Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (5 page)

TEA TIME ON THE GREEN: OR DOUBLE-BOGEY AT 8:00

“A game whereby one attempts to put a very small ball

into an even smaller hole with tools

singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”

—Winston Churchill

A couple of years ago, I took up golf, more or less seriously. Well, at least more or less regularly. As a youngster in West Texas, I had played on the hardscrabble courses of our county country club (I won’t ponder the absurdity of a mostly rural county having a “country club”), but I’d found the game to be more hot and bothersome than anything like fun. Fairways consisted mostly of pounded farmland covered by a bad comb-over of weeds punctuated by rocks; greens more closely resembled worn patches of shag carpeting, haphazardly trimmed; roughs in that rustic geography consisted of mesquite thickets where rattlesnakes and devil’s claw flourished; and we thought “water hazard” meant a hose the greensman forgot to roll up. There were no sand traps; they would have been redundant, as the entire county sat on top of a gritty bed of hard-packed, drought-toughened red sand. The highlight of the whole outing in those days, actually, was a chance to hang around the pool and ogle the girls afterward.

In truth, I’ve never been much of an athlete. I played some beer-league softball in college, but only for the beer and to ogle the girls in the stands. I’d bowled for a while until one of my league teammates dropped a ball on my toe and terminated my enthusiasm as well as my toenail. There was a decade or so when I dedicated myself to tennis, and I actually was decent at it; but then my knees turned into a half-pound of cracked cookies, thereby thwarting any ambitions I might have developed toward doing anything in the way of sports that required more effort than it took to watch a few innings of baseball on television. Football was never in my league, and I was too short, fat, and white for basketball to hold any temptation whatsoever. I sort of liked pool-shooting—or what is mistakenly called “billiards” in today’s parlance—but mostly in bars where I could drink beer and ogle the girls. For the most part, my idea of athletics was centered on lethargy, with a healthy dose of indolence to sustain it.

But a few years ago, I was summoned to meet some film folks in Tucson, Arizona. The idea was that they might make a movie out of one of my novels. I wasn’t truly hopeful, but they were paying for the trip, so I figured I might as well go along. After all, I played the Lotto, and the odds against success in Hollywood were about the same. The woman who picked me up at the airport to ferry me to my hotel casually noted that our “tea-time” had been moved up to eight a.m. the following morning.

I wanted to be accommodating and show I had a sense of humor, so I replied, “That’s okay. I prefer coffee.”

She gave me a curious look. “No, I mean tee-time. Our tee-off time is now at eight o’clock.”

“Golf?” I asked, now understanding and totally horrified. “You expect me to
play golf!”

Indeed she did. I was added to a foursome that included three apparently dedicated duffers. They arrived well-equipped with expensive graphite clubs and matching bags and were all decked out in their athletic sartorial best for a full round on one of the nicer desert courses of the Southwest.

To say the least, this was disheartening. I was standing there beside a bag of mismatched, rented clubs, wearing cut-off jeans, a faded Texas Rangers tee-shirt I’d brought to sleep in, and a pair of dilapidated sneakers patched with duct tape. I made a sorry complement to the group. I didn’t even know my handicap, except insofar as my fundamental ability went. They immediately demonstrated, though, that fashion didn’t necessarily ensure ability. Far from shooting a fantastic round to match their duds, none of the three broke 100. I would have felt better about the whole outing, but I didn’t break 120, myself, even with extra mulligans, generous gimmes, and liberal applications of the “foot wedge” when no one was looking.

But in spite of the embarrassment, which they were kind enough to laugh off, I made an odd discovery. I enjoyed myself. I had a blast, in fact. I totally forgot that it was unlikely that they would make my work into a film—and they didn’t. Still, over drinks in the “Nineteenth Hole,” we took time out from ogling the girls and watched the television screen in amazement as a (then) relatively unknown young pro named Tiger Woods made a hole in one. I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get home, drag out my old set of sticks and get out to the links.

###

Now, over the years, I’d had brief spates of insanity when I decided to take up golf and find out what all the excitement was about. My father-in-law is a pretty good golfer. I think, in fact, that at one point in his life, he shot scratch golf and was a better-than-average amateur. Sometime after my wife and I married, in a misguided inspiration to find something that he and I could do together, I bought a set of clubs from a garage sale. It consisted of some heavy Wilson irons and (real wood) woods, and I had dutifully taken them out and tried to use them to build closer bridges to the family. It hadn’t worked. Even when I applied myself, I was unable to shoot anything like a decent score. It was also somewhat humiliating to be thoroughly whipped by a man twenty-nine years older than I, especially when he only carried a 5-iron, a pitching wedge, and a putter onto the course and explained that it was one of the easier tracks in the area. He usually played it “just to limber up.”

Part of the trouble was where I was living and trying to relearn how to play at the time. I was in Beaumont, down in deep East Texas, a region of the country where (no kidding) stainless steel is commonly known to rust. Courses down there don’t have “rough”; they have swamp. Southeast Texas swamps are treacherous, as they often appear to be dry and solid until you put a foot into them. Then you sink to your knees in slimy muck and watch helplessly while poisonous amphibians swirl around your legs and people around you start yelling for someone to go fetch a boat and some rope. On some area courses, alligators are occasional hazards; more than one potential birdie putt has been left lying next to a scaly reptile that decided that a par-three green looked like a comfy place for a nap in the sun.

Southeast Texas golf courses are aswarm with thus far unclassified but menacing fauna. On one occasion, I actually struck a ball that landed in the middle of the fairway, when some fairly large, furry, sharp-fanged creature scurried out of the forest, gave me a snarl, grabbed my ball in its teeth, then raced off into the dense greenery. I didn’t pursue. I also didn’t take a penalty stroke. Similar hazards can be encountered on courses nearer the brinier bayous, where eel, gar, and other vicious water monsters lurk to attack unsuspecting ball-hawkers. Other problems, not the least of which are mosquitoes the size of attack helicopters and the occasional backwoods poacher mistaking a duffer for a deer, are found on many back nines in southeast Texas. Golf was not designed for such environments.

My enthusiasm came and went in waves, even so. At one point, during a tour of Scotland, I determined to immerse myself in the history of the game by playing a round on the “Auld Course” at St. Andrews. I rented clubs and shoes, bought balls and even donned a stout rubberized raincoat. You see, the course at St. Andrews, where, traditionally, the whole absurdity began, is not exactly what one might expect, even in early July, the time of my visit. The Scots’ idea of a water hazard is the North Sea.

That July morning, the wind off the water was coming in at a comparatively light thirty-five miles an hour. The temperatures were in the low forties, and waves crashing on the Scottish coast combined with a thick mist blowing in off the ocean to insure that any striker was thoroughly soaked before he got off the first tee. St. Andrews is a nine-hole course, which one plays twice from different tips. After a mere five holes, my glasses were frosted over, and I was shivering too hard to see the ball, let alone hit it. I also discovered that sand traps there were more like bomb shelters, and there was something about a thoroughly soused green that impeded a true roll toward the cup. Somewhere on the sixth fairway, I drove a seven-iron shot directly toward the flag, but after about forty yards up into the wind, it took a U-turn and landed behind me in the wet middle of what would have been a lake on the West Texas courses of my youth; in Scotland it didn’t qualify as occasional water.

On the seventh hole, I finally surrendered to the elements and trudged off the course; I was greeted by a local hacker, replete with plus-fours, argyle socks, pom-pom-topped tam, and nothing heavier than a sleeveless sweater against the deluge. He smilingly assured me, “This is as bonny a day for a rund of gorf as I’ve seen in a month of Sundays.” I determined that I was not cut out for Scottish golf any more than I was for the swamp golf of southeast Texas. At least the whiskey in the club house was warming, even if there were no lasses to ogle.

Later on, I moved to North Texas, where golf is affectionately referred to as “pasture pool.” Most municipal courses are constructed on land that only a few short decades ago was home to cotton, corn, or beef cattle; or possibly, it was a city dump during some earlier era. The few water hazards are almost completely man-made. Out-of-bounds markers are sometimes constructed of electrified barbed wire, and it’s not uncommon to hit a ball into a neighboring farmer’s stand of alfalfa. Sand for the bunkers has to be imported, and it’s usually packed tighter than concrete—if sprinklers haven’t turned them to mud—and trees are, well, little more than thorny bushes rising from large patches of poison ivy. Playing golf there, particularly in the heat of summer, is more a matter of endurance than sport. With temperatures reaching better than 100 degrees on an average July afternoon, heat exhaustion is a fair possibility, even if one is riding in a cart.

Of course, Texas does boast some of the best maintained and most beautiful golf courses in the world. But this is not where daily duffers like myself play. Rather than being partnered with designer-clothing-attired strikers with state-of-the-art equipment that matches right down to their ball-markers, one is more likely to be paired off with a snuff-dipping good ol’ boy in a straw hat, bib overalls and work boots who only carries five clubs with mismatched grips in a homemade bag capacious enough to accommodate the better part of a six-pack. The odd thing is that he might shoot in the low seventies, even after he’s totally sloshed.

So, after all these miserable experiences, I gave up any notions of playing the game and began deriding it with a special form of contempt. It was a silly game, I explained to my links-enthused friends. “You hit the ball, then you chase it and hit it again, and the object is to knock the ball into a hole and lose it.” I added with conviction, “Golf is sort of like daydreaming without a satisfying fantasy.” Hence, I abandoned any notions of playing golf, except perhaps the miniature version I had to endure as part of children’s birthday parties. Then came Tucson.

###

My Arizona experience changed everything. I ignored the possible fact that the course I played was private, well-manicured, shadowed by gorgeous mountains, and actually had plush grass and fluffy sand in the bunkers, that the greens were carefully tended and even the fairway sod was soft enough to invite a divot. I imagined that the conditions would ultimately rise to match improvement, and I was determined to try to master the game on some level. For several years, I took lessons, practiced, and played at least once a week, with no noticeable improvement in my score, but with no diminishing of my enthusiasm. One definition of insanity, we are reminded, is to do the same thing over and over again, but to expect a different result each time. Golf, of course, is merely another version of that. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of self-imposed mental cruelty and confirmation of personal frustration and inferiority in our society. No matter how optimistically a round starts out, at some point before the eighteen are completed, most golfers are counting the remaining holes and thinking, “Just X more greens before this misery is ended.” Why anyone claims to enjoy golf is a complete mystery to me. I can think of few endeavors in life, except maybe sex, where failure evokes such feelings of inadequacy and insecurity laced with frustration and self-loathing. Even a casual observer driving by a public course can witness otherwise rational and well-adjusted men slamming their clubs into the ground or some available tree, cursing the clouds in the sky, flinging balls or even entire bags of equipment into nearby ponds, and railing like lunatics and foaming at the mouth over a missed putt or duffed chip. Of course, dedicated players will tell you that all this is relaxing. They’ll say that it’s all about getting away from the job, out into the fresh air, and, of course,
exercising,
that mantra of today’s health-conscious middle-aged population.

But that’s a lie. Few foursomes, even on the most rustic of municipal courses, play a round without a minimum of two well-charged cell phones tucked away in their bags; and now, I read, newer model golf carts are coming equipped with power points to facilitate the use of laptops. The fresh air is genuine, of course, provided the course isn’t next to some traffic-choked freeway or buried in the middle of urban industrialization—which most are—but the notion that golf provides exercise is ridiculous. Even Mark Twain knew that. He called it “a three-mile walk, spoiled.”

Naturally, golf
should
be a “walking game.” A typical eighteen-hole round should take a player on a three-to-four-mile vigorous hike, depending on how straight he hits the ball. When the prospect of toting a twenty-five-to-thirty-pound bag is added, along with eighty-to-ninety (or maybe a hundred or more) swings of the club, it should be an exhausting but rejuvenating experience. And it would be, if golfers
walked.
But they don’t. They mostly ride around in electric carts. What with beverage service and drive-through windows at the club houses, there’s no reason to get out at the turn unless nature calls. Some golfers would never leave their carts on the entire round if the course would permit them to drive up onto the greens. In a way, a contemporary round is more like a game of motorized polo, with the players only having to leave their seats and walk no more than two or three steps to the ball when they hit an especially bad shot out of bounds, as if it’s some sort of punishment.