At the appropriate hour, Jake Strauss called for attention, gave a brief history of the book project—making sure to mention the early work done by Dick Steinmetz—and thanking me for my talent in creating this wonderful pictorial history of the courses of the U.S. Open. Everyone applauded.
I sat down behind the book table, pulled the top off a felt-tip pen and got ready to sign for the masses.
Naturally, nobody left the food table, nor got out of the free drink line. I had designated Victoria to be my in-line assistant, telling her to ask people to whom they wanted the book dedicated and to tell me when that person made it to the place in front of me. Instead, we stared at each other.
After about five minutes of waiting, I must have looked outwardly the way I was feeling inside. Which was something along the lines of I wish I could disappear.
Victoria looked at me. And sighed.
“This is totally bogus,” she whispered to me. Then she turned to look at the crowds standing around the other tables.
“Have you people forgotten that this is a book signing?” she called out, using her outside voice. She has a very loud outside voice. “Hacker can’t sign any books unless you buy one!”
The crowd turned to look at the little girl, as one. They fell silent. Someone giggled. But slowly, first one, then another, they began to come over to my table, pick up a book and hand it to me to be autographed. The bookstore people were standing by to record the sales. I was kept busy for the next hour or so: Victoria would chat with the people in line, tell me what to write in the flyleaf and then I signed my name. Sometimes, people I knew would stop and chat. It was nice. I felt like a writer.
Strauss had pulled up a chair nearby for Mary Jane, and she sat there, cradling her belly, sipping a glass of club soda, and smiling at me the whole time. People spoke to her as well, and she did a lot of smiling and nodding.
It was around nine o’clock when the room began to empty out. People were heading off to dinner. Sharky and Agatha were two of the last to go through the line. I tried to arrange for Sharky to be given a free book, but he insisted on paying for it like everyone else.
“If it’s bad, I want to be able to say it sucks,” he said, a smile playing around the corner of his mouth. “Can’t do that unless I pay for it.”
I gave up and signed his copy. Then I kissed Agatha and thanked her for coming out.
“Where shall we go eat?” I said. “The author is buying.”
Just then, an older woman standing over by the hors d’oeuvres began to wheeze and gack, her hand flying to her throat. Her face turned red and she was in obvious distress.
“Hacker,” Mary Jane said urgently, “She’s choking!”
I started to move towards her, but was bumped out of the way. Jake Strauss leaped across the room, grabbed the woman, spun her around and locked his hands tightly beneath her breasts.
“Exhale!” he said and then gave her a hard squeeze.
“Again!” Another squeeze. A piece of half-chewed something, about as big around as a half dollar, came catapulting out of her throat. It flew about ten feet through the air and landed with a plop on the floor.
Strauss helped the woman into a chair that someone brought over. She was still gasping and crying and breathing in and out and trying to say thank you…all at the same time. Strauss grabbed her wrist and felt for her pulse, counting silently to himself.
“Good strong pulse rate,” he announced, mostly to himself.
An employee of the book store came running over. “Do we need to call 9-1-1?” she asked anxiously.
“I don’t think so,” Strauss said. “Her pulse is strong, her breathing is unimpeded and her color is back to normal. I think she’s fine. But if you’d like to ride to the hospital and let them make sure …?” He left the question for the woman to answer.
She held up her hand. “No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “I’m very grateful to you, sir. That last bite just went down the wrong way.”
“Yes,” Strauss said. “A simple tracheal impediment. Usually pretty easy to dislodge, if you know what you’re doing.”
I stared at him, impressed.
“The doctor is in,” I said. “Twenty-five cents.”
He laugh-barked. HaHa. “Had the training,” he said. “Four years in the Navy as a medical corpsman. I could’ve done a tracheotomy if I’d had to. But I’m glad I didn’t.” He turned to the woman, “Are you sure you’re OK?” he asked.
“Very sure,” the woman said, nodding. “Thank you again.”
“Pretty good night, Hacker,” Strauss said as we were leaving the bookstore. “Sold about forty books and saved a life.”
Out on the sidewalk, Mary Jane announced that she and her daughter were heading back to the hotel.
“I’m beat,” she said, “And the little one here is sleepy. You guys go and have a good time. We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll get him home by midnight,” Sharky promised her.
We walked the five or six blocks over to the Hog’s Breath Inn, once owned by a famous actor. We waited for a table in the bar and finally were seated. Sharky ordered the sand dabs, Agatha had a salad and I went for the Australian lamb chops for no good reason other than that sounded good and I was in the mood to splurge.
“So, I’ve been nosing around a little to find out more about Huckleberry Hills,” Sharky announced after we’d eaten and were enjoying some coffee.
“Good,” I said. “I’ve been wondering what the story was with that project.”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” he said. “Everyone else in town thinks it’s as dead as Tiger’s A-game, but everyone connected with Pebble Beach seems to think it will someday—years down the road—get built. So I started thinking about why that is.”
“Why what is, hon?” Aggie asked.
“Why people like Jake Strauss and Harold Meyer want to believe that Huckleberry Hills is still a viable project,” he said. “There’s gotta be a reason for them to cling to it.”
“And what did you come up with?” I asked, knowing he’d come up with something.
He smiled that evil little Sharky smile at me. The one he keeps in reserve until he has something really juicy.
“You ever hear of an EB-5 visa?” he asked.
I looked at Agatha and she looked at me. We shook our heads simultaneously. “Nope,” we said in unison. And laughed.
“Not surprised,” Sharky said. “Not many people do, even immigration lawyers. But it’s a pretty cool thing.”
He told us how the EB-5 visa program worked. It had been set up by Congress to encourage foreign investments in the United States, especially investments in low income areas, like inner cities or rural wastelands.
“Basically, the deal is that if a foreign investor ponies up enough money for a new development project in the United States, and if that project generates jobs here, the investor gets fast-tracked to get a green card.”
I whistled softly. “Dang,” I said, “Those things are valuable. Everybody wants to get a green card. Everything free in America!”
“How much do they have to invest?” Agatha asked.
“Typically, at least one million dollars,” Sharky said. “But in certain cases, like for projects in low income areas, a half-million will do just fine. And here’s the kicker—the government usually doesn’t do much checking up on these projects. You set up a company, tell all your foreign friends from China and Indonesia or wherever that you’re accepting investments under the EB-5 program, they write you a check, you cash it and it’s all legal.”
“You don’t have to have an actual development going on?” I said.
“Only if your investors want to get their green cards,” he said. “But your US company can just say they’re going to invest in some buildings in East Central LA, or the Mission District in Frisco, or in uptown Harlem, and the government will fast-track the visa. You file some paperwork and then just start collecting checks.”
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br /> “Sounds like a program made for fraud,” I said.
“Yeah, pretty much,” Sharky said. “And the G-men have started to crack down a bit. I found some cases where indictments were filed here and there around the country, and some members of Congress have started complaining about it all. But no one knows how many of these little deals have been set up.”
I sat up, interested.
“And you think Huckleberry Hills might be an EB-5 visa fraud?” I said.
“It fits the profile, to a T,” he said, nodding. “Harold Meyer has the international connections. Hell, Jake Strauss does too, from his time at Baruch Brothers. They could be taking in millions from investors”— he made air quotes with his fingers—“help them obtain their green cards and just salting the cash away.”
He smiled at me.
“It’s a beautiful set up,” he said. “Almost free cash for as long as they want to collect it. They know that Huckleberry Hills will never get past the Coastal Commission. They don’t care, as long as they can keep selling points to foreigners. And they can keep selling points as long as they can get green cards through the program.”
“Wait a minute,” Agatha jumped in. “Aren’t both of those guys already as rich as fuck? Why would they do something like this sort of fraudulent deal? Just for the money? More money?”
Sharky and I looked at her. Then we both burst out laughing.
“Why does a cow eat grass?” I said, still chuckling as I paid the bill. “Ain’t because he likes the taste. Because that’s what cows do.”
I sat in the back seat as Sharky drove me back to Spanish Bay.
“How can we test our hypothesis?” I said, thinking out loud. “Knowing Strauss and Meyer, they’ve probably got this thing buttoned down tight. They probably only accept new investors that are known to one of them, or someone they know. It’d be too dangerous to accept money from anyone off the street.”
“Yeah, I thought the same thing,” Sharky said. “It’d be a great little sting, but I don’t know how we could pull it off.”
“Shit, I’ll bet Charley Sykes found out about it,” I said. “He tried to finagle his way into the deal. Thought it was his big score. That’s probably why he did a header off the cliff.”
“Quite likely,” Sharky said. “But we still don’t know who pushed him.”
“Strauss was worried about me mouthing off to Meyer,” I said. “He told me Harold could easily have me beaten up, or worse.”
“He does have a mysterious and slightly tawdry reputation,” Sharky said.
He pulled into the hotel drive and dropped me at the door.
“Thanks guys,” I said, getting out. “It was a great night. We sold some books, saved a life and came up with another harebrained theory that can’t be proved.”
“All in a day’s work,” Sharky said. He and Aggie were laughing as they waved and drove away.
The U.S. Open is different. You can try and step back from the hype, take in the view from thirty thousand feet and convince yourself that it’s just another golf tournament. Another weekend of four rounds, field of a hundred fifty good golfers, nice pot of money waiting at the end. Just another weekend on the links. Tee ‘em up boys, let ‘em fly and may the best man win.
You could try that, but it won’t work. The Open is a different animal altogether. It might be the history, or the tradition, or the artificial designation as one of “the majors.” All of those things are important, but I think it goes deeper. Or maybe more basic.
Professional golfers play the game for money. We who watch them tend to forget that. Those who play do not. The USGA puts about twelve and a half million on the table. The winner gets two and a quarter mil. Every player in the field mentally deposits that cash before he tees it up on Thursday. That’s why they’re there. That’s why they’ve constructed their lives around the game. All the practice, all the exercise, all the travel, all the swing coaches and mental gurus and physical therapists … it’s all because someone has put twelve million bucks on the table and invited them to go for it.
But there’s more. All who play also want to be remembered. Like we remember Old Tom Morris. (Actually, we should probably remember and revere Willie Park, Senior, who won the first British Open in 1860, beating Old Tom and a field of a couple dozen at Prestwick.) But professional golfers want their names to be recalled along with Braid and Taylor and Vardon, with Bob Jones and Sarazen and Hagen, with Hogan and Snead and Nelson, with Jack and Arnie and Gary, with Tom Watson and Johnny Miller, with Tiger.
Nobody remembers who won the Memphis Open of 1965 or the Greater Milwaukee Classic in 1987. But if you win the U.S. Open, or the Open Championship or the Masters or the PGA, your name gets etched on the trophy and in history forever. People remember the name. Win a few of them and you become an immortal. Immortal. Like everlasting life. Like Zeus and Hera and Odin and Thor and even Yahweh. Yeah, that would tend to get you out of bed in the morning and off to the range.
And that’s why the U.S. Open is different. Why the air is filled with electricity. Why the silence that descends upon a green rimmed by thousands of breathing souls becomes like that of the tomb, at least until the putt is struck. Why every shot, from the 250-yard approach to a two-foot knee-knocker, becomes so vitally important as to tear your guts out. It should be that way. It’s immortality on the line.
On Thursday afternoon, with half the field already done with the first round and in the clubhouse, I wandered out to the fourteenth green at Pebble, making my way slowly through the crowds, enjoying the electricity and the silences and the cheers as I went. Mary Jane and the Vickster were off to visit the Monterey Aquarium, where Sharky had a friend who promised to take them on a backstage tour to watch while some of the animals were fed.
The weather was what it always is on the Monterey Peninsula in mid-June: foggy, cloudy, cool and damp. Most of the players wore sweaters or windcheaters. The usual suspects from the morning draw had turned in good scores: DJ, Speith, Koepka were all three or four under par. This afternoon, Tiger and Phil and Bubba were trying to match that, with varying degrees of success. One of the Molinari brothers tore up the front nine in five under, but made a few mistakes on the back side and had fallen back to earth.
Out on fourteen, I admired the renovated green that had been installed for this tournament. The green had always been small, like many at Pebble Beach, and appropriately so for a par-five. But fourteen green had always been a tough one on which to find four good pin placements. The traditional Sunday pin goes on the left-side plateau, tucked behind the big deep front bunker. But finding three other places to put a pin was always tough, since not even the tortuous bastards from the USGA tournament staff could figure out a way to stick the hole on the side of the steep slope that ran down to the right.
So they had flattened out the green quite a bit, and now they had some good places to put the hole. Today it was back right, with the bunker over there coming into play. I watched a few groups play through, and nobody got their approach closer than about ten feet. Chalk one up for the course.
I wandered over behind the bunker on the right, beneath one of the gnarly-limbed oaks, and managed to wiggle my way down close to the ropes. With the pin cut on this side, I figured a few of the players would end up in the bunker and I looked forward to watching them struggle to make par.
Somebody next to me elbowed my in the ribs.
“Your name is Hacker, isn’t it?” he said.
I turned. The man was wearing a gray wind jacket, a floppy, wide-brimmed hat with straps that he had tied underneath his chin, and a huge pair of amber-colored aviator sunglasses that covered about half of his face.
“Last time I checked,” I said.
He smiled and lifted his huge glasses so I could see more of the face underneath. It was Jack Harwood. He winked at me.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. “I’m trying to go incognito.”
“Right,” I said. “Yo
ur secret is safe with me.”
He nodded, pleased. One of the golfers down the fairway hit his approach shot. I lost it in the cloudy sky overhead, but we all heard it zip into the green about twenty feet beyond the pin, and we saw it bounce once, stop and spin back to about fifteen feet. We all applauded.
Harwood leaned back. There was a small man standing next to him, bare-headed, engrossed in watching the golf.
“Hacker, this is Chin Wan Ho,” Harwood said. “Friend of mine from Taiwan. Chin…this is Hacker.”
I reached past Harwood and shook the man’s hand.
“Been out here long?” Harwood asked.
“Came out about a week ago,” I said. “Had a book signing on Tuesday night in town.”
“Oh, right,” Harwood said, nodding. “Dottie van Dyke told me about that. I would’ve come by, but Chin and I were talking about a movie he wants me to do for him. We lost track of time.”
“Just as well,” I said. “If you’d shown up, my wife would have delivered the baby on the spot. It’s not due until September.”
He laughed. “A baby,” he said. “Congrats.” I nodded my thanks. “You want to go get something to eat? Chin and I were talking about grabbing a bite.”
“Sure,” I said. “I hear the dogs aren’t too bad.”
“Oh, I think we can do better than hot dogs,” he said.
We wiggled our way through the crowds gathered around the ropes again and Harwood led us down the right rough of the 15th hole, the par-four that moved gently downhill and then turned to the right at the green. Behind the green, backed against 17 Mile Drive, was a large white tent. Above the entranceway was a sign identifying it as “The Centennial Club.”
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