It couldn’t be a more congenial group. One look at each other and we knew we were all just slightly different versions of the same person—three guys who hadn’t seriously considered making a living at competitive golf till it was almost too late, and now we’re determined to make the most of our chance. What little chatter there is, is collegial and supportive, each of us giving the others the chance to do their best.
The setting isn’t half bad, either. With no one in front of us, I feel like I washed ashore in paradise and just happened to find my sticks here waiting for me. The only sounds are waves, rustling palms, and birds. If anyone had gotten up at dawn and wandered over, they would have seen some quality golf. Among the three of us, we carded one bogey and fourteen birdies. All those sessions at Big Oaks must have paid off, or maybe it’s the novel thrill of hitting off organic material, because six of those birdies are mine. For the next four hours, my 66 makes me the year’s top player on the Senior Tour, and when the last player walks off 18, I’m tied for second with Gil Morgan, one shot behind the leader, Hale Irwin.
6
FRIDAY, I WENT OFF in the first group of the day. On Saturday, thanks to that 66, I go off in the final one. Instead of playing under the radar with two fellow journeymen, I’m trading shots with the two best fifty-somethings on the planet—Hale Irwin and Gil Morgan. Last year, Irwin won nine tournaments and more money than any golfer in the world, including an elegant young cat named Tiger Woods. Morgan won six times and earned more than Tiger, too. The last time I felt this out of my league was the summer afternoon in college when I got it into my head to play pickup basketball at a playground on the South Side of Chicago.
Everyone knows about Irwin, the former all–Big Eight cornerback with three U.S. Open titles, but it’s the late-blooming Morgan who is the revelation. For one thing, he possesses a perfect swing. Literally. When he was a kid, his father, a small-town mortician, took him to see Harvey Penick, the legendary Austin pro who taught Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite. Penick took one look at Morgan’s move and sent him home. Said there was nothing he could do for him.
Irwin’s swing is not nearly as lovely and he’s much shorter off the tee, but he possesses a level of competitiveness and confidence that is borderline psychotic. As impressed as I am that Morgan hits it twenty yards past Irwin all day, I’m even more impressed by the fact that Irwin could truly not care less.
I don’t want to belabor the point, but here’s one last illustration of the chasm in golfing prowess between me and them. Last year Irwin led the tour with an average score of 68.93, and my average was a shade under 71. In other words, if we had a regular game at Creekview Country Club on Sunday mornings, he would have to give me a stroke a side. But at Waialae on Saturday afternoon, I didn’t need any strokes from anyone. When our round is in the books, I’ve carded my second straight 66 to Irwin’s 69 and Morgan’s 70.
Those aren’t typos. That’s just golf.
7
FOR THE FIRST TIME since that U.S. Senior Open I keep bringing up, the name McKinley looks down from the top of the leaderboard. And it’s in excellent company. Sharing my lead at six under are two of the best players and biggest personalities on the tour—Lee Trevino and Hank “Stump” Peters. As the patron saint of golfing long shots, Trevino has forever occupied a special place in my personal pantheon, and the thought of going off with him in the final group on Sunday is thrilling. But seeing that Hank Peters will be playing with us makes my stomach hurt.
You know how some competitors always bring out your worst? Peters has been providing that invaluable service for me since he beat me on the eighteenth hole of a college match when we were juniors, him at Georgia Tech, me at Northwestern. At the time, Northwestern was the kind of school a powerhouse like Georgia put on the schedule to pad their record, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to beat him so badly. Another was that Peters, an all-state quarterback in high school, exuded exactly the kind of big-guy swagger that has always stirred my darkest competitive instincts, probably because at 6′2″ and 137 pounds, I exuded something quite different.
In our first encounter, back in college, I was two up with three to play, yet Peters never for a second thought he would lose, and of course he turned out to be right. After he knocked in his winning putt, which thirty-two years later I still recall as an uphill twelve-footer that broke two inches to the left, he shook my hand and said, “You got a nice little game, son. Stick with it.”
“Thanks, Hank.”
I guess there’s something about being condescending, patronizing, and better that leaves an indelible impression. Then again, I’ve always had a talent for nursing slights. I collect them like a wine snob collects Bordeaux. I never know when I might need to dust one off. Not that this one has been paying dividends. Since I got out here, I’ve been paired with Peters three times and gotten drubbed every time. Maybe it’s because I try too hard. More likely, it’s because Peters, who won eleven times on the regular tour, is better and always will be.
On Sunday afternoon, Trevino comes out sporting four shades of brown—beige cashmere sweater, light brown shirt, dark brown slacks, and darker brown shoes, and just watching him work his way through the crowd with his distinctive slightly bowlegged gait makes me smile. Peters arrives wearing a camouflage hunting cap and sweatshirt, with several pinches of chewing tobacco stuffed between his teeth and lower gum, but for some reason I find his version of populist charm less endearing. My expression must give me away, because Johnny A promptly walks over and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Now, listen,” he says, “we’re not going to let this cracker take us out of our game.”
8
EASIER SAID THAN DONE, when this particular cracker has been living in my head rent-free for three decades. Trevino plants his tee, doffs his cap, and busts his iconic open-stanced move. His flat, abrupt chop—somewhere between martial arts and grunt labor—produces the same low, hard fade it has a million times before and ends up smack in the middle of the fairway.
“I hit that sunnabitch quail high,” he says to his adoring gallery. “But I guess there aren’t a lot of quail on Oahu.”
After ejecting a brown stream of tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup, Peters knocks it ten yards past Trevino, who at fifty-eight has lost some distance. Appropriately enough, I’m up last, and as I go through my routine, I can sense how anxious the gallery is for me to get it over with so they can hustle down the fairway and watch Trevino and Peters hit again.
Nevertheless, I catch it solid and roll it past them both. Having hit the longest drive, I’m last to hit again, and this time the gallery doesn’t even pretend to wait. Halfway through my backswing, the scenery shifts like the furniture between acts of a play. I yank an easy wedge ten yards left, and when I fail to get up and down, I walk off the first green with a bogey.
“Only the first hole,” says Johnny A. “Plenty of golf to be played.”
True enough. And on the par-three 2nd, I hit my 6-iron to fourteen feet. Knock it in, I’m back to where I started and it’s all good. Unfortunately, I’m so eager to undo my opening bogey, I charge my birdie putt five feet past and miss the comeback for another bogey, and on three, I’m so pissed about one and two, I bogey that as well.
Bogey. Bogey. Bogey. Not exactly the start I had in mind, and while I’m barfing on my FootJoys, Peters and Trevino are keeping theirs nice and clean, carding two birdies each. The round is barely fifteen minutes old, and I’m five strokes behind and well on my way to another traumatic defeat at the hands of my outdoorsy, tobacco-juice-spittin’ nemesis.
At this point, I should summon my inner Lombardi and dig deep, but God knows what I’d dredge up. Instead, I relax and watch Trevino. For all I know, I’ll never get a chance to tee it up with Super Mex again, and if I can’t enjoy it, maybe I can learn a thing or two.
The first thing that stands out is the way Trevino parcels his concentration. Yesterday, Irwin and Morgan never peeked from behind their game fac
es. From the handshakes at the first till they signed the scorecards in the trailer, they never stopped grinding. Trevino has a different MO. For the thirty seconds it takes to plan and execute his shot, he and Herman are as focused as assassins, but once the ball stops rolling, they go right back to shooting the breeze, picking up the conversational thread—dogs, Vegas, barbecue—wherever they left it, as if trying to win a golf tournament is a minor distraction from an otherwise carefree afternoon.
And if the conversation lags, or we’re waiting for a green to clear, as happens on 5, Trevino walks to the edge of the nearest hazard and fishes out balls with his 7-iron. He reminds me of my cheap buddies back home, except that Trevino tosses his plunder to the kids in his gallery.
I’m so captivated by the rare opportunity to observe Trevino in his natural habitat, I barely notice my own birdies on 7 and 8, and when I’m looking over my eagle putt on 10, the prospect of sinking it is such a nonevent, I roll it dead center from forty-five feet. Now I’m back in the hunt—two behind Peters and one behind Trevino—and the thought of evicting Peters from my brain is so tantalizing, I immediately start pressing again.
On the next seven holes, I give myself legitimate birdie looks on five and never scare the hole. Surprisingly, Peters and Trevino can’t make anything either. Over the same stretch, Peters misses three putts shorter than mine—I guess legends and assholes aren’t immune to pressure either—and we head to 18 exactly as we stepped off 10, with Peters one up on Trevino and two up on me.
9
THE PAR-5 FINISHING HOLE is a gauntlet of palm trees, mined by bunkers, which I avoid and Peters and Trevino don’t. That means they have to lay up, and I have a chance to reach in two.
Johnny A paces off the distance to the nearest sprinkler head and checks his yardage book. “Two fifteen to the center,” he says, “two twenty-nine to the flag.”
As soon as that first number falls out of his mouth, I smile involuntarily, because it’s a number close to my heart, the perfect distance for my new high draw that got me through the winter. Of course, as Earl was unkind enough to point out on the range, the high draw offers no tangible advantage, and since this isn’t figure skating and there are no points awarded for degree of difficulty or artistic expression, there is no sensible reason to pull it out now. Except one. If I go with the high draw, I just might be able to foster the illusion that rather than coming down the stretch with Peters and Trevino on Sunday afternoon at Waialae, I’m back at Big Oaks on a Tuesday morning with Esther Lee. And maybe, with a little luck, I can sustain the illusion long enough not to choke my brains out. Plus, as even Earl concedes, it’s the suavest shot in golf.
When Johnny A hands me my 5-wood and says, “Nice soft cut, center of the green,” I don’t bother to contradict him. Instead, I do what I did all winter…in reverse. Instead of savoring the reality of this Hawaiian paradise, I transport myself eight thousand miles away to a drafty, underheated warehouse in the midst of a brutal Chicago winter. The breeze rustling the palms? That’s traffic whooshing by on Route 38. The waves breaking on the shore? Trucks rattling over the potholes.
I do such a thorough job of conjuring those chilly practice sessions, my biggest fear is that Esther will shank another one in the middle of my backswing. It’s a feat of reverse double psychology that might not impress mental guru Bob Rotella, but when my ball drops softly on the green and settles fifteen feet from the hole, it impresses the shit out of Johnny A.
“I thought we said high cut. But let’s not split hairs.”
It also makes an impression on Trevino. “Golf shot, Travis,” he says, and I swear I’m not making that up.
“Thanks, Lee,” I respond, and I would have been more than happy to carry on back and forth like this for another ten minutes, but seeing as he and Peters have their second and third shots to contend with and I’ve got some work left on the green myself, I reluctantly cut our conversation short and follow Johnny A to the green.
10
WHEN WE GET THERE, I discover I’m even closer than I thought, which is always nice. It’s more like thirteen feet from the hole, and considerably closer than Peters’s twenty-one feet and Trevino’s eighteen. And they’re lying three.
If you watch televised golf—and if you’re reading this, that’s more than likely—you’ve heard that pros never root against their competitors. You believe that, I have a warehouse conveniently located on Route 38 you might be interested in. When Peters attempts his birdie, I’m pulling so hard for it to miss, I may have given myself a hernia. If so, it’s worth a little outpatient surgery, because his putt stops three feet short. Trevino misses too, although I swear, I wasn’t bad-vibing my pal Lee…at least not as much.
Once they tap in, I’ve got those thirteen feet, a McKinley dozen, to force a play-off with Peters. Thirteen feet is no gimme. It’s about three gimmes. But it’s manageable, the kind of putt even I can stand over with a certain level of optimism, if not confidence, and Johnny and I are taking our sweet time / stalling, if only to get my heart rate down. Although our extended deliberations must be boring the crap out of Trevino and Herman, I know Peters is watching. For the first time in thirty-two years, I may have his full attention.
There is another reason Johnny A and I are taking our sweet time / stalling, and it has nothing to do with the enormous consequences or the fact that there is enough mental baggage between Peters and me to fill an airport carousel. The putt is dead straight. As long and hard as Johnny and I stare at it, we can’t see any break, and the last thing a pro golfer wants to see when he squats behind a putt is nothing. Nothing is spooky. Nothing messes with your head.
Canvass a hundred guys out here, ninety-nine will agree. On a crucial putt of this length, they’d rather see two inches either way than nothing at all. A dead-straight putt is like looking at a mirror with too much light. It reveals way more about you and your stroke than any pro wants to share with himself, let alone his rivals. Then again, a lot of the people in that survey would say I’m barely a pro at all, which may help explain why I pour it dead center.
11
IT WOULD BE AN exaggeration to say that when Peters climbs out of the cart at 11 for the start of our play-off, he’s a broken man. That’s asking too much. But he’s clearly dispirited by the recent turn of events, just as I’m buoyed by them. For the first time in our unhistoric rivalry, which may be a rivalry only to me, I’m the one feeling jaunty.
You can see it in my step as I hop from my own cart, and my uncharacteristic bonhomie as I chat with Marcus Azawa, chairman and CEO of Azawa Enterprises, the sponsor of the tournament. Judging from my social ease with him and his vice president of marketing, you might conclude I’m employable. And when I pump Peters’s hand for the second time that afternoon and wish him, with utter lack of sincerity, good luck, there’s a few extra pounds of pressure in my grip. I’m feeling so ebullient, I’m half tempted to ask Peters if he can spare a pinch of Skoal.
Eleven is a shortish par 4 with water left, and based on the numbers we draw from the chairman’s palm, Peters has the tee. That’s another break for me, because it gives him that much less time to recover from his disappointing finish. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose, trying to delete the memory of those missed short putts, but unless your last name is Woods or Irwin, that rarely works. As soon as Peters hits it, he knows it’s wet, and when it dives into the hazard, the Azawa Open is mine to win or lose.
Now I’m the one taking New Age breaths. Before Peters’s ball has reached the bottom of that man-made lake, Johnny A has pulled the 3-wood from my hand and replaced it with a 4-iron. Somehow I keep it dry, and Johnny and I head up the right side of the fairway while Peters trudges up the left. He takes his drop and hits it about thirty feet left of the hole, and I hit my 6-iron about the same distance to the right.
On the green, the lengths are so close, it takes a rules official and a tape measure to determine that I’m far. Since we’re on the same line
, that’s a break for Peters, but I still like my chances. If I can lag it close and tap in for par, Peters will have to sink his thirty-footer to tie.
Unlike 18, this putt has all kinds of break, at least four feet of break from left to right, but Johnny A and I are far more concerned with the pace, since the last thing we want to do is run it eight feet past or leave it five feet short. On lag putts, my grandfather taught me to feel the distance, not just see it, and as I walk back and forth between my ball and the hole, I process the contours of the green and the route my ball will travel, through my feet.
“Weight. Weight. Weight,” whispers Johnny A when he finally hands me the ball, and as I place it in front of my marker, I repeat the message to myself like a mantra. My first practice stroke feels a hair tentative, the second a tad strong, and when I put the putter behind the ball for real, all I’m trying to do is split the difference.
The contact is solid, and the weight feels right. And even though we didn’t grind over the line anywhere near as much as the speed, I got that right, too. Six feet from the hole, as the ball slows, takes the breaks, and swerves inexorably toward the hole, I know it’s in.
12
WHEN THE BALL CATCHES the high side of the hole, my putter is already in the air. It glints in the sun like a saber as the ball drops from sight, and it’s still pointing heavenward when the ball catches the back edge and comes flying out the low side twice as fast as it went in. (See physics: gravity; centrifugal force; the combination thereof.) When it stops rolling, I’m ten feet from the hole.