Miracle on the 17th Green

  I walked to the base of the scoreboard, which loomed over the clubhouse lawn like a white version of that monolith at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I read down the names and scores painted in a lovely old-fashioned script until I reached my own, eight names down.

  Travis McKinley.

  Good God, I had really done it.

  Golfers and their next of kin were still stumbling around the last green like dazed victims of a train wreck. No doubt about it, there were a lot more casualties than survivors on that final scoreboard. Maybe some day they would be able to recall with pride that they were even on the board at all, that they had not only come down to Tallahassee to chase their dream, but had performed well.

  I doubted it. Some people say trying is all that matters, but unfortunately it’s only the first step. Sometimes you’ve got to catch a break and win one, too. You’ve got to stand up on the bar and do the antler dance. Plus, as I now knew as well as anyone, people really suck at consoling themselves.

  Chapter 18

  “So tell me, Travis, what do you do for a living?” For twenty-three years, it was the question I dreaded more than any other. “What do you do?”

  I work for an advertising agency. I’m an advertising copywriter. I write commercials.

  God knows there are a lot worse jobs than being an advertising copywriter. And if that’s what you want to do, be my guest. But for me, that unavoidable answer had been breaking my spirit for two and a half decades.

  Now I couldn’t wait for someone to ask me who and what I was.

  “So tell me, Travis, what do you do?”

  “I’m a professional golfer.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yup.”

  “You teach?”

  “No, my friend, I learn. I’m a player. I’m a professional golfer on the Senior Tour.”

  There was a pay phone in the parking lot, and with a half-moon just appearing in the fragrant night, and my heart pounding in my chest, I made my call.

  “Sarah,” I said as soon as she answered the phone, “what am I?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Are you calling from Florida?”

  “What am I, Sarah?” I asked again, almost shouting the words. “What am I?”

  The people milling around me were too caught up in their own miseries to find anything the slightest bit strange about my loud questioning, and perhaps, in her own way, so was Sarah. I had the terribly lonely realization that Sarah had no idea what I was talking about, and didn’t even know exactly why I was calling.

  “You’re a lunatic,” Sarah said with a familiar hint of a smile in her voice. “And I guess you’re a decent father.”

  “I can’t take the suspense any longer, Sarah, so I’m going to tell you what I am,” I said, looking up at the forlorn moon. “I’m a professional golfer.”

  “You made it?” she said in amazement.

  “I made it. I finished eighth. I have a spot in every senior tournament for a year.”

  “Congratulations,” she said. “Listen, I’m really sorry to be telling you now. I really don’t mean to spoil this, but I’m probably going to talk to a lawyer next week about a divorce.”

  For a few seconds I was too staggered to say a thing. You know that Dickensian crap about the best of times and the worst of times. I guess it’s not crap.

  “But, Sarah, we’ve barely even talked about this. Shouldn’t we at least try to see someone?”

  “You mean like a marriage counselor, Travis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You always end up with some Pollyanna on her second happy marriage.”

  I sighed. “It’s just such a weird night, Sarah, and I don’t even know what the point is if I can’t share these little triumphs with you.”

  “This one isn’t so little, Travis,” Sarah said. “Save the charming modesty for someone else.”

  “You’re right, it’s pretty amazing. But don’t decide now. Please. I’ll be gone the next couple of months anyway.”

  “Not to change the subject, Travis, but there’s a guy here who knows exactly how he feels about you, and he’s been hanging around all day for your call. Let me get him.”

  I looked over my shoulder, where a line had formed behind me.

  “Dad,” said Simon, “you made it?”

  “I finished eighth. I got the last spot. I’m a professional golfer,” I said.

  “You showed ‘em, Dad,” said Simon letting out a hoot. “You showed everybody.”

  “I really did, pal. Tell Noah for me, okay, and call Elizabeth.”

  “I can’t wait to tell Pop,” said Simon. “This is amazing.”

  “I got to go, Simon,” I said. “There are all these people waiting to use the phone. I love you.”

  I had to get off so fast, not just because of the murmuring in the line behind me, but because as I thought of Simon and Noah and Elizabeth and Sarah and Pop, something just crumbled, and I started to cry. I don’t mean some sniffles or a few tears of joy. I mean serious chest-heaving, with snot coming out of my nose, bawling that stood out even in this disaster area.

  I cried for everything that had gone right and wrong for thirty years. I cried about Sarah. But most of all, I think I cried out of stunned gratitude. Despite my uncanny tendency to screw up, I had never given up on myself.

  “Don’t worry, pal,” said a kind voice from the darkness, “you’ll get it next year.”

  I sat down on the curb in the dark at the back of the parking lot, waiting for my crying jag to stop. It took a while, and I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought.

  Then I walked back to the clubhouse bar to go find Earl Fielder.

  I owed him a beer.

  Chapter 19

  “You know the line ‘This Bud’s for you’?” I asked Earl, as I walked over to his table at the back of the bar and handed him one.

  “I think I may have heard it maybe three times,” said Earl, looking up from his Barron’s. Earl had finished a very respectable thirty-fourth in the final standings. It wasn’t good enough to make the tour, but he seemed his usual unflappable self.

  “Well, I didn’t write it,” I said.

  “No, I guess they wouldn’t have fired you if you had.”

  “Anyway, cheers,” I said. “I’m very sorry you didn’t make it. You really helped me in the second round. More than you know.”

  “I’m glad you did make it, Travis. I really am,” said Earl.

  The 19th hole at the Tallahassee Dunes, a large restaurant-bar with a television at each end of the bar, was jammed and hopping every night all week, but that evening it was empty and subdued. Those who made it had the decency to celebrate elsewhere, and those who hadn’t had tried to put as many miles between themselves and here as fast as possible.

  But Earl sitting there with his long chocolate brown Habanas cigar and Barrons opened to the week’s market analysis hardly looked like a man who had just missed qualifying by six strokes.

  “What’s your secret to sanity?” I asked. “I’d thought I’d find you muttering in your beer.”

  “I’ve been through too much shit to get bent about this,” said Fielder matter-of-factly, “plus Microsoft went up eleven points this week. But what’s with you? You look like a sponge.”

  “I called home,” I said, “and the next thing I was bawling. It was like my father had come up out of the grave and told me he loved me.”

  “How come you never tried to play the regular tour?” asked Earl. “You got the game for it.”

  “In high school, it’s all I ever thought about,” I said. “Then I went to college and fell in love, and by the time I graduated I had a wife in medical school and a two-year-old daughter. Suddenly golf seemed irresponsible. Plus, I didn’t learn how to putt until about three weeks ago. The irony of course is that the job I took instead proved not to be so safe either, and now my wife is probably going to file for divorce.”

  “Hold on,” said Earl, savoring a long draw on his
Cuban. “You just got fired. Your old lady’s about to give you the boot, and you got all this unresolved shit with your old man. Next thing, youre going to tell me your dog has fleas.”

  “Ticks,” I said.

  “Travis, you’re going to have me feeling sorry for you, and you’re the one who made the goddamn tour,” said Earl with a laugh. “Well, maybe you are kind of a mess, but you’ve got talent, and talent is rarer than you think.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I tell you what,” said Earl, “as I’m feeling so good about Microsoft, I’ll make you a sweetheart deal. I’ll caddy for you for six months, and you don’t pay me anything but expenses and a commission on your winnings. It’ll give me a chance to see what the big leagues are like, and in return I’ll knock some sense into you.”

  “So you wouldn’t be one of those read ‘em the yardage and hand ‘em the sticks kind of caddies?” I asked.

  “Not a chance. With me you get the whole deal,” said Earl. “Caddy, investment counselor, and sports psychologist. All or nothing.”

  I reached across the table and shook hands with my new partner.

  Chapter 20

  “Now on the first tee, from Winnetka, Illinois, Travis McKinley.”

  Thus spoke the starter at the FHP Health Care Classic in Ojai, California, and at 7:18 on a crisp Southern California February morning, with God, Dale Douglas, and Kermit Zarley as my witnesses, I officially began my Senior Tour career — by hooking my drive into the deep rough, and practically dancing down the fairway after it.

  “Try to show a little dignity, for God’s sake,” said Earl, “you’re not supposed to be thrilled with a hook into the bramble. Youre embarrassing me.”

  “Anyone ever tell you youre cute when you’re grouchy?” I asked.

  “All the time,” said Earl.

  I tried to act cool, in a way vaguely befitting my newfound status as a member in good standing of the PGA Tour, but that’s all it was. An act. If Q-School is the Inferno and Purgatory rolled into one, then the Senior Tour is Paradise. As designed by Robert Trent Jones, instead of Dante. And you don’t even have to die to get there. You just have to get old.

  Since Earl and I rolled into town on Wednesday morning, tournament sponsors had handed me the keys to a suite at the Marriott and a pearl white Lexus. I was assigned my own roped-off spot on the driving range furnished with a glistening mound of Titleists more pristine than I was used to playing with, let alone practicing with, and in case any of the paying spectators who wandered out to the range to pick up a thing or two from the pros couldnt quite place my swing, there was a large white placard with my name boldly printed on it, propped up in the grass just behind me.

  Oh, and on my first day of practice, a rep from Calloway fitted me for a full-custom set of Big Berthas, from a 60-degree wedge to an enormous graphite-shafted, titanium-headed Great Big Bertha driver, with a sweet spot about the size of a frying pan.

  And every time I turned a corner, I came face to face with another tanned mug from golf’s Mount Rushmore. The King himself, Arnold Palmer, was hitting balls four spots down on the range. Isao Aoki parked his butt in the cubicle next to mine in the locker room. He turned out to be this incredibly suave, chain-smoking character, kind of like a Japanese Dean Martin. And one morning, when I charged a putt on the practice green, it smacked right into Lee Trevino’s heel. “Sorry about that,” I stammered, as embarrassed as a kid, “my name’s Travis McKinley. Its a real pleasure to meet you.”

  “Travis McKinley,” said Trevino with his enormous exploding smile, “glad to meet you, too. I read about you this morning in USA Today. Listen, don’t worry about that ‘Miracle of Q-School’ crap. No one is going to admit it to you, but we’re all miracles out here, every last one of us. Now go work on your putting, son. Based on that last stroke, you need it.”

  I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. Lee Trevino. Mex, who still wears a Band-Aid on his right forearm to cover an old tattoo, and in 1971 won both the British Open and the U.S. Open, and whose caddy Herman is more famous than half the guys on tour, and he was reading an article about me?

  Beyond that, the guy was cool. And generous. And friendly. And despite being in his late fifties, he exuded more pure high-octane human juice than any person I had ever managed to stand next to.

  He was right, too, about the frosty core of most of the players. When the Senior Tour was started, a lot was made about the unique camaraderie enjoyed by the competitors, and how that was such a refreshing change from the regular or “Junior Tour,” as the seniors liked to call it.

  Then the Senior Tour took off. The players started competing for a million dollars every weekend. And all that warm and fuzzy stuff flew right out the clubhouse window. The seniors may ham it up a little more than the regular Tour players, and have a more relaxed rapport with the galleries, but dont let that fool you.

  These guys would rip out your heart and stomp all over it with golf spikes if they thought it would help them get another year on tour.

  Actually, the Senior Tour reminded me of that old morning game show where they sent a delirious housewife into a grocery store, with only her greed and a shopping cart, and told her she could keep anything she could throw into it in sixty seconds.

  As lucrative as the Senior Tour is, the clock is always ticking. Unless you’re a superstar, youre lucky if you can hang on for four or five years before being pushed out by some spry fifty-year-old coming up from below.

  But who cares? That first week, all those harsh realities were the furthest thing from my mind. I felt so carefree and unperturbable, I couldnt help but play well.

  On a long course in tough, windy conditions, I shot 71, 72, 69 to tie for sixteenth and make my second nice check in two weeks.

  Including the forty-five hundred I made for finishing eighth at Q-School (admittedly three thousand of that was my own money), I had now made twelve thousand four hundred in two weeks. Like shooting ducks, I thought to myself. Even Noah was impressed when I called home. In fact, it seemed everybody in Winnetka was pulling for me — except Sarah.

  Chapter 21

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed your little tiptoe through the tulips, Travis,” said Earl, “because the party’s over.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The two of us were sipping free beer in the lobby bar of the Marriott at the end of my first perfectly delightful week on tour, and Earl was already reading me the riot act.

  “I don’t know what you got in mind for the next nine months, but I didn’t come out here to hump a bag for some starstruck tourist who can’t tell the difference between a boondoggle and the chance of a lifetime. Travis, do you know how many golfers would kill their pets for a years exemption? And the sad thing is, you could do some real damage out here. But you’ve got so much to learn it isnt even funny. So either you get serious, or Im going back to Monroe and work on my own game.”

  I don’t know if I was more embarrassed or grateful, because I knew Earl was right. In my twenty-three-year career as an advertising copywriter, I came up with all kinds of reasons why I was better off not trying particularly hard, and I still stand by most of them. But two weeks ago on a long hot Sunday in Tallahassee, all those reasons expired.

  If I couldn’t suck it up now, I was either a coward or a fool. And I didn’t think I was either.

  From that day on, I started eating, sleeping, and defecating golf. Not only did I play and practice eight hours a day, seven days a week, including at least four hours a day on the range and practice green, but I threw myself into it with a conviction and concentration I had never brought to anything else. For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I was laying it all on the line every day, putting my very soul into it, living like an artist.

  One of my early projects, and something that most distinguishes a pro from a low handicapper, was distance control. When I first joined the tour, I was almost disappointed by the way the players struck the ball. The first time
I saw Dave Stockton, I thought he looked like about a 5-handicapper. Then I saw him putt.

  The fact is, even the hall of famers rarely hit it anywhere near dead-solid perfect. What the good pros do have, though, is this very keen bottom-line-no-bullshit understanding of their own ability, and that starts with knowing exactly how far they hit every club in their bag. Not how far they wish they hit it, or how far they hit it once, but how far they are going to hit it under pressure ninety-nine out of a hundred times.

  After the tournament at Ojai, I set about trying to acquire and refine that same self-knowledge. The first month, I spent at least two hours a day working my way from my wedge to my 5-iron, until I knew within one or two yards how far I could expect to hit each one of them.

  But, then again, I worked like a dog on every part of my game. One day I squeezed on some sunblock, grabbed a towel and a bottle of Gatorade, and spent an entire afternoon in a practice bunker. I know how long I was there because Trevino said hello to me on his way to a practice round, played the entire round, went into the clubhouse, showered, and had a sandwich, and when he came out I was still scooping little holes in the sand.

  “If you’re just trying to impress me, Travis,” said Trevino, “it’s working. Now, if you don’t get out of there soon, someone’s going to report you to the union.”

  I made a pleasant discovery. You work hard at something eight hours a day, you get better. Not a lot better necessarily, but a little better, and that’s just fine, because improving at golf, or anything else probably, is just a matter of making an endless series of tiny improvements.

  Slowly but surely, I began to feel like a professional golfer. I knew the exact distances I hit every one of my clubs. I didn’t get uptight every time I had to lag a forty-footer or hit a flop shot out of the rough.

  Obviously golf is not a craft that anyone ever masters, but one moment in my apprenticeship stands out.

  It was in my fifth pro tournament, Bruno’s Memorial in Birmingham, Alabama. Looking at a flyer lie in the rough, to a green that sloped sharply from front to rear, and a flag cut in the very front, I did something I had never even considered doing as an amateur. I hit the ball smack into the center of the greenside bunker. On purpose.