“Hacker,” he said, peering at me over the top of his paper. “I hear you’re making your virgin voyage with us this afternoon. Nervous?”
“Yeah, a little,” I said. “I’ve always wondered how you guys avoid saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ when you’re on the air.”
He chuckled. “That’s easy,” he said. “If you even think of those words, Ben Oswald will reach through the wires from the control room and choke the very life out of you. Knowing that, it’s actually pretty easy.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s one potential worry dispensed with. Here’s another: what if I have to pee?”
He shook out his paper, folded it in half, laid it on the table and smoothed it out. The man liked his newsprint wrinkle free.
“You get the assistant director’s attention, tell her that you gotta go,” he said. “Next time a commercial break comes up, she’ll give you the word. You got three minutes to get down to the Port-A Potty and back. But if you pee before the show, like your mother always said, you can generally make it through the afternoon. I’ve heard stories about guys taking milk jugs up to the booth with them, but I’ve never gone there.”
“Not a big milk drinker,” I said, “So I guess I’ll just hold it.”
“I heard Billy Joe Bosworth is flying in,” he said. “Word of advice…don’t let him start to ramble. He can tell a story that goes on for hours if you let him. This is TV. Keep it short and sweet and toss the ball down the line to the next guy.”
“Right,” I said. “Short, sweet and pass the ball.”
He smiled at me. “You’ll be fine,” he said. He paused. “I hope.”
With his last words ringing in my ears and causing my insides to cramp up, I went outside. The day was warm and sunny, and the wind was light. There was a good crowd on hand for a Friday, and the air was filled now and then with the cheers announcing that someone had made a nice birdie putt somewhere out on the course.
I saw Delbert Connor in his well-pressed navy uniform talking to a couple of others who looked like detectives outside one of the TV trailers. I went over. He saw me coming and broke away from his conversation before I got close enough to listen.
“Morning, Captain Connor,” I said. “How’s the investigation going?”
“It’s going,” he said, shaking my hand. “But like most investigations, it’s not going in a straight line.”
“Care to tell me what that means?” I said.
“Not particularly,” he said, but he smiled kindly.
“Do you have a cause of death yet?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The victim was electrocuted. Some kind of high current zapped him.”
“Really?” I said. “Was that accidental or on purpose?”
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ve impounded all the equipment and our crime lab rats are going over it right now. Hope to have something to go on by tonight.”
“I’m supposed to do the broadcast from that booth this afternoon,” I said. “Do I need to worry about getting zapped?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Think?”
He chuckled. “Well, one theory is that there was some kind of equipment malfunction,” he said. “If that’s the case, we’ve taken the equipment away and sent it to the lab, so you should be okay.”
“And theory two?”
“Ah,” he said. “That theory says that there was a bad actor involved. If that theory is true, then he, or she, might still be out there.”
“Oh, great,” I said. My stomach did another lap.
“But if that theory holds,” he said, “Then the bad actor was pissed off at Parker Long, not you. Of course, the bad actor, if there was one, might have some kind of problem with all IBS announcers, or people who like golf, or men in general. Under any of those assumptions, you could very well be in mortal danger.”
“You really know how to assure a guy, don’t you?” I said.
“Just doin’ my job,” he said, and doffing his captain’s hat, he walked away.
12
I met Billy Joe Bosworth at the TV tower on the sixteenth green. After grabbing some lunch from the canteen within TV City, which is what I had come to call the confusing collection of trailers, I joined the pre-production meeting of the talent, held in Oswald’s office trailer.
“OK, people,” Oswald had said to us once we had assembled around a conference table. “We’re going to open with a tribute to Parker Long. The storyline is that he died suddenly at the end of yesterday’s broadcast. And that he’d want the show to go on.”
“Is that true?” asked Van Collins. “I mean the part about him dying suddenly.”
“As of now, yes it is,” Oswald said. “We don’t yet know why he died suddenly, but hopefully the cops will have an answer about that soon. If any of you want to chime in during the show with your own personal memories, feel free. This is a tough time for all of us, and our viewers expect us to talk about it.”
He had looked around the table, daring anyone to say something. Nobody did. So he waved us away and we split up to take up our stations around the course.
I had walked out to sixteen. Just as I arrived at the tower, a golf cart drove up, and the Boz got out.
He was in his late forties now, but still looked like the flatbelly kid I remembered from his Tour days. Blond hair, broad shoulders, narrow waist. He was dressed in dark slacks and a golf shirt. He pulled his wraparound dark glasses off when he saw me and came up with his hand out and a big grin creasing his face.
“Hack-Man!” he said, “Great to see ya! How’s your Momma n’ them?”
I shook his hand. His grip was strong.
“Momma’s dead,” I said, “But the family is good. You?”
“Ah, hell, Hacks,” he said, “Wife and kids are better than a hound dog without the ticks. Sheila’s so glad to get me out of the house for the weekend, I’m a little worried she’s got a new stallion out waitin’ in the barn. Haw!”
I chuckled and motioned for him to go first climbing up the ladder to the broadcast room. He scampered up like a monkey and I followed. Tony Sciutto poked his head over the edge of the platform above us and waved. He’d been assigned to take over the camera on the sixteenth tower. I guess Benny from yesterday was still upset with Parker’s death. Shooter had his headphones on and was apparently busy getting his big camera ready for the broadcast.
Inside, the room was stuffy. The wraparound bunting that covered the entire tower scaffold was excellent at cutting off any movement of air. I noticed that two chairs had been set up in front of the plywood shelf that functioned as a desk. The top of the desk was covered by two big TV monitors, a couple of laptops, two thick notebooks full of player stats, and a couple of electrical outlet strips. There were two small plexiglass windows overlooking the putting green below the tower, but the way the desk was set up I don’t think anyone planned to look through them—we were all slaves to the TV screen and its flickering image. Somebody had also placed a drink cooler underneath the desk, and there was a box of snacks—chips and cookies—against the wall.
We heard the entrance flap on the back of the tower flop open and turned to see Digby Allen climbing in. He had some headphones in his hand.
“H-h-hi guys,” he said. “Gimme two secs and I’ll have you all set up and ready to go.”
Billy Joe sat down on one chair. I remained standing and watched Digby. He put the two headphones down on the shelf and crawled underneath. He rooted around, found a wire with a long metal jack on the end, and fed it up behind the shelf. I reached over and held it.
“Th-th-thanks,” Digby said. He continued rooting around until he found a second jack and passed that one up as well.
He stood up, took the jacks from me and plugged them, one after the next, into a metallic box that had been screwed down into the plywood behind the two monitors.
“These are your audio units,” Digby said. “Connects your headphones to the system. You ca
n adjust the volume here…” He pointed to a knob on the unit. “If you want to talk to Control, you hit this button…” He showed us. “When that button is depressed, whatever you say goes over the intercom only. Not to broadcast. You should also hit that button if you have to sneeze or cough or something. It’s like the kill button. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said. “Is this the same kind of equipment that was in here yesterday? Have you tested it for shorts?”
Digby chuckled. It sounded more like a giggle.
“Same equipment, different box,” he said. “The cops took the other one away for testing.”
“So, you’re sure these are safe?” I asked.
“Pretty sure,” he said. And giggled again.
But he took one pair of headphones, put them on his head, grabbed the cable that dangled from it and plugged the jack into the audio control unit. I waited for a bright flash and for Digby’s hair to catch on fire. But there was nothing.
“Sixteen to control,” Digby said into the mic. “Test, test.” He listened, nodded, then took the headphones off and handed them to me. “Good to go,” he said.
While this was going on, Billy Joe picked up his own headphones, plugged them in and put them on.
“Git along little doggies,” he said into his mic, after mashing down the intercom button. “This is William Joseph Bosworth Junior coming to you live and in living color from sixteen green. Over and everlovin’ out.”
I heard someone who sounded raspy and angry like Ben Oswald utter a long string of curses along with an order to shut the hell up.
I adjusted my microphone, which swooped out from the headphones on an adjustable boom, mashed the intercom button and said “Hacker here. Ready to go.”
“Stand by,” said a voice in my ear.
“Okay, guys,” Digby said. “Call me if you have any problems. Have a good show.”
Boz ignored him. I waved my hand. Digby disappeared out the flap.
“Hope you know what you’re doing,” I said to Billy Joe, “Cause I’m flying blind here.”
“No worries, Hack,” he said cheerfully. “This is easier than hunting armadillos. And those little bastards just sit there and let you blow their heads off.”
“Right,” I said. I opened one of the notebooks and began reading some of the stuff that had been provided by IBS’ statistics team on the dozen or so players who were near the top of the leaderboard after the first round. There wasn’t much that could be called top secret: mostly just hometowns, family names and ages, years on Tour, wins and earnings to date and things like that. In other words, the color was mostly gray.
“You call the balls and strikes,” Billy Joe said, “I’ll do the brilliant analysis.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But feel free to jump in whenever you want,” he said. “I mean, you covered these guys for years, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Years.”
At the stroke of three, our main monitor screen went dark. Then, with some doleful music playing softly in the background, the voice of Van Collins, somber and deep, said “Welcome to the Southern Plantations Open. Today, the hearts of all of us here at IBS are heavy. Yesterday afternoon, as our broadcast came to an end, our colleague and brother Parker Long, who has helped us cover the PGA Tour for the last seven years, passed away at his broadcast station overlooking the sixteenth green.”
A photo of Parker, showing him smiling as he sat behind a broadcast desk similar to the one Boz and I were sitting at. He looked natural and happy, headphones over his ears, wires extending out like umbilical cords.
“Our thoughts go out to Jennifer Long and their three kids. We’ll be bringing you more news and stories about Parker as our tournament coverage continues this afternoon. He would have been the first to tell us that the show must go on. So we will continue to show you the golf tournament today, despite our feelings of loss and sadness at the passing of our friend and colleague. Jimmy? Your thoughts?…”
Jimmy Williams, our main color guy, started in on a story about the first time he met Parker Long, at the Bob Hope Classic back in the early 20-oughts. I checked the monitor showing the video Shooter was capturing of the group of three players walking up onto the sixteenth green. Matt Kuchar was one of the three, and he began marking his ball and fixing his ball mark.
I hit my intercom button. “Kuchar’s ready to putt. He’s four under today, three out of the lead,” I said.
“I can fucking see that, Hacker,” Oswald growled back. “We only have thirty-two monitors here, you stupid ass. I’ll tell you when I need you to talk.”
I didn’t say anything, but inside my head, I called him a few names that even the New York Times wouldn’t see fit to print.
Williams finished up with his long and mostly boring anecdote, and Van Collins, ever the professional announcer, made a smooth segue.
“We’ll be talking more about our memories of Parker throughout the broadcast today,” he said. “But for now, let’s get back to the golf. Out on sixteen, Matt Kuchar is getting ready for a birdie putt. Our Pete Hacker is there, along with former Tour champion Billy Joe Bosworth. Fellas?”
“That’s right Van,” I said. “Kooch is looking at about twelve feet for birdie. He’s four under today and steadily moving up the leader board.”
“Aw, heck, Hacker,” Boz chimed in, “Let’s call it five under. This one he’s got is going in. Guys like Kuchar pay the rent with putts like this. I got a hundred this one drops like a Marine recruit at Parris Island. Whaddya say, Hack?”
“Are you betting on live TV?” Oswald was almost screaming. “Jesus H. Christ with a shish-kebab. You can’t do that, you moron!”
I smiled.
“I’ll take that bet, Boz,” I said. In my ears, I heard Oswald begin a long string of obscenities, interspersed with promises to have my testicles tied in knots before being set afire with a blowtorch. I ignored him.
Kuchar ambled around the green like he does when sizing up a putt, stood over the ball and sent it on its way. Shooter zoomed in from above as the ball neared the hole, and had a tight close-up when it fell in. The crowd around the green broke out in cheers. So did the Boz.
“Hu-Ya!” he yelled. “How’s about them green apples, Hack? Been on the air all of five minutes and I’m up a hunnerd buckaroos! Is this a great country or what?”
“Good call, Boz,” I said. “But the day is still young.”
“I’m fining both of you buttwipes a hundred dollars each,” screamed Oswald in our ears. “Go to fourteen. Kelsey?”
Boz and I looked at each other and grinned. He held out a fist and I bumped it with mine. Stickin’ it to the Man.
A few minutes later, Jordan Speith was in the threesome playing the sixteenth. Oswald threw us the shot as he got ready to hit his approach from the fairway.
“Speith’s got one seventy-five,” I said, as one of the fairway spotters reported that number in my ear. “He’s got an eight-iron. Jordan’s struggling today. He’s three over for the round and right on the cut line at one-over.”
“Jordon’s been struggling for a year or two now,” Boz said, shaking his head in the booth next to me. “I wish I knew what it was. For a stretch there, he was golden. In the hunt most every week. Nowadays he ain’t. Lotta talent left on the table, Hack.”
Speith hit his shot. He pulled it a bit and it fell into one of the greenside bunkers.
“He’ll be disappointed with that shot,” I said. “Eight-iron from the fairway and he pulls it wide left. Not good.”
“Not good?” Bosworth said. “That was stinkier than my lil girl’s diaper after she ate all my burritos. Someone needs to a light a fire under that boy, and soon.”
“Careful, Boz,” said the voice in our ear. “No talking about shitty diapers on the air.”
Oswald cut away to show someone putting on fourteen, but came back to us for Speith’s bunker shot.
“Here’s Speith in the bun
ker on sixteen,” I said when we were back. “He needs to make a couple good shots on these last three holes, or he’ll be back in the Big D for the weekend.”
Speith’s bunker shot ran about twelve feet past the hole.
Next to me, Boz began humming “Turn Out the Lights,” a song made famous by Dandy Don Meredith during Monday Night Football years ago.
“That party’s over,” he said. “I’d say ole Jordan is homeward bound, Hack.”
“Looks like it,” I said. “What is it about golf? One day you’re on top of the world, the next, you can’t put two shots together to save your life.”
“She’s a fickle bitch, golf is,” Boz said. “Cain’t never figure her out, nor depend on her. Which is what I said about my first wife. Or was that my second?”
“OK,” Oswald said in our ears. “You guys are officially on notice. Any more of this amateur hour and you’ll both be swimming home. In a box.”
I was asked to send the feed up ahead to the seventeenth, so I did. I looked at Boz.
“He mixed his metaphors there,” I said.
“Aww, Benny boy is ninety percent hot air,” he said. “I’ll bet the people watching at home are liking this shit.”
I hope so, I thought to myself. But I thought they might.
13
“Have you seen your press clippings?”
Mary Jane came into our bedroom wearing nothing but a robe, carrying two cups of coffee and a newspaper tucked under one arm. DJ was on his back next to me, making happy noises and trying to suck on his toes. Victoria had been bundled off to school already, but my wife had called in sick. Shirker. But one with a good union.
I sipped some coffee and glanced at the front page. The Middle East was threatening to blow up, the Chinese were unhappy about a new round of tariffs and, as usual, the President had said or done something that the media determined to be the worst thing ever said or done. In other words, situation normal.
“Sports page,” Mary Jane said impatiently as she lay down on the bed, grabbed our son, opened her robe and attached him to one of her breasts. I watched with a small degree of jealousy. But then I remembered what had happened when I awoke a few hours earlier, before anyone else in the house was up. The best part of having to travel for work was the reunion when I got home.
P.G.A. Spells Death Page 8