Fore! Play (11 page)

Their shots even sound different, neat little Clicks! Not like mine that go: Thdth! Nwack! Thwup! Boink! Blutz! Gank! and
Frang!

Once in a while I hit a shot like the pros hit, and once in a while they hit a shot like I do. But you really have to look
closely for their negatives to find common ground.

And, yes, between those three-hundred-yard drives and thirty-foot putts, the negatives
are
there—even for Tiger. I watch him and am pleasantly surprised to note that he is clearly upset about his golf game much of
the time—just like me! He shakes his head and mutters to himself when his shots don’t turn out the way he’d hoped. Just like
me. Except, of course, his hopes are somewhat higher.

I see Tiger seething when he misses a twenty-five-foot putt—same as me, except mine would be three feet. His putt is for 2
under, mine for somewhere over. He sticks his tongue out at the ball. I stick out my finger.

Later, this very best golfer in the world actually misses a one-and-one-half-foot putt! For a double-bogey! I understand.
I’ve had rounds with double-bogeys, too, but I was happy about them.

He hits one into a little creek and the announcer explains he was “too quick in his transition.” I start to write that down,
but realize he might just as well have said “transmission” because I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Tiger also puts his ball in a sand trap. Now, this is where I’d discreetly toss it at the hole. But he really can’t. Big gallery,
big TV audience. And, anyway, his blast out of the sand lands
6 inches
from the hole—and, frankly, I can’t throw it that accurately.

And I
loved
this one. Tiger hit a ball that struck the cart track, bounced so high it hit some tree limbs, then rolled another fifty
feet down the track away from the hole. That could have been me!

I’m starting to relate. I draw back the iron there in the TV room, and on the backswing the club unfortunately catches the
curtain rod, pulling it down. Just a little caf矣urtain, but it made quite a racket.

“What was that?” Jody yells from the other room.

“Scooter!” I scream, referring to our cat, who is also blamed for foul blustery aromas.

Tiger’s cart track–tree shot looked just like mine, except he does not then go on to shoot a 9 on this hole, as I would. He
pars
the son-of-a-bitch!

At this point the announcers pronounce that something is direly wrong with Tiger’s game today. On the other hand, the guy
is winning
the tournament, now isn’t he?

Tiger yells “Goddamnit!” after one swing—just like me. Glad to see Tiger cursing. Thought he might be an automaton. His profanity-inducing,
really bad shot has landed in tall grass, but his recovery shot comes to rest just inches from the hole. The man sure does
recover well. I don’t recover. I’m terminal.

The announcer says that Tiger’s shot from the high grass to the green “redefines courage.” Golf announcers say some pretty
stupid things when they try to be profound. The announcer trying to wax poetic about Nicklaus passing the baton to Tiger sounds
less like a poet laureate than he does like Jack Handy with his Deep Thoughts on
Saturday Night Live
—or a waitress at the IHOP delivering sickening blueberry-pineapple syrup to your table.

The announcers say a lot of things I can’t quite comprehend, in large part because they’re describing a game so different
from the one I try to play. They say things like “putting for the eagle”—things I never hear on the course. They say “an eight-footer
for bogey is no fun,” when it sounds like a riot to me. They say Phil Mickelson’s thirty-foot putt is “certainly makeable”
but to me it seems certainly not. When he hits one in a sand trap they say it’s “shocking.” Why? And they say things like
“the second cut [of grass, apparently] is affecting backspin.” Could that be
my
problem?

When a player makes a par they lament his “mistake … a squandered opportunity.” When a thirty-five-foot putt stops two and
one half feet from the hole they call it “woefully short.” Harsh. And who can putt on such greens? They undulate wildly. Putts
break one way, then the other. On one green they go downhill, then sharply uphill, before breaking at a 45 degree angle. Why
not toss a couple of windmills and Goofy’s nose on the green while you’re at it?

I’m sure glad I don’t have to play with these guys whispering into microphones about my game. When Fred Funk misses a putt
they mutter a mournful “mercy,” and when he bogeys a hole they call it “a disaster.” (Frankly, a guy named Fred Funk needs
no further aggravation.) Sergio García is only 2 under par, so they feel compelled to explain that he has a fever. When Olazabel
(the man with the unfortunate middle name “María”) chips, they cry “oh noooo!” even though he’s chipped onto the green. And
winds up shooting a 63!

Davis Love misses the green with a 140-yard iron. “Awwww!” goes the crowd, as the announcer intones: “You wonder how he can
hit a shot like that”—meaning “that badly.” Hey! Over here! I can answer that.

They jinx people, like Fred Funk, who they call “the greatest driver on the tour” a nanosecond before he whacks one into the
woods. They call hole 2 “juicy white-meat” for some reason, and they say things that make absolutely no sense to the bad golfer,
like, “He doesn’t want to hit it too close to the hole; he wants to be able to take a full swing.”
Doesn’t want it too close to the hole??!

The broadcast is all very soothing, conducive to snoozing. I wonder if advertisers get built-in discounts for the snooze factor?
Jim Nance, the announcer, has a pacifying, mellifluous voice. If he interjected “Russian ICBMs are scheduled to hit fifty
U.S. cities in ten minutes, folks,” you’d still remain in your La-Z-Boy to see if Notah Begay made his birdie. And Jim would
remain there at the mike to call it for you. (Notah Begay, while sounding like a curried muscle balm, is actually a player
on the tour. As is the aforementioned Fred Funk, who sounds like a perpetually depressed cartoon character.)

I hear Jim comment on the fragrance of the flowers, hear him describe shots as “lovely.” Does he ever do hockey? Unlike announcers
for the NBA or the WWF, for example, golf announcers whisper a lot. They are speaking quietly and reverently, as if in church.
The color commentator has an English accent, adding a veneer of sophistication to the proceedings.

The courses are beautiful, the fairways mown in patterns, the greens perfectly smooth, the bunkers brimming with white sand.
Flowers bloom. Birds are constantly chirping. None of that damned “CAW-CAWing” I hear in my yard at 6:00
A.M
. either, just little tweets and chirps. You can hear the birds so clearly it seems they’re either wearing lavalier microphones,
or somebody in the truck is “sweetening” the sound with birdcall tapes.

Even the applause, which comes after almost every shot, is soothing, sounding muffled somehow.

Occasionally you hear piano music in the background. Now, where the hell is the piano? Where I play, on ratty public courses,
it’s more like Dr. Dre on a boom box.

The game of grace and beauty being played before these announcers lends itself to such genteel coverage. This game is more
akin to ballet than the break dancing in water skis style that I play.

These pros hit with beauty and grace, but also with the precision of machines. I recall attending a PGA Seniors tournament,
where I stood behind a green looking back down the fairway at tiny, barely perceptible figures hitting golf balls that seconds
later somehow plunked down on the green and bit down still. Astonishing! These guys know they hit a certain iron 192 yards—no
more, no less—and by God they do, shot after shot. My best guess for that same iron would be, oooh, let’s see, somewhere between
35 and 125 yards. If I was in the artillery, I’d wipe out every soldier on our side with “friendly fire.”

I see the pros lining up their approach shots on 13 at Valhalla, where their target is a green raised up twenty-two feet and
sitting on a wall of rocks surrounded by a moat. And I watch them lofting the balls, and I see the balls gently landing and
staying still right in the center of the green. And in that same instant I picture myself hitting a low line drive into that
rock wall, and I hear the awful crack, and see the ball ricocheting into the water. I even see my next shot, where the ball
overshoots the green and plops down in the water on the other side. I see that all very clearly.

They play a different game. These players don’t do doglegs. On the first hole, Tiger doesn’t go down the fairway with his
first shot, then turn left and go down the dogleg with his second. He cuts the corner, hitting it over the trees so he winds
up in the same place after one shot that he would have been after two. If I were playing against him, I would call that cheating.
But, then, I wouldn’t be, now would I?

A graphic comes on the screen showing Tiger’s drives are averaging 308.5 yards. I think they must mean
feet
, because that would work out to about 100 yards, which is a nice drive, in my opinion. The graphic says he hits his drives
with 82.1 percent accuracy, whatever that means. Everything is quantified: He has a 61 percent sand save average. I don’t
even like to keep score.

Scott Dunlap is Tiger’s partner! How’d you like to be Tiger’s partner, with thousands of people watching you and millions
more on TV and you’d never ever won a tournament? Somehow, however, he manages to stay with Tiger the entire round, matching
him stroke for stroke, and the announcers refer to him as “the improbable Scott Dunlap.” He finishes the day just one stroke
behind Tiger, but when I tuned in for the next day of the tournament Scott wasn’t listed anywhere among the leaders, and most
of them were far, far behind Tiger. Where was Scott? Probably in a Home For Tiger’s Partners now, finger-painting and banging
his head against the wall.

Davis Love’s shot hits a woman. Just like me. Fred Funk hits the crowd. I always thought I’d hate having a gallery of people
watch me play, until I realized they act as a human backstop. You hit the ball as hard as you wish and it never goes past
the green, it hits people. On the other hand, however, the gallery always goes “awwwwww!” when the pros miss a putt, which
is something you say to a baby when it cries, and hearing that repeatedly would definitely make me start flailing away at
them with my putter. It would get ugly.

The pros are prima donnas, wimpier than you and I. If a camera clicks when Tiger’s lining up his putt, his caddie goes after
the guy. Caddies do everything for the pro golfers. They tell them the distance to the pin, windage, suggest what club to
use and which way the ball will break on the putt. Would that help me? I’m not sure if any of this information is pertinent
to me. I swing, the ball goes … somewhere. I do notice that Tiger puts his glove in his right rear pocket when he’s putting.
I’m definitely going to start doing that.

Tiger pays his caddie, Steve Williams, $600,000 a year or more. Must be a pretty heavy bag. That seems like a lot, except
Tiger will be making $900,000 today plus some multiple of that for wearing those Nike swooshes all over his clothes. I figured
that the word “Buick” on Tiger’s bag probably pays Steve’s salary. I figured wrong. Buick is paying Tiger $10 to $15 million
over two years to put their name on his bag. Tiger is making $1,742 for every stroke this season. He should swing more, like
me.

I snooze … and awaken to see Tiger holding another trophy and kissing it. The man may be at risk from silver polish poisoning.

I
am starting to pick up the language of Golf—and a colorful language it is. Let’s try to translate that earlier baffling conversation,
shall we?

“I was up and down, but she lipped out on me.”

“Up and down”
is a phrase meaning to hit an approach shot onto the green and then 1-putt. Good.

“Lipped out”?
means the putt caught the lip of the cup, twirled a bit, then came out. Bad.

“Chili-dipped the son-of-a-bitch, didn’t catch the apron, and rolled right into the pot bunker.”

“Chili-dipped”
means to hit too much of the ground behind the ball, also known as hitting it “fat” or “sclaffing.”

“Apron”
is the short grass, or “frog hair,” surrounding the green, you know, like an apron.

“Pot bunker”
is a deep pot-shaped sand trap.

You see? Now you are learning it, too. Here are some common words and useful phrases for newcomers to the world of Golf:

“Son-of-a-bitch”
—is commonly heard on the links, with the truncated “Son-of-a …” version used at more genteel private golf clubs to avoid
receiving letters of reprimand.

“It’s still your turn”
—an annoying phrase you’ll be hearing a lot, because the player farthest from the hole always hits next, and often even after
3 consecutive shots “it’s still your turn.”

“Away”
—means farthest from the hole. Where you are. Common use: “You’re away again, Bill.” Common response: “I know, a—hole!”

“Addressing the ball”
—for real golfers this means taking a stance to hit the ball, but you’ll often hear beginners addressing their balls: “You
miserable little s%&#!” or “F#@% you!”

“Fore!”
—you’ll be yelling this constantly. It’s a warning cry that your ball is about to strike someone. You always shout it too
late, and anyway, what are they supposed to do?

“Gimmee”
—a putt so short your partners say you don’t even have to take it. Mafia chieftain Sam “Momo” Giancana was frequently afforded
gimmees on puts of forty and fifty feet.

“Irish gimmee”
—most gimmees are a few inches, this one is anything within a flag stick’s length of the cup. “Woods” are clubs to golfers,
but to us, woods are where we play.