Walking with Jack (40 page)

We are both still fooled by the greens on numbers 6 and 7, where we missed birdie putts from five feet and fifteen feet for two more tap-in pars. He is shaking his head now, and all I can do is remind him that we have plenty of holes left to make our birdies.

Even par after seven holes.

Hole number 8 is a simple 182-yard par-3, but Jack makes a poor swing here, and his ball is short of the green in a bunker. His first sand shot of the day is perfect. The ball stops eighteen inches from the hole, and it’s another par. Even after eight holes.

On the 402-yard par-4 9th hole he hits another poor wedge from a solid drive, and he has to save par from another bunker to stay at even par after the first nine holes today. He does.

Hole 10. This is a wicked hole. A 546-yard par-5 bending sharply left around a lake, with trees blocking the path to cut across the elbow of the dogleg. I want to play safe here after he strikes a good drive up the right side, but with only 203 yards left, Jack isn’t hearing any of it. He bombs a five-iron at the trees. It climbs high and then higher, but it gets caught in the top branches and falls right behind
a big tree. From there he scrambles and saves a par. But that was a hole he could have birdied if he had played it a wee bit smarter. Even after ten holes.

That last hole unnerved Jack. He knows he made a bad mental error there. And on the 440-yard par-4 11th hole, he is in trouble right from the tee. The ball sails up the right side of a very narrow fairway into the trees. All he can do from there is hack it out into the fairway, hit a nice wedge, and make a two-putt bogey.

One over par after eleven holes.

Hole 12 is a 372-yard par-4. A dangerous, very narrow fairway to a landing area that isn’t more than 30 yards wide. Jack nails a perfect three-wood and has 90 yards left. He hits a high wedge that drops and stops dead four feet from the hole. He jars the birdie. Back to even par after twelve holes.

Jack cruises through numbers 13, 14, and 15 with relatively easy pars, landing the greens in regulation and just missing birdies on 13 and 15. “Disturbing,” he says to me when the birdie putt on 15 stops just an inch from the hole. I change the subject and tell him that his mother and I are thinking about getting a pup when Teddy turns ten next year. “That would be great,” he says.

Even par after fifteen holes.

Hole 16. A 430-yard par-4. I’m not going to tell him again to be patient. I’ve said that enough. He hits his drive here too far left, and it clips the branch of the only tree on that side of the fairway. The ball falls straight to the ground, and we’re miles from the green. “How far?” I ask him. “Two hundred and forty-seven yards,” he says. He takes his hybrid and hits it right into the mayor’s office. The ball never leaves the flag the whole way. “That was a golf shot,” he says. It sure was. From where we’re standing, we can’t see how close we are. But it’s only five feet from the hole. And it’s another missed birdie. Another tap-in par. Silence this time. On to the next hole. I wanted that one for Colleen. Even par after sixteen holes.

———

Hole 17. A 447-yard par-4. A great drive, but a poor second shot, and then our first chunked wedge in the Bermuda rough, and it’s a two-putt bogey. Jack is not a happy camper. I start talking to him about Teddy again: “Maybe we’ll get a yellow Lab to keep him company, what do you think?”

“Yeah” is all he says.

One over par after seventeen holes.

“I need to make birdie here,” he tells me as we walk onto the 18th tee of this 532-yard par-5, another dogleg left over water on the second shot. He hits his best drive of the day and then nails a three-wood that lands softly on the green. We have a forty-two-foot putt for eagle here, and somehow after that putt falls three feet short, it takes two more putts to finish the hole. Another tap-in par. Should have had an easy birdie.

We finish the first round at one over par. Could have been better. Could have been worse, I am thinking. There’s no time to look back. We are heading right to the 1st tee to get in as many holes on round two as we can before the sun sets.

“I feel like we’ve been here before,” I say to Jack on the 1st tee. He nails a three-wood to perfect position but somehow airmails the green with his wedge and has to settle for a bogey. One over par after one hole in round two.

He fights back from the bogey by landing the par-5 2nd hole in two and dropping the birdie putt into the center of the hole. Even after two holes. He misses a six-foot birdie putt on 3 but taps in for a par, then drains a twenty-foot birdie putt on 4, and just misses a thirteen-foot eagle putt on 5 for a tap-in birdie.

So here we are on round two—two under after five holes, with three birdies that will make Jack’s mother happy.

We take a stupid three-putt bogey on 6 and then settle down for a par on 7 and are one under after seven holes.

On the simple 182-yard par-3 8th hole, Jack and his two player partners take a total of nine putts. “Just stupid,” Jack says to me. He’s right. We gave away a stroke there and are now at even par through eight holes. Everyone is running out of gas.

It is getting dark now as we finish the 9th hole with a solid par and head to the tricky par-5 10th with that second shot bending left around the lake. We’ve been out on the course seven hours now, and after Jack hits a great tee shot, I am arguing for a lay-up. No way. And Jack hits the trees for the second time today, and he’s in trouble. It’s a dumb bogey. One over after ten holes.

There is just enough light left to record a stupid three-putt bogey on the 11th hole.

Two over par through eleven. Tomorrow is another day.

We have an 8:00 a.m. tee time to finish the round tomorrow, and so we were in bed early. “We’re three over for the tournament,” I said just before I fell asleep. “You played some good golf today, Jackie.”

“Decent,” I heard him say.

We left the hotel in darkness and fog. Standing on the 12th tee, I told Jack that if he finished the final seven holes of round two under par, I would buy him a steak dinner. He looked tired, and I thought this might give him a jump start. He didn’t need it. He played the best golf I’ve ever seen him play. Every single shot he took never left the flag by more than a yard or two. “I’m dialed in,” he kept saying to me, “and I’m still not making birdies.” True. He played the last seven
holes with five tap-in pars, one birdie, and one bogey, finishing the second round at two over par and the tournament at three over par. His best finish on the tour.

Whenever you play a really good round of golf, you can look back and count three or four strokes out on the course that could have made it a terrific round. Three of those birdie putts could have dropped into the cup instead of burning the edge. But it was still fine golf, and I was elated. Jack disappeared at the clubhouse, and I sat outside in the rain that had returned, thinking to myself, One more year. Give Jack one more year on this tour, and he will be ready to make his run at Q school. I could feel it all drawing close, and I wanted to say something to Jack when he met up with me on the 1st tee of the Forest Course to play a practice round in preparation for tomorrow’s event there. I really wanted to say something, but I didn’t. We were on the 2nd tee when he said very casually, “I had a call from Sherwin-Williams. I have an interview next Wednesday.”

It sort of took my breath away. “A week from today,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s good, right?”

“I hope so,” he said.

I watched him murder another tee shot. Here I am, I thought, in a world of dreams, and here’s my son in another world. His own world.

Five a.m. We are down to our last two days together here in Texas and our final tournament. Tomorrow after we walk off the 18th green, we will get into Jack’s truck and start the long drive north straight from the Forest Course at Kingwood, where he rolls his
last putt. I have been thinking about dreams this morning while Jack sleeps across this room that we have shared since late October. His dream, my dream. And for some reason, the American dream. I think most intelligent people recognize that the American dream died quite some time ago in an economy that required both parents to work full-time instead of raising their children, that forced people to hold down awful jobs at poverty wages simply for health insurance, and that strangled college students with debt. I suppose the American dream was laid to waste by money. I’ve always thought that the greatest writing ever done about this American dream was Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, a play I must have taught at five universities to perhaps eight hundred young students. Hundreds of scholars have written hundreds of books contending that poor Willy Loman is killed by the American dream. I never bought that. Yes, there is the stunning portrait of poor Willy Loman, who buys into the same business world that crushes him with its sickening superficiality and breathtaking indifference. But I always argued that Willy, despite his failure in the business world, is already living the dream because he has a wife who is devoted to him and respects him, and two sons who admire and love him. I used to tell my students: Make that your dream. Not some dream that is measured in material wealth.

The other thing is that very few people are prepared to meet the price of their dreams. Years ago an editor in New York told me that when the last collection of Fitzgerald’s stories was put together at the end of his career and the publisher asked the author for a title, Fitzgerald said, “The Price Was High.” And he might have been thinking not only about the price he paid but about the price paid by those who stood beside him.

And even now, living this dream with Jack, I can hear fathers asking me: You mean my son might be good enough at golf to play on a professional tour someday and I could caddie for him? Where do I sign up for that? What do I have to do? My answer would be: Well, at age fifty-eight you have to leave home for six months and go live alone in one room in Scotland with no car, no TV, no Internet, no
telephone, and you have to start at the bottom of the pile and work 187 days without a day off, walking about a thousand miles, most of it in brutal weather. For starters. And then you have to go back to Scotland a second time at age sixty and do it again. The same drill. Only this time with a bad right knee. I won’t know any other way to answer. There might be a shortcut, but shortcuts also carry a price. In fact, in
Death of a Salesman
it is the affair Willy has that costs him the love of his favorite son. And you have to dig deeper to see why he has the affair. The woman he is sleeping with is a secretary to the big buyers, the guys at the top who can buy what Willy is so desperately trying to sell. It’s complicated stuff. And in two hours I’ll be happy to stop thinking about it and just concentrate on golf.

Jack is fast asleep as I write this. Just after he turned out his light last night, I took the advice of a good friend, a former student of mine, and asked him if he wanted to play this last tournament on his own. I called to him across the dark room. “Hey, Jack, I was thinking … you might want to have this round tomorrow to yourself.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, you’re the only golfer on this tour who has played every round, every shot, with his old man standing beside him. I was thinking I might sit this one out. I’m kind of tired, and it would give you some space. You’ve earned the right to have the round to yourself if you want it that way. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings. I just want you to walk away from Houston on your own terms here, however you want it to sit in your mind. I was here; I saw it. I’m proud of you and what you’ve done. I’m leaving with fond memories. So, sleep on it, Jack, okay? You can tell me in the morning.”

“Okay, man,” he said. “We’ll see.”

This morning, just after seven, when Jack stepped out of the shower, he said to me, “I want you out there today, Daddy. We started this together, and you’ve been with me all the way, so let’s finish up together.”

“Good enough, Jackie,” I said.

Of course I was relieved that he had made this decision, especially when we were informed by the tournament official at the start of our round that a forecast of heavy rain tonight would likely make the course too wet for a second round tomorrow. Meaning I would have missed my last chance to walk beside Jack on this tour.

At 8:20, Jack made a poor swing on his first drive, and the ball sailed up the right side of the fairway into bad ground. He recovered on the next shot and landed an eight-iron seventeen feet left of the hole. The greens were soaking wet, and his lag putt fell three feet short, leaving him a downhill second putt with a left-to-right break. He struck the putt a touch too hard, and the ball fell into the left side of the hole and then jumped out. A disappointing three-putt to start the round. One over par after one hole.

He was discouraged but not beaten, and he recovered to record pars on the next six holes. But I could tell by the dirt in the grooves each time I cleaned his clubs that he wasn’t flushing the ball. He was striking the ball off the toe. After another three-putt on the par-4 8th hole, disaster struck when his drive from the 9th tee, a 247-yard carry over the marsh, turned left instead of fading back into the fairway and landed in the water. He tried to recover, hitting his second drive onto good ground, but he couldn’t steady the ship from
there, and he posted a triple bogey. I think only the second one on this entire tour.

We talked then about how there is almost always pain in competitive golf, and I reminded him that he had already proven many times that he could fight his way back from disaster.

He proved it once again, recording six pars and a birdie in the next seven holes. But on the 17th, a 600-yard par-5, he blocked his drive into the woods. For the first time on the tour I found myself looking for a ball that my son had hit, and I wanted in the worst way to find it. Nothing rips a caddie’s heart out like failing to find a golf ball. As I was walking through the woods with my head bowed, I tried to concentrate on the task at hand, but I kept recalling all the times in Scotland I had somehow found my golfer’s ball. This time I failed. We had to play Jack’s provisional shot from the tee, and it was stuck in thick grass off the left side of the fairway. All he could do was hack it out into play, which left him 187 yards from the green as he took his fifth shot. “I’ve got to save a bogey here, to have any chance at all,” he said. “I know,” I told him. It came down to a nine-foot putt from the right side of the green. He looked down the line carefully, then settled into his stance and drained it. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “That damned hole was a struggle. This is the first time your shirt has come untucked here in Texas.”