First Tee Panic

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  I didn’t know this until I was standing on the practice tee the next morning at Desert Island Country Club.

  I didn’t pass out when the starter told me who my “local” celebrity would be, but I’m sure it was only the training of making myself breathe that saved me from that fate right there.

  Now, a couple of things transpired to change what I visualized was a coming disaster. First off, the starter saw my panic. This was years and years before I developed any kind of poker face. Besides, when he told me, I’m sure I went pure white, then turned shades of gray. It would have been hard to miss.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  “Just first professional tournament shakes,” I said.

  The guy laughed and said, “Yeah, Zell told me that was the case. Don’t you like Bob Hope?”

  I had grown up in Idaho, sitting watching Bob Hope specials on a black-and-white television before color was even thought of. Did I like Bob Hope? How do you answer a question about a god like that?

  “I sure do,” I think I managed to say. Right at that moment, I was sure I was going to pass out on the first tee and be one of Bob Hope’s jokes in his next television special. Or I would throw up and then pass out, making everything so bad, they would do a skit about what happened. A really funny skit.

  At that moment, fate decided to take a hand and spare me. A rain drop hit the starter. Rain might have hit me, but trust me, at that moment, in my state of fear and panic, I wouldn’t have noticed.

  It doesn’t rain that often in Palm Springs, but this was still winter, and it was a cold morning.

  The starter nodded to me and said, “I’ll be right back.” Then he headed down the practice tee box where Bob Hope was entertaining about a thousand people that were going to walk with him. That guy could really be funny. A little crude in real life compared to his television specials, but really funny.

  I turned back to the remaining practice balls and tried to put two thoughts together. I think the two thoughts were, in this order.

  “Oh, my, I’m going to play with Bob Hope.”

  And then, “Oh, NO! I’m going to play golf with Bob Hope.”

  I am sure I repeated that sequence of thoughts through about twenty practice balls.

  I went to taking deep breaths trying to calm down, but all I could think about was that first tee and whiffing that first shot and then passing out. I was having that nightmare back then and at that moment it seemed very real and very possible.

  It started to rain even harder, and Bob Hope and most of the crowd at the other end of the practice tee headed for the club house, just leaving a few of us on the tee box.

  I started hitting some easy shots, taking deep breaths and forcing myself to calm down. I could do this.

  Zell wouldn’t have put me in this situation if he didn’t think I could do it.

  Bob Hope was only a man. I could play with him.

  It started raining harder, so I got out my rain gear and kept hitting balls. Rain would help. Slick grips are always a great excuse for missing a shot.

  Then they called the group ahead of us to the tee.

  I hadn’t even hit a putt yet, so I made one slow, smooth swing, as Zell had been teaching me to do all winter, then headed for the practice green beside the first tee.

  As I reached there, the starter came out of the club house and walked up to me. I remember his words well.

  “Bob’s decided to wait out the rain and maybe just play nine. You want to tee it up with McLean Stevenson instead?”

  Lt. Col. Henry Blake of M.A.S.H. One of my favorite characters on one of my favorite shows.

  I think I nodded. But at that moment, I was so relieved to not have to play with Bob Hope, the starter could have told me I was playing with the President of the United States and I would have been happier.

  “Great,” the starter said. “You’re up next.”

  I ended up riding in the cart with McLean. He was as funny and as nice in real life as he seemed on television. And we had a blast.

  And I hit my drive perfect off the first tee.

  But the story doesn’t end happily right there.

  By the seventeenth hole, the weather had cleared and I was really enjoying the day. I also had it two under par with only the last hole to play. Bob Hope’s crowd had gone out on the back nine ahead of us, and not more than a few dozen people had followed us around, with McLean entertaining them.

  At that time, the last hole of Desert Island Country Club was a fairly short par four, with water all the way along the left side. I hit a perfect drive and was within an easy wedge from the green, over a finger of water to a mostly island green.

  Not a problem. I hit a perfect second shot that I remember McLean cheered for while the ball was in the air, telling it to go in the hole.

  The shot looked that good.

  The ball hit about ten feet short of the pin, bounced once toward the hole, then spun back and kept rolling all the way back down into the water.

  The twenty or so people around the green moaned so loudly, I could hear them across the water.

  You think that kind of thing doesn’t happen? Watch the Master’s Golf Tournament some time.

  You can also see this same shot on the golf movie Tin Cup where Don Johnson’s character hits his shot onto the green on the last hole to have it spin back. Of course, for that silly movie, he was hitting a wood and in those days, you couldn’t get a wood to spin backwards if your life depended on it.

  In real life, with McLean Stevenson sitting in the cart, I hit a perfect wedge and it spun back.

  McLean tossed me another ball from my stash in the cart as I laughed. He made a joke which was actually funny and relaxed me. At that point, it didn’t much matter. I had survived the day.

  So I dropped another ball over my shoulder (as the rules said we had to do in those days) and hit another perfect wedge. The ball mark was about ten inches beyond the first ball mark in the green, right in front of the hole.

  The ball hit, bounced once, then spun back into the water.

  It looked exactly like the first shot.

  Now I’m really laughing because those two shots were so perfect, but as can happen in golf, the end result really sucked at the same moment.

  The groan got louder from around the green.

  “I think you need more club,” McLean said to me, laughing. He tossed me another ball out of the cart, I dropped it, and hit a shot that McLean again said was perfect.

  The ball hit six feet short of the pin, just two strides away, bounced forward so close to the pin that people around the green shouted for it to go in the hole.

  Yeah, right. Only in the movies. My shot, with an amazing amount of spin, took off for the front of the green like it wanted to come back to the cart. It hit the water so hard, I thought it might actually skip like a stone.

  The moans got really loud at that point.

  McLean fell out of the cart laughing.

  I kid you not. He was a pretty good and very avid golfer in his day, and he knew just how insane this was. And how good the shots were I had hit.

  I knew how insane this was.

  Now we both had the giggles.

  A young golf professional and a seasoned actor giggling in the middle of a fairway. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you.

  Go ahead, try hitting a golf ball with someone like McLean Stevenson making jokes and giggling. It was damn near impossible, but after a few minutes, I finally stopped laughing long enough to make a swing.

  The next shot, as you might imagine it would, sailed clear over the green and the only thing that stopped it from going in the water behind the green was a bunker. I blasted out and made a decent putt for a ten on the hole.

  I got cheers from everyone watching and McLean bought me a drink in the bar where Bob Hope was telling jokes to friends.

  I went from two under to four over in one hole, and didn’t care. I had played one of the most enjoyable rounds of my life with a wonderful man and
a great actor.

  And I didn’t end up playing with Bob Hope.

  The next day, on the range, Zell Eaton spent two hours teaching me how to hit a wedge shot without spin. I just wish he had gotten to that shot a few days earlier in the lesson plan.

  MY BEST AND WORST TEE SHOT EVER WAS THE SAME SHOT

  BACK UP IN TIME a little to the fall of 1972. Palm Springs, California.

  I was a young golf professional, just starting to be taught how to really play the game by Zell Eaton. I was also struggling to make ends meet, since I had no real money when I got the job with Zell.

  My best friend, Jim Kiser, had helped me get from Idaho to Palm Springs and get set up for the job in an apartment. Jim was a college student at the time, headed to a great career in law, and he was a fine golfer. Just don’t tell him I told you.

  In Palm Springs during those days was a par three golf course, called an “executive course” for reasons lost in time. I have no memory of the name of the place, and I know it doesn’t still exist, long ago replaced by an expansive big course and expensive homes. But in 1972, this big square piece of desert had been turned into a dry, hard golf course, fenced in from the tumbleweeds and blowing sand.

  And it had one feature that got it a lot of play.

  It had lights.

  And it stayed open on some nights far past midnight.

  For a young, avid golfer like I was at the time, this was heaven. A place to go to practice my short game until all hours of the morning. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time on those dry, dusty fairways and small, hard greens.

  One night, my friend Jim, before heading back north to school, decided to go along and play a round with me. We were somewhere on the back nine, facing a hole about 120 yards long, which was fairly long for that course. It was past eleven in the evening, but we were young, strong, and had nothing better to do.

  If I remember right, Jim teed off first and missed the green to the right.

  I stood up there, and with the swing that Zell Eaton hoped to make worthwhile, tried to hit an easy wedge, planning to make the ball land short and bounce up onto the hard green.

  To say I missed the shot would be a very large understatement.

  I bladed it, which means the leading edge of the club cut into the ball like a knife.

  The ball bounced once or twice just getting off the tee, hit something off to the left of the hole, while bouncing, and then just kept bouncing.

  And bouncing.

  And bouncing.

  First right, then left, then back right toward the green.

  I think there had to be a hundred gopher holes out there in that rough for the ball to do that.

  It was still bouncing and moving at a pretty good speed when it reached the green, slammed into the pin, and dropped into the hole.

  Hole-in-one.

  The only perfect shot in golf.

  I had been playing for almost twenty years at that point, and that was my first hole-in-one.

  I have played for decades since, and that is still my only hole-in-one.

  Witnessed by Jim.

  Near midnight.

  On a course that no longer exists.

  I don’t often talk about the shot, to be honest.

  But it did teach me a lesson that I never forgot. The only thing that really matters is the score on the card.

  I was watching Arnold Palmer play a few holes at Indian Wells Country Club later that winter in the Bob Hope Desert Classic. On one hole, the first hole where I joined his “Arnie’s Army” gallery, he duck-hooked his drive. It would have hit a home and gone out-of-bounds if it hadn’t hit a palm tree instead.

  Standing under the palm tree, he rolled his next shot across the fairway. The ball bounced off the brick side of a house, and barely got back in bounds in the rough.

  I had watched him for exactly two shots and all I could see was a real hack of a player. He then hit a really nasty shot that barely got off the ground and just sort of rolled up onto the front edge of the green of the short par four.

  I had now watched three shots and Arnie had hacked all three of them.

  Then he stood up there and made the putt and walked off with a par.

  And the lesson of my hole-in-one earlier was again pounded home.

  It doesn’t matter how pretty, how ugly, or how just plain lucky a shot is, what counts is the final score on the card.

  But, that said, I sure hope your holes-in-one are a little more attractive than mine was.

  And maybe at a better time of day.

  FEAR AND THE ART OF PUTTING FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE FAIRWAY

  FAST FORWARD A FEW YEARS from those first two stories. For me, it’s now the summer of 1976 in Northern Idaho. I am a second-year architecture student in the little town called Moscow, the home of the University of Idaho. I still loved golf, but I had decided I hated traveling as much as it took to be a rabbit on the professional tour during those days.

  You don’t think that’s a good reason to stop working toward something you love? Trust me, just spend a few months alone in a hotel room, with nothing to think about but golf, nothing to look forward to but more and more weeks in hotel rooms. And I was good. Darned good, after the years with Zell, so I could see making it on the tour and maybe doing nothing but spending the rest of my life in hotel rooms.

  You think touring professionals have it easy, think again. It’s a hard, nasty life out there on the road, and it takes a real special kind of person to do it. I clearly liked books, reading, and other things far more than I liked living out of the trunk of my car.

  So one fine day, while I was the head professional of my own course in Palm Springs, getting ready to go play some mini-tours or maybe some stops on the Canadian Tour, I got thinking about the long road ahead. And the linked hotel rooms, year-after-year, and the thought just made me shudder.

  I just quit, sold everything, and went back to finish a college degree I had started in the late sixties.

  So, when I got to college, what did I decide would be a good job for me while attending college? Golf Professional, of course. I seemed to have a little experience at it at that time. So the nice head professional at the Elks Golf and Country Club hired me to be his assistant, starting in the early spring, through the summer, and ending early fall. And he promised he would work with my school schedule.

  He also wanted me to play in tournaments, both as a professional in regional events representing the course, and as the club pro going with members to tournaments called pro-ams.

  I agreed. At the time, after a long winter of doing nothing but studying, it sounded like fun.

  But during the years since I had first turned professional, and that spring of 1976, the PGA had changed some rules for its members. One of the rules they added was a playing test. In other words, you had to be good enough playing the game before they would let you into their tournaments.

  I heard that and just laughed, if I remember right. Good enough to the PGA during those days was something like playing 36 holes of golf in less than ten over par. My thinking was I could do that in my sleep.

  One cold March day in the spring of 1976, the section of the PGA decided to test its young professionals.

  The test course was a very easy golf course in Spokane, Washington that sat on a bluff overlooking a river. That Monday morning, twenty-eight of the Pacific Northwest Section’s PGA young golfers gathered, including me.

  I had skipped a few classes to be there, got up at three in the morning to make the drive, and hadn’t even touched my golf clubs for six months of a long Northern Idaho winter. But I had no worries at all that I would pass the silly test. My memories of the lessons from Zell just years before were still fresh, and during my last days of working full time in the game of golf, I seldom had a round of golf near par, let alone over par.

  Ten over par in thirty six holes would be a joke.

  The joke was on me.

  None of us made it.

  Not one of us.
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br />   I was fifteen over, low score out of all of us, and felt darned happy about that score. The wind was blowing at a constant thirty miles per hour, the rain couldn’t decide if it wanted to be sleet or snow. And it never let up. Not for one minute. It was the longest, most miserable day in my golfing life.

  We all figured the PGA section would adjust the test for the conditions of the day, but nope, ten over was the score and that was that.

  They did, however, quickly decide to schedule another test because no PGA section up to that point had had everyone fail.

  Not one assistant in all the Pacific Northwest and a few head pros taking the test could play in a tournament and that was the last thing any section of the PGA needed at that point in publicity. So the retake of the test would be on the same course in two weeks.

  By the time I had made the two-hour drive back to Moscow, I was so angry, I could have bitten through the shaft of my driver. I could just hear Zell’s voice in my head.

  “Conditions don’t matter. Only the score matters.”

  And in this case, I had failed. Sure, I had the best score of anyone there that day, but so what? I had made more mistakes than I could ever imagine, including the big one of going in unprepared and not thinking correctly about the goal ahead.

  Now understand, I was still very cocky about golf, and I hadn’t failed a test in golf in a long, long time. I wouldn’t fail a second time.

  Every day, between classes, snow, wind, or rain, I went out to the course and hit golf balls, practiced putting, worked the winter kinks out of the Palm Springs golf swing.

  By the time that second test came around, I was behind in school and mad about that.

  And really, really mad I had failed the qualifier the first time.

  I went up to Spokane the night before this time and stayed in a hotel to get the rest needed for the next day’s 36 holes of play. I worked over the map of the course, planning a game plan, making notes as to which holes to play safe, which holes to attack.

  In other words, I did the same thing I used to do for golf tournaments before going back to school.