An Open Case of Death

by James Y. Bartlett

  Change is what life throws at us, I thought to myself. Happens to everyone. Might as well pick yourself up and figure out what to do next, because sitting around and moping sure as hell ain’t gonna get you anywhere.

  So I finished my coffee while the bocce game came to an exciting conclusion. (The last ball of the blue team knocked into the second-closest red ball and then ricocheted into the closest red ball, knocking it away and giving the walk-off blue win to Guido and Enrico. They cheered; their opponents cursed.) I mentally composed a fascinating lede for a nonexistent story on the bocce match for a nonexistent job on some nonexistent newspaper, then I got up, broomed the sugar off my sweatshirt, tossed my trash in the bin and walked home.

  I spent the rest of the day, and the one after that, and those that followed for most of the next month, making calls and sending emails to all of the people I knew in the golf publications business. Told them all I had been laid off and was open for any freelance assignments. Everyone I spoke with was sympathetic—it’s not like this kind of thing wasn’t happening on an almost daily basis, all around the country—but the amount of new work I generated was pretty depressing. I told myself it was autumn, the golf season was mostly over, there were no major tournaments on the horizon, everyone was into football and looking forward to the start of hockey and basketball seasons. Mary Jane kept telling me not to panic, that the universe would soon intervene. I managed to resist quipping in return that maybe what the universe had in mind was a close personal meeting with a moving city bus just outside the marked crosswalk. Then I made a mental note to update my life insurance policy to make sure Victoria was listed as a beneficiary.

  It was close to Thanksgiving when the universe finally piped up. I threw myself into working on the three or four freelance pieces I managed to pick up: a round-up of the best public courses one could play in Las Vegas; a quick telephone interview and 500-word piece on Freddy Couples, the ageless wonder; and 50-word captions on five new golf shoe models to be unveiled at January’s PGA Show in Orlando. When the checks for all this fine work finally rolled in, six weeks later, I would be about $400 on my way to earning my first million. Which I thought was such a funny idea that I actually spent a couple of hours with a calculator and my bad math skills trying to figure out how long it would actually take me to earn a million bucks at this rate. The answer made me long for another long and deep meditation session with Mr. Jack Daniels, Esq. Except I couldn’t afford it.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  “Mister Hacker?” said a cheerful female voice, “Please hold for Mister Strauss.”

  She clicked me onto hold before I could ask “Who?” But then Strauss himself came on the line.

  “Hacker? Jake Strauss here. How are you?” He spoke rapidly, in staccato, one sentence following the next as if they were Siamese words, connected at the breastbone. That rapid-fire delivery was one of the hallmarks of Jacob Strauss, executive director of the U.S. Golf Association. He had been running the USGA for about five years now.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Strauss,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I’m calling because I might be able to do something for you,” he said. “A little birdie told me that you’ve been laid off by the Journal.”

  “Yes,” I said noncommittally. “Couple of weeks ago.”

  “Looking for a job?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Like what?”

  “Like working for the USGA,” he said. “For me, actually.”

  “Doing what, exactly?” I asked. “I’m a newspaper reporter. Never looked good in a blue blazer.”

  He laughed. Two short connected bursts. HaHa.

  “And you’re a wise-ass,” he said. “They told me.”

  “Who is ‘they?’”

  “Never mind that,” he said. “Can you meet me in New York for lunch. Say, next Tuesday? I think we should talk.”

  I didn’t say anything. To be perfectly honest, I was thinking that my bank account might not have enough lying around to afford a train ticket down to the Big Apple. He took my silence as a sign I was thinking hard about his offer.

  “Look,” he said, “Come have lunch, listen to my offer. If you decide not to take it, no hard feelings at all.”

  “If there were hard feelings, does that mean you’d dick around with my official USGA handicap?” I said.

  I got two more short bursts of laughter.

  “I’ll have my girl call you and make the arrangements,” he said. “Tell her if you want to fly down on the shuttle, or take the Acela. I’ve always preferred the train, but it’s your choice.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you next week.”

  “Beautiful,” he said and hung up.

  A few days later, I made my way over to South Station and climbed aboard the south-bound Acela. It was a chilly November day, gray-black clouds blocking out the sun and a frigid northerly wind slicing down from Quebec. If it wasn’t winter, it was surely the announcement that winter was on the way and right around the corner.

  I made my way to a comfortable leather seat in the so-called quiet car—where one is not supposed to talk except in subdued whispers. Of course, no one from New York has ever spoken in a subdued whisper in their entire life, so the car is usually as noisy as any other. I had bought a New York Times so I could catch up on the political hysteria of the day and then tackle the crossword puzzle. At least it was a weekday, which gave me a fighting chance.

  But as the “high-speed” train made its pokey way down the Eastern seaboard, stopping in the gray and grim concrete station at Providence before angling down through Connecticut, I put the paper down after skimming the front page, and began to think about what I knew about Jacob Strauss, executive director of the blue-blood institution that ruled over the game of golf on those portions of the globe that had not been colonized by the Royal & Ancient in St. Andrews.

  Strauss’ appointment as executive director had been somewhat controversial, but only partially because he broke the Jewish ceiling at the USGA: he was the first executive director who was a practicing member of the Hebrew faith. And that was newsworthy only because the USGA has since its founding been one of the last remaining bastions of WASPishness in the country. Only in the last twenty years has the USGA ventured a hesitant toe into the cold waters of diversity, naming Judy Bell and one other woman as President of the organization. But even the women had both been as WASPy as Theodore Havemeyer (1894-96) and the sixty-something presidents who had followed. The position of executive director, basically the chief operating officer, had also been reserved for rich, white, Protestant country club men until Jake Strauss had been appointed.

  But Strauss had been anything but a bomb-thrower for social justice during his term at the USGA. And as a retired director for one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, no one had ever expected he would be. Instead, he was genial, competent, well-liked by most, raised a ton of money for the organization, and showed up at all the various championships run by the USGA, from the US Open down to the Girls’ Junior, to hand out the trophy to the winning golfer. He had been the ultimate no muss-no fuss kind of executive director.

  He had joined with other golf industry officials to fight a rear-guard action against the general drift away from golf participation in the country, a drift that the banking crisis and economic malaise that followed had not helped. Just a few decades ago, it seemed like golf would overtake football as the country’s favorite sport, but that was proved to be a myth. The truth is there have always been around 20 million golfers in the USA. In some decades that number rose a bit; in others it declined. And of that 20 million, perhaps half were frequent or avid players of the game—most people played once, twice or three times a year and that was that.

  The USGA, of course, was an organization that catered to the top one percent. Those who belonged to private clubs. Who played almost every weekend. Who jealously obtained and guarded their official handicaps. Mos
tly male. Mostly white. Mostly rich. And despite the pretty pictures in the advertising spots the USGA produced to show during its major championships during the year, ads which showed happy and diverse crowds of the young, the female, and persons of color all golfing happily together in the pleasant afternoon sun, most of the old white males who ran and who controlled the USGA were quite happy with the way things were.

  And why not? The USGA had tons of money, and as long as the rich white segment of the population continued to exist, it likely would always have tons of money. There might be lean decades until a new Tiger or a new Nicklaus came along to capture the public’s fancy and generate the sale of more tee times; but the game would endure as it always had. Sometimes money speaks loudly and with great authority, and sometimes it just keeps its mouth shut, compounds its interest quarterly and just grows and grows and grows. The USGA belonged to the latter group.

  The train let me off in Penn Station, which in its current iteration is easily the most dreary and uninspiring train station in the free world, and I decided to stretch my legs and walk the ten blocks north up Sixth Avenue. Even on this cloudy and chilly day, the streets were full of people buzzing about as if all the Starbucks in town (at least one per half block as far as I could tell) were adding a nice rounded teaspoon of cocaine to each coffee sold. I love New York, really I do, but it’s a city that takes some getting used to. Most of the people one encounters in the city are completely encapsulated in their own little world: they live in New York; New York is the most important place in the world; therefore whatever each resident there is engaged in is the most important thing in the world. And if some poor unemployed schlub from Beantown happens to get in their way…well, there’s a look for that. And I got a couple thousand of those looks before I reached West 44th Street and turned right towards Fifth Avenue.

  The Harvard Club of New York City had been built out of a row of horse stables in the 1890s, turned into an elegant red brick building whose entrance was designed—by the high-powered architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White—to look just like the gateway entrance to Harvard Square. It’s just down the street from the nautically inspired façade of the New York Yacht Club, the famed Algonquin Hotel of the ‘Round Table’ fame and within a seven-iron shot of the New York alumni clubs of most of the rest of the Ivies.

  I walked into the entrance beneath the crimson “Ve-Ri-Tas” banner and was shown up a flight of stairs into the impressive Harvard Hall. Old Charlie McKim outdid himself with this room: 45-foot ceilings, dark paneling and marble wainscoting, two humongous fireplaces and elaborately framed portraits of impressive aristocrats, er, Harvard grads hanging everywhere. I felt like I should either be carrying my squash racquet or looking for an oar and a polished shell, or memorizing the lyrics of the Cambridge version of the Whiffenpoof song. Instead, I parked my non-Ivy butt in one of the butter-soft crimson leather chairs and waited, soaking in the essence of upper-crust WASPishness. I sat there and watched people coming and going, greeting one another and heading off to lunch and tried to imagine the size of their personal investment accounts. It was a fun game, and I managed to mostly not spend the time hating everyone I looked at.

  It wasn’t long before Jacob Strauss came strolling in, looking like he owned the place. Maybe he did. He was in his late 60s, long graying hair framing his well-tanned face. He had prominent brows, a large but not stereotypical Jewish nose, and was folding a pair of reading glasses to tuck away in his blue blazer. He wore gray wool slacks, black slip-ons and the requisite maroon and white striped tie. There was a woman with him, middle-aged, well-dressed and wealthy looking, like everyone else. Strauss leaned close to her and said something. She nodded, smiled at him and headed back towards the lobby stairs. He saw me as I rose from my chair and, with a wide and welcoming smile, came striding across the oriental carpet with his hand extended.

  “Hacker, my man,” he said. “Glad to see you. Have a good trip down?”

  “The train didn’t hit any cows,” I said, “So I guess it was a success.”

  HaHa. The brevity of his laughter burst told me I’d have to work harder. Strauss escorted me into the main dining room, another three-story high-ceilinged room dark with carved paneling and bright with chandeliers. There were rows of round tables for six and eight in the center of the room and a smattering of booths and tables for two set against the far wall. All of the tables were decked in spotless white linen tablecloths, and many of them had pools of light from small brass lamps set in the center of the tables.

  Strauss decided we should sit in one of the smaller tables, and led me over to one of the booths along the far wall. The woodwork was elaborately carved at the edges and along the top, and once inside, it felt like we were in our own private room, cut off from the hubbub of all the deal making going on outside.

  “Ever eaten here?” he asked me as we settled in. I shook my head. “Pretty good food,” he said, handing me the leather-bound menu. “Don’t miss the popovers. They’re famous for the popovers.”

  A waiter sidled up silently and wondered if we’d care to have anything to drink. Strauss ordered a wine spritzer while I asked for some iced tea. For some reason, I wanted to keep all my wits about me, and the two fingers of good bourbon that I really wanted seemed like a bad idea.

  “You probably want to know why I asked you down here,” Strauss said. “But it’s the tradition in the Harvard Club that we don’t discuss business over a meal. So we’ll wait until the coffee.”

  I laughed. “I’m nothing if not a traditionalist,” I said.

  He ordered the garlic shrimp over rice and I went for the baked scrod. It came with three small boiled potatoes and some easily ignored vegetables. Our silent waiter did bring us a basket of freshly baked popovers, and I ate two of them. Strauss was correct: they were excellent. We chatted about golf in general, the Tour in particular, and a few people we knew in common in the business until our lunch was done. Silent Sam cleared away the plates and brought us each a demitasse of fine Harvard coffee. Pinkies up, boys.

  I dabbed my lips with my crimson napkin and sat back. “Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m worried about the Open,” Strauss said, leveling his gray eyes at me across the booth, his face rearranged into that investment banker’s look: serious, stern and no-nonsense.

  “Really?” I said. “The U.S. Open that’s in the middle of a billion-dollar contract with Fox Sports that has another ten years to run? Or the Open that sells out all its tickets in about an hour and a half? I have no idea how you manage to sleep at night.”

  HaHa. I was rewarded with one of his shotgun bursts. “No,” he said, “You’re right. We’re making tons of money from the Open. To be more specific, I’m worried about next year’s Open.”

  “Pebble Beach,” I said. “The greatest meeting place between heaven and earth as William Shakespeare once said.”

  He smiled, but kept his gunfire laugh to himself. “Actually, it was Robert Louis Stevenson, and he called it ‘the greatest meeting of land and sea.’”

  I laughed. “Actually, it was an Australian painter named Francis McComas who said it,” I said “And he was talking about Point Lobos and Big Sur. Don’t tell Jim Nantz. His head might explode.”

  Strauss waved his hand as if to brush away my finely spun cobwebs of irrelevancy.

  “So what are you worried about?” I asked. “The golf course hasn’t changed since the last Open. You guys ought to be able to shrink the fairways, grow the rough ankle-high and speed up the greens so no one can make a birdie. You’ve done it before. And I don’t think the Lodge is going anywhere.”

  Strauss twitched, sitting across from me in the private little booth. It was just a small twitch, mostly in the shoulders, but I saw it.

  “Ah,” I said. “It is the Lodge. Something’s up? They can’t be going out of business. How can you charge $550 for a round of golf and go broke?”

  “The Pebble Beach Company is not going
broke,” Strauss said, frowning at the very thought. “But there have been some recent changes there that have been of concern. You might have heard that J.J. Udall died a few weeks ago.”

  “He was one of the Four Amigos, right?” I said. “Are they all still the principal owners of that joint?”

  “J.J. was one of the four controlling directors in the company, yes,” Strauss said. He apparently didn’t like the Four Amigos terminology. Investment bankers and USGA executive directors can be such humorless snobs.

  But it had been about twenty years since the Four Amigos, er, controlling directors, had purchased the Pebble Beach Company, which owned the famous Lodge at Pebble Beach, the famed Pebble Beach Golf Links, the big modern convention hotel at Spanish Bay, the so-so golf course there, and the course at Spyglass Hill, along with assorted other parcels of acreage dotted here and there on the Monterey Peninsula, which was one of the most pricey pieces of real estate anywhere on the California coastline. Where pricey real estate was invented.

  The golf course at Pebble, which was celebrating its 100th anniversary, was world famous. Partly because the PGA Tour had played there every year since 1947, first in the Bing Crosby Clambake which later morphed into the AT&T National Pro-Am. Partly because the U.S. Golf Association had staged several of its national championships there, beginning with the 1929 U.S. Amateur, famously lost by the great Bobby Jones. (Jones won the medal qualifying, as expected, then lost most unexpectedly in the first round of match play to a young kid named Johnny Goodman.) And now the U.S. Open was scheduled to return to Carmel-by-the-Sea for another go-round.

  But twenty-some years ago, there had been concerns that Pebble Beach was in financial stress. That’s when the Four Amigos, all very rich men with local Northern California ties, had stepped in to buy the place. There had been a series of corporate owners before them, both foreign and domestic, all of whom seemed more interested in trying to pull as much cash out of the place as possible than in running a good business. So the Amigos bought the place at a near-bankruptcy bargain, raised a bunch of cash and began fixing the place up, trying to keep its reality in line with its reputation.