The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life

by Steven Pressfield

  How could I get out of this and back to them?

  I caught McDermott by the jacket sleeve and blurted some incoherent barrage of excuses: I had schoolwork, a sudden fever, dizzy spells. But he took it all as boyish nervousness and, loudly for the other forecaddies as well, refused to hear of it. “Ye’ll all remimber this day as long as ye live!” He clapped my back, and steered me back among my fellows. We were each given two flags, one white and one red, four feet high with a sharpened steel point at the bottom. Our job was to make sure no ball got lost.

  McDermott issued us our marching orders. In teams of four, we were to leapfrog one hole ahead of the match. A pair of us would be stationed in the landing area on each driving hole, one to the right of the fairway, one to the left. We were to follow each ball in flight and, should it land in any place where it wasn’t immediately visible, in the heathery rough or beyond among the duneland, plant our flag right beside it—white if the ball was in bounds, red if out. Another pair of boys were stationed around the green to mark any wayward approaches, while the second quartet, to avoid getting gummed up in the galleries, moved on ahead and took up positions at the next hole.

  The result was the most exquisite torture a golf-mad boy could be forced to endure. I could see Hagen, see Jones, see Junah, but only as miniature figures 275 yards distant, indistinguishable one from another until they swung, and most of the time virtually invisible in their white shirts and light-colored plus fours against the background of the gallery in identical attire. You could see a player swing, recognize Hagen by his lurching motion or Jones by his slow, stately tempo; then all your focus had to switch to the ball, which you were obliged to scamper under, tracking it like some relentless outfielder till it hit and rolled safely to rest in the officials’ view. That was all you could see or were allowed to see. You couldn’t see the players’ faces, couldn’t see their swings nor their grips, their footwork, their rhythm. You couldn’t hear the jokes they cracked or watch the emotions play across their faces. As soon as you staked your flag and made certain that the marshals had the balls’ positions clearly in view, you were obliged to scoot away, not even to the green where you might still catch a glimpse of the excitement, but an entire hole ahead.

  To make the ordeal even more painful, it was clear that players and gallery were having great fun. The competitors all hit more than one ball, sometimes two and three off each tee, drawing and fading. We forecaddies could look back from a hole ahead and see Jones dropping a ball in the rough for practice to get the feel of the grass, drop another fifty yards behind his drive to rip a long iron into a green and see how it held, or drop two or three close in for niblick pitches and run-ups. They all hit practice shots from fairway bunkers and around the greens chipped from two or three angles. From the deep distance I could see them putting, three or four balls from various levels on the greens, at all probable pin positions. For one stretch of three holes, the eighth through the tenth, Hagen played on ahead, alone, taking just Spec Hammond his caddie and his gallery. He had us running crazy with our flags because he, apparently deliberately, was hitting his drives into trouble, left and right, just to practice playing out. I lost track of Junah and Jones entirely, and when Hagen rejoined the group at the eleventh, Junah was gone.

  What catastrophe had struck now?

  I peered back down the fairways to see if Junah had dropped a hole or two behind to practice alone. Had he pulled a muscle? Cut his hand? Where was he? Had he dropped out completely?

  When we got in, near sunset, I found Garland and learned that Junah had returned to the practice area after the turn, hit a handful of desultory pitches and sand shots, then departed without explanation, with Bagger Vance driving the Chalmers, for home.

  I was getting frantic. I had no idea what private darkness Junah was struggling with, but the image of his face two nights ago in the slave kitchen, that bright desperate smile over his whiskey, and then the blank despair on his features this afternoon made my blood run cold. In some unspoken way, I had identified my own fate with Junah’s. He was my champion as well as Savannah’s. The thought of some desperate debacle, some ghastly mind-driven collapse before the world’s eyes, was so awful I couldn’t bear even to contemplate it. And yet I felt it coming. Sensed it in my bones, even if I had no idea why or from where.

  It was evening now; the banquets had begun in the east and west ballrooms. We boys could hear the orchestra music coming from across the broad lawn, see the gay formal lanterns lining the drive and the queues of automobiles delivering their cargo of ladies and gentlemen at the brilliantly lit entrance of Krewe Island’s grand hotel. We ourselves were feted to a fried chicken, brunswick stew and peach cobbler supper in the employees’ dining room. A dormitory had been set up in a carriage house for the forecaddies and the cooks and others, so we wouldn’t have to fight traffic tomorrow.

  I had to get out of there. Had to get to Junah’s and beg him to include me somehow in his outfit tomorrow; I’d carry ice or sandwiches, anything to get close and be able to see. The thought of passing that day, potentially the most memorable of my life, exiled into the blue distance, an entire hole ahead of my idols, was more than I could bear. I got to a phone and called my brother Garland, who was already fevered with envy over the forecaddie uniforms with the Krewe Island monograms and the fitted plus fours. Would he take my place tomorrow? Hell yeah! I told him where I’d stash the stuff once I snuck away and he promised to collect it; he’d sneak out tonight and creep in with the forecaddies before dawn. Krewe Island had even fitted us for a brand-new pair of shoes, real spiked spectators that we’d be given at breakfast. Garland could have those too.

  Back in bed I feigned sleep for what seemed like hours. My bunkmates chattered and giggled, wide awake with excitement for the morning, while out in the hall the chaperone and dorm master drank coffee and flirted with various chambermaids passing. Midnight came and went; no one had corked off or looked likely to. I gave up and crept to the lavatory, shinned down out the window and beat it away across the lawn. The banquets were starting to wind down, you could see tuxedoed men and bejeweled women stealing kisses out by the cars and in the little alcoves with the statues along the covered walks. Some fool was splashing around in the main fountain, singing a song with dirty words while a flock of Marcel-waved girls cheered him on, giggling. I ducked back through a service entrance and into the pastry kitchen. A couple of cooks were smoking by the big scullery sink, talking about how Jones had gone to bed at the stroke of ten, while Hagen supposedly had no plans to sleep at all. The cooks seemed in that good-natured state of work exhaustion so I let them see me. What about Junah? I asked. Did they know if he’d come in for the banquets? They started laughing like I’d said the funniest thing in the world.

  “Come in? Hell, he’s drunk half the liquor from the second and third services!”

  I don’t know what inspired me to ask this next, but from my mouth came “What about his caddie? Was he with him?”

  “If you mean that strange-ass dark sumbitch, he was in here not twenty minutes ago, getting ice.” They pointed out the hallway where Bagger Vance had gone.

  I took off in pursuit. Down one carpeted corridor that yielded nothing, then following my instincts down another and another. Loud music was coming from several rooms up ahead, doors were open, I felt like I was getting warmer. I turned into a fourth corridor; a crowd of plastered party-goers pushed past, hooting and grabbing at each other. The hall was a mess. There were half-empty wine goblets and ice pitchers set on hors d’oeuvre trays that had been pillaged down to the platters. A lit cigarette was burning on the carpet. A woman ran out of one room and into another without a top, laughing, cupping her hands over her breasts, and then two men came after her, not laughing, huffing and puffing in dead earnest. I turned a corner and glimpsed a dark form way down the hall. Bagger Vance? I raced off down the carpet, a good forty yards, and when I tore around the corner, something slick took my feet wildly from under me; I flew sideways slam
-bam into a wall and crashed like a load onto the floor. Golf balls! Half a dozen were scattered across the carpet, with a whiskey glass set on its side like a target.

  Someone had been putting. My eyes just had time to spot the blade setting against the wall, a Victor East putter exactly like Junah’s “Safecracker,” and then a sound like a cry came from the room straight across. I peered in and there in the darkness was Junah, half naked on the bed, with two women pawing and grinding all over him.

  I don’t believe I had ever beheld a grown woman’s buttocks before. Certainly I had never witnessed that peculiar swiveling, gyrating motion or heard those urgent, throat-catching gasps. Junah was half out of his tux, with the one girl on top of him and the other kissing him from the side, while his hands switched back and forth between both of them. He didn’t see me, none of them did, their eyeballs were rolled back so far into the sockets. There were empty whiskey bottles on the carpet; the whole room stunk of alcohol and cigarettes. I had never witnessed a scene so degrading or so utterly devoid of dignity. Part of me wanted to throw up; another wanted to charge in and give all three of them the thrashing they so richly deserved. I stood there, dumbstruck and paralyzed, when a quiet voice spoke from behind me.

  “Don’t think too unkindly of him for this.”

  I spun. Bagger Vance stood there. Taller even than I remembered and cold solid sober, with that same poise and gravity radiating from him so powerfully. He put a hand on my shoulder and gave an odd smile. “Think you can handle that big persimmon in there?” His gesture indicated Junah’s oversized deep-faced driver, leaning against a chair just inside the room. “Grab it and the putter, we’ve got work to do.”

  Vance said nothing more, simply turned, scooped the balls from the carpet and strode toward the service exit. I grabbed the driver and sprung after him, out the door and across a rear grass parking area. Bagger Vance strode powerfully ahead, past the last parked car and buggy and on out into the dark dripping duneland. I looked back; the lights and music from the ballrooms were dropping farther and farther into the distance, we were out there in the night with nothing but the dunes and the raw black sky. “Where in the world are we going?” I gasped, breathless, when I finally caught up.

  Vance turned off the sand, onto a narrow track that led to an open fairway. “To walk the course,” he said.

  Ten

  IT WAS PAST ONE O’CLOCK and by no means warm. The wind cut sharp and damp off the Atlantic, making me shiver. “You’re cold,” Bagger Vance said. “No, I like it,” I told him. He smiled and again put a hand on my shoulder. Immediately I was glowing like a furnace. Even when he took his hand away, the flush remained, coursing powerfully through the bloodstream, warming me to my toes! “How did you do that?”

  “Stop here,” he said, indicating a level spot on the first fairway. “Let me see you take a stride.”

  It was becoming clear that Bagger Vance never answered a question directly. He always diverted you, or changed the subject, and yet you felt that he was answering somehow, in some delayed-action elliptical style of his own.

  I took a few strides under his critical eye. A little longer, he directed…shorter now, that’s it. One stride equals one yard.

  We began pacing off yardage. From the middle of the second tee to carry the fairway bunker on the right: 243 yards. From the hummock fronting the sixth green to the upper level of the green itself: 41 yards. Vance took it all in. As I strode off, earnestly pacing some yardage he had directed, he would linger in a greenside bunker, wriggling his soles down into the sand to sense the firmness; then, as he raked the area flat, nodding to himself as he filed the information away. He kept it all in his head, no notes. On the seventh and ninth greens, he had me putt balls across the various quadrants, up this slope, across that hogback, while he absorbed their wet-spinning paths in the dew. “The grain will shift tomorrow as the blades of grass follow the sun.” His hand traced an arc east-to-west in the sky. “The same green will break differently in the afternoon than in the morning.”

  At the ninth green he knelt thoughtfully, gliding his fingertips across the nappy grass. “They’ll mow the back nine late, probably only a half-dozen holes ahead of us, then remove all the greens between eighteens at lunch. Keep that in mind, Hagen and Jones will.”

  We strode swiftly through ten, eleven and twelve (apparently Vance felt he could get a sufficient sense of them just from a quick look) and were just commencing the six inward holes when I saw him pull up and squint back behind us. A man was coming. I could make out a white shirt and jacket, with the moon rising behind him. Oh hell. “What is it, a marshal? Should we run?”

  “Look again,” Bagger Vance corrected me. “Can you see who it is?”

  The man was two hundred yards off; an owl with cat’s eyes couldn’t have recognized him. “It’s Mr. Jones’ friend,” Bagger Vance spoke, “Mr. Keeler.”

  Sure enough, it was O. B. Keeler. He came toward us in his necktie and spectacles, peering with a certain apprehension at first, then relaxing, apparently with recognition, as he got closer. “I’m relieved to learn I’m not the only lunatic out here at this hour.”

  He was walking the course too. With a pedometer on his hip and a notepad in his pocket. He came up to Bagger Vance and held out his hand. “I’m O. B. Keeler. You’re Mr. Junah’s caddie, aren’t you?”

  Vance introduced himself and me. There was a bit of polite talk about yardages. Keeler felt you could never trust them as indicated on the card. “No one ever actually paces them or puts the transit to them. The architect eyeballs them once on a flying visit and that’s what you’re stuck with!” He chuckled to himself. “You can’t go to school on your opponent’s bag either. Tomorrow Sir Walter’ll hit full mashies 140 yards and choked lofters 150, as if no one’s caught onto that trick.” Keeler was clearly a patrician, scholarly fellow; I was certain he would excuse himself quickly from a colored man and a boy. To my surprise he didn’t. Instead he sighed, folded his arms across his jacket and peered out thoughtfully over the duneland.

  “A golf course is a different place at night, don’t you think? I’ve walked a thousand of them. Some revert to nature the second the sun sets. They lose their identity as products of man. Deer graze on the fairways and bunkers seem absurdly artificial.” He glanced at Vance; then, satisfied that he was being seriously listened to, continued. “Then there are other courses, the great ones I’ve found, that remain themselves even under a foot of snow, their character is stamped so strongly upon them.”

  “Which class would you place Krewe Island in?” Bagger Vance asked.

  The faintest flicker crossed Keeler’s face, a shadow of surprise at the depth and intelligence in this soft-spoken caddie’s voice. “This is an odd one,” Keeler answered after a pause. “My sense of it is more like a battlefield than a golf links. Can you feel it? The presence of ghosts. I’ve had the same feeling at Shiloh, walking among the stones of the dead.” He shivered, as if to shake off some unwonted apprehension. “And yet the course herself is a beauty. I’d rank her in the world’s top ten already, and she’ll only get better as she matures.”

  Keeler finished. A kind of loneliness seemed to come from him, standing there in the chill. “Would you like to walk along with us?” Bagger Vance said.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Keeler answered with genuine warmth.

  He and Bagger Vance walked on, talking. I missed most of what they said over the next two holes because Vance had me off pacing yardages. They were talking about the swing and chuckling. You could see Keeler still didn’t know what to make of this self-effacing yet obviously extremely intelligent caddie. On the fifteenth tee, they were waiting when I scurried back with the yardage from a fairway bunker.

  “Let’s see you take a cut.” Bagger Vance held out Junah’s driver to me.

  “You mean hit one?”

  “Just give us a few swings.”

  They had apparently been discussing some theory, and I was to be their guinea pig. I
didn’t mind. I took the big deep-faced driver that Junah called Schenectady Slim, planted my feet and gave it a wail from my soles. Once more, Bagger Vance requested. I swung again. When I looked up, he and Keeler were both chuckling merrily.

  I felt like a fool, half ready to slam the club down and storm off, when Bagger Vance again caught my shoulder with that warm strong hand. “We’re not laughing at you, Hardy,” he said.

  “No,” Keeler followed, “more at our own poor selves, I fear.” Keeler explained, “We chuckled out of envy, envy of youth and fearlessness.” He declared that if he had torqued his spine through half the turn I had just taken, it would put him in the hospital for a week.

  He spoke thoughtfully for a few moments about a boy’s natural swing, any boy’s. The big raw pivot, enormous arc, the natural sense of balance, release and turn.

  “May I take it, sir,” Bagger Vance said when Keeler had finished, “that you believe there is such a thing as the Authentic Swing?”

  You could see Keeler cover his astonishment. Apparently Bagger Vance had hit on something Keeler had thought about, and was deeply interested in. “The Authentic Swing, did you say? Yes, I do.”

  He looked at Bagger Vance deeply, solemnly, still more than a little amazed to be addressed so seriously and with such intelligence by this odd, mysterious man.

  “Tell me, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” Keeler said, “what are your thoughts on it?”

  Eleven

  “HAVE YOU EVER SEEN identical twins take up golf? Their swings from the very first are radically different. Isn’t that odd?”

  Keeler absorbed this from Vance, nodding thoughtfully. Yes, he had seen twins swing. Yes, how interesting that their motions were so different….