by Dan Jenkins
“I’ve got a lot more golf to play, Gwen.”
“I understand, but you’re forty-four, Bobby Joe.”
“Damn, I forgot about that. We do have a problem.”
She looked at me impatiently through the smoke.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “When the day comes that I’m no longer qualified for the Tour, I’ll move to Palm Springs. Marry one of those rich-widow dolls. That’ll take care of food and shelter—and I’ll get to wear a pink blazer.”
Her look changed to pathetic.
Then she said, “I talked to Rick yesterday. He drove down from LA. It was very interesting.”
“How’s his hair?”
“Do you want to talk about his hair or the offer he made me?”
“I choose hair.”
“I don’t. Bobby Joe, I am absolutely convinced of something. Rick is going to become the biggest sports agent in the business. I don’t say this because he’s starting out with Scott Pritchard and Tricia Hurt. I say it because he’s shrewd at finance, a great talker, a masterful liar. He’s a little bit smart and a whole lot devious—and all that is a powerful combination.”
“Sounds like he ought to enter politics.”
“I’m only saying Rick has every quality it takes to become an enormous success as a sports agent. I did leave out his other trait. He’s a Lolita collector. Very bad where marriage is concerned.”
“Take me to the offer.”
“I would be a thirty percent owner of the company and the starting salary is half a million a year.”
“Christ, he must not be getting laid at all.”
“Ordinarily that would be funny . . . Rick Knows he can trust me. He Knows I can do a good job . . . and it’s another way to protect Scotty’s earnings. He brought an agreement for me to sign, a deal memo. A contract will be drawn up later. I would run the West Coast office. He wants to operate out of New York. Travel, do his PR and selling thing. I would look after the details he doesn’t want to fool with. And I would have input on everything. I told him I wouldn’t even begin to consider his offer if I had to live in Beverly Hills. I said I don’t own enough pairs of shoes to live in Beverly Hills.”
“I hope he laughed at that.”
“He didn’t laugh as hard as he does at Three Stooges reruns.”
“What did he say about you moving the office?”
“He asked me where I would move it.”
“And you said . . . ?”
“I said, well, since I was in love with this guy in Texas—don’t get overwrought—I might move it to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. He thought about it a minute, and said OK, he was good with that, the air travel works, and half the Tour lives there anyhow, the half that doesn’t live in Florida.”
“What did he say about the guy in Texas you’re in love with?”
“He wished me luck.”
“Did he call me Groovo?”
“Not that I remember.”
“So you took the job, right?”
“I haven’t yet. That’s why we’re talking. Think about this for a moment, and try not to interrupt. Consider the day comes when you no longer play golf as good as you’d like. For whatever unforeseen reason. Injury. Loss of desire. Or maybe age starts to take an early toll. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you already had something else to do? And it was something to Keep you around golf, and it was interesting and financially rewarding? What if you were already in an executive position with International Sports Talent?”
“You want me to be a fucking agent?”
“God,” she said with a give-up look that said she must be speaking to me in an unknown tongue.
I said, “This is pretty good. The woman I’m in love with is offering me a job making plane reservations for her Kid!”
She said, “Can we chill here?”
“Probably not.”
“Did you hear what I said? I said executive position. I’m not talking about today . . . now . . . next year. I Know you’re exempt on the Tour for two more years, and I Know what that means. I’m a golf mom, remember? I Know for two more years at least, you’ll be one of the select hundred and twenty-five pros who’ve earned the right to enter as many as forty-eight tournaments a year and play for a five million purse in each one. It beats air-traffic control, right? I’m talking someday, Bobby Joe. Eventually, OK? But sooner than later . . . and you wouldn’t be working for me, you’d be working with me. You would be a big asset to the company. You’re an athlete. You Know golfers, you Know athletes in other sports. You Know how they think, what they want, what they need. You’d be invaluable to the company.”
I walked over to her. She stood up. I put my hands on her hips.
I said, “So . . . what you’re saying is, I’d better give this serious consideration or there’s no more us?”
“No, not at all. But I guess I am saying I’m probably going to take the job, and you and I will just have to work our romantic thing around it.”
I said, “I have another in-depth question. What happens if I say your long-range plan for me is not that bad an idea—I might go along with it?”
She put her arms around my neck.
“I lose the dress.”
38
Small hotels in towns where British Opens are played tend to fall into the category of your typical rundown British seaside resort dump. They inspire thoughts of old black-and-white English mystery-movie titles—The Condemned Stove, Separate Faucets, The Toilet at the Top of the Stairs, The Spiral Closet, The Hot Water Vanishes.
My small hotel in Carnoustie, on the North Sea coast north of Edinburgh, bore the simple name of Smith House. The name had nothing to do with the Smith brothers of Carnoustie—Alex, Willie, and Macdonald—who came to America and won tournaments and taught golf.
In the center of town, Smith House was two doors from the Maiden Arms, a bed-and-breakfast that had nothing to do with another of Carnoustie’s favorite sons, Stewart Maiden, the only teaching pro Bobby Jones ever had.
The Maiden Arms did have something to do with my caddie. Mitch was staying there with my golf clubs. He’d come over ahead of me, spent a week in London, shopping, dining, getting laid. He’d taken the train from London to Edinburgh—first class on the Royal Scotsman—and hired a taxi to drive him from Edinburgh to Carnoustie, for three hundred dollars.
Some of the caddies said Roy Mitchell had a more enriching life than they did.
Smith House was easy to find. The directions of the owner, the widow Smith, were good. It was on the road that closely bordered Carnoustie’s 18th fairway, halfway between Huggan’s Cranes and Stone-Cutting Machinery at one end of town, and the little gray stone Catholic church at the other end. The church had been vacated, I’d heard from the widow Smith, and was now a pub and bowling alley.
There’d been an opportunity to stay in the Carnoustie Hotel Golf Resort & Spa, the big white four-story edifice—relatively new—that sits directly behind the course’s number 1 tee and 18th green. But Tiger, Ernie, Phil, Cheetah, Knut, and the rest of the stars had seized ten rooms apiece for their friends, families, and entourages, and after all of the Royal & Ancient gentlemen and their volunteer rules officials from the U.S. Golf Association and PGA of America had been taken care of, I was offered the last available broom closet.
Gwen was coming later on the weekend, and I Knew she would be happier and more comfortable in the suite at Smith House, which consisted of a bedroom, sitting room with fireplace, Kitchen, and full private bath. Next to a castle and the title that goes with it, a full private bath in Scotland is the greatest treasure you can stumble upon.
I’d learned another valuable lesson in my first trip to Great Britain. You can rent a car and drive yourself on the wrong side of the road and encounter a near-death experience at every roundabout, or you can spring for a limo and enjoy the scenery.
The choice was simple, as I saw it. Live or die?
My usual driver, Charles, met my flight at Edinburgh Airport and gave me a c
omfortable, no-thrills ride to Carnoustie. Around St. Andrews, around Dundee, around the Firth of Tay—a body of turbulent water in the distance, brownish-grayish, that looked to be headed for a vicious firth-off with the Firth of Forth, the firth that rubs up against St. Andrews, which is not to be confused with the Firth of Clyde, the firth on the west coast of Scotland that rubs up against Troon and Turnberry—and along the coast road to Carnoustie.
Your Scot has no trouble Keeping his firths straight, but Americans generally do.
When we reached downtown Carnoustie, I couldn’t resist. I asked Charles to show me the church pub first. I went in and found it to be an agreeable place to have a lager if you liked low ceilings and plywood walls, and cared to watch somebody try to pick up a spare back there behind the area where the altar had been.
I went to Carnoustie a week early to practice, and not because that’s how Ben Hogan did it in ’53. Our Open convinced me I was playing good golf on a consistent basis. I was on a streak—in a zone, as they say. I figured I had another chance to do well in a major, so why not give it my best shot? Go early, do the homework.
Although I’d played all of the other British Open courses—Sandwich, Lytham, and Birkdale in England; St. Andrews, Troon, Muirfield, and Turnberry in Scotland—I’d never seen Carnoustie.
I’d missed the one there in ’99. I wasn’t exempt for it and didn’t feel like traveling all that way to try to qualify. That was the Open the French guy messed up and lobbed into the lap of Paul Lawrie, an obscure pro whose name was so unfamiliar he might as well have wandered in from a sheep-shearing.
I’d heard all about Carnoustie. I was aware that it was the longest, mistiest, coldest, windiest, dreariest, and toughest of all the British Open courses. Somber. That’s the word most often used by the golf historians to describe Carnoustie.
The course and town were all mine for four days, before the other players started arriving. In practice I played three balls off every tee, trying to figure out where I wanted to be on each hole.
In the early evenings I did the Hogan thing, which I’d read about. I walked the course backwards, starting at the 18th green, to give myself some other ideas about what to expect from the troubles that were out there. The moguls, the winds, and the meandering Barry Burn where it comes into play on the 10th, 17th, and 18th holes. Barry Burn is the poetic name of a wide treacherous creek that likes to drown good scores.
At night I strolled the town. Up and down the streets of old gray buildings mixed with residences, pubs, butcher shops, fishmongers, news agents, laundries, golf shops, Knickknack stores.
I dined in places that offered the “all-day breakfast,” my favorite thing at British Opens: fried eggs up, English bacon—hold the trichinosis—bangers, hash browns, baked beans. But I ventured into two pubs and sampled slices of name-this-meat, which came with sauces of uncertain origin and unrecognizable vegetables. I found a takeout joint where I could order fish and chips or a mad-cow burger. One night I did try the Indian restaurant on top of the shoe store—and set my body on fire.
Otherwise, those first few days were given over to stocking the suite with necessities and becoming familiar with my quarters.
Stocking the suite meant more than laying in snacks and drinks. It meant buying light bulbs that burned brighter than those supplied by the widow Smith, Lavinia. Those in the suite when I arrived were the Kind that when you turned them on, you turned them off. It meant finding bars of soap that were larger and more plentiful than the two used slivers on hand. It meant searching for a brand of toilet tissue that was softer than sandpaper. It meant acquiring more clothes hangers, enough to accommodate two adults. Just two would have doubled the one lonely, misshapen wire hanger dangling on the rod in the closet. Last, it meant going out and buying towels and washcloths after being informed by Lavinia that the one washcloth I found in the suite was actually my towel.
It was another matter to become familiar with my quarters.
I slowly learned the secrets of the hot-water switch after I found it behind the dresser. After that came finding the drinking glasses that were where the cutlery should have been, finding the dishes that were where the pots and pans should have been, finding the silverware that was where the cups and saucers should have been, finding no trash basKets anywhere, learning how to turn on the stove, learning how to turn off the stove, and figuring out how to open and close the windows in the bedroom without the help of a crowbar or two Bulgarian weightlifters.
I was definitely ready for female companionship. Someone besides the widow Smith, who could give Cody Jarrett’s mother two-up a side.
39
I’d lived many years thinking there couldn’t be anything longer than
a tune on a bagpipe, but that was before I played a round of golf in the wind and rain at Carnoustie. How hard did the wind blow in the first round?
It blew so hard it ripped the swoosh off Tiger’s shirt. It blew so hard it took Jesper Parnevik’s cap to Denmark. It blew so hard it Knocked another letter out of Vijay Singh’s name. It blew so hard it made cereal out of the heather. Take my wind, please.
Jerry Grimes said, “Boy, it was a bad-hair day out there. When my cap blew off, I looked like Albert Einstein.”
Grady Don said, “I looked like Don King.”
“Who?” said Jerry.
“That boxing guy. Has his hair done by Lufthansa.”
“This deal saved me,” I said, touching the bill of my brown checkered cashmere Hogan cap, or what some might call a James Cagney cap. “You can buy one in the exhibition tent for only two thousand dollars.”
It was routine to joke about the prices in the exhibition tent at the British Open. Once upon a time you could go to the Pringle booth or the Lyle & Scott booth or any of the other booths in the tent and find bargains, but that was before the people who run Tibet figured out how much the rest of the world likes cashmere.
The exhibition tent itself had lost its charm. Some wizard talked the R&A into throwing out all the fun stuff and turned it into nothing but a great big golf shop with booths for tourist info. It used to be like going to a state fair under a big tent. Along with the golf apparel and golf equipment, you could find tractors, speed boats, sports cars, golf carts, driving nets, bizarre putting devices, antique jewelry, gems and silver ornaments created by Garrard, the Crown jeweler, excellent paintings and prints, rare books ... Only at the British Open could you find a copy of The Brigadier Breaks 90 by Sir Arthur Dragoon Fusilier.
We were having a lager after the round in the bar on the ground floor of the Carnoustie Hotel Golf Resort & Spa. We’d discarded our rain gear and were enjoying the warmth of cardigan over slipover over golf shirt, and the indoors. We had finished our rounds within thirty minutes of each other.
The bartender was a middle-aged Scot who’d been listening to our comments on the weather.
“Aye, it’s just a wee summer breeze, lads,” he said.
Grady Don laughed. “ ‘Wee summer breeze.’ Fucking sky’s purple, the rain’s horizontal, I’m pissing ice water, but this guy’s going to the beach today. What time you going, Jock? I’ll meet you there.”
The bartender said, “Part of our defense, you see. The elements. You have titanium and sports psychologists. All we have is nature.”
Jerry said, “All I Know about the weather is what Scotty Pritchard said about it.”
“Tell B.J.,” Grady Don said.
Jerry laughed. “Scott said, ‘Geeeaaah, the wind.’ ”
They Kept chuckling.
I said, “You guys might be making fun of my future son-in-law.”
Grady Don said, “It must be tough on your future stepson, having to go through life looking like Ride the Wild Surf.”
I said, “Charlie don’t surf.”
Grady Don said, “I don’t accept that.”
I said, “I’ll grant you he can pass for a surf unit, but he’s never done anything but play golf. Gwen says he’s never even gone to the beach to pic
k up a chick.”
Grady Don said, “I guess if you look like Scott Pritchard, you don’t have to go to the beach to pick up a chick. All you have to do is stand around and see who scores highest on the quiz.”
“Old Scotty got himself beat up today,” Jerry commented.
“Clobbered good,” I said. “I’ll bet he hasn’t shot an eighty-nine since he was eight years old. He was in tears when I talked to him. He was humiliated. He said he made a seven on the first hole, and that was as good as it got all day. He’s out of here today. Sayonara.”
Grady Don said, “Those eighty-nines will WD you every time.”
I said, “His mom’s upstairs with him . . . helping him pack ... being a good mom.”
I volunteered the services of my limo and driver, Charles, to transport Scott to the Edinburgh airport, where he could catch a shuttle to London or Manchester, and from there he could find a flight home.
“Geeeaaah, Carnoustie,” Scott said as he climbed into the limo. “Somebody needs to buy this place some lawn mowers.”
The three of us—Grady Don, Jerry, and I—called on all of our experience and wisdom to shoot first-round numbers that were satisfying under the circumstances of wind, rain, and bad bounces.
We dug out middle-of-the-pack scores. I shot a 74, three over, which was only three behind the leader, but there was a gang of brand names between us. Guys with 72s, 73s. Grady Don had a 75, Jerry a 76.
The leader with an even-par 71 was the usual puzzling stranger, a tall, gangling, mystified young Brit named Alfie Crangburn. He’d chipped in three times and holed out a five-iron for a deuce.
His name fit nicely in there with other first-round leaders of past British Opens. Such curious chaps as Flory van Donck, Fred Bullock, Peter Tupling, Bill Longmuir, Paul Broadhurst, Nick Job, Lionel Platts, Neil Coles. Like most of those before him, Alfie Crangburn was expected to disappear at the first opportunity.