. Someone’s trespassing sheep were just now shambling off to the far right, the bail-out zone of the old fairway. I found myself recalling what Keeler had said, the night he and Vance had stood silently, peering out over the darkened duneland. Krewe Island despite the years had not reverted to nature; her identity was stamped so strongly upon her, the hole seemed if possible more itself than ever. The grazing beasts had maintained the fairway. The bunkers along the seawall had been gouged deeper by years of storm and disuse, but in an odd Scottish way that only made them more authentic. The hole had matured. Where the duneland grass grew wild, it looked like the raw carries a player faces at Prestwick or Carnoustie. The worn storm-settled undulations contributed a smack of Western Gailes; Nairn and Troon were there in the sharp wind and over all like a bright patina was the wild, scudding-cloud light of Royal Dornoch. In a savage sea-torn way the land had at last become Krewe Island, Invergordon’s dream.

  “It doesn’t look half bad.” Irene squinted out over the shore. Her hand held Junah’s rebuilt persimmon. Michael made a face.

  “You’re not really going down there?”

  “Why not? We came all this way.”

  “We don’t have spikes. We’ll be slipping on wet grass; my God, the fairway’s half sheep and cow shit!”

  “I don’t know why,” Irene said, “but I want to hit this ball.”

  She held her grandfather’s ’31 Spalding Dot.

  I held mine in my hand too.

  “Here, Michael,” Vance spoke very softly. “I saved the third for you.”

  He held out another brilliant 1931 Spalding. Still white, still new. With the pen-marked J beneath the numeral.

  Michael staggered. Irene fell back too. I thought both their eyes would start from their sockets. “What the hell is this!” Michael turned to me, furious. “Is this some kind of joke, Doctor? Because I don’t find it funny at all.”

  I denied this instantly and profusely. But I felt my own brow flushing with shock and confusion….

  “The path looks dry”—Vance took a step forward—“let’s go down to the tee.”

  Lightning flashed over the ocean. My whole back was gooseflesh. I saw Michael’s glance seek mine. Vance started forward; Michael caught his arm, hard. “Who are you?” he demanded with a harshness unlike anything I had ever heard in his tone. “I’m not taking a step down this path till you tell me what the hell is going on!”

  The warrior god turned to him. He was as tall and lean as Michael was muscular, as poised and centered as Michael was spooked. “You will know me in every age,” he said, “by the way deluded men respond to me. They despise me, as you yourself did when we first met on the road.”

  “That’s not true!” Michael shot back, hard and defensive. “I was only upset because…”

  He pulled up, tripped by guilt and truth. He knew now, and so did Irene. She moved in beside Michael, reinforcing. “Where did you get that ball?” she queried Vance, barely containing the tremor in her voice. “How did you…?”

  “The ball is for you, Michael,” Vance spoke, eyes never leaving the young athlete’s. “You are why I have come. You are why I am here.” He placed it gently into Michael’s palm.

  Vance turned and stepped onto the path that led down to the eighteenth tee. Michael wheeled in disquiet toward Irene; she clutched his free hand. Irene’s glance shot back to me, clearly pleading, What should we do?

  “I don’t know about you two,” I said, “but I’m going to play the hole.”

  I started down the path behind Vance. Now I could smell him. How had I missed it before? That raw keen animal smell that was beyond wildness, to humanity in its deepest, most primordial sense. A sudden fear gripped me; that Michael and Irene would freeze…and flee. “Don’t look back”—I heard Vance’s calm voice—“they will follow.”

  The tee itself, when we tightroped across the last worn crest of path, was dry and cropped as close as a putting green. The links turf grew dense and tight underfoot; even my loafers found sure, easy purchase. I peered down the fairway. From this new vantage with the surf beneath us and the wild dawn light behind, the hole looked like the greatest of Scottish links do, as if crafted by forces far wiser than man, natural as a riverbed, pure as daybreak. “Does it remind you of anything, Hardy?” Vance asked in his still, gentle voice. I knew of course what he meant.

  “Of the thirteenth green,” I answered, “that day you stopped the sun.”

  He turned with a smile and laid his hand upon my shoulder. Instantly the rush of warmth that I remembered so well flooded over my bones. His face, which I like Michael had passed over at first without a glance, now shone magnificent in its warriorlike brilliance and beauty. “You’ve earned the honor, Hardy. Please,” he said, “play first.”

  Michael and Irene had indeed followed us down; now they stepped tentatively off the path onto the tee. You could see their astonishment at the turf’s pristine condition. Even the ancient tee marker remained readable with its worn letters and numerals carved into the wood.

  18

  Valor

  Par 5 541 yards

  I teed my ball and stepped back. “Take no practice”—I heard Vance’s voice behind me—“simply hit.”

  I obeyed. It surprised me not at all to flush the ball d
ead between the screws and watch a hard ripping rocket boom off the clubface, ride the following wind and steam down to land just right of the seawall bunkers, and bound ahead strongly around the neck of the dogleg. Exactly like Jones’ drive, only lacking fifty or so yards of his distance.

  Vance’s eyes summoned Irene next. She teed her ball uncertainly, glancing to Michael and me for reassurance, then gripped her grandfather’s long-shafted driver. It was a serious weapon, even for him, and for a moment I feared that she wouldn’t be able to handle it. Foolish. She drew the big persimmon back in a strong slot-grooved motion and pounded a beauty, along the same line as mine and every inch as long. She stepped away with a look of wonder, even fear, eyes flicking first to Vance, then back toward Michael, who now stood at the edge of the tee with the rain beading on his handsome face and the wind sheeting across his eyes.

  “Forget it,” he spoke directly to Vance. “I’m not taking part in this freak show, or whatever crazy stunt you think you’re pulling….”

  Irene reached for him. “Do it, Michael.”

  “I won’t”—he tugged free—“don’t ask me!”

  Irene glanced anxiously to me. I had no idea what to say. “It’s all right,” Vance spoke evenly. “I understand the young man’s hesitation. Do I have your permission then,” he asked him, “to hit the shot for you?”

  “Do whatever you want, it makes no difference to me,” Michael answered.

  Vance stepped before Irene and held out his hand for the driver. “You’re wondering how long this land has belonged to me,” he addressed her as she placed the weapon across his fingers. “There was never a time when it did not.” He held out his palm to Michael, who with a shudder dropped the third ball into it. Vance bent and teed it. But he was not aiming down the fairway.