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

by Steven Pressfield

  Now he was staring down the gut of a left-to-right downhill slider not for an eagle or a birdie but a par, a par that would after all his heroics lose him a stroke, to Junah anyway, and yawning like the maw of doom before him was the very real possibility that he would miss this too! Would he four-putt? Would this go on all day? Would his ball keep scooting back and forth past this hole interminably? The gallery’s golfing terrors intuited all this; you could see them holding their breath, averting their eyes as the debacle loomed in the failing light.

  Jones stepped up and made his par.

  The mob went berserk. Jones had his four. So did Hagen. Junah had three. They strode to seventeen all tied!

  Now the gallery truly threatened to get out of hand. It got a little scary with the pushing and shoving; the marshals and a number of Georgia State Patrolmen had to close in tight around the players; I held on to Bagger Vance’s hand for all I was worth. The spectators surged and jostled; there was barely enough room on the tee to swing. Jones wanted to tee his ball off the left marker and couldn’t, the gallery could not be moved back; those in the rear were pressing in so hard that their fellows in front, however willing they may have been to oblige the champion, simply could not move back.

  Now came the next excruciating, heartbreaking shot.

  Let me describe the hole.

  I would rank it, the seventeenth at Krewe Island, with Pebble Beach’s eighteenth, the thirteenth at Pine Valley and the fourteenth, “Foxy,” at Royal Dornoch. One of the handful of greatest holes in the world.

  Par four, 444 that played like 490. The wind was against, freshening now, coming from the south along Barnsall Point at about two clubs. The green, which you had to squint at in the gathering darkness, as your eyes teared slightly from the salt breeze in your face, was elevated about forty feet along a sand bluffline (add two more clubs for the carry) and offset about thirty yards to the right from the line of the fairway. The drive was to a broad, scooped-out landing area that kicked in from both right and left, effectively funneling the shot into a steadily rising uphill that sloped gently left, thus carrying the ball, the longer it was hit, farther left and away from the green. There were four pot bunkers left and five grass mounds right. A big drive down the right against the kick of the fairway left the player a heartstoppingly long iron that had to carry a wide ravine and a sheer bluff face to reach the elevated green. The surface would hold, that wasn’t the problem. It was the awesome carry, the precarious target and more dangerous still the wind, the relentless shear that rose from behind the green and would knock off line everything but the most perfectly struck shot and send it tumbling right or left downhill to extremely daunting approach areas that were not bunkered, making them even more difficult because the player couldn’t count on any backstop from the sand, or generate any spin or loft with an explosion shot.

  The alternative strategy was to follow the line of the fairway and play left off the tee. This lessened somewhat the difficulty of the approach because of a grass ridge backstopping the green on the flank, but left the player thirty or forty yards farther from the green, into spoon or even brassie country, and all with that excruciating long wind-buffeted carry.

  Down the right, the hole was a killer par four; down the left, a legitimate five.

  The rowdy gallery was calling out Junah’s name as he stepped to the tee off his run of five under in the last four holes. He himself was deep in the Field. He was meeting no one’s eyes and speaking to no one save Bagger Vance. You could see how relaxed he was, yet how utterly focused. Shots were talking to him. He was listening. Gone completely was any sense of being daunted by the two great champions he was facing. Junah felt every bit their equal, not tomorrow maybe, not the day after, but today, now. On this day he was their match and, by God, he intended to carry it to them.

  They knew it. There were no more jokes. No more wisecracks. This was deadly business.

  Junah teed it right. He wasn’t taking either of the strategies Mackenzie had intended in the design. He was going farther right, aiming deliberately for a patch of lightish rough, to the right of the five grass mounds and in a direct line to the green. It was the boldest shot possible. If he pulled it off, if luck held with a decent lie, a big drive would leave a mid-iron in, instead of a driving iron or even a four-wood. More to the point, the duneline protected the shot somewhat from the wind; since the green held, this would make the approach considerably easier. Junah was gambling. A birdie here would gain one shot for sure and maybe two.

  It could win the match.

  He fired.

  Another cannon shot that snapped the spectators’ necks as it boomed off the clubface, rose and soared precisely where Junah had aimed it. “Hop…hop,” I heard my voice rooting as it streaked down for the rough. It did! One solid skip, another short jump and it rolled to a stop. We could see it! The white of the ball just peeking from the longish grass…The lie was playable; Junah’s gamble had, so far at least, paid off.

  This was the first and only time in the match that I saw Hagen react with real, as opposed to gamesman’s, emotion. He was furious. This was too much, that an amateur of Trans-Miss capabilities should continue to pull off these ridiculously valiant and damn near impossible shots. The Haig had had enough. He teed his ball low and went after it, on the same line Junah had taken. It can be truly said of Hagen that, even at his most fearsome, there was always a touch of wit or irony to his play. His opponents, even as he crushed them, were always left with the sense that they had been outplayed or outthought rather than overpowered. Suddenly that changed. The Haig ripped that drive from the soles of his shoes; like Junah’s it boomed down the channel-way, hit even harder. The gallery gasped. The shot held Junah’s line, longer even, but at the very last it drew just ten feet farther left, caught a left-kicking mound and tailed down off the slope in the rough to finish impeccably in the fairway, and every bit as long as Junah’s.

  Jones followed with a drive that was merely spectacular. Two-seventy down the left, onto a level lie on the short grass. Still he too had a daunting one-iron or four-wood into that wind-whipped uphill target.

  The gallery surged around the competitors as they strode off the tee. It was getting dark, storm clouds were lowering. Officials had sent runners ahead to pull automobiles around the landing area as well as greenside on the eighteenth. If the clouds lowered further or play was delayed for any reason, their headlights would be needed just so the players could see what they were aiming for off the tee. Would we even get in in time? The competitors lengthened their strides, glancing at the fast-sinking sun. It was unthinkable that the match would be called on account of darkness with but a single hole left to play.

  I stuck tight beside Junah all the way up the seventeenth. I had been separated once in the mob rush and didn’t want it again. Let me describe Junah’s state if I can. Unswayed by the rush and surge all around him, he strode with utter composure as if tuned to an internal metronome. His very stride seemed fixed on a rhythm heard only in his own head. He was immersed in the Field, seeking that dimension beyond our three and perhaps even beyond four. I could sense, and so could the galleries, who were electrified by the prospect, that Junah thought he would win. Knew he could win. He never overtly glanced to Bagger Vance or met the caddie’s eye, yet every cell seemed to be tuned intuitively to him. Like Ajax or Achilles sensing that a god is fighting beside him, he veritably glowed with courage and confidence. Yet it was held absolutely in check with a light but relentless discipline. He was a warrior. Purged of ego, disciplined, focused, without fear or hope, living with every fiber of his essence in the present and only the present.

  Hagen and Jones drew the bulk of the gallery with them down onto the wide flat where their balls had come to rest. Junah’s shot from the high slope would have to carry a ravine of about forty feet, then the sheer fifty-foot bluff face that fronted the green. This and the slickness of the slope discouraged most of the spectators, who didn’t want to be trapped out there on
the promontory while their fellows surged ahead and got all the best spots around the green and along the eighteenth. When we reached Junah’s ball there was only Junah, Bagger Vance, me and several marshals, with the massed thousands surging just below in the lighter rough and down across the fairway surrounding Jones and Hagen. The lie was fine, not too high and not too tight; you could spin it. Junah never blinked, just assessed it coldly, remaining deep in his detached rhythm. He squinted up toward the green. The pin was visible, closer than we had dreamed of and shining in a shaft of late sunlight that pierced the clouds like an omen. “I was thinking mid,” I heard him say to Vance, meaning a five-iron, “but now it looks like less.”

  “Hit the mid-iron,” Vance said and Junah accepted this assessment instantly. He plucked the club from the bag.

  Below on the fairway, Jones set up and rifled a one-iron that lacked no more than three feet of reaching the upper level and finishing stiff. Instead it caught the last arc of upslope and spun away left and down, coming to rest thirty-five feet away and on the lower level. A brilliant shot, masterful under these gusty darkening conditions. But not a birdie. Not a likely one anyway.

  Now Hagen played. A mid-iron, the same club Junah held but, from his lie down the hill, the equivalent of twenty yards farther out. The Haig killed it. The shot bore like a bullet through the wind and tore into the green, dead on line and one flag-length short. It took a single hop, when its spin would have kicked in and stopped it dead, but…it hit the pin! The ball caromed off, all backspin gone, and skittered sideways onto the apron right. You could hear Hagen’s teeth grind from forty yards away. The gallery groaned and then cheered. The Haig was okay, twenty-five feet from the stick, but he too was out of realistic birdie range.

  This was luck and Junah knew it. The gallery knew it. Fate was with him, they all sensed. Even Hagen, cursing as he pulled up below to watch Junah’s shot, may have felt that this wasn’t his day and wasn’t Bobby’s.

  Junah was ready. He stood behind the ball as he always did, checking the line one last time as he settled the club into his grip, letting the shaft find its nestle beneath the heel of the left hand, then rocking the thumb down and closing the pad of the right palm impeccably above it. He let the two middle fingers of his right hand find their place around the leather, then the little finger curled over, crooking into place to ride atop the first knuckle of the left hand. There was a loose stalk of grass blowing about two feet behind Junah’s ball; with his clubhead he nonchalantly flicked it, it blew away in the wind. Junah took a step toward the ball. He glanced once toward the target to recheck his line and then….

  The ball moved!

  An inch. No more. Just slid off its grassy perch and settled an inch to the side.

  My heart froze in terror.

  Oh my God! In what was surely no more than a thousandth of a second, every internal process in my body went into slow motion.

  It was clear instantly that this was disaster. A one-stroke penalty. Instead of firing at the green in two with a chance to upend his opponents and seize the match’s momentum, Junah would now be shooting three, hoping to hang on to a bogey and, on this most dangerous and difficult of holes, possibly worse. More bitter still was the psychological dislocation. How could Junah refind his focus? There were no holes left to regroup on.

  All this raced through my brain in a tenth of a second.

  In another tenth I grasped at this straw: that somehow I hadn’t seen right. Maybe the ball hadn’t moved. It was an optical illusion! A speck in my wind-blurred eye. But one look at Junah’s face dispelled that fantasy.

  He knew the rule as well as I. As well as every golfer. A player may remove without penalty a loose impediment lying within a club-length of the ball, but

  if the ball move after any such loose impediment has been touched by the player…the player shall be deemed to have caused the ball to move and the penalty shall be one stroke.

  It counted for nothing that Junah hadn’t touched the ball, that his actions had not been the cause of its moving. All that mattered was that it had moved.

  How could this happen? It wasn’t fair!

  Then, still in the first two tenths of a second, my brain seized upon a terrible alternative. No one had seen the ball move. Not even Bagger Vance, who was ten feet down the hill. Just Junah and I. In the three-inch grass no one else could see it. No one would know.

  We could lie!

  Pretend nothing happened.

  Just hit the ball. Say nothing.

  This thought flashed like an evil comet across my brain. Was Junah thinking it too? Could we pull it off? I raised my eyes to see the expression on his face….

  But he was already turning away toward the fairway, with the club lowering in his left hand and his right arm raised in the direction of Jones, Hagen and the officials. “Bob! Haig!” Junah’s voice rose clear and firm above the wind. “I have to call a shot on myself.”

  Both of them blinked, shock on their faces. Junah came several more steps down the slope. “The ball moved.”

  A chill coursed through the gallery as word spread and they realized what had happened. Those who were non-golfers or new to the game reacted with disbelief and outrage at what they perceived to be the injustice of the penalty. It seemed so unfair that the match, which had been fought so long and so valorously, should turn on such a trivial mischance. You mean the ball moves one inch, by accident, to a place no better than it was before—and the man loses the match because of it! If lightning had slain one of their fellows right there among them, the gallery could not have been more staggered. Not just for the penalty stroke, but for the trauma, the psychological shock. Players collapse. The air rushes from their balloon. I saw a man in the gallery fighting tears. Others were ashen-faced. Hagen, Jones, the marshals and scorers had come up the slope and were now gathered in various glum postures around the ball. No one wanted the penalty assessed; their questions all sought the same salvation: could Junah be mistaken, was it possible that the ball had not moved, that he had not displaced the loose impediment?

  Dougal McDermott read aloud from the Rules. “‘…a ball is deemed to “move” if it leave its original position in the least degree; but…not…if it merely oscillate and come to rest in its original position.’ Is she diff’rent? Can ye be sartain? Sometimes a ball will shudder, then settle back.”

  Junah shook his head. “It was there. It rolled to here.”

  Hagen stood now at Junah’s shoulder. “Hit it quick, kid, before you have time to think about it.” He strode away, gallantly, wanting to clear the arena for his opponent, let him have his room, his air to breathe. I saw Jones catch Junah’s eye just for an instant, a flicker so brief you would have missed it if you’d glanced away even for a second. It was a look that had nothing to do with trophies or triumphs, that would have been as apt for a two-dollar Nassau as for the claret jug of the British Open. A simple acknowledgment, man to man, of an action honorably taken. My glance turned to Bagger Vance, whose eyes were lit as well. He moved beside Junah and spoke, almost too softly to hear.

  “In this hour,” he said, “you have reached me.”

  In the press the next day there were numerous mentions of the tears in Junah’s eyes at this moment, and the way he and his caddie embraced briefly with emotion. Reporters chalked it up to self-pity, shock, the pain or disappointment of the moment. None of course could have guessed the truth.

  As Vance released Junah from their embrace, his own eyes were moist with an emotion bottomless and paternal. I saw him stride quickly to McDermott and the marshals; he began speaking with them privately, seeming to indicate that he was experiencing stomach cramps. My father, Judge Anderson and the elders reacted with alarm.

  What was this?

  Vance was walking off!

  There was a surge of the town fathers, a brief muddled confrontation; I couldn’t hear what was said but clearly saw Judge Anderson clutching Vance’s arm, pleading with him, eyes wide with concern; don’t go,
don’t go, you could read the Judge’s lips. Vance was firm; he detached himself with resolve. The marshals indicated it was official; I could see them communicating the news to Jones, Hagen and their caddies and see them acknowledge and accept it. What would happen now? Who would take Junah’s bag?

  Vance had turned back now and crossed to Junah. “Remember, I am ever with you,” he said in his calm, centered voice. Then he took off his caddie’s cap and motioned to me. In near-panic I scurried to his side, already knowing what was coming and shaking with dread at the terrible responsibility. There was Junah’s bag. Vance slipped it from his shoulder and set it upright on the turf before me, strap extended toward my trembling hand.

  “The man is yours, Hardy,” he said. “Take him in.”

  Twenty-three

  IN AN INSTANT Vance had vanished, stepping into the gallery, which parted in surprise and shock before him, then closed, swallowing him. He was gone! What would I do now? A dozen potential catastrophes flashed before my eyes. What if I clubbed Junah wrong, here or, worse, on eighteen? What if his shot to the green went short or long because of me? What if my fear threw him off, what if my anxiety was communicated to him? What if I choked; what if I stepped in Jones’ or Hagen’s line; what if, fighting through the gallery, I burst forth too suddenly and accidentally kicked Junah’s ball? And these were only my selfish fears. I imagined myself in Junah’s place. How must he feel, facing the shot of his life in the match of his life, suddenly bereft of his guide and mentor, thrust instead into the care of a terrified ten-year-old? I considered with utmost seriousness dropping the bag and fleeing, or crying aloud to the gallery for someone more experienced, anyone more worthy than I. Should I race after Vance? Chase him down through the crowd and beg him to return? Yet already I knew, as I’m sure did Junah, that Vance had vanished not merely in the figurative sense. He was gone. We would never see him again. At least not as he had been, for us and with us.