When it was over, all he could talk about was the three three-putts and the double bogey. “I gave away five strokes,” he said as we walked to his truck. “Five strokes yesterday and five more today.”
“You fought back,” I said. “You really played well the final thirteen holes.”
“I’m getting tired of fighting back,” he said. “I want to fight to pull ahead.”
“I know,” I said. “You will. Trust me. Before we’re finished here in Texas, you will.”
The rest of what I told him, he had heard me say before. The bit about how this is his first professional tour, and after he had played no competitive golf for three years, I didn’t know if we’d ever make a single cut down here. “Look, Jackie,” I said. “You haven’t caught the great players on this tour, but you’ve played well against the good players, and you’ve beaten a few of them. Now you have some time off before we head into our final three events. Maybe give yourself a little credit. What do you think?”
“I have to work on my short game,” he said. “I have to learn to hit from the rough here.”
“Or land every green in regulation so I’m only handing you a putter instead of a damned wedge,” I said.
“I’m not satisfied,” he said. “I guess I had higher expectations than you, man.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “That’s good. Keep going.”
I didn’t say anything to him about what one of the fathers had said today out on the course. He was a sweet man who had been following his son on these tours for seven years. He came up to me off the 17th tee and asked me about Jack. “How far does he want to go with this game?” he asked with a melodious Texas drawl.
I told him that this experience was probably just about Jack trying to learn a few things so that someday he could become a good coach. “Man,” he said as he watched Jack climb onto the tee box. “Not many players can do the stuff he does out here. You should tell him to keep going.”
This wasn’t the first time someone on the tour had talked to me about Jack and his future this way. When we said good-bye off the last green and the father told me he hoped that this tour was just the first of many for Jack, I thanked the man and said exactly what I’d heard Jack say before when he was asked. “We’ll see.”
———
We picked up a couple of Walmart steaks to cook for supper and then drove back to the Studio Plus, to the room we’ve shared since late October, which now feels like home to both of us. Jack told me that Barry had offered to practice with him during the break. He was pleased about this. “Have you ever seen a better player?” I asked him.
“Never,” he said. “He’s the real deal.”
“What a great story,” I said. “He has to leave Ireland when he’s eighteen years old because his dream is to become a player and his father doesn’t believe in him. He comes to America by himself and works his way through college as a caddie.”
“I’ll tell you this,” Jack said. “Anyone who puts up money for him now is going to make a lot on their investment. I’m certain of that.”
“If I had the money, I’d sponsor him, and I’d buy you a couple pairs of pants,” I told him. “And I’m going to write to everyone I know. Maybe I can find five guys who will each put up four grand so he can make his run.”
“You should,” he said.
“Maybe I’d go with him as his caddie,” I said.
“Hey, man,” he said. “You thought this was going to be your last run. But it won’t be. You’ll be over there with him if he makes the European Tour.”
“You think so?”
“I know you, man,” he said.
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
We’ve had two weeks of practice as the days unfolded and then folded into each other while I watched Jack improving and gaining confidence in himself. These were some of my best days in Texas, out on the golf course with him, watching him learn a new way of hitting balls out of the Bermuda rough, following Barry’s instruction to open his left shoulder so that it would lead him through the shot. I loved watching the two of them joking around together one minute and then suddenly turning dead serious as they bore down on their shots. Colleen has told me for years that she wished Jack could have had a brother along with his three sisters, preferably an older brother to guide him. Now he seemed to have found one in Barry, whose composure on the golf course was what I admired most about his game. Nothing rattled him. He just proceeded calmly with due diligence. He had achieved that elusive consistency in his game, and now at age twenty-eight he was right up against a choice: He could continue to play on these small professional tours and earn a modest living. Or he could put himself up against the hurricane, by returning to Great Britain to make a run for the European Tour and the chance to reach his boyhood dream of competing in the Irish Open.
Jack and I spent a lot of time talking about Barry. Talking about his dream and his story always gave us the chance to put off talking about our story for a little longer. Our story, which I suppose I knew was drawing to a close. But tonight, as we sat around the hotel pool, it suddenly presented itself. We were discussing the layout of the course at Cypresswood, and then there we were talking about our story. That’s the way it is: you start out talking about golf, and pretty soon you are talking about life again.
I said, “You know that your mother is upset with us for never exploring Houston. I told her all we’ve seen is this hotel, the airport, the highways, the Walmarts, and the golf courses.” There was a bright scatter of stars above our heads that seemed to mark this night. We were living it up, so to speak, now that the hotel had acquired a grill over the winter. We were cooking steaks that were advertised as “Nolan Ryan’s Steaks” this time. A step up for us, we both agreed. “Living large” is how Jack defined it. It was nine o’clock, my bedtime, and we were relaxed in each other’s company. Even the noise of the highway traffic seemed muted as Jack said he wished we could have flown his mother down to see him play here.
I agreed. “She loves it when you make birdies,” I reminded him. “I checked the stats from the tour, and right now you’re sixteenth on the list of sixty-seven golfers for birdies. I sent her the Web page.”
“I wish I’d done better here,” he said.
We had been together for almost four months and had never spoken about what would happen when the tour was over. I felt this was a good time. “Everyone always feels that way,” I said. “You competed to the best of your ability.”
He looked at me and then nodded slowly. “I don’t have enough ability to make it any further,” he said.
Our eyes met. I began scurrying down the corridors of my mind to find something to tell him. “Hell,” I began. “All my life I wanted to write books like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I tried, but I never had enough ability. I just couldn’t do it. No one on this tour drives the ball better than you. You know that. And not many players can hit three-woods like you can. Two hundred and eighty yards over water, uphill into the wind, with a fade that lands the ball softly on the green. I’ve watched you do it again and again, and you make it look easy. Your swing never changes. That’s real talent. It’s stuff you can’t teach. The chipping and the putting—a seventy-year-old man can learn that. You can learn it. We could try to raise some money for another tour. Maybe get you a coach and keep going. I’d be up for it.”
“I think I’d rather be a coach, you know? Help some other kid chase his dream. But we’ll see.”
I didn’t press him. He got up to flip the steaks. “What was the best thing when you look back?” he asked me.
“The whole deal has been cool,” I said.
“No, I don’t mean here. I mean when you look back over your whole life.”
I didn’t have to think about my answer. “Babies,” I said. “Without a doubt. Having babies and little children around. You don’t want to miss out on that.”
“Babies are expensive,” he said.
“No they’re not. Don’t be afraid of that. Have as many babi
es as you can. Babies press you right up against the miracle of this world. You look in their eyes and you see—everything that is possible.”
“That’s cool,” he said.
“Let me do the math,” I said. “If you get married to Jenna tomorrow and have a baby in nine months, in twenty-one years, after he or she finishes college and wants to play on a pro tour, I’d be an eighty-three-year-old caddie. I guess there has never been an eighty-three-year-old caddie on any tour.”
“I think you should caddie for Barry. I hope he makes a run for it.”
“Yeah. We’ll see,” I said.
“Want to give Mom a call?”
“I do,” I said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind, Jack.”
“What do you mean?”
“About going on further. Maybe you’ll just wake up some morning after we’re finished here, and you’ll want to keep going.”
“Let’s see what happens from here to the end,” he said as he handed me his phone.
I held it to my ear. It was already ringing in Maine. “Do you remember when you were trying to persuade us to get you a cell phone?” I asked him. “Your mother got into bed one night and said to me so earnestly: ‘I think maybe it’s a good idea, Don. It would be nice to check up on him and know where he is all the time.’ I said to her, ‘Colleen, he could tell you he’s in church when you call him. I mean every time you call him.’ ‘Oh, right,’ she said.”
For some reason I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I went back outside hoping to see the stars again, but they were gone. And the highway traffic was wound back up to full volume. Be grateful, I said to myself as I rolled a cigarette. Remember? Gratitude. You’ve had this time with Jack. You don’t have to ask for more.
FEBRUARY 9, 2012
The hallway outside our door measures 113 yards long, which is the exact length across the 13th green at the Old Course at its widest point. I’d taken this as a good sign when I paced it off our second night in Texas. I was looking for signs then that Jack and I were on the right track coming here together. The Katrina kids in the hotel use the hallway as their playground, but late at night after their mothers have rounded them up for bed, Jack and I take over for our heroic putting battles, and we are always reminded that this is how golf began for us, putting across the floor of the family room when he was eight years old. As the years go on, I may forget the courses we played here in Texas, but not the hallway where we talked strategy and rolled the longest putts in the world.
But out there in the middle of the night, alone, I was suddenly traveling across time, back to the room off another hallway where I had lived alone for years before I met Jack’s mother, trying to teach myself to write. As I pictured that room and my black Royal typewriter on the table by the window, it suddenly struck me for the first time in my life that I will probably live alone again in a small room as my time is running to a close. Because I am ten years older than Colleen, there is a very good chance that at the end of my life she will still be part of the wide world where people chase after dreams, and escape hurricanes, and are much too busy to wonder what their lives will be like at the end, while I am already there, knowing what it is like. If that’s the way it turns out, I hope I’m still trying to learn to write in my little room. And though I don’t know where that little room will be, if someone can smuggle in a putter and one golf ball, I know that each time I step out into the hallway, I will be stepping out into the long hallway in Houston, Texas, looking for Jack, and remembering this place and the time we had here.
I was surprised when I went back in the room and found Jack awake. “It’s your back, isn’t it?” I said.
“It’s keeping me awake,” he said.
Too much practice, I thought. I’ve never been a great believer in hitting a million balls on the practice range, where anybody can look like Jack Nicklaus. I got him two aspirin. It was just after three in the morning. “Try to get some sleep,” I told him.
“I’ve been trying,” he said. “Why are you awake?”
“I was worried about the extra putter in your bag.”
“I would have remembered.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
When he got back into bed, I asked him if I’d ever told him my theory about life.
“Which one?” he said.
“Funny,” I said. “No, this is important. When I was about your age and I was finally beginning to figure out how the world worked, I realized what a man needed to be content in this world. Whenever I’d drive by these tar-paper shacks in Maine, you know, the desperately poor people who somehow survive, I would remind myself that all a man needed in that shack was some work to occupy his mind and a darling girl who desired him more than her next breath. If he had that, he had enough.”
“What about his health?” Jack said.
“Yeah, okay, three things then,” I said.
I didn’t say the next thing that was on my mind—how I probably wasn’t going to get all three in my little room at the end.
———
We were in trouble in the first round of the Cypresswood Open today before we even reached the 1st tee. I watched Jack laboring through his swings on the practice range. His back was too sore for him to make his turn. All his shots were bleeding to the right.
It got worse out on the course. I honestly don’t know how he made a single par, but we didn’t say anything about his back until we walked off the 16th green. “I’m sorry,” I said to him.
“No excuses,” he said. “People play this game in pain all the time. I haven’t executed a single shot today.”
So there we were with two holes left to play and knowing that we had to birdie both of them to make the damned cut.
We were paired with Gabe from Iowa again today, and he came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder while Jack walked onto the 17th-tee par-5. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he said. “He’ll make it.”
And somehow he did. A birdie on 17, and then another birdie on 18. Not the prettiest birdies you’ll ever see, but good enough to make the cut and live to fight our way back tomorrow.
FEBRUARY 10, 2012
After a year of almost no rain in this part of Texas, the long drought came to an end at just the wrong time for us and washed out the second round at Cypresswood. Jack and I showed up for our 8:00 a.m. tee time only to be sent home an hour later with no hope of finishing the tournament. The bright side of this was that Jack had the day off to rest his back. But I needed a long walk, and I was pretty sure that I knew the one person in Texas who would play eighteen holes in the rain with me.
Barry was just one of a number of players whose chance to finish the tournament in the money had been washed away. But he was in good spirits, even though his $500 entry fee had turned out to be a very expensive round of golf. “Five hundred dollars for eighteen holes,” he said. “Just like Pebble Beach, I guess.” He had been a tour player long enough, selling his old equipment on eBay for gas money to drive to the next tournament and doing whatever was required of him to keep going a little further, to take all setbacks in stride. “Ah, you get used to it,” he said. “But it’s a struggle.”
I joked with him that if he’d been a struggling writer instead of a struggling golfer, all he would need was some paper and a pen.
Our shoes and pants were spattered with mud, there wasn’t another soul out on the course (just my kind of golf), and as soon as Barry walloped his first tee shot way the hell out there, we started talking about Jack. “He’s told me that you’re a dreamer and he’s a realist,” Barry said.
I caught the trace of irony in his voice when he said this, and then the look in his eyes told me that there was something more he wanted to tell me. And he was willing to tell me, but he wasn’t so sure that I was willing to listen. I jumped in rather desperately and said, “You know if Jack decides he wants to go further after this tour, I’ll work seven nights a week stocking shelves at Walmart for the money if I have to.”
“I’m sure you would,
” Barry said. Then he patiently laid it out for me while we walked side by side up the fairway. Jack could play on these tours for another year or two, working harder on his game than he ever had before, and with his natural ability he might make it through Q school. “But I don’t think that’s what Jack wants,” he said. “I think maybe you want that more than he does, Don. And I’m not blaming you. What Jack wants is to love his girl and hold down an honest job. That’s his dream now. It’s not a bad dream. Every day I think that should be my dream. I shot five over par the other day at Cypresswood, and then I’m in my car asking myself why I ever believed that I could make it. What kind of fool am I? This game breaks you in pieces, Don.”
“You’re not a fool,” I said. “It goes with the territory for dreamers. Most of the time you don’t feel real. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years, every day, seven days a week, and I’ve only had maybe twenty days when I’ve ever felt real.”
“Exactly,” Barry said. “You see what I’m saying then about Jack? Maybe he saw that, and he wants something different.”
“I see,” I told him. And I really meant it.
We played our way around, talking about Ireland and how I was going to try to raise the money for him to make his run for the European Tour. I told him that all winter in Texas, I had been trying to come up with a metaphor to explain the mental torture of golf. “Tell me what you think of this,” I said. “Let’s say you rode your bicycle every morning to the little corner store for a newspaper and then you rode back home. And every single day you knew with absolute certainty that somewhere on that little trip you were going to be thrown over the handlebars. Without exception. That’s golf.”
He laughed. “Yeah, pretty good, Don,” he said.
I had to break both of Barry’s arms to let me fill his car with gas on the drive back to the hotel. “You can get to the next two events on me,” I told him.
Walking with Jack Page 30