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

  Kikuyu grass is an African weed and gives you another reason not to go to Africa, although not as good a reason as your mambas.

  Most of us never try to drive the tenth green. It’s smarter to go with a two-iron off the tee, put yourself in position for about a hundred-yard pitch shot. Which is what I did perfectly with a slight fade.

  “Hello, Golf,” Mitch said.

  Now I stood with Mitch and watched as Cheetah’s dad handed him the three-wood, and said, “Time to turn up the volume, kid. We’re due for a kick-ass back nine.”

  Suitably inspired, Cheetah stepped up and launched a satellite high and long, heading straight up over the trees toward the green. But the ball slowly started curving left—and went even more left.

  “That’s right, hook!” Cheetah hollered at the ball. “Now hook some more, you cocksucking, motherfucking piece of shit!”

  He took an angry swing with the three-wood, but this time he was aiming at the ground. The clubhead took up a foot of turf. He kicked at the divot he’d dug, pitched the club over in the direction of his daddy, and stormed off down the fairway.

  “Did he leave anything out?” Mitch said to a group of fans behind the ropes in back of the tee. Everybody laughed but Cheetah’s daddy.

  I cozied a sand wedge in there about ten feet from the pin for a birdie putt and delighted in waiting to see what Cheetah could do with his second shot. He’d driven it 330 on the carry, a little beyond pin high, but it had hooked thirty yards left and the ball was five inches deep in the kikuyu grass.

  He opened the face on his sand wedge and took a Tiger Woods slash at it, but he didn’t get a Tiger Woods result. He only moved it ten yards, but now he could at least see the ball. A lob shot from there put him on the green, but thirty feet away, and he three-putted for a double bogey six. When I drained my birdie putt, I took a four-shot lead with only eight holes to go.

  Mitch said, “We don’t need nothin’ from here to the house but fairways and greens, my man. Let’s do this thing.”

  Play conservatively, he meant. Don’t do anything risky. Pars were good enough.

  “Hit eleven, stay on twelve,” I agreed.

  Although I hadn’t been straining to find Cheryl in the large gallery, I’d spotted her once on the front nine. She was strolling along apart from the crowd, trying to ignore a couple of college punks who were impressed with her bod. She was wearing large round sunglasses, snug khaki pants, and a tight pink knit top that did a swell job of displaying two of her major assets.

  Cheryl finally made herself conspicuous to me on the eleventh tee. She worked her way up to the ropes, gave me a little thumbs-up sign. I wondered if she was thinking about the $615,000 first-place paycheck. I was reasonably certain that my two exes, Alleene and Terri, were thinking about the $615,000 first-place paycheck.

  You could call that amount of money obscene, and you’d be right. I am more than grateful to the heroes who came before me to make it possible—Hogan, Nelson, and Snead . . . Palmer, Nicklaus, and Tiger. One by one, they kicked the tournament purses upstairs.

  And I don’t buy the argument that we deserve this kind of money because we can play golf better than Joe Jack Billy. Schoolteachers out there teach school better than Joe Jack Billy, but they still make crapola.

  I honestly wasn’t thinking about the money at Riviera. The W itself was more important to me in terms of pride.

  It was ice cream all the way to the cabin. Cheetah made two more bogeys, just to prove how mad at himself he could get, and I parred the last eight holes in cruise control, and it was Buenos noches, coaches.

  I closed with a light-running 68, three under for the round, and a winning total of 275.

  Your faithful golf followers may have noticed that I wound up winning by four shots over somebody named Mark Elliott, a certified lurker that Cheetah let slip past him for second.

  Cheetah somehow scared up the decency to congratulate me on the eighteenth green, backhanded as the compliment was.

  Shaking my hand, he said, “If I were you, Bobby Joe, I wouldn’t go to another dance without that putter.”

  Mitch replied for me. “We buyin’ it a corsage.”

  13

  CHERYL WAS ON MY ARM AS I WAS led into the press room by three tournament officials who were trying to hide their disappointment that I wasn’t Cheetah Farmer.

  The first person to greet me in there was a smiling Irv Klar. He offered me a high five, and I took it.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Hey, I came up today to root for my buddy,” he grinned.

  His buddy.

  I quickly introduced Irv Klar to Cheryl and asked him to look after her while I went up to sit at the table where the microphone was and do my birdies and

  bogeys and try to give the Point Missers and Rally Killers something to write about.

  Fort Worth’s own Jim Tom Pinch, the New York sportswriter who’d coined lurkers, had also come up with Point Missers and Rally Killers. Some years back he’d explained to me that half the people in any press room—in any sport—were Point Missers and Rally Killers. A Point Misser could often be a Rally Killer, too, but there was a tiny difference.

  The Point Misser was adept at asking naïve and pointless questions that had nothing to do with what happened in the sports event, and the answer wouldn’t appear in anybody’s story but the Point Misser’s.

  Meanwhile, the Rally Killer was adept at interrupting an athlete in the middle of revealing something fascinating about himself to ask a naïve, pointless, and completely off-the-subject question.

  Like, for example, a golfer could be saying he stabbed his wife to death that morning with a butcher knife because she threw away his KKK hood, and the Rally Killer would interrupt him to ask if he planned to play at Doral next month.

  I went through my round quickly. I said it was good to be back in the winner’s circle—it had been a year and a half. I lied when somebody asked me about Cheetah Farmer’s collapse. I said he got a lot of bad breaks today. I gave credit to Roy Mitchell, my caddy. I was in the process of talking about Mitch making me switch putters to the Armour and how it had made the difference in my game the last two rounds when a Point Misser interrupted me.

  He wanted to know if I planned to play at Doral next month.

  A studious writer was aware that I was single and had two ex-wives in my background, and brought it up. He asked which was easier, to play good golf, single or married?

  I pointed out Cheryl Haney in the back of the room, said she was my fiancée, and said I’d been trying to talk her into becoming my third ex-wife but she was insisting I sign a pre-nup agreement first.

  I waited for laughter. Nothing.

  Minutes later, while I was talking about how much it pleased me to be from Fort Worth and win a tournament on a course where Ben Hogan had won three times, and Byron Nelson had won once—I thought the Fort Worth angle was interesting—a Rally Killer stood up, frantically waving his hand at me.

  I stopped in midsentence, looked at him, and said, “Yes . . . ?”

  He said, “What iron did you hit to the eighteenth?”

  The Rally Killer was groaned at by his fellow journalists.

  The rest of the interview was pretty much a dogfight between Smart Money and Rally Killers.

  I was on my way out of the press room when Irv Klar asked me where we were going to celebrate tonight. He said Cheryl invited him to join us.

  I said, “Do you own a pair of long pants?”

  He said he came prepared, having had immense faith in me.

  We were a party of four in the Polo Lounge that night—me, Cheryl, Mitch, and Irv Klar. Those three had never been in the Polo Lounge before and were excited about having a passel of celebrities to look at.

  I gave “Pepe le Moko,” the maitre d’, a hundred-dollar bill to make sure he seated us in one of the booths on the left as you enter. Pepe le Moko was Charles Boyer’s name in Algiers, I explained to Irv Klar. As for the boo
ths on the left, it’s a well-established fact that the booths on the right are Bulgaria, and all of the seating in the back is Albania. If you can’t sit in one of the booths on the left in the Polo Lounge, you might as well go to a Denny’s.

  The maitre d’ glanced at the hundred and gave us the big round booth in the left corner and a telephone and two platters of guacamole with chips.

  I asked the maitre d’ if he’d ever been to Algiers.

  Nothing.

  We all drank quite a number of adult beverages until it was time to order shrimp cocktails and cheeseburgers, then we drank adult beverages through the shrimp cocktails and cheeseburgers.

  Irv Klar, my new young journalism friend, had to be told to shut up at least three times throughout the evening. Those were the occasions when he kept directing the conversation back to himself.

  As I vaguely recall, he’d decided to make Sports Illustrated hire him right away, he’d write for them for five years, but by the time he was thirty he planned to be running a TV network or a movie studio.

  I was yawning when Irv said to me, “I want to help you with your book. You’ll need a wordsmith. That’s me. My name will have to be on it, too. By Bobby Joe Grooves with Irving Klar. Like that. I’d never write without a credit, no way. I already have a great title, you ready? Tees and Sympathy. Huh?”

  My yawn that time came with a whimper.

  Mitch barely spoke all evening but he was relaxed, enjoyed himself, and was tickled by the glances he drew from passing waiters and other customers. His slick bald head glistened like Michael Jordan’s, and he wore a light gray pinstriped suit with a blue handkerchief in the pocket, a dark blue button-down shirt with a lighter blue silk tie, and a pair of shades.

  Pepe le Moko treated Mitch like he must be somebody famous, but he never could think of who.

  14

  GOING BACK HOME AS A tournament winner meant granting some local newspaper, TV, and radio interviews, but I didn’t get to play the conquering hero too long. A big mistake caught up with me.

  The big mistake, I came to find out, was the one I made at the Crosby. Which was telling Nonnie Harrison what Cheryl Haney’s name was and where Cheryl worked.

  Cheryl was over at my place late one afternoon about three days after we came home from LA, and, as luck would have it, while I was out running errands—going to the cleaners, the drugstore,

  picking up ribs and brisket from the Railhead for dinner—she’d received this phone call.

  Guess what the first thing was Cheryl said to me when I walked back in the house. Never mind. I’ll tell you what it was. She said:

  “You fucked that woman in Pebble Beach!”

  Under a surprising and immediate attack like that, I said what any man would say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Nonnie Harrison,” she said, eyes blazing.

  “Nonnie Harrison?” I said. “Yeah, Nonnie. She’s married to that guy, J. Rodney. He was my amateur partner at Pebble Beach.”

  “I just spoke to her.”

  “You just talked to Nonnie Harrison on the phone?”

  “Yes. The woman you fucked in Pebble Beach.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I get a phone call from a woman I barely know and that means I fucked her? Why’d she call here? I mean, how’d she even know the number? I’m unlisted. I sure didn’t give it to her.”

  “She knew my name and where I worked. She called my office for your phone number, and my office gave it to her—as if that is of any goddamn importance in the light of things.”

  I said, “Cheryl, let’s slow down a minute here. What exactly did Nonnie Harrison say, and what did she want?”

  “She wanted to know what your travel schedule is over the next few months. She said to tell you she’d been thinking about you ever since the evening you two spent together. She said . . . I don’t fucking believe this—she said to tell you it had been a long time since she’d been with a man as sensitive as you are.”

  “And you think that means I nailed her?”

  Her look said what kind of a fool did I take her for?

  Oh boy.

  She said, “You know what almost makes it worse? Her fucking name is Nonnie! You fucked a Nonnie, for Christ sake!”

  Six or eight fucks right off the bat, incidentally, was no NCAA record for Cheryl.

  I momentarily wondered if it would have made any difference to Cheryl if Nonnie’s name had been Mary Ellen. I also momentarily wondered whether it would be better to stonewall it or confess, beg for mercy.

  That was decided for me in the next instant by Cheryl, who said, “Bobby Joe, if you don’t tell me the truth right now, I am walking out of this door and you will never see me again. I mean it.”

  I said, “Why do you want to put me in a jackpot like that? If I say I didn’t screw her, you’ll call me a liar. If I say I did, you’ll hate me.”

  “I won’t hate you,” she said. “I will know you are man enough to stand up and tell me the truth. I can’t live with a liar, Bobby Joe.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Okay, we . . . fooled around.”

  “You fucked her, you mean?”

  “Well . . . it was more like she fucked me.”

  “I hate you!”

  “See there?” I said.

  “You rotten bastard!” she said. “How dare you? How dare you?”

  All I could think about was, I knew I should have gone with popular theory. Like any sane man. Never confess, no matter what. Even if they have game films.

  “You are double stupid,” Cheryl said. “On top of not having any respect for me, you go off and fuck a bitch named Nonnie.”

  I thought about telling Cheryl that Nonnie had a sister named Neenie, but I wisely kept that to myself.

  “It was an accident, is what it was,” I said.

  “It was an accident?” Cheryl said. “Your dick wandered off by itself and wound up between her legs?”

  “It didn’t mean anything,” I said. “A big mistake on my part, yeah, but it was nothing. It was like, you know . . . I believe any understanding, clear-thinking person would consider it a sports event.”

  “Really?” Cheryl spoke with folded arms. “Maybe I’ll go fuck a Dallas Cowboy . . . call it a sports event.”

  “Offense or defense?”

  “Be funny. That’ll fix it.”

  “Any normal guy in the same situation would have done the same thing, believe me.”

  “Wrong. Any miserable asshole with no character in the same situation would have done the same fucking thing. I thought I meant something to you.”

  “You do, babe.”

  “Don’t call me babe.”

  “Look, I’m guilty. I did it. But it was a weird circumstance. It was like, you know, strange. It’s never happened before in all the time we’ve been together, and it’ll never happen again.”

  “Not till another Nonnie shows up.”

  “That’s not true—and refresh my memory about something. We’re not married, right?”

  “Oh, that makes it okay?”

  I said, “It makes it something less than a federal offense. It makes it less of a sin, a big deal, doesn’t it?”

  “You know what? It makes you less of a big deal, is what it fucking well does.”

  I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sick about it. I did a terrible thing to you. I wish I’d been stronger, had more willpower. Call me a weak shitass. Shoot me, stab me, slit my tires . . .”

  “The only goddamn thing you’re sorry about is you got fucking caught!”

  “There is that,” I said.

  “Keep being funny. See what it gets you.”

  “How bad do you want me to feel, babe?”

  “Don’t call me babe!”

  “What can I do about it now? That’s all I want to know.”

  “You can catch a venereal disease.”

  “Now who’s being funny?”

  “Damn it, what a dumb shit you ar
e. You’ve got a nifty lady who loves you, who cares for you, and you can’t wait to fuck it up.”

  “I’m curious about something,” I said. “What did you say to Nonnie when she asked you what my schedule was?”

  “I told her it was none of her fucking business, and that my real name was Gambino—and if she ever put her cunt in your face again, she’d hear from my nephew Guido. That’s about all.”

  I wanted to laugh at that, but held it in. Then I said, “There’s one thing you ought to understand about Nonnie. She’s a viper, man. She’s the kind of woman where . . . if I hadn’t done it with her, she’d have told you I did.”

  “My God,” said Cheryl. “It was self-defense!”

  15

  CHERYL STAYED HOT THE WHOLE two weeks I was home. We didn’t see much of each other, and when we did, I was the recipient of what you call your silent treatment. That was on the one hand. Her wise mouth was on the other. Not many civil responses to anything I said. Punishment deal.

  All in all, I was reminded from prior experience with two wives that when a woman gets as hot as Cheryl was, the anger just has to run its course. Like my daddy used to say, you might as well try to fight a house fire with a garden hose.

  Even flowers didn’t do shit.

  Another mistake I made was not stay-

  ing out on the Tour, keep playing after I won at LA. You tend to play in streaks. I knew that. If my putter was on a roll, why didn’t I let it keep rolling? I should have remembered the old gambler’s motto. You need to make a bet on something every day—you might be walking around lucky and not know it.

  But I felt like I stayed sharp hitting practice balls and playing a few friendly rounds out at Mira Vista while I was home, and I was feeling confident about my game when I went down to Doral.