Albatross

by Terry Fallis

  My teammates eventually came around to me, even Tom. I apologized for calling him an asshole, though in truth I was just sorry he was an asshole. Tom offered his own weak-assed apology and even thanked me for putting Stanford on top of the NCAA golf rankings. Other players on the team had played well, but I was the only one to win.

  Given the distance from Stanford to Toronto, I only made it home once in the fall term, for Christmas. It was really great to be back with Mom and Dad. They seemed to be the only ones, other than Ms. Davenport, who understood what was happening to me—you know, the paradox of the unexpected campus celebrity who everyone seemed to know and the low-level loneliness that came with never quite fitting in. And even though I had a strong desire to see Allison, I honoured our agreement and didn’t reach out to her.

  “You’re not loving it, are you?” my mother asked on Christmas Eve. “The whole golf thing at Stanford.”

  “I love my classes, and I’ve got lots of time to write,” I carefully responded. “And it’s not costing me—or more accurately, you and Dad—anything.”

  “But if you’re miserable, you can always just bail and come back here, you know,” she said, sitting down next to me. “You can go to school here.”

  “I know. But I’m not ready to do that. Golf is more of a minor distraction. It helps that I’m pretty good at it and don’t have to think too much about it, or practise much. So I’m okay. I’ll ride it out for the writing. But thanks for asking.”

  “That’s what parents do, among other things.”

  JUNE 2015

  As expected by then, Stanford won the NCAA golf championships with yours truly, or at least my special golfing machine of a body, leading the way and breaking collegiate records right and left. The following week, I had my first national cover shot, on Sports Illustrated. Ms. Davenport coached me through the media frenzy that followed. I had dinner with the president of the university, and was the star attraction at a campus-wide pep rally to celebrate our NCAA victory. As my coaches and Ms. Davenport had predicted, along with anyone else with two synapses to rub together, I was named NCAA player of the year. It was all very gratifying. Check that. Actually, it wasn’t. Gratifying is the wrong adjective. But it did make me feel special, even if I had nothing to do with it.

  “COACH, THIS IS Professor Ingemar Gunnarsson,” I said as the professor and I entered his office.

  Coach stood up from behind his desk and offered his hand. The professor looked at Coach’s outstretched hand and eventually, after what seemed like an hour-long pause, shook it.

  “How do you do,” Professor Gunnarsson said. “It is a very odd ritual, is it not? Two people who have never even laid eyes on one another begin by a most intimate gesture. We hold hands and lift them up and down briefly. I cannot fathom why we do that.”

  “Yeah, well, good to meet you, too, Professor Gunnarsson,” Coach said before resuming his seat.

  At Ms. Davenport’s suggestion, I’d briefed everybody I thought we might encounter during the professor’s Stanford visit. So Coach already knew about the famous Ingemar Gunnarsson’s notorious social graces.

  “I’m really glad we could arrange to have you visit the campus. Thanks for making the trip and for checking out our golf team,” Coach said.

  “It was good of you to fly me here,” Professor Gunnarsson replied.

  “I hope you’ve been enjoying your tour of Stanford.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it, but I am finding it fascinating and enlightening, which is more important than finding it enjoyable,” the professor replied. “The sports facilities are extraordinary and much better than at the universities with which I have been affiliated. If the money spent on athletics was redirected to the sciences and other more worthy intellectual pursuits, I can only imagine the strides that could be taken here on many important fronts.”

  “Well, professor, Stanford has a great reputation as a leading academic institution, as well as a strong contender in the NCAA,” Coach replied with a defensive tone he utterly failed to mask, if he tried at all. I grimaced.

  “Yes, yes, yes, I’m well aware that Stanford is a fine and respected university. But it could be so much better with fewer weight rooms, gymnasia, and practice fields, and more labs and lecture halls.”

  “Well, be that as it may,” I interjected. “Professor, perhaps you can report back to Coach here on what you found when you ran the numbers for the team. We’re both eager to hear.”

  “Yes, good idea, Adam,” Coach jumped in. “How did we do?”

  “I can summarize if you wish,” began Professor Gunnarsson, pulling a sheet of paper from his very old-school leather briefcase.

  He flattened the briefcase on his thighs and placed the paper on top so he could see the results. It was like a lectern on his lap. In my mind, I christened it a “laptern.” But I digress.

  “Of the eight women and twelve men on your vaunted NCAA golf team, no one, other than Adam of course, even breaks into the eighty-first percentile,” Gunnarsson said, reading from his paper. “Two of the men and three of the women would likely be much stronger swimmers than golfers. Four of the men and two of the women might wish to give track a try, particularly middle-distance running. Finally, the two weakest men and the worst performer on the women’s team should probably just give up the game, for they have already reached their maximum potential in golf and are unlikely ever to get any better.”

  I don’t think Coach was very happy with his report. I could tell by the hue of his neck and the way his chin vibrated. He clenched his jaw so tightly I feared it might shatter.

  “Is there anything else?” Coach asked, confirming that certain short sentences can in fact be enunciated and understood through a locked jaw, if the lips are parted.

  “Only that given the team’s Gunnarsson scores, and the fact that most of them are already playing as well as they will ever play, any coaching they’ve had over the course of the year has likely been superfluous and ineffectual,” the professor said with his eyes fixed on the paper.

  Coach then stood up…rather quickly. His desk chair crashed into the wall behind him, generating a noise I’d not thought possible in such a confined space.

  Professor Gunnarsson convulsed in his chair at the sound.

  “Ahhhh, Coach, remember the filter thing we talked about,” I said, also rising to my feet. “And your blood pressure.”

  Professor Gunnarsson ended his visit to Stanford a tad early, and I rode in the taxi with him back to the airport.

  “Remember during our first Skype call, I said it would also be important for you to have fun when you’re playing?” he asked.

  “I remember,” I replied. “If I have such a high Gunnarsson number, what does it matter whether or not I’m having fun?”

  “Simply because it is easier to listen to your body, empty your head of all golf-related thoughts, and swing perfectly naturally for four hours at a time if you feel good, if you are happy,” he explained.

  “Well, I usually feel fine—physically, I mean—when I play. And sometimes I’m happy, because I have time to think about other things. I plot my stories. Map out my future. When I play alongside Bobbie, we talk about a vast array of different and interesting topics. So we have hours of great conversation, interrupted only when we reach my ball and I have to take another shot.”

  “But is the actual golf fun?” he persisted.

  “Well, for me, fun is not a word I associate with golf.”

  “What words would you associate with golf?”

  We were almost at the airport. To respond or not to respond? Just tell him.

  “Tedium. Boredom. Unimportant. Overvalued. Insignificant. Lucrative. Enervating…” I stopped when the taxi stopped.

  “It seems your filter may be malfunctioning,” said Professor Gunnarsson as he stepped out of the taxi.

  I hopped out and hauled his suitcase from the trunk before the driver even got out of the car.

  “It was good of Stanfor
d to bring me over, though it was likely motivated by something other than generosity,” the professor said. “Thank you for showing me around, Adam. It was very illuminating.”

  With that, he pulled his small suitcase behind him into the terminal.

  * * *

  —

  IF YOU ASKED me what was my best memory of my first year at Stanford, it wouldn’t be winning the NCAA championship, or being named player of the year, or watching the half-hour documentary ESPN produced about my short but extraordinary golf career. Those were all nice, I guess, but what gave me my biggest high was having a poem of mine published in the Stanford Daily. It was tough to get published in the Daily. What made it all the more satisfying was that it had been submitted on my behalf by one of my professors, under the name Adam James—my middle name standing in for my surname—with an assurance to the editors that it was in fact written by an undergraduate student enrolled in the creative writing program. Had I sent it in myself, under my full name, they probably would have published it whether it was good or shite—I’d learned the word shite in a Roddy Doyle novel and loved its exotic sound. But as a campus celebrity, I’d never really know if I was being rewarded for writing a good poem or winning golf tournaments. Only my professor and I know who really wrote that poem. It was called “If At First You Succeed.” A cryptic, meandering, and metaphorical piece, few knew what it was really about. But I knew.

  Chapter 7

  JANUARY 2016

  “YOU DON‘T HAVE TO explain everything. Let the reader do the work,” said Professor Edwards as I sat across from her. “Readers want to do some of the heavy lifting. So let them figure some stuff out for themselves. They’ll be more engaged and invested in the story. Give them enough, but not too much. Easy to say, I know. Figuring out that balance may be difficult, but it’s a big and important part of writing.”

  I really liked Professor Edwards. She said we could call her Amy, but I never felt right doing that. I was meeting with her during her office hours to discuss a short story I’d been working on in her creative writing class. She’d told us during our first session that she’d been born and raised in Texas and was still getting used to California. She had a Ph.D. and two collections of short stories published by a small and very literary press. I’d read both her books, but found that most of the stories flew right over my head. She was also working on a novel, but she taught because the royalties on her two short-story collections wouldn’t even cover the brake job her 2007 Honda Accord needed. Such was the life of the working writer.

  “So you’re saying I should stop pounding my point into the ground? Stop giving readers a full, interactive, detailed map of the story? And just let them get there with a few chalk marks on the sidewalk once in a while?”

  “That’s all readers need. They know what two plus two is. You don’t have to provide the equal sign and the four.”

  “Hmm. Makes sense,” I said, nodding. “Okay, I’ll take another run at it and leave a little more to the reader’s imagination.”

  “You’re Canadian, aren’t you?” she asked as I slipped my unfinished story into my backpack.

  “I am,” I replied. “Wait, don’t tell me. You could smell maple syrup on my breath. Or no, it was the plaid toque, wasn’t it? I knew I shouldn’t have worn the plaid toque.”

  She smiled. “Hey, I’m from Texas. I think I suffer more stereotyping than you Canadians ever will. Hell, I’m a progressive and a feminist from Abilene, and I’ve never even owned a pair of cowboy boots. I was lucky to be allowed back into my hometown at Christmas,” she replied. “I just had a hunch you were from north of the border. It’s in your writing. A different touch. A different tone. A different sense of humour. It just feels like it comes from a different place—that you come from a different place.”

  “Thank you, I think,” I said. “And now I’m trying to decide if that’s a good thing for my writing.”

  “Oh, it’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned,” she replied. “You’ve clearly worked very hard in this course, particularly for a student athlete. In fact, you’re the only athletic-scholarship student I’ve ever taught who seems in any way interested in my course, let alone dedicated to his writing.”

  “Well, that’s why I came to Stanford, for its English lit and creative writing reputation.”

  “I thought you came for golf.”

  “An understandable misconception,” I said. “My golf is paying my tuition, but I’m really here for my writing. I had offers from thirteen other big schools, some of them higher in the NCAA golf rankings, but none had Stanford’s creative writing rep. That’s why I’m here.”

  “How refreshing and utterly unprecedented, at least in my experience,” she said. “I just don’t know how you find the time to keep up with the terms of your scholarship and put in the hours academically to succeed.”

  “Well, it helps if your extremities are precisely the right length and you stumbled upon an obscure Swedish kinesiologist peddling what sounds like a ludicrous theory that actually turns out to be true.”

  “Oh, if I had a dime for every student athlete who spun me that story, well, I’d have exactly ten cents,” she said, shaking her head.

  I learned a lot from Professor Edwards. She made me want to write more.

  APRIL 2017

  I was invited to play in the Masters on a special amateur exemption, courtesy of my meteoric rise in the NCAA. If that weren’t enough, I was to play a practice round at Augusta with Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, and Jordan Spieth on the Tuesday, two days before the start of the 2017 Masters. If I’d grown up obsessed with golf, playing with those three legends certainly would have been a much bigger deal. I mean, I am an informed citizen of the planet, so all three names were familiar to me, even though I could only have picked Phil out of a police lineup.

  Then there was the course itself. Augusta National was unlike any golf course I’d ever played. Then again, I hadn’t actually played on that many courses. I had no idea there were so many different shades of green on Earth until I walked onto that fabled chunk of Georgia real estate. It was such stunning natural beauty. Well, as natural as you can get with inlaid sprinklers, surgically manicured flowerbeds, and discreet colour-coded TV towers everywhere.

  I was fine until I met them on the tee. For a practice round two days before the real show, the crowd was huge. I kept reciting the mantra It’s only a practice round. It’s only a practice round. I hoped I was only reciting to myself and not out loud, but I can’t be certain. They were all really good guys and seemed pretty down to earth for the fame each shouldered. What blew my mind was that they knew about me, and my unorthodox journey to the top ranks of college golf. Even though they’d reached superstar status on the PGA the old-fashioned way, by working their bodies to the bone for years, they were genuinely curious to hear that there was another route. As we walked the course, they acted like there weren’t hundreds of spectators and about fifty sports reporters and cameras following us around. They just kept asking questions about my game.

  I didn’t play very well, but the rest of my foursome could not have been more patient and encouraging. The caddie I was assigned clearly didn’t understand my unique approach on the course. He kept urging me to shape my shots and try a little cut here and big draw there. After a while I just kind of tuned him out and tried to fly solo. It helped that I had some great shots along the way. They were particularly impressed with how long and how straight I consistently shot the ball using at least one club higher than they were using from the same position. The game actually passed quite quickly. I shot even par while my fellow players were all in the red and dialled in for the start of the tournament on Thursday. I survived.

  So in my junior year at Stanford, my first official PGA tournament turned out to be the Masters. Nothing like starting at the top. I didn’t really want to participate in the media circus that is the Masters. I wasn’t sure I was ready. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But a few months earlier, when
I’d gingerly broached the idea of declining the invitation, I had endured so much vehement pushback from, well, from every single person I approached and many I didn’t, I felt I didn’t really have much of a choice in the end. So I accepted. The practice round made me feel a little better, but not much. So I called her from my hotel room in Augusta that evening.

  “Mr. Coryell, you’ve been given a gift from the golfing gods. Playing in the Masters when you don’t bear the pressure that most of the other players face is an opportunity too good to miss,” said Ms. Davenport after we’d chatted for a few minutes. “There’ll be no expectations on you. You can just go out there, enjoy the pristine beauty of Augusta, think about anything but golf, and play your game. I fear you’ll regret it later if you don’t step up to the tee.”

  “But there’s so much I don’t know. If you hadn’t told me I had to wear long pants on the course, I would have shown up in shorts. I don’t think I’ve ever played golf in long pants,” I replied. “It felt a little weird for the first few holes.”

  “Your wardrobe is not exactly a justifiable reason to withdraw from golf’s premier marquee event. I can see the headlines now. ‘NCAA Champion Only Plays in Shorts, Pulls Out of Masters,’ ” she chided. “What’s really going on, son?”

  “I just feel so out there on my own. I know they’re trying, but even my coaches don’t really get me. I’m an aberration, an anomaly, an outlier.”

  “And a master of synonyms,” she interrupted.

  “I guess I do like my synonyms,” I concurred. “Anyway, Ms. Davenport, I called because I think you can help me. But it’s a big favour to ask, so don’t feel any pressure.”