Miracle at Augusta

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.

“ON THE FIRST TEE…
from Winnetka, Illinois…the 1996 winner of the U.S. Senior Open…Travis McKinley.”

I've never set foot on Augusta National before, let alone teed it up, so for thirty seconds, I just stand there shivering and let the polite applause of the patrons wash over me. Okay, “wash over me” is a bit of a stretch. How about “trickle over me”? Could you live with that? While the clapping subsides, I close my eyes and picture the shot I need to hit.

Because my grandfather gave me a book on the Masters one Christmas, I happen to know that Augusta was originally a nursery owned by a Belgian horticulturist named Prosper Berckmans. That's why all the holes are named after trees. The first, Tea Olive, is a 445-yard par 4, which doglegs right and calls for a high fade to the right side of the fairway some 290 yards away. When the image of the shot is locked in my mind, I step up and launch my drive into the December gloom, aiming twenty feet right of the big wire net that keeps balls from flying into the parking lot of the CVS next door.

I'm happy to report that my tee shot comes off pretty much as planned, leaving me 165 yards to an uphill green, so I swap the driver for my 7-iron and aim for the right rear corner of it. When the ball lands softly and trickles—like that applause—toward the pin, tucked up front, just beyond the trap, I give myself the eight-footer for birdie and move on to the par-five 2nd, aka Pink Dogwood.

My body may be fifteen miles outside of Chicago, freezing its nearly fifty-two-year-old ass off at the Big Oaks Driving Range on Route 38, but in my mind it's in Georgia in April, and those color-corrected dogwoods and azaleas have old Prosper turning over in his grave.

The start of my third year on the Senior Tour is a month away. As some of you may recall, my rookie year went rather well—unkind sportswriters leaned heavily on the word
miraculous
—culminating in my win at Pebble, which the starter was gracious enough to mention. My sophomore season, however, was lackluster at best, so I'm doing everything I can to prepare for '98, particularly since the shelf life out here is so brief, what with me growing more decrepit by the day and fresh young blood bubbling up from below. If you think it's hard fighting for scraps left by Hale Irwin, Gil Morgan, and Hank Peters, and believe me it is, imagine what it will be like next year when Tom Watson, Lanny Wadkins, and Tom Kite flash their birth certificates and step up to the senior buffet.

I don't even want to think about that. I just know that this year is huge, and since the end of October, I've been at Big Oaks every afternoon, fifth stall from the left, chewing up these nasty rubber mats and whatever cartilage is left in my right elbow.

To relieve the tedium, I've been playing virtual rounds at Augusta, hole by hole, Flowering Crab Apple to Carolina Cherry, seeing if I can find the correct half of the fairway and then land it on the correct quadrant of the green. Along the way, I try to keep my scuffed range rock from rolling back into Rae's Creek or finding the pine straw or nestling up behind the Eisenhower tree. It keeps me sharper than mindlessly banging balls.

For the front side, the nine they never put on the air, I make do with the pictures and descriptions in my old Christmas present, but for the back nine, I have thirty years of TV viewing to draw on. When I get to 12, Golden Bell, that nasty par 3 at the end of Amen Corner, I even know which tree Byron Nelson used to look at to decipher the swirling winds. Instead, I gaze roofward and see if there are any plastic bags whipping around in the currents. My favorite holes are 13 and 15, Azalea and Firethorn, the two short par 5s that have been the scene of so much drama. In the last couple of weeks, I've even been working on a high draw to keep it on those slippery greens, which, in my mind at least, are never less than 13.2 on the Stimpmeter.

Today, at 15, I catch it solid off the tee, and since I get even more roll off the Big Oaks cement than I would from the hard, sloping fairways at Augusta, I've only got 215 left, a perfect yardage for my new pet draw. As I prepare to launch the ball into the azure sky, there's a bang behind my left shoulder. It sounds like a shotgun blast but is in fact a shank from Esther Lee, the housewife in the stall to my left.

“Sorry about that,” says Esther, raising a hand in a pink glove.

“No problem,” I reply. But the reverie is broken, and suddenly it's a lot harder to pretend I'm in Georgia and not a drafty warehouse in suburban Chicago. After a couple more swings, I pack it in for the day and deposit my bag in the closet behind the front desk, where the manager has been nice enough to let me keep it, seeing as I'm here five days a week.

Then I drive the nine miles to Winnetka and get in line with all the other trophy housewives and husbands and wait for Noah to be released from his kindergarten classroom at Belltown Grammar. Elizabeth and Simon were already well grown when Noah made a surprise appearance nearly six years ago, and as I watch the little gink shuffle out of the back, his backpack hanging off one shoulder and his baseball cap turned backwards, I appreciate how lucky Sarah and I are.

“Hey, Noah, how was your day?”

“Not bad. How about you? How was Augusta?”

“Shot thirty-two on the front.”

“Give yourself a lot of eight-footers?”

“You know what I say, Noah?”

“Charity begins at home.”

“Exactly.”

Our house is less than five minutes from the school, and seeing Sarah's Cherokee in the driveway makes us both uneasy.

“Mom's home early.”

“Yeah.”

When we get out of the car, Sarah is standing in the doorway. “I have some sad news to share,” she tells us. “Pop died.”

AT 2 P.M. THE FOLLOWING
Saturday, some two hundred of my grandfather's friends convene in the parking lot of the Creekview Country Club and follow him up the frozen first fairway. By now, Pop has been reduced to the ashes that fill the Tupperware container head pro Matt Higgins holds in the crook of his left arm. When Higgins reaches the first green, he pulls off one glove, pries open the lid, and sprinkles a bit of Edwin Joseph McKinley over the portion of the green where the hole is generally cut.

As the gray soot rains down on the winter green, Higgins utters the signature words with which my grandfather started a thousand rounds: “No gimmes. No mulligans. No bullshit. Let's play golf,” and the ragtag army, some of whom have been forced by age and infirmity to ride golf carts with home health aides, hurl it back in unison like a battle cry: “No gimmes! No mulligans! No bullshit! Let's play golf!” Then Higgins hands Pop off like a football, and another volunteer takes the lead.

It's an impressive turnout, particularly considering it's fourteen degrees. Included in the boisterous band of mourners is my best friend and former caddy, Earl Fielder, who came up last night from North Carolina. No doubt my grandfather would be touched to see so many dear friends. Pop, who hated slow play, would also appreciate the brisk pace. In forty minutes, the procession covers thirteen holes, and with five left, the next two generations of McKinleys take over.

Simon, a freshman at Northwestern, leads us up the par-five 14th. He carries his grandfather over the longest hole on the course, then turns him over to his proud younger brother, and now the chilled brigade, many of whom have been fortifying themselves with frequent nips from their pocket flasks, fall in line behind a five-year-old. After Noah guides them to the 15th green, they take particular delight in the unlikely spectacle of a kindergartner leading them through another chorus of “No gimmes! No mulligans! No bullshit! Let's play golf!”

But it's the McKinley ladies, Elizabeth and Sarah, who get to me the most on this freezing afternoon. Elizabeth, because she is surely the most devastatingly beautiful radiology resident in North America, and Sarah…because she's Sarah. Sarah walks off 17, she hands off Pop with a kiss, and it's up to me to carry him home.

Affection for my grandfather is inscribed on every face in this unholy procession, many of whom are by now overfortified, but for me the affection and appreciation are overwhelming. Without my grandfather, I have no idea where, or even who, I'd be. I wouldn't be a golfer. When I was eight, he put a cut-down 7-iron in my hand, and for the last forty-three years or so he's been my only coach. And when Leo Burnett tossed me to the curb a couple of Christmases ago, he was the only one who didn't think my grandiose scheme of qualifying for the Senior Tour was insane. I've been so dependent on his guidance, on and off the course, for so long, I'm more than a little worried how I'll do without it.

I carry Pop the final third of a mile and sprinkle what's left on 18, banging the bottom of the container like a bongo to make sure every last particle of the beloved man has been set free.

“No gimmes! No mulligans! No bullshit!” I shout. “Let's have a drink!”

“I think he means an indoor drink,” says an old friend, turning over an empty flask, and we file into the clubhouse for one last round or three on Edwin Joseph McKinley.

AFTER EARL HAS RUN
a gauntlet of McKinley hugs and kisses and accepted pats on the back and best wishes from a dozen of my grandfather's starstruck old cronies, I walk my friend from the clubhouse into the freezing Midwestern night. At the end of the flagstone path, a cab is waiting to take him to the airport, and as we approach the car, I realize, and not for the first time, that I also owe a great debt to Earl, without whom I never could have succeeded in my rookie year, and although I feel the urge to finally thank him in clear and explicit English, I fall short, in the finest male tradition.

“Thanks again for making the trip” is about the best I can manage. “As you can see, it meant a lot to all of us.”

“It meant a lot to me too, Travis. When you kick off, I'll come to yours, too.”

“Promise?”

“Yup.”

“Thanks.”

“See you in a couple of weeks, then. You ready?”

“I better be. I've been working my ass off.”

“Good. Because I don't want to embarrass you out there.”

When we've exchanged as much of this as we can stomach, Earl gets into the car, and I walk to the back of the lot and get into mine. After letting the heat run for five minutes, I pull up in front, where Sarah, Elizabeth, Simon, and Noah pile in.

Creekview Country Club is an older course and, like a lot of older courses, is in the center of a neighborhood that has deteriorated over the decades. On the way back to the highway we pass a series of strip malls, lined with liquor stores, pawnshops, and mini-marts that seem particularly threadbare on such a raw night.

In the last year and a half, I've done pretty well, almost embarrassingly so, and my one indulgence has been this Mercedes sedan. Although I've had it six months, I often still feel uncomfortable behind the wheel, an impostor, but the one time I never regret the purchase is on a night like this, when it's stuffed with McKinleys and I feel that, at least for the duration of the trip, the tanklike vehicle is protecting them all, not just from the wind and cold but from all life's other harsh realities as well.

Plus, as Noah often points out, it's kind of swank.

Up ahead, at the light, a broken-down old van sits on the side of the road. As I wait for the light to turn, a middle-aged woman climbs out of the driver's seat to gauge the extent of her problem, and when she walks in front of her car, we make eye contact. I know I should pull over, but the lateness of the hour and the sketchiness of the neighborhood lobby against it, and before I can offer a convincing counterargument, the light turns green and the impregnable Benz rolls on.

Two stoplights later, my conscience gets the better of me, or maybe I just feel the heat of Elizabeth's gaze on the back of my neck. “I'm going to circle back,” I say, more to myself than anyone else. “See if I can help her.”

It's a four-lane road and half a mile before I can make a U-turn. By the time I get back to the woman and her van, I'm relieved to see that a second just as beat-up car has pulled over and parked behind it, and an older man, African-American with a gray beard, is wrestling a spare tire onto the right rear wheel. I roll down the window and the cold air rushes in.

“Need any help?”

“That's okay,” says the man, taking in the well-dressed family from below.

“Sure?”

“It's just a flat tire, sport. We got it covered.”