Slim and None

by Dan Jenkins

  Gwen cooked dinner for the two of us that night. She’d been in town three days. Long enough to conquer our stove, find a grocery market, rearrange everything in our suite, and make friends with the widow Smith.

  I discovered Gwen Knew how to make a shepherd’s pie, which, next to golf, is the best thing the shepherds ever gave us.

  Gwen’s was superb. She mixed ground beef with the ground lamb before adding the chopped celery, carrots, onion, and beef broth, and she sprinkled grated cheese on the layer of mashed potatoes that covered the whole top of the casserole.

  While I came close to eating myself into a coma, I said, “Gwen, this is so good it makes me want to throw rocks at France. Of course there’s more than one reason to do that.”

  Gwen said, “It’s easy to make.”

  “It’s great, I mean it,” I said, and leaned over to give her a Kiss.

  She smiled. “And me not wearing my sex bracelets.”

  We toppled over after dinner and settled in for an evening of watching television—four channels were available. That particular night our choices consisted of a panel of educators and literary critics discussing The Utter Failure of Yorkshire Poets, a documentary on Hebridean sheep, a special on Dundee’s dental hospital, and a news show on which we learned that the first-round leader, Alfie Crangburn, was not, repeat not—as inadvertently reported earlier—the great-grandson of Lieutenant Alfred Crangburn of the Royal Engineers, V.C., D.S.C., D.S.O., the man who had Killed more than eighty Zulu warriors in a single day at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.

  40

  The wind and rain came back for an encore in the second round. The Skipper ordered it in case Carnoustie’s narrow fairways, high rough, and unlucky bounces weren’t enough to expand a golfer’s vocabulary.

  My threesome went off early on Friday, shortly before noon, having played late on Thursday. But it didn’t help us beat the weather. The round still took close to six hours, windy and wet all the way. The slow play did give me time to learn the names of my companions. The Korean was Kang ju, the Bolivian was Santiago.

  The pairing reminded me that the British Open has the most international field of the four majors. A third of the contestants come from countries where it seemed to me that trying to stay alive would rank well ahead of golf as a pastime.

  I became aware of this the first time I played in the championship, which was at St. Andrews fifteen years ago. I was excited about watching the opening ceremony. I intended to be out at the number 1 tee at 7 A.M. before the first group went off in the opening round. But that was before my chance meeting in the clubhouse bar the day before with Peter Dobers, a highly respected British golf writer having a large glass of red wine at what I recall was midmorning.

  When Dobers overheard me saying I wanted to rise early and go out on the first tee the next morning, he said, “What on earth for?”

  “I want to watch the opening ceremony,” I said. “Don’t they raise flags . . . Doesn’t a band play and a guy say, ‘Gentlemen, start your engines,’ and somebody sings ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ . . . that Kind of thing?”

  “Good God, no,” he said.

  “What do they do?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I suspect the starter simply looks at his watch and tells the Nigerian to hit it.”

  There was a long delay at the 6th hole, the par-5 with the out-of-bounds fence on the left. Up ahead, guys were tromping around in the heather, looking for balls. I took the moment to share the news with Mitch that with this tournament, this week, I would complete my Hogan’s Alley slam.

  I explained how there are almost as many Hogan’s Alleys in golf as there are Hogan stories, and now I’d played all of them.

  Pinehurst No. 2 was the first. It was called Hogan’s Alley because he won the old North and South Open three times on Pinehurst No. 2. The second Hogan’s Alley was Riviera, where he won the Los Angeles Open in ’47 and ’48, and returned later in the summer of ’48 to win the U.S. Open and set a new seventy-two-hole record doing it. The third Hogan’s Alley was Colonial Country Club, in our hometown of Fort Worth— his and mine—where he won the Colonial National Invitational five times.

  “Colonial your alley, too,” Mitch said.

  “It is,” I said. “I think I won a back-nine press there one day.”

  Now we were standing under umbrellas on the fourth Hogan’s Alley, the 578-yard 6th hole at Carnoustie. It’s the only Hogan’s Alley that consists of one hole. It acquired the name after Hogan birdied it three times in ’53 when he won the only British Open he ever entered, completing the Triple Crown—he’d won the Masters and U.S. Open earlier that year.

  The 6th at Carnoustie was first Known for something else. The land on the other side of the out-of-bounds fence is a firing range belonging to the Ministry of Defence, and has been for years. I’d seen a photo of the old sign that once adorned the fence. The sign said:

  DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING. IT MAY EXPLODE AND KILL YOU.

  You could say the left side of the fairway on Carnoustie’s number 6 had once ranked among golf’s most daunting hazards.

  The 6th that day was where I started Keeping myself in the championship. I was three over on the round after five holes, courtesy of evil bounces, but I birdied the 6th into the wind. Drove it good. Threaded a three-wood into the criminally narrow layup area, which was only eleven yards wide. My best shot of the day. I pitched on and made an eight-foot putt.

  It was a fistfight trying to save shots all day. The only other par-5 on the course, the 515-yard 14th, dogleg left, was where I made my other birdie. Since it was playing downwind I was able to bite off a hunk of the dogleg. My tee ball was big enough to take the Spectacles out of play. The Spectacles are the two side-by-side bunkers in the middle of the fairway. They stare at you from about seventy-five yards short of the green. I cleared them easily with my second shot. That set up my bump-and-run pitch from in front of the green, which left me with a birdie putt of three feet. No short putt is easy when the wind is trying to blow you off balance, but after backing off twice I side-doored it.

  My one-over 72 gave me a thirty-six-hole total of 146. Normally that number wouldn’t mean shit, but in bad weather on a tough course it was a Lucille. At the end of the day I was only two back of the five players who were tied for the lead.

  Defying the odds, one of the leaders was still Alfie Crangburn. He scrounged out a 73 to go with his opening 71. Keeping company with him were four names that would give anyone a restless night—Sergio Garcia, Nick Price, Darren Clarke, and Cheetah Farmer.

  A swarm of people could be found three and four shots back. Grady Don and Jerry were included in the swarm, as were the usual marquee suspects, Phil, Ernie, Tiger, Knut.

  Mitch studied the situation and said, “Everything too bunched up. Time somebody thin the herd.”

  Gwen and I dined that evening at a pub called The Goose and Garter, one of the places offering the all-day breakfast, which I ordered and savored. Gwen tried the fried fish that badly wanted to be Dover sole but may have been plaice and was most likely cod.

  We took a small table where we could see and hear the TV, and watched highlights of the day’s golf. There was a brief glimpse of me. I was bent into the wind, clutching my Hogan cap. The voice on TV described me as “a veteran American campaigner.”

  Gwen said, “The veteran American campaigner. I guess it was pretty rough, huh, going up that cliff on Omaha Beach?”

  The most interesting moment on TV was Alfie Crangburn’s interview with a reporter. The unexpected co-leader said, “Oh, I haven’t a prayer of winning. My Knees are already wobbly. I dare say none of you chaps will want to speak to me tomorrow night. Not after I’ve returned an eighty-five or ninety, what? It will all be gone, then. But I shall be proud to say I once led the Open Championship.”

  Reading the daily papers in England and Scotland was always a treat when I was there. They ranged from intriguing to outrageous. One of the things I asked the widow Smith
to do was supply the suite every morning with the papers I’d come to prefer over the years, and add them to the bill, please, which was something I shouldn’t have even bothered to mention.

  Each day I received the best of what you’d call your real newspapers, the International Herald Tribune, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, and The Scotsman, and I’d also receive the fun-filled tabloids: the Daily Mail, Sun, Mirror, Express, Star, News of the World.

  After dinner that night we relaxed in the suite. I built a fire and Gwen made a pot of coffee. I rummaged through the papers while she smoked, sipped coffee, and read a chapter or two in The Vicar’s Rector’s Bimbo , a paperback novel she’d picked up. I could have the title wrong.

  One of the things I explained to Gwen about the London newspapers was that certain stories could be a good riddle. You could come across big headlines that jolted you with such news as “Gooch Says No,” or “Hadley Tops It Off,” but you’d have to read ten paragraphs before you could tell whether the story was about cricket, soccer, or rugby.

  I confessed something to Gwen. The fact that I’d accumulated a list of words that, if those words appeared in the headline, I wouldn’t read the story. It was particularly so in the papers back home.

  “No matter what?” she said.

  “Never.”

  “Why not?”

  “The story couldn’t possibly interest me.”

  “What words?”

  I wrote the words down on a piece of paper for her, not necessarily in order of my intense noninterest.

  Deficit

  Merger

  Steroids

  Teenage

  Congress

  Hollywood

  U.N.

  Gay

  Hip-hop

  Hunger

  She read them aloud. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw her fight off a smile at the end.

  Gwen had vacationed in Europe more than once, but she hadn’t been abroad in five years, so she was shocked by some of the things she found in the London tabloids today.

  Like skin.

  Nude slatterns of every make and model, usually hung, shouting in the headlines that they’d like to shag a royal or any celebrity from the world of show biz or sports.

  Gwen said, “Shag was a dance when I was a girl. We did the shag.”

  “It means something else over here now,” I said.

  Our favorite of the day was the full-page layout in the Star of Vashtine Ulberg, the future Mrs. Knut Thorssun. Nothing on but a thong. Sitting on a stool. Legs spread. Cupping her stunning breasts. Bedroom look. The headline blazed:

  Vashtine to the Open Golf Field:

  I WOULD SHAG THE LOT!

  “Knut must be very proud,” Gwen said.

  41

  he weather in Saturday’s third round was an authentic wee summer breeze, the kind any American could identify, and there were welcome patches of sunshine with it. Otherwise I don’t think I would have bit off Carnoustie’s head and sucked out the lungs.

  My three-under 68 was the low round of the day and the championship, but it wasn’t the only one. There were two others Saturday. Fortunately those players were well back in the field. A 68 was carved out by somebody named Kahiko Katsuyo, and the other was fired by somebody named Tosayo Suyoshi. I’d never heard of them, but I’d seen Back to Bataan on TV a couple of times.

  What my own 68 did was slide me into what you call your thick of things. My fifty-four-hole total of 214 was only one stroke back of Alfie Crangburn’s 213. He was still refusing to go away.

  Alfie shot a 69 by holing out another five-iron for an eagle, sinking five putts longer than sixty feet for pars and birdies, and benefiting from a favorable ruling a drunk official gave him which saved him a par. The rules official was so loaded he gave Alfie a free drop out of thick heather and into the fairway at the 15th hole.

  The official ruled that a TV camera tower had been in Alfie’s line of sight, but the tower clearly hadn’t been in his line of sight, and Crangburn admitted later he had frivolously asked for relief, never dreaming he’d get it. Nobody blamed him for taking advantage of the ruling.

  That evening on the BBC 2 sports lineup you could see and hear the rules official up close on the 15th hole.

  “Absolucally,” the official said to Alfie. “Temporanny Immovable Obstruption. Rule Twenty-four tube. Place on, please.”

  I could only laugh when I saw that the gasolined official was Jarvis Phillip W. Burchcroft.

  The Key to my round, I told the press, was staying out of the purple flowers. That’s a Kind way to describe heather. A thick clump of heather can make your hand ring when you try to hit out of it.

  My round included five birdies and two bogeys. Bunkers caught me at the 5th and 13th. Deep as they were, I was happy to escape with bogeys. I birdied the two par-5s again, 6 and 14. Unlike Alfie Crangburn, the longest putt I sank was a twenty-footer for birdie at the 17th. The best club in my bag was the four-iron, I said. I hit it to three feet at the 12th, and it took me home over the Barry Burn at the 18th for a par.

  Gwen had walked the full eighteen. She was hard to miss in my gallery. Good-looking babe in a bulky white turtleneck, snug gray slacks, her long raven-black hair swirling in the wee summer breeze around her jazzy sunglasses.

  It should have been obvious to any thinking person that Gwen was following me. She couldn’t have been interested in Cheetah Farmer.

  I was somewhat disappointed no writer asked me about Gwen. I could have been a wit. Said she was a notorious golf groupie from the States who followed me everywhere, and I didn’t Know what to do about it.

  I did get a laugh when a British writer brought up Sunday’s final pairing, which would consist of Alfie and me. He mentioned that we wouldn’t be going off until very late, like 3:20 in the afternoon, and asked what I’d do to Kill the time?

  I said, “Oh, I’ll probably do some shopping, have a long lunch, take in a movie.”

  In all of the excitement of my round and the media attention, Gwen and I had forgotten a dinner date and were only reminded of it when we returned to our hotel and found the note.

  The widow Smith, Lavinia, had insisted on cooking something special for us on Saturday night. A gourmet surprise.

  Gwen took her hot bath first. I napped. I took my hot bath. She smoked. We dressed comfortably. I made cocktails. A potato vodka and club soda for her, an off-brand scotch and water for me. Junior didn’t do this part of Scotland. And we were off. We carried our drinks and the bottles of vodka and scotch down to the owner’s flat on the ground floor.

  “Oh, I see you’ve brought spirits,” the widow Smith said. “I don’t allow alcohol in the home, but I will make an exception in this case. Now start on this while you have your drinks.”

  She put down a plate of smoked salmon and Melba toast on a coffee table in the living room.

  “Please make yourselves comfortable,” she said. “I shall be going back and forth to the Kitchen to prick the boil. I made a decision. I hope you don’t mind. Some people like minced tripe in the haggis, some do not. I’ve included it. I do hope this will be all right.”

  Panic. I Knew what tripe was. I might not have Known much about haggis, but it had been my staunch belief throughout my entire life that tripe was something to be dodged at any cost.

  Gwen caught my look and called out to the widow Smith, “Uh, I’m sorry you’ve gone to so much trouble, Lavinia, but we really can’t stay for dinner. When we accepted your Kind invitation the other day, we had no idea Bobby Joe would be in contention for the Open. Surely you can understand. He never allows himself to eat much before the last round of a tournament . . . and I do want to make sure he gets his rest tonight.”

  The widow Smith called back from the Kitchen that she understood completely. She should have thought of it herself. She would share the haggis with her neighbors. But she would prepare two platters for us to take to our suite. She did want us to try it. We hadn’t been to Scotla
nd, she said, if we hadn’t eaten the haggis.

  Gwen looked at me. “Didn’t I do good?”

  “Tripe,” I whispered. “Tripe.”

  She shushed me.

  “First you obtain the large stomach bag of a sheep,” the widow Smith was suddenly saying as she trotted into the living room, picked up a slice of salmon on toast, and trotted back to the Kitchen. Next thing I Knew I was hearing about washing and scraping the sheep’s stomach, and she was saying, “. . . and nurture the pluck, which is the lungs, the liver and the heart, of course.” I was reaching for the bottle of scotch by then. Next came something about leaving the windpipe hanging over the side of the pot to allow “the impurities to pass out freely.” I poured more scotch as she went on about “the lights,” which were the lungs. I gulped and refilled as she continued discussing “the pluck” and “the King’s hood,” whatever that was. It was when she mentioned chopping up the beef suet—“fat” in my lingo—that I was forced to hold in a monster groan. But I hung in there, as did Gwen, who was pouring herself a straight vodka. Then we heard about adding the beef fat to the mixture, and this was followed by throwing in the handfuls of toasted oatmeal with the minced tripe and the grated lungs and the ground liver and the finely sliced heart, and adding salt and pepper, and giving it a “good shaking,” and dumping all of it in the stomach bag, and sewing it up with thread before putting it in the large pot of water to boil for three hours, making sure to prick the bag occasionally to let the air out.

  “Delicious,” Lavinia said. “Don’t spoil it with garnish or sauce.”

  “Top of the world, Lavinia,” I said as we left to go to our suite, me carrying a platter of haggis and the bottle of scotch, Gwen carrying a platter of haggis and the bottle of vodka.

  There was a lively race to the commode. I wasn’t about to lose. My haggis was flushed first, but Gwen was raking hers off the platter and into the john an instant later.

  I said, “Forget a stab in the eye with a hot poker. Before I’d even taste this deal, I’d go to the Congo, take off my clothes, and let a family of pygmies shoot poison darts at my naked body.”