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

by Steven Pressfield

  AT THIS POINT in the telling of the story, Michael and I became aware of a storm breaking—a real one, just like the storm in the story—smack outside across the inlet. We could see lightning flash over Skidaway Island and hear the willows in the yard moan in the rising wind. It was past ten o’clock, both of us were getting restless; we were debating braving the weather for a hike down the beach, when I suddenly remembered:

  “My goodness, Michael, something just occurred to me. I don’t know how I could have forgotten: Junah’s granddaughter is here! Now, in Savannah. On Skidaway Island.”

  “His granddaughter?”

  “The daughter of the young child he left in Germany. Do you remember? When his wife died and he returned to the States in ’27? She’s long since a grown woman, in her thirties now, I believe. How could it have slipped my mind? I’ve been in contact with her, making arrangements to return certain books which Junah left me in his will. No doubt that’s why he’s been so much on my mind of late, and why I was inspired to tell his tale to you tonight.”

  Junah’s granddaughter and her husband made their home in Boston, I told Michael, but they kept a cottage out on the island. Did he think it was too late to phone—and possibly drive over?

  The young lady’s married name was Lederer. Irene Lederer. I had her phone number from correspondence we had exchanged. But should we call? She had small children and no doubt could use her sleep. It was Michael who insisted; perhaps this was serendipity, at least it was inspiration. “Besides, you called on her grandfather once at a late hour, and that seemed to be blessed by fortune.”

  We phoned. Irene was up. We drove over. The storm had become a real Atlantic rattler. Shrimpers were bobbing at their moorings as we passed the Skidaway basin; rain was blowing in sheets across the causeway. I was encouraged that Michael wanted to meet Junah’s granddaughter and yet, in the dimness of my clattering Dodge’s front seat, I could feel his mood, brooding and dark. He seemed to sense my unease and spoke: “Dr. Greaves, I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me tonight. Believe me, it means a lot, just that you would take the time. I wish I could say it was helping.”

  Anyone who has watched a child grow to adulthood knows the peculiar sensation, a kind of multiple perception that doubles our vision of him as a grown-up. It becomes impossible not to see him still in short pants and muddy T-shirt. I realized as I glanced at Michael now in the storm, in the dimness of the dash-lit seat, that I was still seeing him as that carefree young caddie with the pure natural grip and the faultless free-flowing swing. How had he grown into this troubled young man, to these same torments that had plagued Junah, and myself as well, for so many years?

  Michael was, Junah included, the finest student-athlete ever to come out of Savannah. Universities as far away as Harvard and Berkeley had courted him since eighth grade; he chose Penn, where he was Academic All-American in football, basketball and track and a scratch golfer almost as an afterthought. He possessed that rarest combination of athletic gifts, the speed and power of a track star with the hand and eye coordination of a billiard master. I watched him one afternoon pick up a lacrosse stick for the first time; within an hour there was no player on the field, including two All-Americans, who could defend him. But these gifts, rather than flushing Michael with confidence and self-assurance, seemed only to trouble and torment him. Like a woman blessed with spectacular beauty, he was profoundly mistrustful of the effect his presence produced so effortlessly on other people.

  The fact that Michael was black I am sure only added to the dubiousness with which he regarded his gifts. He refused to be stereotyped either as an athlete or a scholar. I think it may have been the excessive attention he received in other sports that drew Michael so powerfully to golf. His admirers all thought him a fool. There was no big payday coming from golf, no signing bonus or Super Bowl incentive clause. I myself observed Michael’s passion with deep satisfaction. As I told him earlier in the evening, I sensed that he saw through to the soul of the game. Golf kept Michael humble, and I think that meant a great deal to him. Many times watching him grow, I was almost eerily reminded of Junah. Here was that same instinct for the game, the same grace and power. What a shame he and Junah could never have met. That, I suppose, was at least partly what I hoped to redress this evening. To give Michael a flesh-and-blood sense of that other tortured athlete, that other brilliant product of Savannah’s tidal shores.

  I was failing. Michael withdrew into silence, uneasy, and even, I sensed, a bit guilty. I was at a loss and didn’t know how to continue.

  “When you talk of war,” Michael broke the silence, “of Junah’s mental torment…and I know you suffered too in your own war. I mean, on the one hand I empathize with your pain and all that you both went through….” He broke off, then continued with sudden emotion: “But the truth is I envy you.” He stopped again; I glanced across at him. “This body God gave me, these talents. I know it sounds crazy but I feel like I am a warrior, like these gifts I’ve been given were meant for that, for battle. Not battle in the modern sense of push buttons and machines, but something ancient and noble, hand to hand, with ringing steel. And yet…”

  His voice broke off. I was about to prompt him when he turned, peered out at the storm and resumed. “And yet I know exactly what Junah meant when he had Bagger Vance drive him away that day onto the duneland. How can anyone of consciousness fight willingly in war? How could I—for all the skill I’m sure I’d have at it? I’ve marched in demonstrations, Dr. Greaves, I’ve stood across picket lines from men and women who hated me. But I…I couldn’t hate them. I didn’t hate them. If it were war, could I kill them? They were just me. Me with another man’s face. It wasn’t real, do you know what I mean? The battle. In a way I thought studying Medicine would give me that. Life and death. Real actions taken for real people. But…” Michael’s voice trailed off. “You know what that’s like.”

  We drove on for several minutes, across the Neskaloosa and onto the old barge road that paralleled the Intracoastal Waterway. Michael was relating with frustration his experiences in medical school, the relentless pressure toward specialization, the overriding pursuit of the dollar, the contempt for patients that oozed from the pores of so many of his fellow students and instructors. I felt a terrible sense of futility; it was clear that my efforts were not communicating what I had hoped. I found myself thinking of ancient Greece, which had become, for its troubling parallels with our own time, more and more a preoccupation of mine. The so-called Golden Age lasted only three generations. Junah’s was our first generation, the first of our American Golden Age. Mine was the second; Michael’s now the third. In Athens Junah’s and mine would have been the gallant decades of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Pericles and Themistocles; ours would have been the glories of Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis and Artemisium. Michael’s would have been the bitter third generation of Alcibiades, the generation of plague and empire when painted youth mocked the Mysteries and fell from the excess of their own brilliance.

  This is what I feared for Michael. That his generation, so strong, so well made, so bright and aware beyond its years, would compare itself to us in envy, envy of the clarity of our challenges and the brutish obviousness of our enemies. What was I trying to tell him? That to us when it was happening, it hadn’t been so clear, it hadn’t been so obvious. The world had looked much as it did to him now, a hellish twilight era with greatness fled and meaning elusive as sand between our fingers. My mood became as dark as the storm. I was just glancing over to Michael, not even sure what I was going to say, when he suddenly lunged past me and seized the steering wheel. “Look out!” The car swerved wildly under his grasp; I turned in shock as our hurtling mass blew past a homeless man, standing in the roadway! “Sonofabitch!” Michael shouted in anger at the fellow, eyes flashing rearward. I had the wheel now; we bucked and twisted back onto the pavement. “Are you all right?” Michael asked, his voice shaking.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. We didn’t hit him, did we
?”

  No, Michael assured me. In the mirror I could glimpse the man gliding on, vanishing without haste into the tall grass. Michael glared back through the rain. “What the hell’s the matter with these people? Jesus! That bastard was right in the middle of the road!”

  We were delayed for an oil barge at the drawbridge onto Skidaway. Had the rain not been so thick and had we been able to mount the bridge’s towers, we could have peered east toward the linksland that had once been Krewe Island. What was left of Invergordon’s ancient acreage was now a wildlife preserve, only four or five miles away; not far in fact from the spot where we had nearly hit the derelict man. I could see Michael was still upset by the incident. We sat in a line of cars with their wipers beating and steam rising from their hot idling engines.

  Michael spoke: “Did I ever tell you about the trip my family took to New York City, when I was eleven?” I was so relieved to hear him speak that I put all I could into my encouraging reply. Michael turned toward me and relaxed somewhat in his seat. “My dad carried us up there on Amtrak, to see the Statue of Liberty and the U.N. He wanted to show us our legacy as Americans. The sights of course made practically no impression on me. What struck me, and has stayed with me to this day, was an event that happened purely by chance—one midnight, when we found ourselves marooned in Times Square. We were coming from some show on Broadway and couldn’t get a cab to pick us up. My mom and brothers were hungry so we stopped in one of those sidewalk Orange Julius places. My father, I realize now, was feeling helpless and furious, but I was young and completely oblivious. I stayed outside on the sidewalk, alone, mesmerized by the passing multitudes. They were of every age and sex, every race and color, streaming past beneath the neon. I had never seen such grotesque or tormented-looking specimens. Each seemed immersed in his own private hell, driven by demons only he or she could name. I was seized with an overwhelming sense of pity. I wanted to rush out among those warped and misbegotten forms and embrace each person one by one and somehow, by magic or instinct or just by wishing it so hard it had to come true, make them well again. Restore them. Make them clean and straight. I would have given anything…everything…for that gift.”

  Michael’s voice trailed off in sorrow; his dark eyes glanced across to me. “Later, in medical school, we studied palpation with a Bengali doctor named Gupta. He was blind, or nearly so, but he had the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen. He would put them on his patients without any of the hesitation or self-consciousness of a Western doctor. The thing he impressed upon us was always to use two hands. If you were palpating with your right, keep your left on the patient as well. It comforts them, he said. Listen with your right hand, put love in with your left. Of course my classmates snickered like hell at that.” Michael’s voice broke off again, and when I looked across in the dimness his eyes as well were turned away.

  It was almost eleven when we got to Irene Lederer’s cottage, tumbling in in a welter of wet shoes and sodden jackets. I apologized at once for the lateness; could she forgive us for thrusting our presence upon her at this hour? “Don’t be silly,” the young lady insisted, “I wouldn’t have invited you over if I didn’t mean it. Come in, come in, we’re all wide awake anyway. No one on the whole island’s going to get any sleep in this storm.”

  Irene’s children were in pajamas, her three and two from the neighbor’s, all with various coughs and sniffles but generally just using the storm as an excuse to stay up. Irene and two teenage nieces had them settled campsite-style in sleeping bags around the fireplace. When I introduced Michael it created a stir; the girls all knew of him; he was a hero; he had to endure a grilling on the subject of why he had turned down a draft from the Atlanta Falcons after graduation. Irene brought coffee and we settled onto cozy couches around the fire.

  Irene herself was an exceptionally handsome woman in her mid-thirties, quite tall, with much of her grandfather in her. She had his fine high forehead and keen gray eyes. But what struck me most were her hands, which were virtual duplicates of Junah’s: the same long slender fingers, same strength and beauty. She even gestured with them much as he had. Junah had had a particularly appealing cock-legged stance when he was listening intently to something, with his head canted to favor his right ear and his hands deep in his pockets. “You stand in that exact posture,” I told her. I asked about her mother, Junah’s daughter, and Irene said she was in Pacific Grove, California, now, doing research on migratory butterflies. Irene’s husband Jim was in Boston, planning on coming down in a week.

  Irene and I lamented the fact that we had never found time, or made time, to make each other’s acquaintance and discuss her grandfather. She had never known him but had heard many tales from her mother. “It’s hard to get an objective picture from a daughter, you know? I could never tell how much of what Mom said was real and how much was pure hero worship.”

  “Dr. Greaves has been telling me about your grandfather all night,” Michael addressed Irene. “I wish you had been there to hear it. We’re in the middle of 36 holes with Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.”

  Judging by the three reweighted sand wedges stacked in the corner, Irene was something of a golfer herself, as I knew her mother had been, and she jumped at the prospect of hearing more about her grandfather. “Let me listen in for the second eighteen,” she volunteered. “Have I missed too much to make sense of it?”

  I wasn’t convinced that now was the time or place to continue. She and Michael insisted however, seconded by the children, who with cups of cocoa clearly intended to take advantage of this rare excursion into the wee hours.

  I did my best to bring them all up to date quickly. Irene was aware of the 1931 match and even produced an album with clippings and later correspondence between her grandfather and Jones. I found myself, as I told the tale in abbreviated form, deliberately softening the parts about Bagger Vance’s powers, no doubt from fear of Irene’s incredulity. Surprisingly she became impatient with my vagueness and asked several times specifically to know more about the fellow. “My mother talked about him all the time, and my grandfather’s writings are full of him. He vanished after the match, didn’t he? Do you have any idea what became of him?”

  I told her I didn’t, with the exception of one rather mysterious occasion which perhaps would weave itself into this tale as it unfolded. Should I continue? I was ready to pick up where we left off, at the start of the second eighteen, when Michael spoke up.

  “You ask what became of Bagger Vance,” he addressed Irene, then hesitated. “Perhaps I shouldn’t inquire at this point, but can you tell me, what happened to your grandfather? After the match, I mean. What did he do? Did his life change?”

  Irene glanced once to me, almost as if asking permission to answer. She could see Michael’s curiosity burning, perhaps because that issue—what to do with one’s life—was so much on his mind at that moment.

  “One thing I know for sure,” Irene began. “Immediately after the match he returned to Germany to collect my mother, who was five or six at the time. He brought her back to the States along with her grandmother who was raising her and settled them with him at the Aerie. From what my mother told me growing up, my grandfather absolutely devoted himself to her from then on. That, and his passion for navigation.”

  Michael leaned forward at this. “Navigation?”

  “My grandfather developed the first aircraft guidance system that wasn’t dependent on celestial, magnetic or gyroscopic orientation. It was called Polar Antivalence Navigation. I don’t know how technical you want me to get, but antivalence bases its guidance processes on—”

  Michael broke in: “Lines of force. The fields of subtle energy surrounding the earth.”

  “Yes, that’s it. How did you know?”

  Michael didn’t answer, just glanced once, very quickly, in my direction. “Please go on,” he continued to Irene. “What exactly was your grandfather working on?”

  “Don’t get me started,” Irene smiled. “I’m afraid I’ve become
a bit obsessed with it myself, at least as it applies to music.” Michael and I had noted in the rear of the cottage a big under-construction studio packed with computer and synthesizer gear, along with ancient intruments, viols, lyres and theorbos.

  “My grandfather was fascinated by the significance of vibration, frequencies, harmonics. He believed that surrounding the earth were numerous ‘flows’ and ‘meridians’ of energy, like magnetic fields but infinitely subtler, which could be used in navigation if we could develop instruments sensitive enough to detect them. He claimed that Nature herself already did. In a brain as tiny as a butterfly’s. He kept birds, hundreds of them. Migratory waterfowl. He had a regular wildlife refuge at the Aerie. The birds, he said, navigate along those subtle flows, and our planes could too.”

  Here Irene’s handsome features grew darker. “My grandfather, as Dr. Greaves may have told you, was obsessed with the coming World War. He felt America must be ready and take up fascism’s challenge early and forcefully. This was not a popular belief at that time. My grandfather had become a flier by then, for his navigation research, and he tangled with Charles Lindbergh who as you know was a passionate isolationist, an America Firster. I’m afraid my grandfather came out on the short end of that stick.”

  Irene was getting agitated. She shifted in her seat, then, rousing herself with a smile, asked how our coffee was holding up. Did we need a warm-up? She was on her feet now. “But please,” she called back as she moved to the kitchen, “don’t let my ramblings tear us away from the story. I know that much of my grandfather’s subsequent life sprung directly from the events of that day at Krewe Island. Please go on, Dr. Greaves. Tell us what happened on the second eighteen.”

  Twenty

  JUNAH AND VANCE headed for the first tee again.

  The rain had stopped at least an hour earlier, but with draining and cleanup, bailing of the bunkers and the dispatching of crews with their twenty-foot bamboo whisks to whip the water off the greens, not to mention the players’ warm-up, another hour and a half had been consumed. It was past 3:00 before the officials declared the turf playable and almost 3:30 by the time the competitors shook hands again and finished obliging the relentless importunities of the news photographers. Would there be time to finish? Sunset was at 7:06, which should have allowed more than sufficient margin, though the marshals feared that the gallery, in the muck, could become unruly. But the wind was working strong at ground level, drying the fairways, and the linksland’s excellent drainage provided additional cause for optimism. All would be dry, it was hoped, by the turn and more than playable, if a bit damp, till then.