Walking with Jack (30 page)

I closed my eyes and waited for sleep to come. Outside the door to our room the Katrina mothers were rounding up their children to put them to bed. I thought about the missing fathers, and I wanted to believe that they were back in New Orleans busy rebuilding a life and they would summon their families someday. But maybe they had been defeated by the flood and by their fears, and they would spend the rest of their lives wondering what had become of the little children who had smiled at them, and the women they had taken into their arms with a certain measure of hope for what their future held. Hope that somehow gave way to fear. And what about the rest of us?
The vast army of fathers out there with our new fears of the next oil delivery, or the pink slip, or the hike in insurance premiums, or the doctor’s bill, or the bottom falling out of the stock market, or tuition bills we might not be able to pay. I suppose we are afraid of disappointing the people who depend on us, or being cut loose from what protected us for so long and ending up as haunted, weary travelers on a night journey, bound for where we might never be certain again.

I was looking forward to morning, when all these thoughts would fade away and it would just be Jack and me and the eighteen holes in front of us. I pictured the first dogleg at Cypresswood. On Thursday, in round one, maybe I will ask Jack to just hammer his drive straight up the middle and forget about trying to shave the corner. Make a few early pars, and then take our chances.

I e-mailed old Glen that I was frozen the whole way around today, as cold as I’d ever been caddying with him in Scotland. He replied with one line: “A caddie goes nowhere without his long johns.”

At five this morning it was clear and cold as I took my walk around the hotel and went over the course in my head. I know we have decent birdie chances on the 1st and 2nd holes, but after that, if the wind is up again today, we’ll be fighting to get on the greens in regulation. And I hope the battle doesn’t come down to number 17, the 328-yard, drivable par-4, with ponds on the right, left, and behind the green and a creek running in front. The hole reminds me of number 12 on the Old Course. A 316-yard par-4 with a stroke index of 3, marking it as one of the toughest holes on the course because of all the hidden bunkers. But if you hit an eight-iron off the tee, and another eight-iron
into the center of the green, you could take all the trouble out of play and be putting for a birdie. Yesterday when I asked Jack, “So, how do you play this hole if you have to make a par?” he didn’t budge from his earlier position. “You take driver, and you drive the fucking green,” he replied.

Not exactly music to a caddie’s ears.

I had a terrible golf dream in the night. I had become one of those overbearing fathers; I guess they call them helicopter parents because they’re constantly hovering over their kids’ lives. Anyway, I was caddying for Jack, and we were within shouting distance of making it onto the big tour, and I began cheating secretly. Suddenly these two officials from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club showed up at our hotel room, formidable fellows in double-breasted blue blazers with brass buttons. They wanted to inspect my wardrobe. “Actually, we’re only interested in seeing your trousers,” one of the gentlemen said. I had seven pairs of pants hanging on the rack, and they discovered that I’d cut a hole in the right pocket of each pair so that I could drop new balls into play without being detected. Jack stood there mortified while they read me my rights and summoned the gendarmes. “What were you thinking?” he kept yelling at me. “Golf is a fucking meritocracy, man. We already agreed on that!”

We left the hotel at 9:15 for our 10:40 tee time. In the four hours since I’d been outside, the sky had cleared to a beautiful pale blue, and the wind had risen. On the radio in the truck there was news about a mother somewhere in Texas who, having been denied food stamps, shot both her children and then herself. “Jesus,” Jack said.

It was as good a time as any, I thought, for me to follow the advice of a man I respected in Maine who had recently counseled me that if I was going to talk with my son about the civil war between the
rich and the poor in America, I should be sure to present both sides equally. I began by telling Jack that plenty of the wealthy guys I’d caddied for in Scotland had done a lot to try to help the poor, just like this man in Maine who had worked his way from nothing to the top of his profession and had given millions of dollars to underprivileged kids and worthy college students along the way.

“The same with the people at Inverness,” Jack said.

“So, what’s the answer then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, how come every great civilization since the beginning of time fell apart for the same reason—when the divide between the poor and the privileged grew too wide?”

He thought about this while he tuned the radio to ESPN. Then he said, “It’s like anything else, man. People blame each other for the problems instead of working together to solve them. You take the biggest problems in America right now, and if you could get a hundred smart poor people and a hundred smart wealthy people in the same room to talk to each other instead of blaming each other, you’d solve them. Maybe in a couple of hours.”

From the mouths of babes, I thought.

I was still smiling about this when we made our way to the range, and I was thinking to myself, He’s a good boy. No, he’s a good man.

He struck the ball beautifully on the range and stepped onto the 1st tee and drove it 322 yards right up the left side. “We’re in the mayor’s office,” I said.

So there we are, a simple soft eight-iron to the flag. He takes his smooth practice swing, steps up to the ball, takes the same smooth swing, and—what! The ball squirts right and barely flies 60 yards. He looks at me. “What was that?” he asks. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve grown so used to seeing all his iron shots fly straight to the pins. “I shanked that ball off the
toe of the club,” he says with a disgusted little laugh. “I can see shanking it off the hozzle, but off the toe? I almost missed the ball completely.”

“Maybe you didn’t settle into your swing” is all I can say.

From there we nearly saved par but took a bogey.

Up to the next tee and another bomb right up the middle, 80 yards past our playing partners. Now we’re 90 yards from the hole, a simple wedge.

And bang, he pulls it into the bunker left. Trying to adjust from that last iron, I am thinking. The sand is as wet as concrete, and he leaves the first shot in the bunker. It’s a double bogey. We’re three over after two holes, another miserable start after two perfect drives. “I guess I just don’t ever want to make it an easy start,” he says to me with a shrug. He’s not upset. I’m not worried.

But I should have been. The rest of the round is the same thing. One perfect drive after another, and every iron shot flies 40 or 50 yards off line. On the par-4 number 4, we’ve got 117 yards left to the hole after a monster drive. I hand him his wedge, and I’m already taking the putter out when—what! He shanks it straight into the woods. We take a triple bogey.

And we never figured it out the rest of the round. One terrible iron shot after another. I’m talking wedges, short irons, long irons. All just awful. We hit two greens in regulation, and by the 12th hole we both knew that without four birdies coming in, we weren’t going to make the damned cut.

We kept our composure; we were talking about Jack’s sister Cara, heading home from college tomorrow for Christmas break, cutting down a tree with Colleen. Jack looked perfectly relaxed. He just missed every iron shot. I thought for a while that it was something with his hands, not getting the club square and through at the bottom. But if that was the case, he would have been blocking drives all day long. At one point I thought maybe he was standing too far from the ball, an inch perhaps. But when he made that adjustment, he pulled the shot left by 50 yards.

———

So we missed the cut by four strokes. And just to add to the puzzle, on the one hole I had worried about, the drivable 328-yard par-4, 17, we made an easy birdie. Our only birdie of the day.

“I’m pissed,” I said when we got back in the truck. “I fucking hate missing cuts.”

“Crazy,” he said. “I never hit irons like that before.”

“Maybe you were tired.”

“I wasn’t tired.”

“Yeah, I guess not. You couldn’t have hit drives like those if you were tired. And you looked great on the range.”

“What the hell,” he said.

“We couldn’t make the adjustment. Something was wrong and I couldn’t see it. I think it was the long break.”

“I played every day during the break.”

“Yeah, but flying back here, you know, the traveling is rough.”

“No excuses.”

“You’re right, no excuses.”

“I should have been able to figure out what I was doing wrong.”

“Yeah. I wish I could have helped. I guess I was just stunned. You know? I’m so used to your solid iron play. Usually, I’m watching the ball tracking right toward the flag, and I’m thinking after each swing, Just be as good as you look. I don’t know.”

We were both thinking the same thing by the time we got back to the hotel. We were going to have to start over again, just like after the first round of the first tournament.

“I’ll hit a million irons tomorrow on the range,” Jack said as he left the room to go ride the exercise bike.

“Okay,” I said.

After the door swung closed, I threw my notebook across the room and cursed.

Yesterday passed. And it passed miserably. If I’m honest, I’ll have to tell Colleen that I wasn’t really living that day here with our son. I was just stumbling through. I remember telling Jack that I was going to rest my knee the day after we missed the cut, and he said, “That’s okay,” as he headed out the door to hit balls at the range. The moment he left, an emptiness settled in the room, and I wished that I had gone with him. These were the last days I would ever get to spend with Jack, and he was at the range by himself while I pissed away a long afternoon feeling sorry for both of us. Sorry for him because he knew that everything he had fought for in the first three tournaments, he had lost in the fourth, and now he was going to have to start over from ground zero. Sorry for myself because I didn’t know what to say to him to make missing the cut any easier to accept, and because I should have been able to do something
before
it happened,
to keep it from happening
. We had gone into that fourth tournament believing that we would play our best. Or if not our best, at least well enough to make the cut, which was thirteen strokes
over par
. We should have been able to do that with our eyes closed.

What made things even worse was that while Jack was at the range, I think I figured out what I could have done. I remembered one afternoon on the Old Course when one of the old Scottish caddies had rescued his golfer after the man had hit two miserable shots. He handed him back his club and said, “Sometimes the body abandons us in this game. Now go over there and take five good, hard practice swings, and you’ll get back into your groove.” It had worked. He had turned the man’s game around.

———

I spent the afternoon on the couch in room 228, thinking that is what would have saved Jack and kicking myself, while he was off at the
Tin Cup
range hitting a million balls by himself.

It was getting dark when I stood outside for a few minutes watching the wind move through the tall brown grass, thinking about Scotland and what I would have given to go back and caddie there for one more season. It would be Christmas soon, and I would be home in Maine. And then back on the tour for January and February. And then Jack and I would be driving away from Texas in his truck, back to our separate lives, where what we had shared here would be divided into our separate memories of the time and the place. I would be in my house in Maine with four empty bedrooms, waiting for the next time my children came home to visit. Colleen would be busy each day with her little school. And I would be dreaming.

The last thing I did before I turned my couch into a bed was say to Jack, “We’ll play a good practice round tomorrow.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

We’ll see, I thought. With golf that’s about all you could say really. One of the guys we’d played with on our disastrous round was a tour veteran and a fine player. He told Jack that in the second event he was in the lead, standing on the 17th tee with two holes to play for the win. He made a triple bogey on 17 and then another triple on 18 to drop out of the money.

“What should we think about tomorrow?” I asked Jack after he turned out the light.

“One shot at a time, I guess,” he said.

This morning, without any warning, Jack asked me to tell him the story of my life while we played our practice round at the Island Course at Kingwood, a beautiful track with tree-lined fairways and ponds filled with ducks and herons.

“I don’t want to talk about golf,” he said. “I’ll play and you tell me your life story.”

“The whole deal?”

“Yup, in eighteen holes.” He said that he thought he ought to know the story in case someone ever came to him wanting to write a book about me, and I started by telling him that they wrote books only about the great writers, not the good ones, even though the good writers have more failure and heartache and humiliation to tell about, which would make a better book. I told him, “I’ll give you my whole life story in eighteen holes, and I won’t leave out the bad stuff. Just the really bad stuff.”

The 1st hole. A 545-yard par-5. If you drive the ball up the left side, you have a good chance to be on in two and putting for an eagle unless you pull that shot left of the green into a pond. Up the right is death behind trees—a struggle to just make par from there.

“Here’s how it begins, Jack. I grew up poor and stupid with a father who could never really look at me. On my fourth birthday just before I was supposed to blow out the candles on the birthday cake with my twin brother, my grandmother who took over when our mother died sent me into the alley to look for him. I found him sitting inside his
Chevy, smoking. When I called to him through the windows, he just stared off into space.”