The Downhill Lie

by Carl Hiaasen

  With one hole remaining, we were now down by 3 and playing for pride. After Junior pushed his tee shot into the water, his father loudly topped one that sputtered 175 yards on a surreal, flawless vector, straight to the green.

  “You’ll have to teach me that one,” Leibo said, stepping to the tee. Despite a vicious crosswind off the lake, he fired a laser twelve feet from the pin.

  I followed with a towering 4-iron that caught a thermal and drifted off line, plopping into the neck of a greenside bunker. Having failed to execute a proper sand shot all day, I amazed myself by floating it softly out of the trap; the ball hopped gently down the hill and rolled to within ten feet of the cup.

  Said Leibo: “You actually looked like you knew what you were doing on that one.”

  Sinking that sucker would have been an inspiring finish, but it wasn’t necessary. Leibo easily got his par, Senior three-putted and we took the hole—a puny morale booster after a doleful morning.

  During our lunch break, Leibo scouted the leader board and reported that we’d fallen to last place in our flight. Although we weren’t mathematically eliminated, the odds of rebounding to victory were slim. “We have a better chance of getting abducted by aliens,” Leibo said.

  The last match started on No. 16, the long downhill par-3. Our opponents were two brothers, say Mickey and Malcolm, neither of whom made the green. Nor did Leibo.

  I struck another acceptable 4-iron but the wind strangled it. My ball stalled in the least desirable location of the putting surface, with no smooth line to the hole. To make the putt, I’d have to scoot it forty feet over a hump, across an intruding burr of fringe.

  Delroy, who had remained upbeat in the face of almost-certain defeat, told me to pitch the ball. It was a shot I’d never before attempted, practiced or contemplated. Moreover, I’d recently watched Phil Mickelson, who owns one of the great short games of all time, try the same play and chunk a small crater in the green.

  Without hesitation, I chickened out and reached for my putter. The result wasn’t pretty; I might as well have used a shoe. I scrambled for a 4, which was as good as a par, and we halved the point. On No. 17, another stroking opportunity, I made a five-for-four to keep the match level.

  Approaching the tee at No. 18—for me, the most ungovernable hole at Quail Valley—I vowed not to repeat the previous day’s meltdown. Then, uncannily, I did just that.

  The only difference in my hapless shot sequence was that this time I employed a fairway wood instead of a rescue club to locate the front bunkers. My subsequent moonshot over the green was a carbon of the one I’d launched in the third match.

  Fleeting redemption occurred, under pressure, on the next par-5. Malcolm and I were both stroking, but his approach was dead on the stick, as usual. For a 14-handicapper, he was freakishly accurate with his long irons.

  Fifty feet from the hole, I was praying just to park my lag somewhere in the same zip code. For once I thought my pace was perfect, yet the ball coasted four feet past the cup. Malcolm missed his bird but he was in with a five-for-four, which meant we’d lose the point if I didn’t save my par.

  “Left center,” Delroy said. “Don’t quit on it, pro.”

  Thunk. Back of the hole. I remember nothing but the sound of the ball landing in the cup; my brain was blissfully blank.

  “Now that,” said Delroy, “was a putt.”

  Leibo gave a congratulatory knuckle-bump and said, “You saved us on that one.”

  A small luminous moment, in a day of many failures.

  On No. 13, I went exploring. Instead of pulling my drive into a necklace of cruel fairway bunkers (my usual route to the flag), I sliced it completely out of sight. I told Leibo and the two brothers to play on ahead; I’d catch up later.

  My ball had settled in a sandy knot of weeds near the edge of a citrus grove. I tried blasting a rescue club, and the shot dribbled all of forty yards.

  For my next trick, I’d have to shoot the ball virtually straight up in order to clear a steep hill, the crown of which was adorned with young oaks. Even better, the angle was completely blind.

  Delroy waved down and called out, “Aim here, between these trees!” Then he hastily ducked for cover.

  This time the rescue club lived up to its name. I ran to the top of the hill in time to see my ball drop close to the green, behind a small mound. I wasn’t out of the hole; not yet.

  “Welcome back,” said Leibo, when I caught up to the others. “We thought you got lost.”

  Because I couldn’t clear the knoll any other way, I was forced to reconcile with the Vokey wedge. It was the same simple pitch that I’d practiced maybe three hundred times on the range, with occasional competency; one of several rudimentary shots that had mysteriously vanished from my meager arsenal in the days before the tournament.

  Dreading another sh_ _ _, I silently recited what Steve Archer had told me: Turn, don’t slide, away from the ball. Turn, don’t slide.

  And I assume that’s what I did, because the ball dropped thirty feet from the flag and stuck like a dart. Then, with uncommon deliberation, I gutted the putt for a bogey.

  Leibo hooted. “We call that a Daniel Boone!”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you were in the wilderness the whole time.”

  Ba-da-boom.

  The sparkle of the moment dimmed when Mickey nailed his par, leaving Leibo with a dicey fifteen-footer to halve the hole.

  No problem. With two to play, we were only one down.

  Nobody bungled the par-514th, so all four of us were looking at birdies. My putt was by far the longest, forty-five feet downhill, breaking three balls left to right.

  Delroy told me to let it rip. “Your partner’s in good shape, mon. Don’t hold back.”

  My line turned out to be perfect, although the speed was a bit muscular. The ball struck the back rim of the cup and popped into the air like a piece of toast, leaving a sickening six-footer for par. “You got no luck today,” Delroy sighed, “no luck at all.”

  Before my stomach had time to knot, Leibo calmly stepped up and stroked his ball. It rolled eighteen feet to the lip and hung there, Delroy shouting, “Let him in! Let him in!”

  Thunk. The ball dropped, and the point was ours.

  Leibo smiled. I sagged with relief. Delroy made a fist and gave us a nod.

  With one hole remaining, the score stood even. We probably had no chance to win the tournament, but it would have been grand to take the last match.

  The final battleground was No. 15, a 386-yard par-4 that plays uphill, and almost always into a bracing wind. Peppered with bunkers, the hole carries the number two handicap rating at Quail Valley, although many members believe it is the hardest of all. Frequently it’s the cruelest.

  Leibo split the fairway as usual. I opted for drama, rolling my hands and duck-hooking my drive into a waste bunker the size of Rhode Island. Leibo whispered, “Don’t worry, nobody’s reaching this green in two today.”

  Wrong.

  Both Malcolm and Mickey hit epic drives, followed by epic second shots that put them nicely on the putting surface, within birdie range. It was deflating, but we didn’t wilt.

  That would come later.

  I made a rare smooth swing in the gritty sand, and clobbered my rescue club about as far as I could into that whistling wind. The ball landed on the steep side of a depression, sixty yards from the stick. Leibo was much closer and contemplating a short lob—his specialty.

  Instead of tempting fate with another wedge shot, I reached for the 7-iron. Some might call it cowardly; I prefer the word “resourceful.” In any event, I punched the ball too cleanly. It rolled through the break and off the green, cozying in the kinky fringe. A save from there would have been difficult for a scratch player.

  Like me, Malcolm was getting a stroke on the hole. It meant that Leibo needed to sink his pitch or at least drop it close enough for a tap-in, to put pressure on the other team.

  What he did was something I�
�d never seen him do—raise up on the downswing, which caused him to squirt the ball into a bunker. The shot was painful to watch. It reminded me of me.

  Leibo was seething at himself, but in truth the hole was mine to win or lose. A par by Malcolm was as good as a birdie, so our only chance was for Malcolm to three-putt, and for me to sink my shot from the edge of the green.

  Delroy read the line as straight, and if I’d stroked it that way I might have lucked out and hit the pin. But the slope was like frozen grease, and the ball got away from me. Malcolm two-putted with ease, and the match was over. We lost 6–4.

  Back at the clubhouse, Delroy hopped off the cart and shook our hands. When I apologized for the way I’d chopped up the course, he smiled and said, “It wasn’t your week, that’s all. That’s golf, captain.”

  The next day, he would be flying to Jamaica to watch the world cricket championships. It sounded like a great way to forget about the tournament.

  Leibo dragged me to the scoreboard for the postmortem. We finished with 21.5 points—not the worst of the forty-eight scores, by far, but low enough to dock us dead last in our flight.

  I asked him, “When’s the last time you finished last in one of these things?”

  “Never,” he replied. “But I feel good about it.”

  At first I figured he was being a smartass, but he wasn’t. “Are you kidding?” he said. “Three days of beautiful weather on a beautiful golf course—what’s better than that?”

  How about a partner who doesn’t fold like a cheap accordion?

  “Lighten up, would you? It was your first tournament,” Leibo said. “I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t ask me back next year.”

  “That may be the next time I play golf,” I said.

  “Seriously. I had fun.”

  “But you carried me the whole way! I was useless.”

  “That’s not true,” Leibo insisted. “You had a couple of bad nines, that’s all.”

  Which is like saying: Don’t let an iceberg or two spoil the whole cruise.

  After a snack, we grabbed a cart and rode out to watch the playoff among the eight pairs that had won their flights. The format required teammates to take alternating shots, with scoring adjusted for the differing handicaps.

  The scene reminded me of a Mad Max movie—sixteen harried golfers pursued by a streaming convoy of Club Cars, many of the riders enjoying adult beverages. I couldn’t imagine trying to steady myself over a golf ball amid a throng like that; the possibilities for soul-scarring indignity seemed boundless.

  Later, Leibo returned some business calls while I pensively assessed the tournament experience. Playing forty-five competitive holes against ten strangers was no lighthearted romp for a reclusive, neurotic, doubt-plagued duffer. To sink that clinching putt in our only victory was a gas, but overall my performance had been sloppy and unpoised. Worse, I’d let down my partner and friend, who was too kind to say so.

  Before leaving Quail Valley, I tossed the blister pack of Mind Drive capsules into a garbage can. Eventually I’d have lost the damn things, anyway.

  Day 577

  The day after the tournament ends, I drive out to Quail Valley resolved not to swing a club—and I don’t.

  Because I’m burned out. Fried. Whipped.

  For a year and a half, I worked hard, played adequately in spurts, and now I’ve smacked the wall and spun out.

  Facts are facts: I am not a young man with untapped talents, supple joints and nerves of titanium (or even Titallium, whatever that is). Tomorrow I’ll be fifty-four years old, and the limits to what I can achieve on a golf course have been starkly presented. A strong case could be made that I should park my sticks for another thirty years.

  But today is a dazzling March morning, breezy and cloudless, and despite the fresh wounds from the tournament it feels all right to be standing in the sun on the practice range, just watching.

  The mighty Quinn wields a midget driver, while his beautiful mother is trying out a new 5-wood. They’re both spanking the ball, and they’re happy. When the sport is new, every crisp shot is a wonder and a thrill.

  I believe this is how you’re supposed to feel with a golf club in your hands: Full of heart and free of mind. This is the whole slippery secret; the only way to survive, and possibly enjoy, the game. Hit the ball, forget about it, then hit the ball again.

  Quinn’s current swing model is part Tiger Woods, part Russell Crowe with a barstool. With a grunt he tops the shot and finishes in a comic pretzel, holding the pose.

  From under his crooked visor he peers at me with a sheepish expression. “I looked up, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He tees up another one and bangs it a hundred yards straight down the pipe. He spins around, grinning proudly, to make sure I saw the shot.

  For a second, I’m a kid again and my father is standing behind me on the range, watching me whack one ball after another. And I can recall exactly how fantastic it felt to pound one—really crush it—then peek back to catch the look on Dad’s face.

  I’m wondering if he knew what those Sundays meant to me; if he understood that even when I was playing poorly and fuming like a brat, there was nowhere else I’d rather have been, and no one else I’d rather have been with. I hope I told him so, but, sadly, I cannot remember.

  Now Quinn Hiaasen, who never got to meet his grandfather or see him hit a golf ball, says, as if on cue: “Dad, this is so much fun!”

  Word for word, I swear to God.

  The Sweet Spot

  When my mother asked how the tournament went, I answered with glum honesty: “Not too well. On some holes it was horrible, like I’d never touched a club before.”

  I didn’t mention that I’d worn Dad’s watch for good luck. No mojo was potent enough to have saved me from myself.

  “Was it your putting?” she asked delicately.

  “A little bit of everything, Mom.”

  “But wasn’t this the first golf tournament you’ve ever been in?”

  “Yup,” I said, “and very possibly the last.”

  “So you didn’t have fun?”

  Again with the fun.

  “That’s a good question,” I said.

  Since it was Mom on the other end, there was no choice but to tell the truth. “Some of it was fun,” I conceded.

  She understood completely. Golf is a vexing, soul-stomping sport for perfectionists, and she’d been married to one.

  I recall often hearing my father grumble after striking what appeared to me as a dandy shot. What I hadn’t realized was that he’d hit an unintended fade instead of a draw, or that he’d been aiming left of the flag instead of right, or that he’d been trying to spin the ball dead at the front of the green instead of rolling it to the back. The shots that he’d executed so dependably in his twenties no longer flew easily and true, and Dad realized that his skills were slipping. I remember how quiet and weary-looking he became as his shoulder pain worsened and his scores began drifting into the mid- and then upper 80s, never to descend.

  It’s probably a blessing that I wasn’t a low handicapper the first time around, when I was young, because otherwise the failure to play well in midlife would be withering and possibly unbearable. With mediocrity as my only personal frame of experience, I have no conception of how it must feel for a really good golfer to hit a really bad golf shot.

  I do, however, know how it feels for a hacker to hit a good one. It feels great.

  That’s the killer. A good shot is a total rush, possibly the second most pleasurable sensation in the human experience. It will mess with your head in wild and delusive ways.

  One day I took Mike Lupica to play Quail Valley. The course was gusty and heartless, typical for early spring. After parring the first two holes I commenced the Big Stumble, finishing with a 97 that included four ignominious putts on No. 16.

  Lupica himself got mugged by the back nine, and slouched off muttering unprintable slurs about Messrs. Fazi
o and Price, the course designers.

  Later, in a more reflective mood, he said: “You couldn’t have picked a harder place to try to get good at golf. You have to factor that in when you’re evaluating yourself—this course is really tough…. You’re a good person trapped in an abusive relationship.”

  Here’s what feeds the addiction: On No. 8, the most pitiless of the par-3s, I’d slashed a 4-iron through a savage crosswind, landing the ball six feet from the flag—one of those startling golden scenes that seem surreal at the moment.

  That night, instead of sensibly fixating on the grisly four-putt at the 16th, I found myself reliving that lovely tee shot on the 8th as if it wasn’t the fluke that it was, but rather a lightning glimpse of my true potential. Hope bloomed like a staph infection, and I was back at Quail Valley the very next day.

  The Member-Guest had provided so few such moments that rosy self-deception was impossible. Leibo kept urging me to focus on the good holes, but the highlight reel was woefully brief.

  There was The Putt, that tricky three-footer that I’d sunk for our one and only win. As thrilling as that dinky little par had been at the time, alone it seemed hardly enough to justify prolonging a struggle that had taken a melancholy turn.

  An impartial review of scores from the past nineteen months would confirm that I’d peaked the previous autumn, and was now skidding downhill toward an unacceptably ragged level of play.

  Maybe the time had come to quit all over again, while the brighter memories remained vivid and untainted….

  That eagle with a 9-iron from the fairway bunker on No. 7.

  Those three birdies I’d made one morning with Bill Becker.

  The absurdly long, sidehill sand shot that I’d nearly holed out with Lupica last summer at Noyac.

  A 306-yard drive that I’d hit with Leibo, chortling, during the practice round of the tournament.

  And that singular shining round of 85, which seemed destined to stand forever as my personal best.

  The comeback had unfolded as neither a storybook tale nor a total fiasco. I’d reached my two simple goals of besting the lowest eighteen-hole score of my youth, and of completing a tournament without crumbling to pieces.