by Otto Penzler
He hit a dozen balls with Big Bertha, then returned her to the bag and got out his spoon. He liked the 3-wood, liked the balance of it, and he had to remind himself to stop after a dozen balls or he might have run all the way through the bag with that club. It was, he’d found, a very satisfying club to hit.
Which was by no means the case with the 2-iron. It wasn’t quite as difficult as the longest iron in his bag—there was a joke he’d heard, the punch line of which explained that not even God could hit the 1-iron—but it was difficult enough, and today his dozen attempts with the club yielded his usual share of hooks and slices and topped rollers. But among them he hit the ball solidly twice, resulting in shots that leaped from the tee, scoring high for distance and accuracy.
And therein lay the joy of the sport. One good shot invariably erased the memory of all the bad shots that preceded it, and even took the sting out of the bad shots yet to come.
Today was an even-irons day, so in turn he hit the 4-iron, the 6-iron, and the 8-iron. When he finished with the niblick (he liked the old names, called the 2-wood a brassie and the 3-wood a spoon, called the 5-iron a mashie, the 8 a niblick), he had four balls left of the seventy-five he’d started with. That suggested that he’d miscounted, which was certainly possible, but it was just as likely that they’d given him seventy-six instead of seventy-five, since they gave you what the bucket held instead of delegating some minion to count them. He hit the four balls with his wedge, not the most exciting club to hit off a practice tee, but you had to play the whole game, and the short game was vital. (He had a sand wedge in his bag, but until they added a sandpit to the tee, there was no way he could practice with it. So be it, he’d decided; life was compromise.)
He left the tee and went to the putting green, where he put in his usual half hour. His putter was an antique, an old wooden-shafted affair with some real collector value, his choice on even-iron Fridays. It seemed to him that his stroke was firmer and more accurate with the putter from his matched set, his odd-iron choice, but he just liked the feel of the old club, and something in him responded to the notion of using a putter that could have been used a century ago at St. Andrews. He didn’t think it had, but it could have been, and that seemed to mean something to him.
His putting was erratic—it generally was—but he sank a couple of long ones and ended the half hour with a seven-footer that lipped the cup, poised on the brink, and at last had the decency to drop. Perfect! He went to the desk for his second bucket of balls and returned to the tee and his Big Bertha.
He’d worked his way down to the 6-iron when a voice said, “By God, you’re good. Kramer, I had no idea.”
He turned and recognized Bellerman. A coworker at Taggart & Leeds, until some competing firm had made him a better offer. But now, it turned out, Bellerman was retired himself, and improving the idle hour at the driving range.
“And you’re serious,” Bellerman went on. “I’ve been watching you. Most guys come out here and all they do is practice with the driver. Which they then get to use one time only on the long holes and not at all on the par 3s. But you work your way through the bag, don’t you?”
Kramer found himself explaining about even- and odd-iron days.
“Remarkable. And you hit your share of good shots, I have to say that. Get some good distance with the long clubs, too. What’s your handicap?”
“I don’t have one.”
Bellerman’s eyes widened. “Jesus, you’re a scratch golfer? Now I’m more impressed than ever.”
“No,” Kramer said. “I’m sure I would have a handicap, but I don’t know what it would be. See, I don’t actually play.”
“What do you mean you don’t play?”
“I just come here,” Kramer said. “Once a week.”
“Even-numbered irons one week, odd ones the next.”
“That’s right.”
“Every Friday.”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding me,” Bellerman said. “Right?”
“No, I—”
“You practice more diligently than anybody I’ve ever seen. You even hit the fucking 1-iron every other Friday, and that’s more than God does. You work on your short game, you use the wedge off the tee, and for what? So that you won’t lose your edge for the following Friday? Kramer, when was the last time you actually got out on a course and played a real round of golf?”
“You have to understand my routine,” Kramer said. “Golf is just one of my interests. Mondays I go to the gym and put in an hour on the treadmill. Tuesdays I go to the batting cage and work my way up to fastballs. Wednesdays…” He made his way through his week, trying not to be thrown off stride by the expression of incredulity on Bellerman’s face.
“That’s quite a system,” Bellerman said. “And it sounds fine for the first four days, but golf… Man, you’re practicing when you could be playing! Golf’s an amazing game, Kramer, and there’s more to it than swinging the club. You’re out in the fresh air—”
“The air’s good here.”
“—feeling the sun on your skin and the wind in your hair. You’re on a golf course, the kind of place that gives you an idea of what God would have done if he’d had the money. And every shot presents you with a different kind of challenge. You’re not just trying to hit the ball straight and far. You’re dealing with obstacles, you’re pitting your ability against a particular aspect of terrain and course conditions. I asked you something earlier, and you never answered. When’s the last time you played a round?”
“Well, as a matter of fact—”
“You never did, did you?”
“No, but—”
“Tomorrow morning,” Bellerman said, “you’ll be my guest, at my club on the Island. I’ve got tee time booked at 7:35. I’ll pick you up at six. That’ll give us plenty of time.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re retired, for chrissake. And tomorrow’s Saturday. It won’t keep you from your weekday schedule. You really can’t? All right, then, a week from tomorrow. Six o’clock sharp.”
Kramer spent the week trying not to think about it and then, when that didn’t work, trying to think of a way out. He didn’t hear from Bellerman and found himself hoping the man would have forgotten the whole thing.
His routine worked, and he saw no reason to depart from it. Maybe he wasn’t playing “real” golf, maybe he was missing something by not getting out on an actual golf course, but he got more than enough pleasure out of the game the way he played it. There were no water hazards, there were no balls lost in deep rough, and there was no score to keep. He got the exercise—he took more swings at the driving range than anyone would take in eighteen holes on a golf course—and he got the occasional satisfaction of a perfect shot, without the crushing dismay that could attend a horrible shot.
Maybe Bellerman would realize that the last thing he wanted to do was waste a morning playing with Kramer.
And yet, when Kramer was back at the range that Friday, he felt vaguely sorry (if more than slightly relieved) that he hadn’t heard from the man. He knew how much he’d improved in recent months, hitting every club reasonably well (including, this particular day, the notorious 1-iron), and, of course, it would be different on a golf course, but how different could it be? You had the same clubs to swing, and you tried to make the ball go where you wanted it.
And just suppose he turned out to be good at it. Suppose he was good enough to give Bellerman a game. Suppose, by God, he could beat the man.
Sort of a shame he wasn’t going to get the chance…
“Good shot,” said a familiar voice. “Hit a few like that tomorrow and you’ll do just fine. Don’t forget, I’m coming for you at six. So remember to take your clubs home when you’re done here today. And make sure you’ve got enough golf balls. Kramer? I’ll bet you don’t have any golf balls, do you? Ha! Well, buy a dozen. They’re accommodating at my club, but they won’t hand you a bucketful.”
On the way there, Bellerman to
ld him he’d read about Japanese golfers who spent all their time on driving ranges and putting greens. “Practicing for a day that never comes,” he said. “It’s the cost of land there. It’s scarce, so there aren’t many golf courses, and club dues and greens fees are prohibitive unless you’re in top management. Actually, the driving-range golfers do get to play when they’re on vacation. They’ll go to an all-inclusive resort in Hawaii or the Caribbean and play thirty-six holes a day for a solid week, then go home and spend the rest of the year in a cage, hitting balls off a tee. Well, today’s your vacation, Kramer, and you don’t have to cross an ocean. All you have to do is tee up and hit the ball.”
It was a nightmare.
And it began on the very first tee. Bellerman went first, hitting a shot that wouldn’t get him in trouble, maybe 150 yards down the fairway with a little fade at the end that took some of the distance off it.
Then it was Kramer’s turn, and he placed a brand-new Titleist on a brand-new yellow tee and drew his Big Bertha from his bag. He settled himself, rocking to get his cleated feet properly planted, and addressed the ball, telling himself not to kill it, just to meet it solidly. But he must have been too eager to see where the ball went, because he looked up prematurely, topping the ball. That happened occasionally at Chelsea Piers, and the result was generally a grounder. This time, however, he really topped the thing, and it caromed up into the air like a Baltimore chop in baseball, coming to earth perhaps a hundred feet away, right where a shortstop would have had an effortless time gathering it in.
Bellerman didn’t laugh. And that was worse, somehow, than if he had.
By the third hole, Kramer was just waiting for it to be over. He’d taken an 8 on the first hole and a 9 on the second, and at this rate he seemed likely to wind up with a score somewhere north of 150 for the eighteen holes Bellerman intended for them to play. That meant, he calculated, around 130 strokes to go, 130 more swings of one club or another. He could just go through it, a stroke at a time, and then it would be over, and he would never have to go through anything like this again.
“Good shot!” Bellerman said when Kramer’s fourth shot on 3, with his trusty niblick, actually hit the green and stayed there. “That’s the thing about this game, Kramer. I can four-putt a green, then shank my drive and put my second shot in a bunker, but one good shot and everything feels right. Isn’t it a good feeling?”
It was, sort of, but he knew it wouldn’t last, and it had begun to fade by the time he reached the green, putter in hand. He was some thirty feet from the cup, and his first putt died halfway there, and he overcompensated with his second, and, well, never mind. He took a 10 on the hole.
“Still,” Bellerman said as they approached the next tee, “that was a hell of an approach shot. That was a 9-iron, right?”
“An 8.”
“Oh? I’d probably have used a 9. Still, it worked out for you, didn’t it?”
By the end of the seventh hole, he’d lost four of his new golf balls. Two were in the water on 6, out of anybody’s reach, and one was in the woods on 5, where it would take sharper eyes than his or Bellerman’s to spot it. And another was somewhere in the rough on 7; he saw it drop, saw it land, walked right to the goddamn thing, and couldn’t find it. It was as if the earth had swallowed it, and he only wished it would do the same for him.
On the eighth hole, the head of his Big Bertha driver dug a trench in the earth behind the teed-up golf ball, and the ball itself tumbled off the tee and managed to roll three feet before coming to rest. “I don’t think we’ll count that one,” Bellerman was saying, but he stopped when Kramer lost it and, enraged, swung the club at a convenient tree. That was the end of the club, if not quite the end of the tree, and Kramer stood there looking at the ruined driver, embarrassed not only by what he’d done but by the unseemly feeling of satisfaction that stirred him.
“Probably not a bad idea to use the 2-wood off the tee,” Bellerman said gently. “You gain in accuracy what you sacrifice in distance. Hey, you’re not doing so bad, Kramer. This is real-world golf. Nobody said it was going to be easy.”
Nor did it get easier. The good shots, fewer and further between as the day wore on, were no longer even momentarily satisfying; Kramer was all too aware that they were just a brief interruption to the parade of bad shots. He used his brassie off the tee, and every time he drew it from the bag it was a silent rebuke for what he’d done to his driver. At least he didn’t get mad at his brassie. He hit the ball—never terribly well—and returned it to his bag, and went off to look for the ball, and, if he found it, hit it again with something else.
On the sixteenth hole, a 140-yard par 3 on which he’d miraculously hit the well-protected green with his tee shot, his putter betrayed him. He’d brought both putters, of course, had in fact brought every club he owned, and he was using the antique wooden-shafted club, the one that might have been used at St. Andrews.
He stood over the ball. The cup was eight feet away, and if he could sink this putt, he’d have a birdie. A birdie! He’d been writing down 7s and 8s and 9s, he’d carded a hideous 14 on one endless hole, but if he could actually sink this putt—
It took him six putts to get the ball in the hole.
He couldn’t believe what was happening. In his hands, the trusty putter turned into a length of rope, a strand of limp spaghetti, a snake. He poked the ball past the cup, wide of the cup, short of the cup, every-damn-where but into the cup. Bellerman tried to concede the fifth putt—“Close enough, man. Pick it up”—but Kramer stubbornly putted again, and missed again, and something snapped.
And not just within him. The graceful wooden shaft of the old putter snapped when he broke it over his knee.
The last two holes were relatively uneventful. None of his shots were good, but neither were they disastrous. He drove with his brassie, and each time kept the ball on the fairway. He took four putts on 17 and three on 18, using the putter that matched his other irons. He didn’t utter a word during the last two holes, just playing doggedly, and Bellerman didn’t say anything, either.
They didn’t talk much on the way back to the city, either. Bellerman tried a couple of times, but gave it up when Kramer failed to respond. Kramer closed his eyes, replaying a hole in his mind, and the next thing he knew they had reached his house. He got his clubs from the trunk.
“I know it was a rough day for you,” Bellerman said. “What can I say? Welcome to the real world, Kramer. You can get that putter repaired, you know.”
Kramer didn’t say anything.
“There are craftsmen who fit old clubs with new wooden shafts. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. Look, you played real golf today. This was the genuine article. Next time it’ll come a lot easier.”
Next time?
“And before you know it, you’ll be hooked. You’ll see.” A hand on Kramer’s shoulder. “I’ll let you be, buddy. Grab a shower, get yourself some rest. We’ll do this again.”
That was Saturday.
Sunday he stayed in and watched sports on TV. There was golf on one channel, tennis on another. Ordinarily, he much preferred watching golf, but this day, understandably enough, it got on his nerves. He kept switching back and forth between the two channels and was grateful when they were both done and he could watch 60 Minutes instead.
Monday he went to the gym, warmed up on the elliptical trainer, then put in his time on the treadmill. There were runners, some of them men as old as he, some of them older, who entered the New York Road Runners races in Central Park, trying to beat others in their age group, trying to improve their times from one race to the next, trying to up their mileage and complete a marathon. That was fine for them, and he could applaud their efforts, but no one would fault a man who ran just for exercise, no one would argue that he wasn’t doing it right if he never took it outside of the gym.
Tuesday he went to the batting cage and took his cuts. He hit some balls well and missed some of them entirely, but he wasn’t so invested in results a
s to lose his temper with himself or his equipment. He never had the impulse to slam his bat against an unyielding metal post or smash it over his knee. And he never for a moment saw his activity as a second-rate and laughable substitute for joining a team and playing baseball in the park.
Wednesday he went to the gun club, Thursday to the gym again, this time to lift weights. And Friday found him at the driving range at Chelsea Piers.
He hadn’t yet replaced his Big Bertha. It would be easy enough to do—one Big Bertha was essentially indistinguishable from the next—but he hadn’t yet had the heart for it. He hit his drives with his 2-wood, as he’d done on the course, hit a dozen balls with it, then continued to work his way through his bag of clubs and through two buckets of balls.
It wasn’t the same.
Memories of the previous Saturday kept getting in the way. “The wonderful thing about golf,” Bellerman had assured him, “is the way memory improves it. You remember the good shots and forget the bad. I suppose that’s one of the things that keeps us coming back.”
Wrong, dead wrong. He’d already forgotten the handful of good shots he’d managed to achieve, while the awful ones crowded his memory and got in the way of his practice today. He couldn’t take a club from his bag without recalling just how horribly he’d topped or sliced or shanked a shot with it. His mashie, which he’d hit solidly on 12, only to send the ball thirty yards past the damned green. His 3-iron, which he’d used from the rough, visualizing a perfect shot to the green between a pair of towering trees. And, of course, the ball had struck one tree dead center, rebounding so that it left him further from the hole than he’d started, but with the same shot through the trees. Second time around, he’d hit the other tree…