The Legend of Bagger Vance

by Steven Pressfield

  I wish I could say that I was observing all this in a detached scientific manner. But in fact I was terrified. In a way it was like one’s first surgery on a living human being, that first parting of the flesh and beneath it the revelation of another world, a pulsating breathing world that strikes terror in you at the same time that it beckons and fascinates. That was how it felt, only more daunting because I had no training, no preparation. I was just a boy. I felt as if the ground beneath me could no longer be trusted; every physical law was turned on its head. Would I fly up off the earth in defiance of gravity, would I die, was I dead already?

  At the same time, it was utterly involving and hypnotic. I dreaded hearing Bagger Vance’s voice again, fearful of the mysterious powers he possessed, but at the same time I couldn’t wait to hear more. Explain it to me! Tell me what I’m seeing! What in the world is going on here?

  The course is the Field, he said, with its vectors, lines of force, tones, colors, harmonies, chromatic and somatic, magnetic lines extending above the earth, along its curvature, up into the stratosphere and soaring off into space, all of it organic and all interconnected. Our bodies were also the Field. This was the holiness of sport: that it opened a pathway via the body to the spirit. He kept instructing Junah in the proper use of the will.

  Junah birdied fifteen but bogeyed sixteen. He was overwhelmed; he couldn’t get it, it was all too much too fast. Vance continued guiding him quietly but emphatically:

  “Hagen and Jones do not will the swing into being, they use their will to find the swing that is already there, that was there before they were born and will continue to exist through eternity. Then they surrender their will to it.

  “Only when the Knower and the Field are one do they swing.

  “The Knowing is everything,” Bagger Vance said. “It is the Knowing alone that survives the death of the body. You are your Knowing. The Knowing finds the swing and the swing is you….”

  It was somewhere in here that I fainted.

  We were on the eighteenth, the final hole of the morning round, when I suddenly became aware that I was on my back on the ground with anxious faces bending over me. I felt my father’s cool physician’s hands lift me and I knew I had crossed back through the membrane to safety. Already the vision of the other side was fading; I was desperately relieved, grateful as a castaway washed up on dry land, the dislocation was so fearful, and yet I ached for what was already dissolving like a dream.

  One fact I knew, even as my head swam and I felt my father lift a cup of cool water to my lips: I knew with every cell of my being that this world, this Field that Vance had somehow revealed to me and Junah, this was Reality. The normal world, the everyday consciousness to which I was now so rapidly (and gratefully) returning…that was illusion. Or, more accurately, a foreshortened, watered-down version of reality. Reality strained through gauze, diluted and dimmed down to the thinnest of gruels.

  This is what I saw at the last.

  As the swollen throng surged down the eighteenth, the par five named Valor flush by the ocean, lightning began striking out at sea. The storm was breaking, though I couldn’t tell if it was a real storm or the Field crackling with its own voltage, a voltage that was always present but that I—we, in our normal state of awareness—was oblivious to. I felt the charge course from water to land and tingle through the soles of my shoes. Along the beach the lightning strike made a flight of gulls take wing; I saw them in the Field, responding to the Field. They sprung, one following the other, into the air, rowed skyward into formation and wheeled hard toward the west. The flock was the individual, of one mind only, and that mind was wedded intimately to the storm, to the wind, to the currents of finely drawn elemental spirit, strung like filament, which the birds followed flawlessly and without choice.

  I had the clearest, most incontrovertible sense that the gulls were playing.

  This playing was somehow cosmically important.

  I sensed that every aspect of the gulls’ life, of the storm’s life, of the planet’s itself, was play. Hunting and killing included. It was all play.

  Only we humans broke this natural law.

  But we were not breaking it now. We were playing.

  This play was, I could see, not in any sense inferior to “work.” It was superior. An aspect of devotion, holy in itself, but more than that, absolutely necessary in the cosmic scheme. As if the gears of the universe itself depended on these gulls wheeling in the wind and us humans, enmeshed as intimately in that same wind and same Field.

  Somehow both playings were equal, perfect and necessary in the sight of God.

  I felt an emotion enwrap me, a warmth and sense of safety which I can describe only as sublime. It seemed as if I were on the verge of some great understanding, some holy truth which trembled just beyond the reach of my fingertips.

  At the same time I felt I was about to explode. It was too much; there were too many Fields, an infinitude competing for my attention, each tugging my unseasoned mind with its own massive centrifugal power. I whirled among them. My nervous system couldn’t take it. I was coming apart, atom by atom. I summoned all my mental power, struggling to return focus to the course, to Junah and the match, but when my vision turned toward the massed gallery the figures dissolved into thousands upon thousands of individual auroras, each and all at once vibrating separately and intertwined, with all their tendrils and filaments brachiating into space, to the Field….

  A fuse blew. The circuit breaker snapped open in my head, and I hit the deck, out cold.

  Eighteen

  THE STORM HAD BROKEN, wind was lashing the medical tent; through the untethered flaps I could see the stampede of galleryites scurrying for shelter as the hard Atlantic rain sheeted in. Is the eighteen over? I kept asking my father. Yes Hardy yes, but you’re flushed and fevered, he answered, nestling me firmly onto a camp cot and covering me with a blanket.

  “Junah has gone in to the grill for lunch. Jones and Hagen are dining there too, with the press and celebrities and the mucky-mucks.”

  “Where’s Bagger Vance?” I blurted anxiously. Then I saw him, beside the cot, maintaining his usual silent vigil.

  “He’s here,” my father answered, pressing my burning brow and slipping a thermometer beneath my tongue. “He hasn’t left your side for a moment.”

  An hour earlier that news would have been a source of profound reassurance. Now it scared the bejesus out of me. I didn’t want Vance to touch me. Not that hand again on my shoulder! I couldn’t stand any more unscheduled flights to the ozone. But here was Vance moving beside me; I could see his huge strong hands. “May I, Dr. Greaves?” he asked my father, meaning could he examine me in his own fashion. Before I could stammer a protest, my dad had nodded and Vance was lifting me gently to a sitting posture.

  “The body is also a Field,” Vance spoke softly, for my ears alone, “known by the hands of the lover…the athlete…and the physician.” His fingertips tapped me three times—once on each word, each tap higher on the spine—then rapped me one final pop on the crown of the head. A rush of energy shot from my tailbone straight out the top of my skull. I would have passed out again, had Vance’s hand not steadied me.

  Then, in a flash, I was fine.

  My father plucked the thermometer. “Ninety-eight point six,” he announced with surprise and relief. “There’s no tonic like youth for a quick recovery!”

  I was given a hot shower and dry clothes. Junah brought a meal for me from the grill, hot brunswick stew with bean salad and hush puppies which I ate with my dad and the shoeshine boys, straddling a bench in the players’ locker room.

  Junah himself had gone on to the club storage room. I followed forty-five minutes later, as soon as my father would let me.

  The room was empty. Brand new and gleaming, with its freshly carpentered golf-bag racks, row after row from floor to ceiling, each brass-numbered slot smelling of freshly cut lumber and all of them vacant, waiting for the first hotel guests.

 
; Junah sat motionless on the floor, eyes closed, crosslegged like a Sioux, with Bagger Vance in an identical pose directly opposite.

  The sight made me even more agitated. What mesmeric snare had Vance caught Junah in now? What bizarre scenario was playing out now in the champion’s mind? As if reading my thoughts, Vance opened his eyes and turned to me.

  “We are practicing, Hardy,” he said softly so as not to disturb Junah. “We have worked through the woods and mid-irons. We’ll finish with niblicks and sand shots, then a little putting.”

  I peered. Junah’s clubs were all in the bag.

  “We have no need of clubs”—Vance again spoke before I could—“in many ways they are an impediment.”

  He declared that the exercise Junah was now performing was a primeval discipline of sport—sport, he emphasized, which contrary to contemporary wisdom had not evolved from the arts and skills of war, but in fact preceded them. “Did you know that the philosophers and rishis of the Indus Valley played an ancient form of golf? They played without clubs or balls. They were the greatest shotmakers who ever lived!”

  I was running out of patience with this stuff. Maybe it was the cold, or my irritation with the rain delay; maybe my fear for my own self and how Vance so easily toyed with my mind; maybe I was afraid for Junah, who had become as dear to me as a brother over the past eighteen holes.

  “I’ll bet they were,” I responded hotly, “and you were probably there too. One of the reechies.”

  “Rishis,” Vance corrected me gently. “And no, I was not one of them.” He paused. “I taught them.”

  “Of course. You were the pro! Twenty-one thousand years ago.” I warmed to the sarcasm. “Or was it twenty-one million? When Krewe Island was called Mu.”

  “See,” Vance said with a grin, “you are learning.”

  I was getting madder and madder. I remembered what Vance had said about the battle, the one that had been fought here at Krewe Island, and I began to mock that with my best ten-year-old’s scorn when Junah suddenly released a profound inner moan and began to rise, still entranced, from his seated posture.

  I broke off, staring. Junah rose gracefully, unconscious as a sleepwalker, and began slowly to glide through a series of poses. The Krewe Island bath towel that had been draped over his shoulders now fell, revealing his bare back. I gasped at the sight of his war-scarred flesh. Lurid welts that could only be bullet wounds rose in knotted knobs beneath his shoulder blades. Two striated slashes that my boy’s imagination credited to some kind of blade or bayonet spanned the width of his lower back. His whole left upper torso was a mottled moonscape of third-degree burn scars. This of course had become invisible to him. In the trance, his spine arched forward and back, he twisted and canted. Vance watched casually but with keen attention, as if he were monitoring by some mysterious process Junah’s every thought and vision.

  “This posture you see Junah entering now is called, in the East, Dandahan Virasana. Chariot Warrior pose.”

  Junah balanced with legs spread, hips low and spine erect, arms extended, joined powerfully in a single grip.

  “Danda in Sanskrit means ‘weapon.’ Han is ‘strike.’ Together with vira, ‘hero,’ they are translated by the moderns as ‘warrior.’ But danda in the primordial Vedic meant not ‘weapon’ but ‘club.’ And han to the ancients was without exception ‘swing.’

  “In other words,” he said, “‘warrior’ was originally ‘swinger of the club.’”

  This fellow is making a fool of me and Junah, I thought. I became furious. I was ready to blast him with my highest indignation, when Junah, still deep in transport, began to glide anew. Hands yoked with unfaultable grace, he executed, first to the right and then to the left, a flawless golf swing!

  At this precise instant, a sharp rapping banged from the door. “Mr. Junah,” Dougal McDermott’s voice came through the pine, “are ye in thaer, sir?” Junah wove woozily back to consciousness. The pro’s head popped into view with a smile. “Storm’s clearin’, sir. Will ye be ready soon? Mr. Jones an’ Mr. Hagen are preparin’ tae move tae th’ practice tee.”

  Junah stood, blinking, still half in trance. Vance answered. “I’ll come with you now, Mr. McDermott. These irons need to be emery-clothed and I must mink-oil Mr. Junah’s spare shoes. He will follow shortly.”

  He whispered a few words to Junah, then shouldered the bag and moved off behind McDermott.

  I turned to Junah.

  We were alone.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Concern and emotion flooded my voice. “What is that man doing to you?!”

  “Who?” Junah blinked. “McDermott?”

  “No—Vance! Your caddie, if indeed that’s what he is!”

  Junah straightened and brought his eyes into focus. “Why? Are you worried?” He was completely unruffled, gathering several balls and tees, ready to follow in Vance’s wake to the lockers.

  “Who is he?” I caught the champion’s sleeve. “You have to tell me, Mr. Junah! Is he a demon? Or some kind of fakir who spellbinds us into trances?”

  Junah laughed gaily. “How does a sprig like you know a word like fakir?”

  “I’m not stupid,” I responded indignantly. “I read books. My father’s a doctor, and I’m gonna be one too!”

  “Not a golf pro?” he teased.

  “Heck no! I’m gonna be like you and Bobby Jones, an amateur. And win the U.S. Open!”

  “My, my. A doctor and an Open champ.”

  He was deflecting me off the subject, just like Vance did. It made me even angrier.

  “You have to tell me who this fellow is! How does he make us see these crazy visions? And that way he talks. Every time he puts his hand on my shoulder, more cracked stuff keeps happening!”

  “On your shoulder? You mean like this?” Junah lunged teasingly toward me; I sprang backward. He began laughing in earnest.

  I was upset and scared. Junah could see it. He motioned me over kindly and made me take a seat on the bench beside him.

  “Don’t be afraid, Hardy. Whatever Vance is, he will never harm you. In fact, I’ll make you a promise: as long as he stands beside you, no harm can come to you from any quarter.”

  “But who is he? Where did you meet him? How can he do the things he does?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Because he never gives a straight answer! And you’re pulling the same trick!”

  I felt Junah’s arm wrap warmly around my shoulder. His eyes met mine; he tugged me gently to him like a brother. “Let me ask you something, Hardy.” His tone had become serious. “What you and I saw out there on the course this morning, what Bagger Vance allowed us to see…what do you think is its relation to Reality?”

  I knew what he was going to say. That it was Reality. That the world we see normally, our everyday world, is nothing but…

  “I’ve seen that Reality before.” Junah’s words cut off my thought. “Shall I tell you where?”

  His tone sent a shiver through me.

  “In France.”

  He meant the Great War. My spine went to ice; I felt the hair stand straight up on my neck.

  “That is where I met Vance. Stepping forth from a cloud of shellfire to preserve me. He was my driver. Or rather, became my driver.”

  Junah broke off for a moment, absent in memory. Then his glance returned and focused on me.

  “I was in a veterans hospital for most of a year,” the champion spoke softly, “upon my return from England after the armistice. My mind had slipped its moorings, as they say. I was lost upon the storming inner oceans, quite insane according to the doctors. Vance never left me. He was my guide and instructor.”

  “Instructor in what?” I demanded, becoming even more agitated.

  “He started me playing golf again. That was when he made Schenectady Slim.”

  “What? Vance made that driver?”

  “From a hickory bough he brought from the woods beneath my window. The hospital was in Schenectady, New York.”


  Junah met my eyes and held them. “When my inner world was careening off its axis, Vance would place my hands in a grip upon that driver. It never failed to quell my terror. I was able to be tossed upon those inner seas and not be driven mad.”

  Junah stopped and glanced up. Bagger Vance stood there. He had slipped back soundlessly through the door and now glided forward, bringing Junah a dry, oiled pair of golf shoes. “The human being at his current level,” Vance spoke softly, directly to me, “is incapable of perceiving Reality, except in rare ecstatic bursts. In earlier eras, men could hold that consciousness longer. In future ages, they will again. But not now. That is what golf is for.”

  He asked if I understood; I said no.

  “Are you afraid, Hardy?” he spoke gently. “If you’d rather not continue with us…”

  “No…no!” I blurted. Unexpected emotion came rushing over me. To my surprise I realized I didn’t care who Vance was or what dark forces tormented Junah; all I knew was I couldn’t stand to be anywhere except with them. The thought of being separated from them, held even for a moment in my imagination, was enough to plunge me into despair.

  Was Vance some kind of dervish who had mesmerized me into his power? He must be, or why was I so desperate to stay? Why was I so certain that Vance knew every thought that had flashed through my mind just now and every thought I had had since the moment we met?

  I watched him kneel before Junah, helping the champion slip into his fresh spikes. Vance snugged the shoes over Junah’s dry socks and began to lace them up.

  “By the way, Hardy”—he grinned at me over his shoulder—“have you heard the morning’s scores? Our man came in in 35 for a far-from-shameful 76. Hagen’s at 70, Jones at 69.”

  Nineteen

  AT THIS POINT in the telling of the story, Michael and I became aware of a storm breaking—a real one, just like the storm in the story—smack outside across the inlet. We could see lightning flash over Skidaway Island and hear the willows in the yard moan in the rising wind. It was past ten o’clock, both of us were getting restless; we were debating braving the weather for a hike down the beach, when I suddenly remembered: