Sports in Hell (8 page)

Driving into town, I couldn't help but shudder at the steep face of Mt. Socorro. At a BBQ that night, the realization that I was about to do something very, very dumb started to sink in.

A man so weathered by the sun you could screw his hat on came up and asked me: “You bring tweezers?”

“Tweezers?” I said.

“Yeah, tweezers. For when you fall in the cactus. There was a cameraman
here once, fell right in a big cactus, and the reporter had to pull like 200 needles out of his butt. Gotta have tweezers.”

No, no tweezers, I said.

A woman in a cowboy hat said, “You got new jeans?”

“New jeans?” I said.

“Yeah, 'cause of the horseflies. Some of 'em are so big they'll bite through your jeans. Hurts.”

No, no new jeans, I said.

“I did it once,” said a guy named Rich, sucking on a Bud. “By the time I got to the bottom, I couldn't walk.”

Oh.

“Always follow your spotters,” said Mike Stanley, the legend of the Baca, who won it all eighteen times he played it.

“Follow your spotters?” I asked.

“Yeah, that way, the snakes'll bite them first.”

There was a long argument about whether I'd need to worry about all that since I probably wouldn't make it down in the first place. They told the story of the German TV guy who had to be carried off the mountain—fireman's style—by Anita, the 120-pound safety expert. There were reports that he was weeping.

Mike warned me not to lose a ball (one-stroke penalty) and to “be real quiet after you hit it. Don't call them on your walkie-talkie right away. Let them listen for the ball.”

Walkie-talkie?

I was also warned against (a) contracting the hanta virus (mice), (b) severe dehydration, (c) getting lost, (d) falling into old mine shafts, (e) mountain lions, and, most of all, (f) letting your spotters get drunk the night before. I looked over at two of the three spotters I'd been assigned—Matt Majors and Jason Metzger, two young NMT explosion engineers—and they were well on the way to winning the blottery.

“We got your back, big guy!” one hollered. The other whooped with half his mouth, the other half occupied by his Budweiser.

Uh-oh.

•   •   •

At 5:15 the next morning, I was picked up at my hotel by my only sober spotter, demolition expert Tony Zimmerly.

“You got Styrofoam?” he asked.

No.

“Or a piece of carpet?”

No.

Turns out you need Styrofoam and carpet to tee your ball up so you can hit it, since you're allowed to re-tee it anywhere within fifty feet of where you find it—no closer to the hole, which you can't see anyway.

At the range, where we were allowed to hit a few balls, I saw my two other spotters. They were still drunk. Their eyes were mere suggestions of eyes. They smelled like closing time.

Matt? I asked. Jason?

Apparently the volume in my voice was too much for Matt. The man was still drunk.

“Uh, yeah,” Matt said. “We stayed until four at the bar, then everybody came to my house. Actually, uh, they're still there.” They would be my eyes on this hellahole, even though those eyes would be bright red.

A big-shouldered, happy-faced guy in camo's came over, carrying a bunch of carpet pieces and Styrofoam.

“Heard you might need these,” he said. “Name's Dennis. I'm dumb enough to play in this thing, too.”

I took them, gratefully, and made up my mind to stay near him. Not because he was friendly but because he looked big enough to give me a piggyback if my legs staged a work stoppage.

One by one, I met the entire field of eight:

1. Primo Pound, thinnish. Really, that was his name:
Primo Pound
. Tell me that's not a great porn name. He was about fifty, gray hair, wearing a pair of gloves. “You'll want them once you fall,” he said.
He also played his spotters smart. He brought a birdwatcher and a hunter. Is that better than two drunk guys?

2. Scott Jameson, a goateed grocer. I'd seen better swings on epileptics.

3. Mic Hynekammp, thirtysomething, ran the brewery/restaurant in town. He was dressed like he was going on Golfward Bound. Looked like he could hike from here to Switzerland. Golf? Not so much.

4. Bill Hall, fifty-seven, but in good shape. Decent swing, did it on a dare.

5. Chris Ritter, fifty-five, Bill's buddy, real estate broker from Albuquerque. Both these guys looked like good sticks. Both brought their wives as spotters and nobody else. Guys like that hit it straight. Stiff competition for me in the Best Middle-Aged Guy Award.

6. Caleb Gonzales, about twenty-five, good swing, good spotters, including his brother. By far the favorite. Won it the last two years. A slice of cheesecake in Dan Ackroyd's fridge had a better chance than I did against this kid.

7. Dennis Walsh, maybe thirty, family man and loaner of Styrofoam. People were picking him for second.

8. Yours truly, feeling a little nauseous.

    “Do you want your own EMT?” Tony asked. I looked at him. He was not kidding. Not a good sign.

Everybody had three clubs. I had four—a driver, a 5-iron, an 8-iron, and a wedge. “You won't need all those,” Primo told me. He
was holding a driver and an 8-iron and that was it. He said that one time, a teenage girl did it with only an 8-iron.

“How'd she do?” I asked.

“She had to be taken down the mountain on a rope.”

Anita, our safety coordinator, got us together and basically said we all had the intelligence of single-celled organisms for trying it. She warned us against just about everything under the sun, especially playing a three-mile golf hole down a mountain full of explosives. I asked Anita to tell me about the time she, a 120-pound skinny safety tech, carried a full-grown man down the mountain.

“Which time?” she replied.

We all piled in eight Suburbans and started the drive up. We passed “the chicken gun,” the legendary weapon that fired chickens into the cockpit of a Boeing 727 to see whether a flying bird could crack an airplane window. (Frozen, yes. Thawed, no.) We passed airplane fuselages, old boats, all flavors of abandoned cars, small buildings, a helicopter, and an ersatz hardware store, all in the middle of nowhere. It was like driving through Hiroshima the day before the A-bomb hit. Everything we saw was doomed.

They dumped us out and had us hike a half hour to the first tee. That's when I knew one of the two older guys, Chris Ritter, was in trouble. He barely got to the top. He was exhausted.

The view was thrilling. The idea that we were going to play down it? A little terrifying. There was a small wooden platform hanging off a ledge somebody had built.

“What's that?” I asked.

“That's the tee,” Dennis answered.

That thing? It was hardly big enough to pee off. It couldn't have been four feet wide and three feet long. You couldn't knit off it, much less hit a full driver.

Dennis handed me two crappy balls and took me to the other side of the pinnacle, where a couple of guys were hitting practice shots that would land God knows where. I'd never seen a golf ball fly that far, and I've covered John Daly. “You'll never hit a golf ball
farther in your life,” Mike Stanley had said the night before. But he said if you didn't hit it high on your first shot, you were going to give away hundreds and hundreds of yards. You could be on that mountain all day. I completely topped the first practice one and thinned the next one. I saw a rope in my future.

“What's par?” I asked.

Under the old rules—where you had to hit it where it lied and you played to a normal, tiny golf hole—par was about 50. Now, with the fifty-foot re-tee rule and the thirty-foot-wide hole with a twenty-foot-high flagpole, it seemed to be about 16, which happened to be the same exact par on any hole played by the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

Soon they were handing me ten yellow balls marked with a big “2” and the year “07” and saying, “OK, let's start.” It was 6:30
A.M
. and it had to be eighty degrees already. Let the story begin: Into Thin Error.

Primo went first, naturally, because his name is Primo. When it was my turn, I was shaking. The platform seemed even tinier as I stuck my tee through my piece of carpet and into my piece of Styrofoam. I radioed my spotters.

“You guys ready?”

Only Tony answered. Perhaps Jason and Matt had found a way to suck cactus juice.

I set my borrowed driver up to it—you don't think I was going to wreck my
own
clubs?—and made possibly the most in-she-barrel swing of my life. My head and hips hardly moved forward an inch. As a result, it went straight as Amy Grant and really high. Why don't I do this all the time?

Can I just tell you how fun it is to hit a golf ball 800 yards? I felt like Tiger Woods after a trip to A-Rod's medicine cabinet.

As predicted, Caleb hit the best drive—off a tee stuck in a broom. Dennis' was long, too. The two Albuquerque guys seemed worn out already and hit lukewarm shots, though they didn't fall off the platform. The grocer just cold-topped one. It dribbled fifty yards, all downhill, until it hit a rock. It meant his spotters were
going to have to climb all the way up to it—a good twenty-minute hike, at least. And it meant he'd surrendered 750 yards. Sucked to be him, I guessed.

And then it was time to go.

Chris Ritter turned to his spotter and said, “Where's the path?”

“No path, man,” the guy said. “You just go straight down.”

He had a look on his face like he'd just seen Keith Richards naked.

I couldn't blame him. The mountain was all rocks and razor-back ridges and the promise of a big hard sun coming soon.

Those first few steps were all loose shale, so people were already falling on their butts. The only way to get down it at all with any speed—and speed was important, since the temperature was supposed to hit 103 by noon—was to ski down it. You know when you're skiing and you get stuck on a really steep cliff face and all you can do is make hockey stops, left then right, until you can finally point your skis downhill again? That's all I did. Hockey stops straight down for 400 yards, with my Nikes substituting for Rossignols.

It was about then I met my official scorer, who somehow was getting down it without a problem. She was an engineer named Aubrey Farmer, the girlfriend of one of Dennis' spotters. She looked about twenty-five, athletic, brunette, in hiking boots. She liked mountains, golf, and blowing things up for a living. In other words, the perfect woman.

Suddenly, we heard a “fore!” and we looked backwards 200 yards, where the grocer was topping it again. After a few minutes, he found it again and yelled, “Heads up!” Only this time, we just kept walking. We were right in his line, so I knew we were safe. This time he shanked it right. His spotters' heads sagged. There was only one channel for all eight teams, so you could hear everybody else's problems. “Uh, that one wasn't good,” the grocer said over the radio. The last we heard him, they were still looking for it, which meant he'd be hitting five and we still hadn't hit our second yet.

It'd been a good half hour since I hit my first shot, so by the time I got to the ball, only Tony remained. The liver demolition boys had set off on another half-hour hike farther down—negotiating ledges and steep drop-offs—to the place where they guessed I might hit it. And when I found it, I had a new problem. When you're on a mountain face, it's almost impossible to find a place flat enough where you can swing the club without hitting a rock or a cactus or falling forward to your death. At last I whacked it again and sliced it right. And about three minutes later, Matt radioed: “Dude, you won't BELIEVE where your ball is!”

When I got there, they were pointing at something under a bush that grew out of a rock. Then I saw it. My ball was encircled by a rattlesnake. Just the body. The head and the tail were under the rock. Maybe it decided my ball was an egg? From the girth of it, we all decided it was big, maybe five feet. I stood ten feet away, happy to let it hatch and raise my golf ball for the rest of its life. Good luck to them both. Matt, though, kept taking my 5-iron and poking at it. I ask you, in the name of all that is holy, why would he do that?

“Hey! Knock that off!” I whispered in a panic.

“We gotta get the ball,” he whispered back. “One-shot penalty.”

I looked at Aubrey to see if this was true, even in this case. She nodded.

Was that something you wanted on your tombstone?
Died saving a stroke
.

And now comes a sentence never heard on
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom: Matt finally nudged the golf ball away from the venomous reptile and threw it to me
. I switched to a different one. Nobody likes snake juice on their golf ball.

Off they hiked again. I waited twenty minutes. It was just such an odd way to spend a day—like the Von Trapp family playing golf as they escaped through Switzerland. Tony said the third shot was crucial because if you mauled it, you could get over a cliff and then it could run down the mountain like snowmelt.

Tony went about 200 yards down from me and told me to hit it
right over his head. Hell, it was straight downhill. I could FALL that far. I hit a screamer—an absolute rocket-propelled grenade—that looked like it might part Tony's hair. It sailed right over him and was still howling as it crossed the cliff. My primo pound of the day.

On the radio, there was a “Crap.”

Crap?

“We didn't have anybody down there,” Tony said.

It took me a good forty minutes to get down this time—sometimes going belly-down cliffs and feeling my way for footholds—all while holding golf clubs. Aubrey, though, looked like she was maybe shopping at Nordstrom's. Who
was
this girl?

When we got there nobody could find it. We looked for fifteen minutes and finally gave up. A lost ball already. My next shot would be my fifth. Winning was out of the question. Surviving was the best a guy could hope for now. I sat on a rock ledge to take a rest while the spotters scampered down to get in position again. I was just sitting there—swear to God—when I looked behind me and there it was, sitting under a ledge. As though it had decided to just get some shade and chill. I pointed wordlessly to Aubrey and then to the ball. Seeing as how there is no five-minute rule, she allowed it.