The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist

  Cheryl welcomed me back like a schoolgirl with a crush. We had a blissful and sexually satisfying week. During all that activity, and purely because I was so proud of my innocence in the deal, I got around to telling her about the dreaded Nonnie Harrison turning up at St. Andrews.

  I was more or less prepared for Cheryl to explode and accuse me of nailing Nonnie again. But I would slowly explain how Mitch and I had handled the matter so craftily. And I would turn out the hero in the deal.

  But no explosion. Cheryl was amused and congratulated me on my inspired craftiness.

  We were sitting at the breakfast table in my townhouse that morning. I’d eaten my three eggs basted and country sausage. Cheryl had eaten her Cheerios and was dressed for work.

  “You buy it, just like that?” I said. “I don’t have to bring in character witnesses?”

  “No, I can tell,” she said.

  “You can tell what?”

  “I can tell you didn’t knock off Nonnie, or anyone else.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yeah, it is. You could have knocked off a dozen guys while I was gone and I’d never know it.”

  “That’s true. Men can’t tell. Women can.”

  “A woman can tell but a man can’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “All women can tell?”

  “No. Smart women can.”

  “That’s absurd. You didn’t know about Nonnie at Pebble Beach until you talked to her.”

  “I knew you were acting guilty about something. I was going to let it slide, whatever it was, but then the slut called here.”

  “How could you tell I was acting guilty?”

  I was thinking voice inflection . . . subject matter . . . overshow of affection . . . undershow of affection . . . too much aftershave . . .

  “It can’t be explained,” she smiled. “It’s a woman thing.”

  With that, she kissed me on the forehead and went off to sell a house.

  The bliss wore off a day later. What did it was my announcing that I was leaving again and would be gone three weeks.

  “Christ,” Cheryl said, “I might as well be involved with a trapeze artist. There’s always another circus.”

  I said, “Look at the bright side. My year will basically be over in a little while longer. We’ll go to a movie.”

  “Great,” she said. “Now I have something to cling to.”

  And she was off to work again.

  As I sat around drinking coffee that day I gave some thought to the fact that in all our time together, over two years, Cheryl had never seriously mentioned marriage, and neither had I.

  We’d joked about it. How it might screw up a perfectly good relationship. I’d quote Buddy Stark, who once said, “A man can’t be happily married unless he always knows what time it is, and likes going out to dinner.” And Cheryl would quote Jolene Frederick, who liked to say, “I wouldn’t fucking darn socks for Ben Affleck.”

  But I’d always held to the notion that everybody really wanted to be married. Not young people. Young people were aliens. Young people didn’t know what they wanted, other than lots of money and abortions and music that sounded like a disposal. Mature people, on the other hand, knew that being married was the best way to live.

  I know I’d enjoyed all my marriages, even when they didn’t work out.

  So I asked myself, Was I possibly creeping up on asking Cheryl if she wanted to bust out of the single world and do this marriage thing?

  I answered myself with a full-on maybe.

  41

  THE DAY BEFORE I LEFT FOR the PGA I received a swell send-off courtesy of FedEx and Irv Klar.

  Tees and Sympathy

  By Bobby Joe Grooves

  with Irving Klar

  You must first allow me to rhapsodize on the beauty of the game of golf before I begin my own story. It is the only game that leads one unrelentingly into the glories of nature. They are all around the golfer, these sensuous charms. Fresh air to breathe, the pungent solitude, the velvet fairways, the finely textured greens, the dark looming forests, the shimmering sand, the blue ponds, the rippling streams, the sprawl of dazzling flowers. All of this thrusting you into an emerald cathedral each time you go out for a round to seek an examination of your own private skills. Ah, the eternal bounty of golf!

  My thought this time: Irv Klar is a dead Jew.

  42

  THERE WERE NO DOT.COMERS AT the PGA to listen to my history babble, so I made do with lurkers. Most of your lurkers are interested in anything a tournament winner has to say, believing him to be smarter than atomic secrets.

  After a practice round one day I was in the clubhouse having a snack in the contestants’ lounge, and I invited three lurkers to come sit at my table. Two Kevins and a Chuck, or maybe it was two Chucks and a Kevin.

  Contestants’ lounges are provided in the clubhouses at the majors and most other tournaments to afford us privacy. Security guards are on the door to see to it that nobody comes in but players.

  This has always made me laugh because in every contestants’ lounge I’ve ever frequented I’ve watched it overflow with family members of players, officials of the PGA of America, officials of the USGA, officials of the PGA Tour, network TV announcers, IMG agents, and equipment reps. Everybody but sportswriters.

  If a sportswriter tries to enter, a SWAT team appears.

  I mention this because a moment after the lurkers joined me in the lounge at Oakmont, a Pittsburgh writer I knew slipped past the security guard and came in and tried to ask Phil Mickelson a question, and I watched as the newspaper guy was quickly apprehended, cuffed, and led away.

  Jim Tom Pinch, the magazine writer, once explained to me why such a harsh attitude exists toward sportswriters on the part of tournament officials and country club members. He said it’s because the sportswriters are only needed to help sell tickets to the tournament by writing glowing stories about it before it begins.

  “Once the tournament starts,” Jim Tom explained, “we’re a nuisance. All we do is take up parking spaces and write wise-mouth stories nobody likes but us.”

  I passed that info along to the lurkers while we munched on the fruit and cheese and lunch meat sandwiches from the players’ buffet. Slices of lunch meat are often known as cold cuts outside of Fort Worth.

  “I agree with Cheetah,” one of the lurkers said. Kevin or Chuck. “Cheetah says newspapers ain’t good for shit, except to read sometimes.”

  “Boy, you got that right,” said another lurker. Chuck or Kevin.

  I wondered if the lurkers realized how much history they were wading around in on these outskirts of Pittsburgh. One of them said Oakmont was the first course he’d ever played with a freeway running through it. I pointed out that the “freeway” that intersects the course, leaving the second through the eighth holes on one side of it, was actually the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It came slicing through the course in 1947 but didn’t change the layout.

  He said, “Pay deal. I guess that’s why it don’t look too busy down there on it. You see some trucks, but I’ll tell you one thing. If it was in Houston or Atlanta, you’d be looking at NASCAR around the clock. Them bridges over it ever collapse?”

  Not that I’d ever heard about, I said. Nothing in golf lore about it.

  I noted their looks of surprise when I informed them that Oakmont had played host to more national championships than any club in the United States. The club had held seven U.S. Opens, four U.S. Amateurs, three PGA Championships, and one U.S. Women’s Open. This PGA would make it a total of sixteen.

  Oakmont’s members could also brag that their course was the one and only course in history on which Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, and Jack Nicklaus, the three greatest players of all time, had won majors—the ’25 U.S. Amateur for Jones, the ’53 U.S. Open for Hogan, the ’62 U.S. Open for Nicklaus.

  And the members might be eager to a
dd that a few other fairly reputable players had won majors at Oakmont. Some fellows named Gene Sarazen, Tommy Armour, Sam Snead, Johnny Miller, and Ernie Els.

  Oakmont deserved its distinction as a home of immortals, I said, because the man responsible for its existence, William C. Fownes, son of a steel baron, had set out in 1903 to design and build “the world’s hardest golf course,” and for more than fifty years it held the title.

  Fownes was a golf nut and a fine player—he won the U.S. Amateur in 1910—and a fellow who devoted his whole life to the care and feeding of Oakmont. To its drainage ditches that are the only water hazards on the course, to the famed furrowed bunkers that are now gone, and to the greens that were once cut, shaved, and rolled into the fastest in the world, and are still among the speediest.

  He invented the heavy three-foot-long metal rake with V-shaped teeth that was used to create the furrows in the bunkers. Those furrowed bunkers stood as the trademark of Oakmont’s difficulty for half a century.

  It was Jimmy Demaret who once said, “You could comb Africa with that rake.”

  Fownes invented the infamous device because he firmly believed, and relished saying, “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.”

  “Where is Ear Boaty?” a lurker asked.

  “Where’s what?” I said.

  “You said something about Ear Boaty.”

  “I said irrevocably.”

  “Oh. Where’s that?”

  “Uh . . . yeah,” I said, standing up. “Fownes was born in Irrevocably, then he moved to Pittsburgh. Nice visiting with you guys. I believe I’ll have me some more of that salami and cheese.”

  ALTHOUGH THE PGA has a lusty history and is one of the game’s four major championships, it suffers in terms of national publicity and in the mind of the public. Everybody knows this—I’m not giving away any inside information here.

  The biggest reason it suffers is because it’s last. The last major of the year. The Masters has April, the U.S. Open has June, and the British Open has July. This leaves August for the PGA, which means we generally play it in blast-furnace heat and dripping humidity no matter which city is the host.

  Last is bad for another reason. The sportswriters who cover us regularly are tired of golf by then and ready for football and pennant races—unless Tiger Woods is working on the Grand Slam.

  So the sportswriters, being tired—and hot, and humid—give the PGA of America a little bit of hell every year for not returning the championship to match play, for not taking it back to the good old days when it was won by Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan and Sam Snead in head-to-head battles with other gladiators.

  The PGA was conducted at match play for forty years, from the time it started in 1916 until 1958, the year it was switched to stroke play to get itself on TV. Television executives fear match play the way I fear esses. They don’t want to run the risk of having two nobodies, two funny guys, in the final, afraid it will send viewers scrambling for their remotes.

  The writers like to argue that the guys who might have won the PGA at match play couldn’t have looked any funnier than some of the slugs who’ve won it at stroke play over the past thirty hot and humid years. If the PGA would smarten up and go back to match play, they insist, the year’s last major would at least have its own look, and therefore might attract more interest and attention.

  Personally, I would dearly love to have been one of the slugs who’ve won the PGA in the past. I would dearly loved to have won it this year, in fact, but Tiger Woods didn’t give anybody else a Chinaman’s chance, or even a slug’s chance.

  Oakmont still could have been trying to defend itself with its furrowed bunkers of old but Tiger wouldn’t have seen any of them. Not off the tee. Not unless his ball looked down while he was airmailing them.

  Tiger opened with a 64, a seven-under round that was six shots better than anybody else, and he put it on cruise control from there on. His 273 was eleven under and nobody else even broke par of 284. He won by twelve. A laugher.

  Myself, I sat on 73 all week and hatched a 292. The total tied me for sixteenth and earned me $68,000. I wasn’t so disappointed in my performance that I wanted to put the paycheck in a garage sale, but I did feel I had a valid excuse for not playing better.

  It was finding out about our Ryder Cup uniforms.

  I hadn’t seen Larry Foster, our captain, since I’d qualified for the team. I’d received a note from him after the U.S. Open. His note said “Welcome” and “Beat Europe.” But enclosed in the envelope was a copy of the brochure he’d had made up. It contained several pictures of him, scrappy little guy, smiling and swinging clubs, and it invited anyone who happened to have a loose $5,000 to “play a round of golf with Larry Foster, the U.S. Ryder Cup captain.”

  Most of the players laughed about our Ryder Cup captain becoming a crafty old fund-raiser—for himself.

  The day before the first round I had a brief visit with Larry Foster and his wife, Jill, a half-blonde chunko, many pounds removed from her days as a Playboy centerfold. Jill owned a boutique in LaJolla, where they lived, but now she was Madam Captain, and hugely enjoying the role.

  I was privileged to have a cup of tea with them in the U.S. Ryder Cup hospitality tent. The hospitality tent was overflowing with officials of the PGA of America in their blazers of the day. Red and blue candy-striped.

  That’s where I found out about the uniforms. Mrs. Larry Foster, Jill, Madam Captain, had taken it upon herself to design them.

  This fact was dropped on me a moment after I said I was really looking forward to wearing the red, white, and blue.

  They looked at each other, and Jill said, “Well . . . we’re going in a slightly different direction this time. We—Larry and I—felt it was time our colors become more diversified.”

  “Diversified?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Does the United States know about this?” I asked.

  They forced a smile.

  Jill said, “I believe we, the United States of America, should stress our originality and our diversity. That is essentially what I’ve strived for. I’ve gone with a mixture of tan and yellow in two of the flowered shirts you’ll wear on the course.”

  “Tan and yellow,” I repeated, glancing at Larry. He didn’t dare look like he was anything but pleased.

  “The PGA has approved everything I’ve done,” Jill said. “We will still wear red, white, and blue at times, of course, but they will be different from the red, white, and blue in our flag. For one thing, the red in one pair of the golf slacks and one of the golf shirts is more of a maroon.”

  “Maroon,” I said. “We’re the Texas Aggies.”

  No laughter that time.

  I excused myself, thanked them for the uniform update, and told my captain that in whatever colors I wore when the competition started, he could count on me to leave it all on the field.

  43

  NO POINT IN DWELLING ON THE scintillating golf I played at Firestone and Oak Hills in San Antonio. Thinking most of the time about the Ryder Cup and Cheryl and marriage, all I did in Akron was finish last and collect my thirty Grovers. As for San Antonio, while it was good to see the old Tillinghast course again, I wasn’t the birdie machine you need to be on that kind of layout. Old, short, sporty. I shot my 68 and 71 and did a Marlon Brando—got me “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”

  Back home I worked hard on my game for ten days, hoping to sharpen it up for the Europeans. Our team was impressive

  at the top—Tiger and the others—but every point counts in the cup matches, and I wanted mine to count for the good old maroon, tan, and yellow.

  The day before we left for Columbus, Ohio, I took Cheryl out for a romantic dinner of chicken fried steak and cream gravy at Rick’s on the Bricks, a popular tavern-slash-restaurant not far from downtown.

  We sat in the quiet dining room where we wouldn’t be bothered by the noise from the bar—the booming discussions of go
od and evil as they related to TCU’s football fortunes—and where we could read the big sign on the wall that said:

  In Dallas they call it sushi—in Fort Worth we call it bait.

  “I don’t have enough makeup to live in Dallas,” Cheryl said.

  That was the night I asked Cheryl to join me in legal and maybe even holy matrimony, seeing as how I’d realized I couldn’t live without her through another year on the tour.

  “You’ll empty the trash?” she said.

  “Do my best.”

  “You’ll unload the dishwasher?”

  “If you’ll show me where it is.”

  “You’ll change lightbulbs?”

  “I can learn how.”

  “You won’t fuck Nonnies?”

  “Never again . . . Alleene, maybe.”

  Cheryl startled me with a laugh. I’d expected a squint.

  Then she said, “I won’t have to worry too much about that. Alleene would rather be on the golf course.”

  “That’s the truth,” I said.

  “Alleene is my buddy now,” she said. “Your business partner, my new best friend.”

  “She is?”

  Surprised deal.

  Cheryl said, “We’ve gotten to know each other while you’ve been touring Western civilization. She’s terrific. We have lunches. She wants to go to the Ryder Cup.”

  “Really?”

  Even more surprised.

  “I hope she does,” Cheryl said. “You’re going to be in a golf coma. I’ll have somebody to fool around with. What is there to do in Columbus?”

  “Not a whole lot,” I said. “Mostly, everybody just walks around singing Ohio State fight songs.”

  “Well, that alone,” she said.

  Here was my plan, I said. We should get married—to one another—sometime after the Ryder Cup. Our wedding cake didn’t necessarily have to be a stack of barbecue brisket. We could go on a honeymoon, if she wished. Anywhere but Mexico or Arizona. We should sell my townhouse and her garden home and move to Mira Vista. Buy Versailles or the Kremlin, whichever one she liked best. I preferred Versailles. More lawn for somebody to mow. And there was something else. In order for her to be free to travel with me as often as possible, I wanted her to have her own real estate agency, be the boss. I’d finance it. She could hire Bonnie Lasater and Jolene Frederick to work for her, take care of things when she was gone. They’d be a winning combination. When a couple came along and seemed interested in a house, they’d be good at closing the sale quickly. Bonnie could occupy the wife’s time while Jolene fucked the husband.