by James Dodson
I said: “I’ve never had a hole-in-one. Wouldn’t this be a perfect spot?”
“Any place would be a perfect spot for a hole-in-one,” he said.
“Here goes,” I announced, then proceeded to fire my ball into the depths of the huge yawning bunker in front. “What I meant was, this would be the perfect spot to make two from the bunker.” Dad looped his five-iron shot to the grass just in front of the green, chipped on, missed the putt, and made bogey. I made double, saving my ace for another day.
We sat down to rest on the grass at the tenth tee.
“Our scores are awful,” I said, adding up the damage.
“Ah, well. No matter.” He yawned. “This is so delightful. Look at those birds.”
I glanced up at several white seabirds darting over the roof of the train station and the peaked red rooftops of St. Annes. Our halfway scores were lousy, but the sun was now sprinkling late September warmth over the Irish Sea (wherever it was), and the moment really was delightful, proving, as someone who probably never broke 80 once said, that golf is mostly about whom you choose to play with.
“People were very decent to soldiers here,” my father, still in reminiscent mode, observed as we sat there resting our legs. I noticed him gently massaging his left leg, reminding me what an effort this hike really was for him. Thank God, I thought, for Lytham’s gentle old terrain. I noticed, as well, that one of his collection bags was leaking, staining the front of his trousers. He hadn’t noticed, though, so I kept quiet.
“We were basically a bunch of smart-aleck kids a long way from home, and they made us feel welcome. That may strike you as just an old soldier’s sentimental memory,” he said to me, “but there was such civility in the way we were treated here. You don’t forget kindness like that. The world could use some civility like that.”
Watching the birds soar and plunge to earth, I agreed.
—
We carded a 42 and 53 respectively on the outward march. They weren’t good scores, but if the trip had ended right there, it probably would have been just fine.
The back nine at Royal Lytham is loaded with danger and history. Bobby Jones played heroically down this stretch to capture the first of his three Open championships in the first year, as it happened, that golf fans actually paid gate admission to watch a golf championship—an attempt aimed at controlling crowds rather than making money. In those days the Open concluded on a Friday, with a thirty-six-hole final, and ten thousand spectators paid half a crown for the privilege of watching the two best players in the world compete. Both were Americans but might have hailed from different galaxies: Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones.
Jones and Hagen were symbols of golf’s past and future, playing the game for entirely different reasons. Jones was the ultimate amateur in an age when amateur meant something good. He entered twenty-seven majors in his relatively short career and won thirteen of them, including four U.S. Opens and three of the four British Open championships he entered. At twenty-eight, in 1930, a mere stripling by today’s standards, he hung up his clubs and called it quits “to avoid getting myself into a position where I would have to keep on playing.” He noted that he intended to “keep golf in perspective” by using it as “a means of obtaining recreation and enjoyment.”
Hagen was something quite different: brash, flamboyant, money-loving, a failed Philadelphia Phillies prospect and drinking pal of Babe Ruth’s who took the golf world by storm and became the game’s first touring professional and slickest “mental” player.
Beginning in 1914, Hagen won a pair of U.S. Opens, four British Opens, the Canadian and French Opens, and five PGA titles, four of them in a row. Opponents claimed Hagen intentionally mismarked his clubs to throw them off—a charge he took pains never to deny—and the British press ripped him for his cheeky off-course extravagance, which only endeared him to the masses. He chartered airplanes to fly to tournament sites and dined on champagne and lobster in clubhouse parking lots. For the 1920 British Open, he booked a room at the Ritz in London and appeared at the golf course in an Austro-Daimler limousine with a footman. He often departed a tournament site by bouncing balls to kids. His golf philosophy was “Never hurry and don’t worry.”
Pursued by ex-wives and creditors, consorting with British royalty and Gatsby rogues, Sir Walter became the game’s first true glamour boy. “Into this gaudy period,” Charles Price once wrote of him, “stepped the Haig, as he was called, with the sangfroid of a Valentino, his black hair pomaded to an iridescence, his handsome features browned by the sun and the wind until they had the hue of briarwood.”
Jones played his way to Lytham in 1926 by firing 66/68 at Sunningdale, in the London suburbs, to easily qualify for the Open. Because his first round was a model of symmetry—requiring thirty-three putts and thirty-three shots with irons and woods—his Sunningdale performance became popularly known as the “perfect round of golf.” Bernard Darwin simply summed it up as “incredible and indecent.”
By the third round of the Open at Lytham, though, neither Jones nor Hagen was on the lead. That belonged to a Detroit club pro named Al Watrous, who held a two-stroke lead at 215. Since they were paired for the final round, Jones suggested the two competitors retire to his hotel for a quiet lunch and a bit of rest before the final that afternoon. When they returned to the players’ entrance at the course, the guard refused to readmit Jones, who had left his player’s badge on the dresser at his hotel. The guard could not be persuaded he was one of the competitors, and Jones finally trotted to the main entrance and paid admission to reenter—the only player to ever pay his way into his own major championship title.
As Dad and I began the long walk home to the clubhouse from the tenth tee, we talked about Jones and how his love of sportsmanship really set golf apart from every other sport.
“Jones, you know, came here during the war.”
“You mean to Lytham?” I said.
“Right. He did a Red Cross exhibition match here in the summer of ’44. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see him. I don’t remember why—probably because it was just after D-Day and we were working double shifts at the base. Some of the guys from the base saw him, though. They said he was as nice a gentleman as you’d ever wish to meet.” He added with a chuckle, “Of course, they were sergeants. Jones was a lieutenant colonel.”
We played the next four holes more or less in silence. Trying to concentrate on my game, I didn’t feel any need to speak, and Dad seemed to be lost in a pleasant reverie or two of his own. I noticed that we’d slowed our pace even more; he was limping slightly again. Oh well, I thought. Never hurry and never worry.
Lytham holes eleven, twelve, and thirteen strike some connoisseurs as a trifle dull, but hole fourteen begins a final stretch of long par-fours that can wipe out anybody’s score. The grassy dunes, as they are somewhat ambitiously called, begin to rise a bit as you approach the critical closing holes, and the greens themselves seem to hide behind the swelling land as if to signify impending high drama.
During the final round of the Open in 1926, Jones came alive at Lytham’s daunting fifteenth, a 463-yard par-four some say is rivaled in difficulty only by St. Andrews’ Road Hole. He birdied it to catch Watrous. The players were still even at the seventeenth, a 462-yard par-four that bends slightly to the left and where a player’s drive must be played to the right so he can have an open approach to the green. In Jones’s day a frightful sand waste area stretched down the left side of the fairway, and that was unfortunately where he pulled his tee shot. Unable to see the green, and with Watrous’s ball already on the putting surface, Jones fired one of the most miraculous shots in golf, ripping a flawless four-iron over the dunes. His ball came to rest on the green closer to the flagstick than Watrous’s ball. Shaken, Al Watrous three-putted to oblivion. Jones got down in two.
Fittingly, there was really only one man left on the course with a chance to catch Bobby Jones, the new leader in the clubhouse. That was Sir Walter the showman. Playing almost two
hours behind Jones, Hagen came to the final hole at Lytham two strokes behind Jones, needing to hole out from the fairway to tie. The cause was basically hopeless. It was an impossible shot. But gifted entertainer that he was, Hagen walked slowly to the green and asked his caddy to please hold the pin. Sir Walter’s theory on performing for the masses was to make the hard shots look easy and the easy shots look hard. He walked back to his ball and took aim. His pitch nearly struck the pin before trickling off the back side of the green.
Jones had his first Open championship. But the Haig once again sent the masses home smiling.
—
My father soldiered along Lytham’s rugged back nine with his usual collection of bogeys and doubles and only one triple, but my game, despite better concentration, came seriously unglued. I made the hard shots look hard and the easy shots look harder. At sixteen, where Seve Ballesteros had intentionally missed the fairway and driven his ball into the temporary car park at the 1979 Open, then got up and down with a brilliant sand-wedge shot, I could barely manage double bogey and wondered why my game was foundering so badly. Was it the distraction of the emotions I was struggling to keep at bay? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps my golf game simply reeked that day. Golf is like that, as fickle as any BBC weather forecast.
At seventeen, the hole where Jones struck his brilliant recovery shot, I found the little marker that commemorates the blast. I was lying two in the same sandy spot. I used my six-iron to advance my ball approximately ten yards. Then I chili-dipped, followed by a miserable shank, which preceded an angry skull. I eventually found my ball buried in a thick tuft of grass behind the green and scowled over at my father. A la Sir Walter Hagen, he was busy chatting up two elderly ladies who were playing along the nearby second fairway, blissfully unconcerned for my fate. He strolled back just in time to hear me mutter a murderous oath about the game.
I finished the hole with an eight, ballooning my score to 88.
Dad bogeyed the eighteenth. I escaped with a par. His 102 was respectable enough, considering his age and the fact that he hadn’t walked an entire golf course in over a decade. My 92 was one of the worst golf scores I could just about remember. I don’t know which of us looked more exhausted.
—
Tony Nickson was waiting for us.
Nickson was a former club captain and treasurer of Royal Lytham, a dapper seventy-six-year-old semiretired chartered accountant in a blue blazer and club tie who had recently authored the club’s comprehensive history, The Lytham Century. He gave us a delightful walking tour of the large Victorian clubhouse, which is one of those great drafty places that seem to be all ancient paneling, cut-glass doors, and wide quiet corridors.
Nickson showed us pictures of Lytham’s distinguished line of Open champs, including Bobby Locke (1952), Peter Thomson (1958), Bob Charles (1963), Tony Jacklin (1969), Gary Player (1974), and Ballesteros (1979 and 1988). As he described each of these players’ conquest of the claret jug, I was struck by the pivotal role Royal Lytham played in each man’s career.
Locke and Thomson were at the peaks of their careers when they won at Lytham, and Charles became the only left-hander to ever capture an Open, confirming the belief that the best courses bring out the finest in the best players. Jacklin’s win made him the first native son to win in twenty years and transformed him into nothing short of a national hero. Gary Player’s third Open win in 1974 would be his last, effectively a coda ushering in a new generation of champions named Watson and Miller. Nobody outside of Britain knew much about a twenty-two-year-old called Serviano Ballesteros when he came to Royal Lytham in 1979. Three years before, the young Spaniard had tied Nicklaus and nearly beaten eventual winner Johnny Miller at Birkdale with brilliant iron play. He was dark, broodingly handsome, and spoke terrible English. But he played with such breathtaking passion and creativity—as his car-park recovery shot in the final round at Lytham in 1979 proved (the wayward shot, Seve later insisted, was intentional, designed to give him a better angle at the green)—Europe’s most glamorous golf star was born on the spot.
Seve’s follow-up act at the Open, his win over Nick Price at Lytham in 1988, was merely the crowning touch of Ballesteros magic—but it also set Nick Price up, Price will tell you, to earn his claret jug at Turnberry six years later. “In order to win the Open,” Price told me, “you have to first get close to winning. That helps you believe it’s possible. Lytham is special to me because it’s where I first got close. Playing there convinced me that winning the British Open, my childhood dream, was within my reach.”
As Tony Nickson emphasized, though, one name transcends the rest at Royal Lytham—Bobby Jones. He led us into the empty club room, with its high ceiling and vast polished wooden floor, and showed us what amounted to a shrine to Bobby Jones, various memorabilia including the famous original J.A.A. Berrie oil portrait of Jones and copies of his original cards for all four rounds in 1926. There are also photos of Jones in the heat of competition and being presented the Open trophy afterward. The mashie club he used to strike his famous shot from the sand at seventeen is hung just below Berrie’s famous painting.
We had a drink in the men’s bar, and Tony invited us to step out onto the small private porch off the bar, which overlooks the eighteenth green, explaining slyly, “During the Open, of course, access to this spot has to be fiercely monitored due to its proximity to the eighteenth green. Certain members, emboldened by spirits, have been known to issue a few untimely remarks over the years.”
I left the two gents to warm themselves in the sun and went back inside to snoop around some more. Drafty old clubhouses—as opposed to sleek, swank new ones—reek dignity and character and greatly attract me, and I was eager to spend a few minutes alone to try and decipher the crime I’d perpetrated on such a fine golf course. I went back in the club room, pausing to pay my respects to Jones, then went out and looked again at the wall of Lytham champions. There were several photos of Seve in action. In every one of them, the Spaniard looked seriously annoyed. In those days, whenever Seve looked seriously annoyed, the rest of the field usually booked the next train out of town.
I heard a phone ringing somewhere in the recesses of the old building. I heard footsteps echoing, a door open and close, and suddenly in this great place where I’d never been but felt such warmth and kinship, I once again found myself marveling that my father and I were finally here.
All this talk of Bobby Jones had opened up a host of my own memories. Bobby Jones had brought me here, in a sense. But it wasn’t the Bobby Jones my father and Tony Nickson were chatting about out there on the members’ porch.
It was the female version of the greatest player who ever lived.
—
One day in 1983, after years of hard work and no golf, I called my father from an unlikely place—the office of the Vice President of the United States. I was in Washington for a long-hoped-for interview at The Washington Post, and the editor I’d spoken to was encouraging about my prospects. At dinner the night before, a friend named Rudy Maxa, who’d worked for years on the paper’s award-winning Style section, urged me to pursue my ambition to work at the paper of Woodward and Bernstein but quipped that I would need two things if I came to the greatest newspaper in America—a good literary agent and a great psychotherapist.
Rudy was just being funny. The competition, he meant, was awesome—you’d need to commit everything to making a name for yourself there. But his joke deflated something in me. I felt a sudden unaccountable fatigue and sadness. Why was that? It didn’t add up or make sense. Wasn’t this why I’d worked so hard, skipped vacations, even given up my golf game? I wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, or at least the next Rudy Maxa.
On my way out of town, thinking it would make me feel better, I stopped by Vice President George Bush’s office to say hello to some of the staffers I’d spent several weeks with on the campaign trail in 1980. I suppose I foolishly hoped I might even get to say hello to Bush. Several times over the weeks I spe
nt with him on the campaign trail, we talked about our mutual love of golf. Bush, at least, still played. The staff was all new, and Bush was out of town. The secretary was kind enough to let me use a phone. I called Opti.
“I think I don’t want to be a reporter anymore,” I told him flat out.
“Really?” He sounded surprised. “Maybe you’re just tired. When was the last time you played golf?”
“Let’s put it this way. Carter’s polls were still good.”
He suggested that I change my plane ticket and meet him in Raleigh. He picked me up there the next morning, and we drove to Pinehurst. He had my brother’s Wilson clubs with him. (I never bothered replacing my Hogans after they were stolen on that train in France.) We played Pinehurst Number 2 with a vacationing realestate couple in matching designer warm-up suits, the Rizzos. They were from somewhere in New Jersey—“The really nice part of the state,” Doris Rizzo kept assuring us. Dad played his usual game and finished in the respectable mid-80s. My drives, on the other hand, kept screaming off into the surrounding pine woods, prompting Rizzo the real estate baron to ask me, “Is your natural shot a duck hook or a peeled banana?”
Afterward, Dad and I sat drinking iced teas beneath a slowly turning ceiling fan in the club’s Donald Ross grill room.
“So why are you tired of being a reporter?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Journalism is supposed to make democracy work. Mostly it’s making me feel creepy.”
He asked if I had any clue why that was.
I replied that I used to like writing about crime because it provided a nice little window on the human psyche—murderers and extortionists, the theory goes, actually do things the rest of us only vaguely think about—while writing about politics was just plain fun. Like covering a war without bloodshed, to paraphrase Chairman Mao.
“Maybe you’re tired of the battle.”
I thought about this, conceding he might be right. Politicians and their assorted handlers, regardless of party stripe, were all beginning to sound eerily the same to me, and every time I wrote a crime story, I admitted, I increasingly felt like I was earning my rent on the back of somebody else’s problems. The problem was, as I explained, all my hard work and no play had finally begun to yield some tangible rewards—the prospect of a job at the Post and a couple enticing book possibilities. Two editors had recently made inquiries. One wanted me to consider writing a book about America’s fascination with serial killers. The other had a bio of my home state’s archconservative senior senator in mind. Both projects would come with respectable advances.