by Dan Jenkins
“That’ll help me sleep better tonight,” I said.
Irv looked up. “What’d you shoot today, Bobby Joe?”
“I carved out a little sixty-seven, is all.”
“Hey, did you hear me on Imus this morning? Three book mentions. Maybe you weren’t up that early.”
“I don’t believe I was, Irv.”
“I got four minutes.”
We left him writing his name in his books.
A truce was declared and Gwen and I even vowed not to touch each other until after I won or lost the U.S. Open. To make sure the truce got off to a good start we invited other people to join us for dinner that Thursday evening.
I invited Grady Don and Jerry. She invited her son. We were a table for five in the Carolina Hotel dining room. The conversation was almost exclusively about golf. Grady Don ordered an expensive bottle of red wine and proposed a toast to me and my 67.
Looking around the table, he said, “Here’s to the man who went out there today and bit off Pinehurst’s head and sucked out its lungs.”
Gwen lifted her glass and said, “I couldn’t have put it better myself— although I would have tried.”
The same group assembled for dinner Friday night, minus one.
Scott Pritchard shot a hard-luck 79. “Geeeaaahh” was his personal critique of the round. When Scott added it to his opening 72, he missed the cut by three strokes. Which put him in a carefree mood to wander over to the lively Pine Crest bar instead of dining with boring grownups.
“I’m gonna go hang,” he announced to his mother at our table. “Catch some pour, scope out a bim.”
Gwen said, “Be choosey, please. Don’t connect with a bim you might bring something home from.”
There were more things to celebrate Friday night.
One was my even-par 70. It gave me a thirty-six-hole total of 137 and Kept me in the lead by two. The score was good even if the way I went about it wasn’t. I saved par six times. I got up and down from Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Asheville, and once from Richmond, Virginia.
Mitch had said, “You a lucky thief today. We ought rob us a bank when we done here. Won’t nobody catch us.”
I thought my best quote in the press center was “I hit a lot of greens today—my ball just didn’t stay on very many of them.”
It was the wind coming up and the firmer greens that made the day tough for everybody. There were only two sub-par rounds, J. J. Henry’s 68 and Fred Couples’s 69. They played early when it was calmer, and were back in the pack, barely made the cut.
Knut Thorssun and Claude Steekley both shot 72s and made the cut with a little room to spare. I credited their solid play to the fact that their ladies weren’t around.
Vashtine stayed in the hotel to work on a new rap “song,” Knut said, using the word loosely. She’d been inspired to create by her experience yesterday with rum, gin, Crown Royal, Budweiser, and a nice Merlot.
Knut said, “It is to have words to recommend bloody murders on golf officials and uniform police. Also to make green and yellow vomit and dainty piles of shit on the wives of golf officials. This is the song I am hearing as I left the hotel room, to be sure.”
I said, “It’ll run a year, Mr. Kern.”
“I am to do what?”
“Nothing. Talking to myself.”
Claude didn’t say what Pookie was up to, but I guessed she’d found a devout young gentleman to study passages in the Bible with her at a motel in Southern Pines.
Grady Don and Jerry were among the cut survivors. They were particularly happy about it because three of the big favorites, Woods, Els, and Mickelson, all missed the cut. They shot 78, 79, and 81 in that order.
It was a cruel blow to the championship, losing three marquee names such as those, but it gave the press a chance to refer to the second round as “gloomy Friday.” In the days before political correctness, of course, the press would have referred to it as “black Friday.”
Jerry Grimes said at dinner, “Bobby Joe, it don’t hurt your chances to Know Elvis and them have gone to Downtown Cut City.”
I said, “There’s still plenty of heat on the board. Cheetah Farmer’s right there. So’s Stump Bowen . . . Rainey Walters . . . Julius . . . Knut.”
Grady Don amused himself by saying, “I like your pairing tomorrow, is what I like.”
I was paired with the space-alien teen bitch.
31
The day of the third round started for me with the thrill of breakfast and the agony of a business proposal. Looking bacK on it, I’d say there was an omen in there somewhere. Smokey Barwood, live-wire agent, arrived in Pinehurst during the night by plane from New York and by limo from Charlotte. Grady Don and I met him for breakfast in the Carolina dining room.
Smokey was wearing a black suit and a dull tie in a white pin-collar shirt. He looked more like a man at a funeral than a golf tournament.
As he shook my hand, he said, “I came here to be with you.”
“In his hour of need,” Grady Don said.
We talked about the Open for a while before Smokey brought up the business proposal. He removed a folder from his briefcase.
“What have either one of you heard about cerelixopone?” he said.
“Spell it,” I said.
He did. No help.
“What is it?” Grady Don asked.
Smokey confidently said, “Only the greatest leap forward in club performance since titanium. It’s the result of a secret process that mixes a ceramic material with nylix and suropone. Metal will never be the same again. Take my word for it. The cerelixopone driver is a Killer. Tests prove it gives the average player twenty percent more distance, thirty percent more accuracy. Launch Golf is the company that developed and owns the process. Headquarters in Carmel, California. The owner is a delightful gentleman named Gavin Saunders. I’ve met Gav. Hell of a guy. We have a chance to get in on the ground floor as stockholders with you two as the spokespeople for the product on TV, in print ads, billboards, everywhere—and the company has a great marketing idea for the launch.”
“Gav?” Grady Don said.
“Right,” Smokey said.
“He likes to be called Gav?” Grady Don said.
“Yes,” Smokey said. “Their surveys show that the greatest growth in golf over the past four years is among homosexuals. Therefore, they plan to hit this group hard, right from the get-go. They’re going to market three cerelixopone models at once—the Big Gavin, the Bigger Gavin, and the Biggest Gavin.”
Grady Don and I were laughing before Smokey finished.
Looking serious, Grady Don said, “Hi, I’m Grady Don Maples. I’m here to talk to you about the Big Gavin. That’s Gav’s new driver, not his cock. Bobby Joe will talk to you in a minute about his cock, which is bigger than a rechargeable flashlight and available at any Ace Hardware.”
Smokey observed Grady Don with deep sadness. “I take it you’re not interested in pursuing this opportunity?”
“Damn, you’re shrewd, Smokey,” Grady Don said.
The agent turned to me.
“I’m with him,” I said.
“You don’t even want to hear the financial details?” the agent said.
I said, “Let me put it this way, Smokey. If I was sprawled out in a gutter with my head on a curb and a bottle of vanilla extract in my hand, I might listen.”
Smokey closed the folder, put it away, and ran a couple of other opportunities past us.
Grady Don could do an outing and clinic for a group of plumbing executives who were going to a retreat in Mexico.
“Can’t handle it,” Grady Don said. “I don’t speak Spanish.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Smokey said.
“Sure it does,” said Grady Don. “I wouldn’t Know how to say, ‘No, I don’t want to fuck your sister.’ ”
The deal Smokey proposed to me was a $5,000 appearance fee if I’d go to Germany and play in the Stuttgart Open. The son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was the tournament chairm
an.
“That’s a lure?” I said, laughing again. “Where’s von Rundstedt? Maximilian Schell? Hardy Kruger? If you have Nazis, you gotta use ’em.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” the agent said.
Stuttgart and the Big Gav Kept me smiling on the practice range and putting green while I prepared for the third round.
Gwen gave me a thumbs-up sign and a good-luck grin as I walked past her on the way to my two-thirty tee time, where a gallery of four hundred million people was waiting for the last group of the day.
All those fans who would no longer have Elvis, Madonna, or Britney to follow. I wondered how disappointed the crowd would be with my pairing, those who weren’t out there strictly for a swing tip. Half of them would be thinking, “I paid good money for this ticket, but now I don’t get to see Tiger, Phil, or Ernie? Maybe the little babe will be interesting to watch, but who’s this geek?”
My fifteen-year-old playing partner came over and introduced herself on the first tee, saying, “Hi, Mr. Grooves, I’m Tricia Hurt.”
I shook her hand.
“Tricia, my treasure,” I said. “Make it Bobby Joe.”
“OK, sure,” she said. “Bobby Joe.”
She was as tall as I was, but had better legs. Sweet face, I thought. A tap-in from beautiful.
“Play good today,” I said.
“You, too,” she said, and walked back to the other side of the tee.
I noticed her daddy, the Dabster, had worked his way up to the ropes by her caddie and was giving the caddie a last-minute lecture. The expression on the Dabster’s face was stern, threatening.
The caddie chewed his gum and looked straight ahead as he listened to his orders from the man who was apparently telling him that if his daughter didn’t play well today, he would rip the caddie’s heart out of his chest with his bare hands and jump up and down on it in his Guccis.
I stood with Mitch on the tee while we waited for the group in front of us—Cheetah Farmer and Stump Bowen—to make their way to the green.
Mitch said, “We got enough candy in our pocket, you reckon?”
I smiled. “I have Caramel Nips, what have you got?”
“Lifesavers.”
“That’s it? You forgot the Butterfingers?”
“I have hundreds. They like those, don’t they? Don’t hundred-dollar bills make young girls horny?”
“They used to. I believe it takes a Jaguar now.”
The first hole at Pinehurst No. 2 is a straight-away par-4 of 404 yards, relatively easy. I didn’t care for the idea of a teenage girl outhitting me off No. 1 in front of a sizable crowd, which was why I went with the Show Dog.
I made a smooth pass at it. Felt like I stung it pretty good. My tee ball split the fairway down the middle about 295 yards. Walking back over to Mitch, I was thinking, “Chase that one, muffin . . . puddin . . . princess.”
But I stopped thinking it the minute she took that big, graceful swing and launched her own tee shot.
I Knew she’d FedEx’d me.
32
The muffin, puddin, punkin princess lost her genius at the 8th hole. It must be a terrible thing to lose your genius.
The 8th is a rigorous par-4, 485 yards, curving to the right, but it’s not as tough as Tricia made it. Her problem began when her approach slid off the green and wound up in a swale, leaving her with a long chip up a severe slope.
She chose to chip with her three-wood. It’s a shot Tiger introduced to the world in the nineties, and I might add, a shot only Tiger had been able to make work with any consistency. The times I tried it, I thought I was playing croquet.
Tricia’s first chip rolled halfway up the severe but smooth slope and came back down to her feet. She looked up and said something to the heavens. She chipped her next one a little harder. But not hard enough. It came back down the slope to her feet again.
Furious with herself, she took two steps forward and met the ball as it was rolling back toward her and almost rapped it again before it stopped rolling. Her third try made it onto the green, and she two-putted from forty feet for a triple-bogey 7.
She had started the round trailing me by two strokes. We had both parred the first seven holes, so when I managed a par to her triple on number 8, she was quickly five back—and steaming.
As we walked to the next tee, I tried to console her. “You’re only three over for the championship,” I said. “There’s still a long way to go. Now’s the time to call on your patience.”
She didn’t say anything. Head down. Trying not to make eye contact with her dad.
I said, “Incidentally, you do Know if you’d hit that second chip back there before it came to rest, it would have been two more. That’s a two-stroke penalty.”
“I don’t need you to tell me the rules,” she said.
I was startled by her response.
“I Know the rules,” she said.
I said, “I’m sure you do. You’ve been in a lot of competition for someone your age.”
“I Know the rules as well as you do.”
“That may well be true.”
“It is true.”
“Hey, I surrender.”
“I scored one hundred on the rules quiz at the golf academy.”
“I’m impressed. Everyone there must have been.”
“They were,” she said. “Nobody had ever scored a perfect hundred before I did.”
“What do you say we drop it and play golf, huh?”
Our conversation ended with her muttering something under her breath.
I’m sure it couldn’t have been “Fuck you,” even though it sounded faintly like it. They wouldn’t have taught her that at the golf academy, would they?
Suddenly, Tricia wasn’t as beautiful and gracious as she’d been back on the first tee. Before my very eyes, she’d turned into what may have been her true self—the space-alien teen bitch.
I found myself dwelling on teenagers again for a moment. Grady Don and I often talked about how we’d been raised to say yes ma’am and no sir and dress properly and sit still and Keep your mouth shut in restaurants and respect authority and compete hard but fair at sports. But today’s teenagers, guys in particular, liked tattoos, body-piercing, noise for music, bloomers for clothes, didn’t respect anything but money, and their idea of humor was a stupid remark they’d heard somebody say on a sitcom. Grady Don was fond of saying he’d like to take every affluent white Kid who wore his baseball cap backwards and make him live in a poor black ghetto for six months, then let him out and ask him how he’d like to wear his cap now?
Tricia and I didn’t speak for the next two hours. We were busy grinding, struggling to make pars, which we did.
Up ahead, I tried not to let something else annoy me.
It was Cheetah Farmer holing every putt he stood over. The scoreboards told me he was four under on the round. That moved him to within a stroke of me.
He was working on a 66, low round of the tournament, and when I stood on the 18th tee and listened to the roar coming from the green, I could tell he got to the house with it.
Chandler “Cheetah” Farmer had no friends on the Tour, and didn’t care. He liked being a jerk. He seemed to take pride in it. He came out five years ago with a gunnysack of arrogance, having been a big winner in amateur golf, and unfortunately for the rest of us he proved himself as a pro right away. He became a consistent money winner, a tournament winner—Greensboros and things—and he pulled in two majors, the British Open at St. Andrews and the PGA at Southern Hills. Having become a marquee name, he took to firing people. First person he fired was his dad, the bull-neck crewcut dullard who caddied for him. He accused his dad of stealing his money. He replaced him with a guy who’d been caddying for Wu Sing Fu on the LPGA tour. Cheetah had fired all of his gurus twice—Butch Harmon, Rick Smith, Dugan Cockrell. But he was now back with Butch. He’d fired three agents and lately was representing himself. He’d even fired three girlfriends—Kitty, Jackie, and Angela—all of who
m were Known for the hot pants they wore and the tattoos on their thighs and shoulders.
Cheetah didn’t occupy my thoughts long. Soon enough came the incident that was either a tragedy or a comedy, depending on whether you were a fan of mine or a Nazi Commie Islamic rodent.
33
A tragicomedy is what Miz Dinker would have called it. But my old continental lit professor would have been talking about Europeans who wrote books thicker than their beards. Not golf. It started when I couldn’t decide what to hit on 18, the Show Dog or a steer job. The last hole at Pinehurst No. 2 is a dogleg-right par-4, 450 yards, slightly uphill, trees on the right, practice range on the left.
If you don’t hammer a big drive out there, you’re left with a long difficult second shot to a well-bunkered green where a lucky bounce counts for as much as skill.
But you need a tee ball in the fairway at all cost or you can wind up in worse trouble. Like deep in the rough. Dead. Deader than a stock tip from a rich guy.
Confused is the worst thing any athlete can be in competition. I’d only Known that since high school, but I momentarily forgot it.
Which was why I made an indecisive swing with the driver—let out or let up?—and hit the looping, out-of-nowhere, Baker-Finch hook that looked for all the world like it would sail over the pines and into the practice range, out of bounds.
“It could be OK,” Mitch said.
“Or not,” I said disgustedly.
I looked over at Tricia and said, “I’m gonna reload, just in case.”
Meaning I was going to hit a second ball to play in the event that my first drive was, in fact, out of bounds.
I steer-jobbed a three-wood this time, making sure I threaded it into the fairway. Damage control.
Stroke and distance is the penalty for out of bounds. Thus, if I was forced to play the second ball, I’d be laying three, shooting four—and still 200 yards from the green. I’d be looking at a double bogey or worse.
As you might imagine, I was overjoyed to find my ball inside the boundary stakes. It was in bounds by a few heartwarming feet. Not only that, I had a clear shot to the green.