Final Rounds

by James Dodson

  Recently, while visiting with Jacklin at the home he was selling in the Scottish border country to prepare for life on the Senior Tour in America, he told me that Trevino’s “lucky” shot at Muirfield had effectively ended his career. Shaken by what he’d witnessed, Jacklin, never the best of putters to begin with, missed his birdie at seventeen that day—and then missed his par. The wild reversal of fortune handed Trevino his second consecutive British Open title. “I’m convinced my own confidence died on the spot,” Jacklin reflected quietly. “I mean, I’d played the best I could, I’d done everything required of a champion…only to lose it all on a man’s careless lucky shot. My God, that broke my spirit.”

  My father finished with a 93, which made him visibly happy. I finished with…who can say? I was happy, too.

  —

  Buoyed by our bonny trip around Muirfield, Archie drove us through the village and explained a bit more about the history of East Lothian, then whizzed us up a residential lane in his little Ford Fiesta very nearly to the crown of Gullane Hill. He wanted to show Dad the grand view and even gave us a snippet of verse for the occasion.

  “It’s up the hill,” he recited, “and doon the hill,

  And roond the hill and a’man;

  And ye should come to Gullane Hill

  If you can golf at a’man.

  We’ll cure you of a summer’s cold

  Or of a winter’s cough,

  We’ll make you young even though you’re old,

  So come and play at golf.”

  We applauded, Archie bowed slightly. We climbed back into his cramped car and sped down the hill with Archie telling us how he met and courted his wife Sheila, about the years he spent studying in America prior to the war, and how he’d given up his veterinary practice due to the changing nature of that trade. We parted with a drink at the Old Club House Pub, which overlooked the children’s links, where several future Sandy Williamsons were out shooting at red flags. Archie wanted to know where we were putting up that night.

  I mentioned we had a couple rooms at Greywalls, right next door to the hole where I drove a ball like the Golden Bear.

  “Oh, splendid,” Archie said. “If there’s a good moon tonight, be sure and look out at the golf course. It can be quite an extraordinary sight.”

  My father thanked him for his hospitality. I added my hear-hear.

  We touched our glasses, drinking to Trevino’s luck and Jacklin’s misfortune and the eternal mystery of the hole, whoever invented it.

  “That’s why we love this game, you know,” said Archie. “The bittersweet mystery of it all. The uncertainty of what we shall discover….”

  “It’s new every time you go out,” agreed my father. “Wasn’t it de Vicenzo who said golf is like love—one day you feel too old, the next you want to do it again?”

  “Right you are, Brax.” Baird felt his own familiar quotation coming on, “ ‘A tolerable day, a tolerable green, and a tolerable opponent supply, or ought to supply, all that any reasonably constituted human being can expect in the way of entertainment,’ ” Archie recited. “That’s Lord Balfour. The rest of the quote goes thus: ‘With a clear course and fine sea view the golfer may be excused if he imagines that golf, even though it be indifferent golf, is the ultimate end of man’s existence.’ ” He looked at me and said, “He was thinking of Gullane Hill when he said that.”

  I started to raise my glass to Spyglass Hill and Gullane Hill, both of which had cured something in me, and to Laird Small and the laird of Gullane Archie Baird, genuine custodians of the game, but I wasn’t sure anyone in the Old Club House Pub but me would get the connection. I simply hoisted my glass and said thank you to Archie.

  Several hours later, I had a clear view of the course and the sea beyond from my room at Greywalls, a cozy cell overlooking Muirfield’s tenth. The moon, shining on the water, made me think of a Zen belief that enlightenment is like the moon reflected on water: The moon does not get wet nor the water broken; the light is wide, but a whole sky can be reflected in a single drop.

  True to Archie’s word, I could see a great deal of the linksland, washed blue by the moon and stars. My room had green wallpaper and floral drapes, a small reading lamp, five prints of soldiers on the walls, a single bed, a Finlandia TV, and a slipcovered chair. I sat in the chair and flipped on the TV, just to see if there was still a world beyond Muirfield. The late news was on. A woman who hadn’t spoken in seventeen years had finally broken her silence, asking for a ham sandwich. Britain’s oldest chicken had died after a ripe old age. The fratricidal factions in Bosnia were at least talking about talking again. Mu‘ammar Gadhafi had graciously repeated his offer to have his son marry Chelsea Clinton to improve diplomatic relations with the United States. On the local front, former president George Bush was visiting St. Andrews to attend the annual autumn meetings of the Royal and Ancient and play a little golf.

  Thinking what an ironic twist that was, I turned off the set and walked down the narrow hallway to my father’s room to see if he wanted to go down for a nightcap in the bar, but he wasn’t in his room.

  I strolled downstairs, past the empty front desk and the photo wall where Greg Norman was giving a Greywalls chef a midnight golf lesson. I found my father in the library, playing old war records on an old wind-up record player sitting on the piano.

  “Look at this,” he said, as I entered. “Great stuff here.”

  He showed me several 78-RPM records from the war years and reminded me for the umpteenth time how he’d met my mother in the record department of McCrory’s, how he’d gone back for weeks to buy classical and big-band records and hadn’t even owned a record player. Then he told me another story I’d never heard: that my mother made a recording of “I’ll Walk Alone” and had it sent to him overseas. During the war he used to take the record to village libraries and play it on their record players.

  He handed me one of the records. “Look. Tony Martin singing ‘To Each His Own.’ ”

  “Who’s Tony Martin?”

  “Big Hollywood star in the thirties and forties. Not much of a soldier, though.” I asked how he knew this.

  Dad smiled. “Because he was in my outfit at Chanute Field. Funny guy. Used to flirt with your mother a lot. Told her she looked like Alice Faye, the movie star. I think Alice Faye might have just divorced him. Your mother sold cigarettes at the Buckingham Palace PX—that was the name of the place, believe it or not—and I was teaching at the parachute training school. We lived off base. Martin was the kind of guy who wasn’t above having other buck privates shine his boots and make his bunk. Guess they thought they’d get into the movies or something. I can’t say I ever really knew the man, though I might have yelled at him a few times.”

  We played the Tony Martin record. Tony Martin had a superb voice. I pictured slinky women with cigarette holders and eyelashes that could wound.

  “So how was Mom?” I knew he had vanished to his room after dinner to call my mother. I’d stayed downstairs chatting with a young newlywed couple from Phoenix whose parents had mysteriously given them a trip to Scotland for a honeymoon. Neither played golf. “I guess I’ll have to learn to play golf now,” the bride complained with a note of doomed resignation. “Kevin wouldn’t know which end of the club to hold.” She indicated the groom, who had his nose safely buried in a copy of Country Life.

  “Your mom is fine,” Dad said. “She’s having a man come and waterproof the wooden fence in back. I told her she ought to go buy Thompson’s because that’s the best water sealer, but she said the man at the hardware store suggested Olympic because it has sunblock in it. So she bought the Olympic.” He held another record up to the light and squinted at the title. “I guess she’s learning she doesn’t need me around quite as much as she first thought.”

  I started to say something but didn’t, either because my tongue wouldn’t get out of the way or because I simply couldn’t think what to say. So I said I was going to walk out and stand on Muirfield’s
tenth tee in the moonlight and admire the hole where I’d made my Nicklausian blast earlier that day. He said he might join me in a minute or two. As I left him, Tony Martin was crooning that he’d found his one and only love.

  I walked out back and stood on the little stone wall above the tee, looking out at the Muirfield links, thinking about the Mystery of the Hole. The hole was critical to golf, yet a hole was really nothing more than ten ounces of air, a divine nothingness. The object of the game was to reach this place of nothingness as economically as possible, to pass through nature with as much grace and dignity as we could muster. Less really was more, and even if golf wasn’t the ultimate end of man’s existence, it struck me that a small, ever-shifting, mysterious nothingness was precisely what gave the game its essential glimmer, balance, and allure, impregnated it with a power that was simultaneously as visible and elusive as moonlight on the water.

  I decided to step down onto the grass and, stepping forward off the wall, kept going, falling about four feet. I landed directly on my back and lay there, the wind knocked out of me, on a pillowy pad of fragrant grass, feeling really dumb but far more startled than injured, staring up at the moon.

  So much, I thought, for Buddhist woolgathering. After a few minutes I got up, rubbed my backside, climbed back over the wall, and went inside. My father was just heading up the stairs and paused to wait for me.

  “How was the golf course?” he asked mildly.

  “Very comfortable.”

  He smiled and slipped his hand through my arm, mostly to give his knees a bit of support as we slowly climbed the steep stairs together. I started to say something about my mother being brave under the circumstances, but he seemed to read my mind and spared me the effort.

  “Your mother will be all right,” he said as we neared the top. “Change is difficult for her, but she’s a surprisingly tough lady.”

  The corners of his mouth turned up slyly.

  “You know, it’s only been the past five years I’ve gotten her to sleep in the nude. You sleep much better in the nude. I’ve told her that for years. I think she’s finally beginning to believe me.”

  ELEVEN

  Haunted Ground

  On our first full day in St. Andrews, my father and I strolled down to the first tee of the Old Course to watch 20-handicapper George Bush tee off.

  It was a cool, overcast morning, and a large crowd had gathered in anticipation of seeing the former president. Standing in the crowd near the front steps of the Royal and Ancient’s famous sandstone clubhouse, I heard snatches of several languages—French, Japanese, and someone who was clearly from Brooklyn. Bush and his entourage of fellow Royal and Ancient members finally appeared, accompanied by Secret Service men and a small drove of reporters. The former president turned and waved to the crowd, prompting modest cheers and a volley of clicking cameras. Reporters and photographers jockeyed with the spectators to get a better angle on the proceedings, or else they ignored the protests and sprinted ahead out onto the course to get a better view.

  Bush, whose father was a USGA president and whose maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, gave the prize cup to the international amateur matches that bear his name, teed up quickly and slapped a respectable little drive to the right side of possibly the most generous opening fairway in the world. The crowd cheered as if Greg Norman had just unleashed one of his patented monster drives.

  “This must be a little strange for you,” my father reflected. “To cross paths with your old friend Mr. Bush like this.”

  I admitted it was a little like looking at the ghost of Christmas past. But then, I thought, this whole trip had been a journey into the past.

  I said, “I doubt if he would even remember me. I was just one of several hundred faces shouting questions at him in those days.”

  “Oh, I bet he would. Seems like a pretty thoughtful guy. You liked him, as I recall.”

  I didn’t deny it. In some respects, that was part of my problem. Privately, Bush was one of the most engaging figures I’d spent time with as a reporter. He talked straight and laughed a lot, loved to tell stories, and always looked you in the eye. His politics were centrist, sensibly middle-of-the-road. He seemed genuine and hopeful. He reminded me eerily of my own father and even resembled him a bit.

  In this respect, political reporters and golf journalists have the same kind of dilemma—how to get close enough to a subject in order to understand what he’s about without falling under his spell or finding an ax to grind. Maybe I’d fallen a bit too much under Bush’s spell. At any rate, as the tone of politics turned decidedly uncivil in the mid-1980s, when unnamed sources close to the campaign began to replace the traditionally valued identified sources, which so much of responsible journalism used to rely upon, I’d learned there really is no such thing as an “objective” reporter. The challenge is to simply make yourself be a fair one.

  Now, these years later, watching the reporters jostle around Bush made me recall the hectic weeks I’d spent with him on the campaign trail in 1980. One morning in Puerto Rico, relieved to be away from the slush, opinion polls, and high-wire tension of the New Hampshire primary, Bush and I jogged a couple miles alone together on a tourist beach, talking about the campaign and his grandchildren and other things, when we came upon a man who was practicing his sand-wedge game on the beach in front of his hotel. I was impressed that Bush didn’t feel obliged to stop and introduce himself and press the flesh. As we passed, he merely wished the man good morning and quipped over his shoulder, “Now there’s a truly committed golfer. I wish I had a sand game like that.” A few paces along, he murmured to me, “I wish I had time to do that.”

  Well, thanks to America’s voters, George Bush finally had the time to work on his sand game and be with his grandchildren. And watching the former president smile and shake hands with Scottish dignitaries who’d turned out in full force to greet him, I didn’t get the impression he really missed the grind of the presidency, any more than I missed being in the press pack. Both of us had moved on to kinder and gentler jobs that allowed us to play the game we loved most.

  After Bush and Company were gone, Dad and I walked over to the little white starter’s house to see if our names had made it through the Old Course daily ballot. The man inside informed us that the results of the drawing wouldn’t be known until later that afternoon. It was only noon. We had several hours to fill up.

  About forty-two thousand rounds a year are played on the Old Course, almost half of them reserved for the citizens of St. Andrews, an inalienable right they’ve enjoyed since Archbishop John Hamilton of St. Andrews, one of Scotland’s leading churchmen during medieval times, signed a decree in 1552 granting them unhindered access to the town’s linksland—in effect, creating the world’s first municipal golf course.

  The balance of Old Course teetimes are made available to visitors, but demand for the precious slots grew so fierce several years back that Links Trust Management, which operates the town’s six golf courses on behalf of the town, was forced to institute a daily ballot drawing that determines who will get a teetime on the most famous golf course in the world. There are 450 golf courses in Scotland, and five other splendid tracks in the town of St. Andrews itself, but pilgrims who find they’ve made it through the daily ballot feel as if they’ve been granted a special dispensation from the gods.

  In the five or six times I’d played the Old Course, I’d never encountered the slightest difficulty getting a teetime. That’s because I usually appeared alone and was penciled in to fill out some other group’s foursome. As a result, and proof of St. Andrews’ international stature, I’d gotten to play the Old Course with golfers from several nations, including several Brits and Americans, a Japanese newlywed couple, and a charming Italian man who hummed arias the whole way round and insisted that Arnold Palmer’s family originated in Sicily, where their family name was Palmeri. My best score on the course was 80. My goal was to shoot 75—what Sam Snead shot in the final round to win the Br
itish Open here in 1946.

  Snead’s St. Andrews story is a typically colorful one. The Slammer hadn’t wanted to play in the British Open that year, but under the terms of his contract with Wilson Sporting Goods, he was forced to enter. While leaving New York, his airplane caught fire and had to be evacuated. Arriving in bomb-ravaged London, he found that hotel rooms were scarce and he had to sleep on a public bench before catching a train for Scotland. When he arrived, he was angry to learn he couldn’t use his favorite center-shafted putter because the R&A had banned that style after Walter Travis won the 1904 British Amateur using his famous Schenectady putter. Upon seeing the stark, spare Old Course for the first time, Snead turned to someone and asked, “What the devil is that? It looks like an abandoned golf course.” His problems mounted when his caddy, said to be one of the canniest at the Old Course, showed up for work drunk; Snead had to fire him on the spot. His replacement proved no better—whistling through his teeth every time Sam prepared to shoot. Despite all this, the Slammer ran away with the title, firing 290 for seventy-two holes, beating his pal Johnny Bulla and Bobby Locke by four strokes.

  Officially, you’re supposed to have a 28 handicap or better to get on the Old Course, evidenced by some kind of official documentation—a USGA certificate, say, or a letter from one’s home club pro—but visitors work diligently to subvert this essentially fair-minded system, producing letters from nonexistent pros back home or, in the case of some overzealous guests, submitting Scottish-sounding names in the doomed hope it will somehow improve their chances of acquiring a desired teetime.