Round two tomorrow. They say it will rain hard all day. The first full day of rain here in about eleven months. I hope it pours. That’s our kind of weather. And I will get to watch Jack again in his Carnoustie rain jacket.
DECEMBER 16, 2011
Four in the morning. I am remembering the Old Course, the evening before the British Open in 2010, when I walked all eighteen holes with Ray, who was caddying for Ricky Barnes. We had just finished, and I was rounding the corner of Golf Place, when I ran into a group of noisy, middle-aged women, twelve or fifteen of them, all worn-out-looking housewives in matching red shirts, who had flown to Scotland from the States to form a cheering section for Tiger Woods. I was stunned. By then the whole world knew that Woods had betrayed his wife and children. This didn’t matter to these ladies. They loved him. They couldn’t wait to get a glimpse of him the next day. I suppose no one loves winners the way Americans do. It’s fine if you have no love in your heart, but if you end up living with your family in a Studio Plus hotel, you cannot be pardoned in America. Finishing in the money is what counts.
I can remember when Jack was six or seven and he first began to excel at hockey and baseball and I told him that no matter what kinds of wild celebrations took place after winning, he had to be the quiet kid who just walked up to his coaches and shook their hands and thanked them for the chance to play. And I remember the spring evening he hit his first baseball over the fence at Bailey Field when I told him that all the truly great athletes know that you learn more from losing than from winning.
That’s not going to help him today. Whatever lesson he might learn from losing today, he’s not interested.
It has just begun to rain.
By 9:00 a.m., it is a cold rain on gusting winds, like a hundred Scotland mornings I remember. All the golfers on the practice range look a little stunned, as if someone were playing a trick on them. The only thing I say to Jack are the words we memorized years ago from Band of Brothers. Captain Winters to his men in the 101st Airborne just before they board the planes the morning of D-day. “Listen up. Good luck. God bless you. I’ll see you in the assembly area.”
But when Jack doesn’t acknowledge me, I’m a little annoyed and I call to him. He turns back. And I decide in that moment that I will keep my silence. I will just be his caddie today, not a philosopher or a father, though most caddies I knew in Scotland are about the best philosophers I’ve ever met. And a lot of them are damned good fathers too. I am thinking in this rain that I wish Malcolm were here to roll my cigarettes for me in the wet today, a skill I never mastered. And I am thinking about Davy Gilchrist, my caddie master at Kingsbarns who gave me my first chance. He remains one of the most decent people I’ve ever known. I watch Jack walk away. It’s cold and wet enough now for him to be wearing his proper rain jacket. The beautiful light blue Duke’s Course jacket I bought him with the first tips I earned as a caddie. I am thinking of David Scott, who runs the Duke’s and has such great insight into golf and life. I wish he were here today. And old Glen up in Canada. I have a bad feeling standing in the rain. I just wanted Jack to be grateful this morning for the round he played yesterday, but when I tried to talk with him on the ride in, it didn’t go so well. All he had to say was “I played nine good holes yesterday. And nine lousy ones.”
“We made the cut,” I said. “We’re back to fight another day.”
“Not good enough,” he said.
I went on. “I just think if a man is grateful in this life, then his heart is set in the right place.”
“I don’t buy it,” he said. “In golf it’s about making the swing. If you make a good swing, you play well. If not, no excuses.”
“You don’t have to buy it,” I said. “I’m just an old man now, and nobody cares what an old man thinks about anything. I’m just telling you what I believe. If a man isn’t grateful, he can’t be calm. And in this game if you’re not calm, you’re dead.”
That was the end of the talking.
I wish we could have spent the day talking instead of playing golf. It was that kind of day, starting with the first drive, when Jack made the worst swing I’d seen him make in Texas. The ball flew perhaps 100 yards, never more than two feet off the ground. With 260 yards left to a narrow green perched on top of a mound and surrounded by bunkers, Jack hit a miraculous shot and saved par. He hit another miserable drive on the 2nd and then made another miraculous par save after hitting a towering seven-iron—a completely blind shot—over a stand of tall trees blocking our view of the green.
We dropped shots on 3, 4, and 5, then recovered with a nice par on the 6th hole before the wheels fell off in a miserable run of bogey, bogey, double bogey. Yesterday in round one we finished the front nine at four under par. Now we stood at seven over.
I suggested we just try to make some birdies coming in for Colleen, and though he was trying his best, things just got worse. I stopped keeping score after eleven holes. I think we hit two good shots from there on in. It was another embarrassment for Jack. There are many ways to lose a golf tournament. You can stink on the first day and fail to make the cut. You can have one blowout hole. You can putt like an idiot. You can drive the ball out of bounds. For us, it was none of that really. Just one poor shot after another, shots that missed being good by a yard or two. A slow bleeding away of our hope and expectations.
Standing alone in the fairway on the 15th hole, I thought again about Scotland. Suddenly my mind was soaring across the Atlantic, back to the ground that I love. When I was last there, I was writing hard on a new novel from 4:00 each morning until I got on the bus to the course to go to work. My agents had sent the novel out to Hollywood—how many weeks ago was it now? I’d lost track. But the silence could mean only one thing.
“You don’t understand how it feels,” Jack said to me when we were walking back to his truck. “It hurts bad. Playing that way.”
“I do understand,” I told him. “You spend three years writing a novel, and then you realize it’s not nearly good enough. That’s been my story for the last thirty-seven years.”
“I don’t know, man,” he said.
Instead of music on the ride back to the hotel, we talked. It came down to me telling him that he has all the shots and enough talent to play well on this tour. “It’s in your heart,” I told him. “What I said to you this morning about being grateful. That’s what I’m trying to learn now as I grow old. I think the only way you can grow old gracefully is to be grateful enough to be calm. And that’s funny, because when you and your sisters were little, that’s the one thing your mother insisted on. That you all were grateful.”
“I have to start all over when we get back here after Christmas,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “We’ll take what we’ve learned and do the best we can on the second half of the tour. But you don’t have to start over.”
Maybe I didn’t believe that when I said it. I wasn’t sure. We have a long struggle ahead of us, and we might never climb the leaderboard again. I know that I have wondered before if someday I’m going to look back on my time as a father and see it as a long run of fixing things. I am pretty certain that I’ve learned here during our first run on the tour what is broken in Jack. I know he’s going to have to fix it himself.
DECEMBER 17, 2011
We are halfway through the tour now and facing three days of practice rounds before the two-week Christmas break. I am trying to take inventory early this morning. And trying to figure out what the hell happened yesterday. One reason golf is such a brutal game on the mind is that it is a game of uncertainty. But I think that part of my job as Jack’s caddie is to cut through all that is uncertain and try to nail down some essential truth that we can carry with us onto the second half of the tour. If such a truth exists.
And I believe it does. I studied my notebook from yesterday’s disaster and discovered that on seven holes where we earned bogeys and worse, we might have had quite simple pars if we had gone to the center of the green ins
tead of at the flags, where missing left or right by two or three yards, as we did, placed us in great difficulty. That might have been a swing of seven to eleven strokes. The difference between a humiliating score and a respectable score, which is all that Jack was fighting for after the poor opening nine. Going for the flags is Jack’s game, and that is what accounted for his outstanding four under par on the front nine of the first round. But it may also have accounted for the disappointing four over par on the back nine. Which makes it a difficult equation with reasonable arguments on both sides. Just as you might argue that a writer who spends three years trying to write a novel determined to reveal some important truth about the human condition that no one ends up reading would be wiser to spend those three years in law school. So what can we conclude with certainty here? We began this sixth tournament planning to just be content with the center of the greens, but when the rain softened them, Jack decided to go for the flags. That is his game. It has always been his game. But the figures from today’s round tell a certain truth, I think. When you drive the ball as well as he has, and putt as well, maybe you consistently shoot respectable rounds by just going for the center of the greens. And so, it may be that when we return after our two-week Christmas break, Jack will have to consider changing his game.
I fell asleep last night thinking of an old, dear friend whose father loved and played golf into his nineties at the Rochester Country Club. If he had been caddying for Jack yesterday, I think I know what he would have said to him as they walked to the 3rd tee: “Son, you just made two outstanding pars on the 1st and 2nd holes and you are near the top of the leaderboard with sixteen holes to play, and you may think you have your ‘A’ game today and that you can fire at every pin, but I saw your first two drives on those holes, and I am here to tell you in no uncertain terms that you do not have your ‘A’ game today. So from here on out, you are going to have to dial it back if you want to shoot a respectable score and win some cash money.”
We are going to have to regroup these next two weeks and then get back here and fight on. I have no idea how it will all turn out in the end. That is just more uncertainty. But tonight before we turned out the lights, I said this to my son: “Whatever happens from here on out for the rest of the tour, you had the courage to try to do something most people, most very good golfers, would never try because they couldn’t face the disappointment and the failure that you have endured here. I will always respect you for that. You never made excuses. You never gave up. You played every shot as hard as you could even when you were defeated and humiliated. Even if this is all you win here in Texas, I hope you will take that with you for the rest of your life and be proud of yourself and grateful that you had the chance.”
We’ll be home for Christmas, as the old song says.
I have cooked up a secret plan for Jack. Barry O’Neill, the lad from Ireland, has agreed to work with Jack through our final six events on the tour, playing practice rounds with him every free day he has. Jack has never had the opportunity to have a coach before.
JANUARY 11, 2012
In Maine we got to sneak onto the Prouts Neck golf course again and hit a few balls for Teddy to chase. It was one of those perfect winter afternoons with the lowering sun throwing blazing bands of red and pink light across the fairways and through the tall dark fir trees. It was far too warm for December in Maine, and when Jack checked the temperature in Houston on his iPhone, he told me it was ten degrees colder there. We talked for a while about going back. He said he felt good about it. “We’ve got half the tour still left to play,” he said. “I feel like I’m just getting started.”
“Well,” I said, “we learned some things in the first half. We played a few lousy rounds, a few solid rounds, and for a while you were at the top of the leaderboard. So I guess we hit all the highs and lows.”
“I guess so,” he said. Then he looked out across the harbor for a moment before he told me that during the round when he was four under par through nine holes, he was thinking that maybe he might go further than the Adams Tour. “It felt so good to finally be playing to my potential,” he said. “I thought about trying to find a sponsor to cover my expenses so I could enter Monday qualifiers for the Nationwide Tour, you know?”
“It’s something to think about,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll see.”
Then I told him that when we returned to Houston, I was going to be stepping into the background.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Barry O’Neill, the Irish lad, has offered to play practice rounds with you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He’s happy to help out.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “I can learn a lot from him.”
Much of the time back home in Maine, after hearing from Barry, I thought about shadows. Until I worked as a caddie, I never thought about my shadow before. But a caddie must always be conscious of where his shadow falls. You don’t want it to lie across the line of the golfer’s putt. Or pass over his stance, or distract him in any way. In Scotland, where it stays light until ten thirty at night in the summer months, it takes a while to get used to having to think about your shadow at so late an hour. Sometimes, I suppose, metaphors match the physical world. As Jack’s father, I wonder if maybe I must fall back a little ways now for the rest of the tour. We know that a son has to be released from his father’s shadow. I wonder if it is the son who must step free or if it is the father who must move aside. Or if it is a little of both.
Back in Houston now, as Jack took a place on the practice range at Panther Trail beside more than twenty players on the tour, I was thinking about the pink light in the winter sky above the Prouts Neck golf course when we were there together over Christmas, and the hope in Jack’s voice when he spoke about the possibility of this tour leading to another tour if he could find a measure of consistency in the next six events. I had said nothing about what I was thinking then. I would never talk with my son, or with anyone else, about how I wished that this winter together would turn into a spring and summer together on another tour. But I would give anything to help Jack achieve that measure of consistency in the weeks ahead of us this winter so that maybe, just maybe, we can go on further. All the players on the range with him want the same thing that Jack wants. To achieve that elusive measure of consistency that will carry them on. I know this. Just as I also know that golf is a leaking ship of dreams. And you board at your own peril.
Jack and I talked about this last night for a while in a conversation that began with the physical layout of the golf course but soon veered off to the metaphysical. It turns out that nothing in my son’s life has made him question his nonbelief in God the way Tim Tebow has. Jack has believed in him from the time he won two national championships in college, and when the Denver Broncos fired the coach who had drafted him and then benched him early this season, Jack began telling me that someday all the Tebow doubters in the world would be proven wrong. “I think I’ve figured out what it is with you,” I said to Jack. “You don’t believe in God, but you want to believe. And right now Tebow is making you doubt your own doubts. It was the same for me when you and your sisters were born. I mean when I held each of you for the first time.”
“That’s interesting” was all he had to say.
“Well,” I went on, “as far as God and golf are concerned, I can’t be the first caddie in St. Andrews to have discovered this little insight. Make a vertical list, by name, of the six golf courses in town”:
Balgove.
Jubilee.
Old.
New.
Eden.
Strathtyrum.
“Now, take the first letter of each name, line them up horizontally, and you get”:
B JONES
“And given that most of these courses were named long before Bobby Jones came into the world, I used to tell my golfers that this was proof not necessarily that there was a god but most definitely that there was a golf god.�
�
“I guess we believe what we need to believe,” Jack said.
We left it at that. And then he told me that he’d received a text from Barry. “He’s not going to play in this tournament. After the long break he needs more time to practice. But he says that he’ll catch up with us for the next one.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I wonder how he’d play number 18 if he needed to make a par.” The 18th hole featured another island green, but this one was so small that anything more than a high-lofted wedge or nine-iron would never hold. And because the hole was a sharp dogleg left from the tee, you needed a perfect drive to set up the shot into the green.
“You have to go for it in two,” Jack said.
“I’m not sure about that,” I argued. “If you don’t nail the drive, you can lay up on the second shot, fly a wedge to the pin, and make a one-putt par.”
He sighed. He wasn’t buying it.
JANUARY 12, 2012
Four in the morning. We start the second half of the tour today with an early tee time. Eight twenty. Which means I will be waking Jack at 6:15 so we can begin our drive to the course at 7:00, up Route 45 in the dark. I am more than a little concerned about what lies ahead today after playing a ragged practice round yesterday. Jack hit every fairway and had only one three-putt green, but the best he could manage was seven over par. We teamed up with two other players from the tour. One of them, Gabe from Iowa, had won his state title as a freshman at age fifteen. He was thirty-five now and still trying to chase down his boyhood dream, though after all the years he had enough perspective on life and the game to play with a mirthless smile on his face. I had wanted a disciplined and rigorous practice round, but it turned out to be a lighthearted affair. Maybe that is what the boys needed after the long break. We’ll see. It is now thirty-three degrees and the wind is high. It will be long underwear and a wool cap for me. I’ve been scrolling all the greens through my mind since I opened my eyes this morning after misreading four putts yesterday. There was a lot of rain while we were away, which made the Bermuda rough very sticky. Jack left three wedges short yesterday. I was hoping we’d have time to hit a hundred more on the practice range, but it was dark by the time we finished our round. Today we are going to have to land the greens in regulation in order to have a decent chance. I don’t want to try for anything more than fairways and greens. Keep it simple. Fairways and greens. If we make pars, we’ll make the damned cut.
Walking with Jack Page 27