by James Dodson
“I’ll give you seven strokes a side on a two-dollar nassau. Two bits for greenies and sandies. Please don’t ask for more, though. You’re getting the senior citizen discount.”
This was our usual game.
“Who’s asking for more? I’ll take six and pin your ears back, insolent pup.”
By early August, everything was set. I’d made plane and hotel reservations, reserved the rental car, and contacted several club secretaries who were enthusiastic about helping out. It read like a grand tour of the British golf establishment: Sunningdale, Royal Birkdale, Royal Lytham, Turnberry, Royal Troon, Carnoustie, possibly Gleneagles and Muirfield, and of course, St. Andrews. I’d been to most of these places on my own but couldn’t wait to go back with my old man.
Two weeks before the trip, he called again.
I took the call on our cell phone, standing out behind the perennial garden where I was trying to figure out the best place to build my daughter a playhouse like the one she’d seen in a local theater production of Peter Pan.
“I’m afraid the trip will have to be postponed,” he said. With a sinking heart, I asked why.
“I had some bleeding. I didn’t think it was any big deal, but I guess I was wrong. They did some tests. They want to do some more, starting tomorrow.”
The cancer of a decade ago had come back, he said, spreading radically throughout his pelvic region. It had moved into his back, had even invaded his stomach and intestines.
I asked for the official prognosis and will never forget what he told me: a month, two at most.
Then he laughed. Only Opti would have laughed at such a verdict. He said he would call back in a couple more days when he knew more.
I hung up the phone and sat down on a wooden bench. My first thought was undeniably selfish: Christ, we’ll never play golf again. I went through the next few days in a trance. I tried to read stories to my children but kept missing passages. I tried to write my columns and prune my roses but nothing helped. I went to my golf club and played three holes and quit. I picked up the phone to begin canceling reservations but put the receiver down again.
Then my father called back.
“Well, the options are not good,” Opti said, sounding eerily like his old self. “They can pump me full of poisons and maybe hook me up to some machines and buy a few more weeks. Who the hell needs that?” He said he planned to let nature take its course.
I told him I admired his courage.
He told me to save my lung power for the golf course.
“I’m planning to whip your tail at Lytham and St. Andrews,” he said. “Hope you haven’t canceled those reservations or anything.”
I said I hadn’t.
“Good. Here are my terms,” he continued. “No complaints. No long faces. We go to have laughs, hit a few balls, maybe take a bit of the Queen’s currency from each other’s pockets. But when I say it’s time to go home, I go home. No questions asked. I’ve got plenty of stuff to do. But I do want to pin your ears back for old times’ sake—so you’ll at least remember me.”
I sort of laughed; then agreed.
“Good. See you at the airport in Atlanta,” he barked happily, banging down the phone.
Opti the Mystic had spoken again.
I went out and finally pruned my roses, damn near barbering them to the ground.
TWO
The Road Hole
As our plane bored through the darkness five miles above the Atlantic, Dad put aside his Wall Street Journal and turned to me, smiled, and said, “Know what I’m anxious to see?”
“It’s just a wild guess. Either Dean Smith win another national basketball championship, or possibly the Queen Mum in her Calvins?”
“Smart mouth.”
“It’s my job,” I reminded him. This was true. Dad was such a perfect straight man, I always played Bob to his Bing in our thirty-year road show.
His smile widened. “I’m wondering how you’ll take the corner when the pressure’s on.”
I knew exactly what he meant. This was an elliptical code for taking the dogleg corner of the seventeenth hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews, sometimes called the Road Hole, regarded by many as the toughest par-four hole in the world, 475 yards of celebrated Scottish madness that offers the player the difficult choice of firing his ball dangerously over a set of old replicated railway sheds that invade the driving line of the left-to-right dogleg, or the opportunity to play “safe” and face a tough long iron or fairway wood shot to a shallow, unforgivingly firm, slightly elevated green bordered by severe out-of-bounds to the right and an infamous pebble road and wall in back—to say nothing of the murderous pot bunker that lurks in front and has buried the hopes of more ordinary mortals and great players than probably any single patch of sand on earth.
“Same as always,” I assured him, sipping my expensive scotch. “Grip it and rip it over the shed to the heart of the fairway. A neat five- or six-iron to the center of the green, followed by two putts. No problem.”
“You seem to have it figured out nicely. You’ve played it that way, have you?”
“Only in my dreams, I’m afraid.”
I knew exactly how my father would play the Road Hole, though. His usual short fade off the tee, two more irons to the green, and one good putt for par. That was the ideal approach and how he basically approached every par-four hole—pretty much how he approached life in general, come to think of it, a patient player who accepted the physical limitations of his game and waited for his moments to score. Never gifted with length off the tee, his salvation was his short iron game and his putter.
“How many times did you play the hole?” I asked him.
“Only twice. I took the train to Scotland two times, once in late ’43 and again in ’44, just before D-Day. Then they sent me off to France.”
“So how’d you do on it?”
“I double bogeyed it the first time.” He was now fiddling with his earphones, trying to untangle them from his newspaper, preparing to plug into the inflight movie, in which several cars were already exploding. I helped him by taking the newspaper, glancing absently at the date as I did. It was late September, and something gently stirred in me.
“And the second?” I asked.
“I almost hate to say.”
“C’mon. I won’t tell. A snowman?”
“No. A birdie, I think.”
I stared at him. “You think you birdied it?”
“Actually, I know I did”—he smiled again, remembering—“because the little gentleman I was playing with was so ecstatic about it, he insisted on buying me supper to celebrate. I have to say, it was one of those crazy shots you couldn’t do again if your life depended on it. Basically a fluke. I chipped in from off the green.”
“From where exactly?” I was pleased to hear this but shouldn’t really have been too surprised. Over the years I’d seen him chip the ball into the cup dozens of times, from the worst kind of lies—out of sand, penal rough, hardpan dirt. Like Paul Runyan, the great short game impresario who used his putting and chipping talents to compensate for his relatively puny game off the tee, Dad seemed to relish any opportunity to extricate himself from Bogeyville with his trusty chipping iron (usually his seven-iron) or bang the ball into the back of the cup from the backside of nowhere with his old Ping putter, crushing his opponent’s spirits in the process. I’d been the victim of his great chipping and putting touch far too often to write off his good fortune at the Road Hole, however improbable, merely as a fluke. Still, a bird at the Road Hole! I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who’d done it. Most professionals never even came close.
Dad was fiddling with the volume knob now, the headphones in place, tuning in to his blow-up adventure movie. He was obviously in no rush to reveal anything more. He sipped his scotch, settled back, then glanced over at me and smiled. “I have a better idea. Why don’t I show you when we get there?”
He obviously wanted me to leave him alone for a while. I got up and wen
t to join the after-dinner queue for the toilet.
—
It’s said a great calm descends on you when you begin a long journey.
The road ahead stretches so far, you can think only of what is happening now. The thing was, I didn’t have a clue what was really happening at that moment. My father was supposed to be dying, but he didn’t appear to be dying, and the idea that he would soon vanish from my life—the worst fear of my childhood—seemed utterly incomprehensible, almost laughable. Opti the Mystic was so alive, so constant, still so there despite the direst verdict of medical science. And what’s more, we were streaming through a cold black ocean of air, drinking scotch, and getting our digs in as always, finally bound together for the Road Hole. Was it the beginning of a trip, I wondered, or the end of a journey?
As I stood in line for the bathroom, arms braced against the bulkhead, gently swaying with the plane, I stared out a porthole window thinking about that Road Hole birdie and told myself not to put too much expectation on this trip. Opti would have stressed the importance of staying in the moment and not worrying about the outcome.
But living in the moment had always been so difficult for me. So much of my life was spent worrying about things that were going to happen in the future, racing to make plane connections or conduct interviews or make approaching deadlines. Reporters live in the land of tomorrow. So do fathers and gardeners. I was all three. On our hill in Maine, I’d cleared almost two acres of land by hand, propelled by a single vision of how glorious my vast yard and gardens would someday look. Sometimes I worried about the kinds of boys Maggie would bring home or how Jack might fare on his college boards. These events were only ten or twelve years in the future.
Through the porthole, I found myself gazing at a star.
The unexpected brilliance of it made me think of my own childhood. Every story my father read my brother and me as children seemed to have two things: a moral and a guiding star. There were legends of Indian warriors crossing wildernesses in search of their destinies, Greek myths of seafaring sons in search of their fathers, Columbus on the prow of the Santa Maria. Sojourning man pursued undiscovered worlds by contemplating the stars and the ancient Greeks, for one, believed that men’s souls were composed of the same elements as stars, Plato believed a man who lived his life well on earth went to reside happily on a star afterward. He said the soul was pure memory.
—
Nothing, said Balzac, is insignificant. For me at least, the reason for, if not the soul of, this trip was almost entirely bound up in the memory of hearing about St. Andrews and the Road Hole for the first time.
It was a balmy evening in the 1960s, and my father and I were headed up the eighteenth fairway at Green Valley. A small plane flew overhead. Dad looked up and smiled. “Look at that,” he said, with obvious pleasure. “An old J-3 trainer. I flew one just like that before the war.”
As we watched, the plane’s engine suddenly stopped; the ship seemed to hover dangerously on the evening’s air currents, and then the engine refired. “He’s practicing stalls at sunset. I used to do the same thing. It’s amazing how well you can see everything from up there at this hour. Saint-Exupéry said the airplane revealed the true face of the earth to man.”
I looked at him. “You flew an airplane?”
“Sure. Didn’t I tell you?”
No, he hadn’t. I’d never heard of a saint called Exupéry, either.
That evening a box of old letters and photos came down from the attic. I was surprised to learn my parents had lived another life before my brother Dickie and I were born. Dad had been a pilot, and Mom had won the Miss Western Maryland pageant. They lived on Schley Street in Cumberland, Maryland. Dad wrote an aviation column for the paper, sold advertising space, and flew on weekends. He loved to fly his old Cessna low along river valleys, following the seams of the earth, and he once frightened my mother so badly on a trip down the New River Valley, she refused to fly with him again. She drew the line when he volunteered to fly a plane through a flaming wall at a Jaycee airshow. “I told your father it was that plane or me,” she said, sliding him a meaningful look. “For a while,” he added with a wink, “it was a toss-up.”
Not really, of course. There were all these black-and-white photos from that time. They were both so young, carefree, aping for the camera at the rail of a tramp steamer out of Baltimore harbor or posing in the deep snow outside a handsome white house in a suburb of Chicago—just the kind of cozy little place, my mother explained, where they hoped to raise a family of their own someday. She thought Dad looked like the movie actor Alan Ladd in his tech sergeant’s uniform. There were other pictures of him from the war: posing with a bunch of grinning GIs around a big-breasted sculpture of a woman fashioned from the muddy snow outside a Quonset hut in England; sitting astride a white horse at the edge of a forest in France; taking a swing with a golf club on a barren piece of ground with the broken rooflines and church spires of an almost medieval-looking town rising up in the distance. The town turned out to be St. Andrews. The picture went into a frame that sat on my bedroom dresser for years. I used to lie on my bed and gaze at it and think: I’m going there someday.
For me, everything seemed to happen that year in the mid-1960s. The Beatles came to America, and I got my first guitar, a Silvertone from Sears. I also got a new set of Northwestern golf clubs for Christmas and a book called Education of a Golfer by Sam Snead.
My aunt Polly Tracy lived on the seventeenth hole at Sedgefield Country Club, where the Greater Greensboro Open was played every spring. That April, in 1965, we all went out to the tournament for the first time. Aunt Polly really wasn’t my aunt. She was the wife of my father’s friend, Bob Tracy. They worked together in advertising and were planning to open their own ad agency soon. The Tracys had a house full of noisy kids—Mimi, Pam, Bobby, Teddy, Paula—people always coming and going, kids carrying on, and meals being served. Mimi’s boyfriends were always pulling up in sports cars. Bobby was a golf star on his high school team. Pam had actually drunk house paint and had her stomach pumped out! Teddy was the first girl I ever kissed. Paula was just the tag-along kid.
I wanted to see Sam Snead because he was my father’s golf hero. I also wanted to get him to autograph my copy of Education of a Golfer. On Saturday afternoon, my father and I followed Snead in the third round. Two months shy of fifty-three, the Slammer was on or near the lead, and the excitement was palpably building in the gallery. I hugged my book and waited for my chance.
We followed him to the eighteenth hole, where the crowds grew very large. I remember laying the book down on a concession table to climb up on a radio broadcast tower to try and see better. My father and I had gotten separated. When I climbed back down, the book was gone. I couldn’t believe it. I watched Snead head off, and then I walked back down the fairway toward Aunt Polly’s house, furious with myself and blinking back tears.
The next morning, another copy of the book was lying on the breakfast table. “Try and hold on to this one for a while, will you, Bo?” was all my father had to say about the matter, glancing at me over the Sunday funnies.
We drove out to Sedgefield again and watched Snead make history. By winning Greensboro, he became the oldest man in history to capture a regular PGA title. The problem was, his triumph made even getting close impossible. Snead was surrounded by jubilant fans and disappeared into the Sedgefield Inn before I could reach him. My father told me we would get the autograph “next year.”
—
Not long afterward, I told a girl named Kristin Cress that Sam Snead had autographed my book. It was a daring lie, and I don’t know why I did it except I desperately wanted her to like me. She was two inches taller and a year ahead of me in school, but we sang in the same youth choir at church. She was very popular and very pretty, a junior high school cheerleader with big brown eyes, shiny black hair, and an unusually fine singing voice. She was the star in school plays, and older boys were always hanging around her.
Kristin didn’t seem impressed by my Sam Snead story, and it was another two years before she even seemed to notice me.
By then, I’d invented a secret golf game involving Kristin Cress, which I sometimes played on the putting green at Green Valley. The stakes were always high in these intense fantasy matches. Normally I putted against Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer for the “Championship of the Entire Earth,” a cool million dollars, a box of new Titleist golf balls, perhaps a chance to play rhythm guitar with the Beatles, and a new Corvette Stingray I would eventually be old enough to drive.
But this game was different. If I could putt my way completely around the nine-hole putting green in fourteen strokes or less (Kristin was fourteen), it meant Kristin Cress would fall in love with me. I could envision the whole thing. We would marry, have children, maybe move into a big house on a golf course like Aunt Polly’s, drive a Stingray, get nice big Christmas cards from Arnie and Jack. But I would have to knock at least four putts into the jar in one stroke and do no worse than two-putt on the remaining five holes. For a while I played this game over and over, after almost every round—you got only one chance per day—for most of my thirteenth summer, trying to make the magic happen. But it never did. Belief ebbed. I pretty much gave up.
Then one day in the autumn, when I was just fooling around, waiting for my father to arrive at the club, stepping up and rapping putts for the heck of it, I realized that all I needed to do in order to complete the sacred Kristin Cress love grail was to finish the ninth hole in one putt.
The putt was a twenty-footer with a one-cup break from left to right. I took a deep breath and set my putter behind the ball. I made a solid stroke and watched the ball roll beautifully to the edge of the cup…and stop. I remember looking at the perfect black script—Titleist. “Get in,” I whispered. The ball dropped into the cup. She was mine.