“Hiya, Hacker,” he said. “Hang on a sec.”
He bent back down over his work and deftly soldered a wire to a brass connection on the edge of the circuit board. A puff of white smoke drifted up and away, its smell acrid in my nose. He looked at his work through his magnifying glasses, then nodded to himself. He took off the glasses and turned to me with a smile.
“How you doing?” he said.
“Good, good,” I said. “Listen, I have a question. Technical question.”
“Best kind,” he said. “Shoot.”
“I was just talking to the cop down in Savannah looking into Parker Long’s death,” I said. “He said that the state crime lab boys took Parker’s headset apart. Said they found the wiring inside was messed up. They think someone did it deliberately.”
“That would cause static,” Digby said without missing a beat. “He’d get a lot of feedback and interference and stuff. Be hard to hear anything.”
“That’s what the crime lab techies said,” I said. “Can you think of any reason someone would do that to a guy’s headsets?”
Digby thought for a minute. Finally, he shook his head.
“Naw,” he said. “The announcer would have a hell of time with something like that. Be a real problem.”
“So who would want to mess around with Parker’s headphones?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Digby said, shrugging his shoulders. “Someone who didn’t want Parker to hear very well. Nobody in this crew would do such a thing. That’s crazy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Crazy.”
He turned back to his work bench and I left.
23
Tony Sciutto and I met for breakfast at the Cumberland Arms Inn on Tuesday morning to go over this week’s Hacker’s History segment for the broadcast. He brought with him Jenny LoBianco, a young sound technician who he said would be working with us. We all went through the breakfast buffet, got some hot coffee and I showed him the script I had written over the last weekend.
He read through the pages, nodding to himself here and there. Once or twice he marked the pages, scribbling some notes with a pencil. Jenny and I ate in silence. Finished, he put the script down.
“Pretty good stuff,” he said to me, smiling. “I can work with this.”
“There’s a lot of reference to the PGA back in 1958,” I said. “Do you think you can get some historical footage?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Tony said. “I’ve already talked to the PGA’s chief archivist. He says we can use anything he’s got.”
“The PGA has a chief archivist?” I said. “Did not know that.”
Sciutto gave the script to Jenny, who immediately began reading it. She was in her late twenties, long brown hair pulled back into a pony tail. She wore blue jeans and a long sleeved polo, and a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses.
She zipped through the script, lips pursed in concentration. When she was done, Tony gave her a series of instructions: who to call, what to ask for, when to have the material ready for Becky Ann Billingsly, IBS’ crackerjack film editor. Jenny took all this in, nodded, and slid out of the booth.
We watched her walk away.
“Sound technician?” I said.
He smiled. “She wants to get into producing,” he said. “I’m letting her get some experience with this segment. She’s a smart kid. She’ll do fine.”
“Not bad looking, either,” I noted.
He held up his hands. “Not the deal, here,” he said. “I’m a happily married man, She was in a relationship that ended badly. Took it pretty hard. I’m just trying to keep her busy with stuff, keep her occupied.”
“Boyfriends can be such cads,” I said.
He frowned, lines forming across his forehead.
“In this case, the boyfriend got dead,” he said. “Jenny was dating Arnie Wasserman. Semi-secretly, but some of us knew.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Yeah, I can imagine that’s tough.”
We agreed on a time to get together later that afternoon to shoot some of the stand-up parts of my script. The rest I would do in an edit booth at the tournament’s Television City compound.
I wandered over to the practice range. Old habits. Before a tournament, the range is always a good place to pick up gossip, rumors or other innuendo that might turn into a good story for the paper. Or the airwaves in my case. The best stuff rarely comes from the pros themselves, although they will talk for hours about their golf swings, but from the caddies, managers, physical therapists, wives and girlfriends, all of whom can be found wandering around the range while their man hits seven-irons for an hour.
I was watching Jon Rahm crushing his driver, while I stood near the ropes next to the tubs filled with brand new Titleists and Callaways. There were a couple of volunteers filling those little cloth bags with thirty or so balls, which the caddies would come over and pick up.
“He’s a big ‘un, ain’t he?” said someone standing behind me. I turned. It was Billy Joe Bosworth. He grinned at me, and nodded at Rahm, stilling hitting huge drives down the range.
“Ever think how much money you coulda won if you were his size?” he said.
“The woods are full of big hitters,” I said. “According to Hogan or someone.”
“Yeah, Big Jon hits ‘em right down the pike,” Boz said. “I think they call him CenterLine. Anyway, who is this Hogan of whom you speak?’
I laughed.
Charlie Zimmerman, one of the big wheels with the big player agent company, Player Reps Incorporated, or PRI, walked over. He was carrying a leather briefcase. Always working, these agent guys. Always on alert in case a dollar gets loose and runs squeaking for the underbrush.
“Well, well,” he said, looking at the Boz and me,“If it isn’t the Laurel and Hardy of golf.”
“I’d like to think we are the Three Stooges of golf,” Boz said with a straight face.
Zimmerman looked at him, eyebrows raised, then shook his head.
“Still an idiot, Boz,” he said. “Don’t ever change.”
“Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” Boz said.
Charlie turned to me.
“Did you see this morning’s Times?” he asked. “Bart Hastings ran an interesting piece on IBS.”
“I heard he was working on something,” I said. “No, I didn’t see it. Got all the fish wrapped up I need. What did he say?”
Zimmerman rooted around in his briefcase and pulled out a copy. “Here you go,” he said. “All the crap they see fit to run.”
It was a column, running down the left side of the sports front. IBS Reeling from Recent Deaths, the headline began, Weakened Team Prepares for PGA.
Executive producer Ben Oswald puts on a brave front, but the broadcast team from International Broadcast System’s golf division is reeling from the deaths of two important figures in recent weeks.
Deputy executive producer Arnold Wasserman was gunned down on the Upper West Side two weeks ago, and longtime booth announcer Parker Long died in a still-unexplained incident during the company’s broadcast of the Southern Plantation Open in Savannah in March.
While Oswald says he expects IBS’s broadcast of the PGA Championship this weekend from Gold’s Hudson Links course in Dutchess County, New York, to go off without a hitch, others say the network has been devastated by the deaths of the two men.
“I don’t see how the quality of the broadcast won’t be affected by these losses,” said a longtime observer of the television industry. “You can’t lose two important cogs and still have your machine operate flawlessly.”
Police are still searching for Wasserman’s killer, but said yesterday they do not currently have a suspect in that case. As for Parker Long, there are more questions than answers about his sudden death during the tournament in Savannah. Police in Georgia have discovered some irregularities with the broadcast equipment Long was using, but would not comment when asked if those equipment irregularities led to the death of the longtim
e sports announcer. That case is still under investigation, the police said.
During a Monday morning press conference at Conrad Gold’s luxury golf club along the Hudson River some 50 miles north of New York, Ben Oswald turned hostile when asked about Parker Long’s death, and threatened bodily harm on this reporter.
I stopped reading and had to chuckle.
“’Threatened bodily harm,’” I said. “That’s pretty rich.”
Boz had been reading over my shoulder.
“Who is this ‘longtime observer of the television industry’ he’s quoting?” he asked. “That could be anyone who’s ever watched a TV set.”
I nodded. “The new journalism,” I said. “Hastings hopes the reader thinks he’s talking about some professor at Columbia who’s written forty-seven books about the television industry. But if it was someone like that, he’d just quote him directly. No need for protection. So the fact that he’s using that qualifier—’longtime observer of the television industry’—is a clue that the person being quoted is anything but an expert. But Hastings got him to say the words he wanted to quote, and wrapped that quote around an empty qualifier. Or, it could also just be Hastings himself, making up the quote. Hastings knows that no one will ever question him about it, and if someone did, he would get all huffy and claim the inviolate right to protect his sources. But of course, no reporter from the New York Times would ever do something like making up a quote and attributing it to some amorphous being.”
“Of course not,” Boz said. “Except for any day ending with a Y.”
Charlie Zimmerman was watching us. “You guys don’t seem like you’re unable to operate flawlessly,” he said.
“We are unquenchable,” I said. I gave him back his paper.
“Speaking of which, Hacks, it’s gotta be almost lunchtime, right?” Boz said.
“I believe you are correct,” I said. “Let’s go.”
After lunch, we had a two-hour production meeting in Television City, which lasted approximately a hundred and ten minutes longer than it should have. When it was finally over, I walked back onto the golf course and, to clear my head, watched some of the late afternoon practice rounds finishing up. Those last three holes along the Hudson were fun: the players and their caddies were trying to figure out the proper attack strategies, and there were a lot of splashes going on while they did. Because it was Tuesday and just practice, everyone was in a relaxed and good mood, and there were lots of playful insults being hurled around the greens.
I watched as Ernie Els stood on the seventeenth tee, looking down at the island green for several long minutes. I was standing up near the green, but I saw Ernie turn to look at someone in the gallery behind the tee, laugh and hold out his club, as if to say “OK, you give it a try, buddy!” The spectator declined the opportunity and Els finally hit a shot to the middle of the green.
After watching the shot-making for a while, I wandered up the hill to stand in the area where the players and their caddies came off the 18th. During the tournament, the players would head into the official scorer’s office, set in a temporary trailer near the basement entrance to the clubhouse. The caddies would wait outside, zipping up the bags and waiting for their man to come back outside and tell them what was next: back to the range, over to the putting green, forty minutes for lunch, or done for the day and we’ll take the clubs home.
This caddy staging area was my second favorite spot, after the practice range, for gossip from the caddies. They’d tell me, in so many words, how their man was faring.
“Oh, geez,” one would tell me, “He had four three-putts today. He’s still trying to figure out the speed.”
Another one would shake his had. “Army golf off the tee,” he’d say. “Left, right, left.”
I would know that neither of those players would likely be a factor in the weekend’s event. You can’t win on Tour, especially a major, if you’re not driving or putting the ball well. Not going to happen.
And of course, the caddies of the guys who were driving and putting well would never tell you that. Not right out, in so many words. Superstitious, they’d dance all around it.
“Pretty grooved today,” the caddie might say. Or “he’s hittin’ it pure.” Or, “mistakes at a minimum.” All ways of telling me that the player had brought his A-game, and might be worthy of consideration for the weekend.
Of course, sometimes the results were totally opposite of what the caddies were expecting. The guy hitting Army shots off the tee might make everything he looked at on the green and be on the leaderboard on Sunday afternoon. Or the guys hitting stripes on Tuesday might be found deep in the woods on Thursday and Friday and on their way home Friday night. That’s golf.
I chatted with some of the guys while they packed up for the day. The players, instead of heading into the scorer’s room, were mostly branching off into the clubhouse, where they’d sit around the locker room for a while to decompress, or talk about sports and women with their entourage: the agent, the physio, the driver, the private jet pilot, the security guy, the equipment man, the nutritionist and the assorted friends and relatives who turned up for these big events.
Big Ben, the English caddie named after London’s big clock because he was about six-six himself, was sitting on top of a rock wall, the bag of his man, Sidney Williamson, at his side. He was taking in the scene with wry amusement, as always.
“How’s Sir Sid playing this week?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Some good, some bad, some other,” he said. “Been playing pretty good golf the last month or so. He’ll show up this week.”
Translated from the caddie, that meant that Sidney’s game was in proper order, and Big Ben his caddie fully expected to be playing on the weekend and positioned on the first two pages of the leaderboard.
“He looking forward to Troon?” I asked. The British Open, still a couple months away, was scheduled to return to Ayrshire this year. Sidney had played well there in the past, with a couple of top ten finishes.
Big Ben shrugged, his eyes followed a couple of cute young things down the sidewalk next to the clubhouse. “He’s paid his entry fee,” he said. Translation: He’ll be there and expecting good results.
Art the Dart came over, plunked down his heavy bag and heaved a sigh of relief. Art carried for Billy Wollaston, the young pro from Fort Myers who was moving quickly up the money list this year.
“Man, this place is hilly as fuck,” he said, moving his back and shoulder muscles around. “Think we can get a golf cart?”
Big Ben chuckled at that. “They turned John Daly down,” he said, “Very much doubt if they’ll give one to you.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. “Bastards hate us, don’t they?’
He looked at me.
“Hacker!” he said, “How you likin’ the TV gig?”
“It’s OK,” I said. “A bit different. But pretty much the same thing I was doing before.”
“I hear ya,” Art the Dart said. He was thin as a rail, with long hair tied in a pony tail behind his head. He got his name from his boundless energy around the course, never being able to stand still for long.
I was about to move on, when Art stuck out his hand and stopped me.
“Listen, Hack,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to mention to someone from your network. That round down in Savannah, y’know…when Parker Long passed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“Well it just so happened that Billy was playing the sixteenth that afternoon,” Art said. “And I remember seeing a light from up in the booth. I mean, Billy was lining up his putt, waiting for the other guy to finish, and I was just standing on one side of the green, holding the flag, and I saw this flash out of the corner of my eye.”
“A flash?”
“Yeah, from up in the booth in that tower,” he said. “Kind of a blue zap kind of thing. It was like one of those old camera flash bulb things you see on
TV sometimes when a politician or a movie star walks out, y’know?”
“But it was from inside the booth?” I said.
“Yeah, pretty sure,” he said. “I mean, I wasn’t staring right at the booth or anything, right? But I caught a glimpse of it anyway. Thought it was a little weird at the time. Later, I heard that Parker had croaked about that time. And I wondered about it.”
“You tell the cops?” I said.
He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “It was just a peripheral vision thing. I couldn’t swear by anything. Just caught a glimpse of a flash.”
“You see anything else?” I asked. “Someone going in or out of the tower?”
He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Billy made his putt and then we were off to the next tee. Didn’t think it was anything important.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks. The cops think something went wrong with his equipment that day. The flash you saw might be connected to that. I’ll tell the cop down in Savannah who’s running the investigation.”
“Yeah, sure,” Art said, getting up and slinging the heavy bag over his shoulder. “If they want to talk to me, I’ll tell ‘em the same thing.”
He strode away. I stayed put and thought about that for a while.
24
Hacker’s History, PGA Championship edition:
Back in 1957, the PGA of America staged its 39th annual Championship at the Miami Valley Country Club in Dayton, Ohio. This tournament is historically important because it was the last PGA Championship to be conducted at match play.
If you’re trying to remember who won the last major of 1957, it was Lionel Hebert, who pipped Dow Finsterwald in the final, 2&1. If you’re trying to remember who Lionel Hebert was, you’re not alone. He had a brother, Jay, who also won the PGA, in 1960. And Dow Finsterwald would come back the next year and win the first PGA Championship played at stroke play.
P.G.A. Spells Death Page 16