The Downhill Lie (12 page)

“Night and day,” he declared, adding, “It’s probably better-looking than it feels right now.”

No argument there. The new swing was about as comfortable as bowel cramps. Wakulsky assured me that I’d get used to it.

Off we went to the putting green, where he placed eight balls twenty feet from one of the holes. I sank four in a row before he even got the camera warmed up. It was ludicrous.

“I couldn’t do that again in a hundred years,” I said unnecessarily, and proceeded to pull the next three dozen putts.

As a kid, I’d used a blade putter that allowed me to switch from right-handed to left-handed on a whim. Wakulsky said he didn’t recommend that system, and instead proposed that I stand farther away from the ball and stop breaking my wrists.

We finished with bunker shots and greenside chips, Wakulsky providing a few simple tips that produced immediate results. I allowed myself to feel guardedly optimistic.

After a final video recap, Wakulsky burned a DVD of Ernie and me so that I could study it at home. He said that I had the ability to be a good golfer, that I shouldn’t let myself get discouraged, and that I definitely shouldn’t quit the game again.

I thanked him for his help, and then selected my complimentary David Leadbetter cap, shirt and lesson book.

On the trip home, one thing that Steve had said stuck in my mind:

“You want this game to be fun.”

Sure, I want this game to be fun.

I also want peace in the Middle East, a first-round draft pick for the Miami Dolphins and a lifetime of reliable erections.

Wanting, however, won’t necessarily make it happen.

Day 444

On my first day back from the Leadbetter Academy I am sideswiped by the most dreaded disorder in golf—a shank. Aborting my round on the eighth hole, I hurry to the range, where the condition proceeds to worsen with each swing.

After fifteen minutes I give up in despair. For the first time since I started golfing again, I am seriously considering heaving my bag into a canal.

Everything I know about shanks is black doom. There are several theories about how a golf ball comes to be impacted by the stem of a club’s shaft—the hosel—instead of the face of the blade. Whatever the cause might be, the result is sickeningly unmistakable: The shot flares radically to the right.

Worse, shanking is like the hiccups; once you start, you never know when you’ll stop.

Many players are so fearful of the shank that they refuse to utter the word. Harvey Penick, the fabled golf teacher, preferred to call it the “Lateral Shot.”

The shank is to hackers what the clap is to porn stars. Unfortunately, penicillin won’t cure a shank. The condition abates only when the gods of golf take mercy on your soul, so from now on all references to it will be masked with dashes.

Day 446

My first full eighteen in almost four weeks, again in a blustery wind. I complete the first hole without a single sh_ _ _, so I’m practically euphoric despite the triple-bogey.

The highlight of the front nine is a curling twenty-footer to save bogey on the fourth. On the back side I’m in the water twice, and for good measure stack on a couple of listless three-putts.

But, for once, I finish with minor heroics and a smile. After my worst drive of the afternoon—possibly of the year—on the lengthy and difficult 18th, I rally from the boonies by scorching my rescue club about two hundred yards. Then I pitch a wedge to within six feet and drop the putt for a par.

The final damage is 93. If I’d scored that high after shelling out $10,000 for a private day with David Leadbetter, I’d probably be homicidal. Now I figure I got off easy.

Later, Mom calls and asks, “How’s the golf going?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“Aren’t you finding it at least a little relaxing?”

“It’s not relaxing, Mom. It’s a diversion,” I say. “There’s a difference.”

“Diversions are good, too,” she says.

“That’s true.”

“Even if you can’t relax.”

“It’s just the way I am.”

“I know, son,” Mom says fondly. “I know.”

Day 448

A friend and biologist, Derke Snodgrass, tells of a recent adventure in Senegal, where surly monitor lizards kept mistaking his golf balls for stork eggs and snatching them off the fairways.

If the PGA had any imagination, it would release large, aggressive reptiles during all major tournaments. Talk about boosting the ratings! Who wouldn’t tune in to see Phil Mickelson wrestle a Burmese python in Rae’s Creek at Augusta, or Vijay Singh jump a komodo dragon on the island green at Sawgrass?

Day 451

A late nine holes with Leibo, Lupica and Al Simmens, who are all in jolly form. Meanwhile I’m playing as if I’ve never touched a golf club before.

It’s the perfect time to test my new RadarGolf system. Each ball comes equipped with a microchip that transmits its location to a handheld receiver. The closer you get to a lost ball, the louder the receiver beeps.

According to the infomercial, Radar Balls send out a signal up to a hundred feet. In my case, a hundred yards would be more useful.

I tee one up on the fourth hole, enduring a fusillade of mockery from my friends. Every Radar Ball features the image of a hunting dog on point, yet nobody seems to think this is particularly clever.

When my drive obligingly disappears over a hill, I feel a misplaced rush of anticipation. As Lupica and I speed toward the area where the Radar Ball exited the fairway, I activate the receiver, which starts beeping frenetically. That’s because five other Radar Balls are stowed in my golf bag, and I’ve neglected to secure them in the factory-provided satchel, which is specially insulated to block the homing signals.

As a result, the ball-detector gizmo is now tweeting louder than the smoke detector in Willie Nelson’s tour bus. Leibo shouts something crude in our direction, but I can’t hear him over the noise.

Cresting the hill, I’m dismayed to find my Radar Ball in plain view near the eighth tee—there’s no need to track it electronically.

Lupica orders me to turn off the frigging receiver. “This is so embarrassing,” he mutters.

I dash down the slope and whack my ball in the imagined direction of the pin.

“Did you see where it went?” I ask.

“No, I did not,” Lupica says.

“Perfect!”

At greenside, three balls lie within ten yards of each other on the fringe. I bound from the cart, point the handheld unit and follow the beeps straight to my ball.

“See, it works!” I exclaim, provoking a fresh wave of derision.

Leibo asks how much the RadarGolf kit cost.

“Two hundred bucks,” I tell him.

The consensus is that I’ve been ripped off. Leibo warns me not to bring the gizmo to the Member-Guest tournament because we might be disqualified, or possibly assaulted by our opponents.

“Just wait,” I say. “Someday Tiger’ll be using these.”

Finally, on the ninth, I sh_ _ _ a beauty out of bounds, into some heavy vines along the shore of a lake. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the microchip-equipped Radar Balls that’s gone MIA. It’s a brand-new Pro V1, which I’d teed up by mistake.

Another four bucks down the crapper.

Day 453

Election Day. Golf is rained out, but Bill Becker stops by for a field demonstration of Radar Balls.

He lobs one into a neighbor’s yard and we advance as meticulously as prospectors, sweeping the receiver back and forth. It doesn’t make a chirp until we’re twelve feet from our target, which is sitting up smartly and quite visible on a tuft of sod.

A glaucomic Pomeranian could find a ball at a distance of twelve feet, which is exactly eighty-eight feet shy of the advertised range of the patented RadarGolf homing device.

Bill says a refund is in order. I say the golf industry shamelessly traffics in false hope. First the Q-Link, now the Radar Balls…even a sucker like me gets wise after a while.

Day 467

America’s most despised casual golfer, O. J. Simpson, is making headlines again. A New York publisher has scotched a book in which Simpson re-creates the stabbing murders of his former wife and a male friend, crimes for which he was famously acquitted.

The tome was to be titled
If I Did It,
to which informed readers might have replied: What does he mean “if”?

Simpson was said to reimagine the vicious attacks through a hypothetical character named “Charlie,” and editor Judith Regan had breathlessly promoted the book as a virtual confession.

Its release was to be timed with prime-time interviews on Fox TV, but the public reacted to the hype with such gastric revulsion that even cold-blooded media baron Rupert Murdoch (who owns both Fox and HarperCollins, the publishing company) was compelled to kill the project days before the big launch.

Characteristically, Simpson is shrugging off the fiasco. Today he told a Miami radio interviewer that he’s already spent the book advance, a high six-figure sum that he sensitively described as “blood money.” Meanwhile, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are still awaiting the $33.5 million that a civil jury ordered Simpson to pay.

The ex–football star insists that
If I Did It
was not a confession, and that he didn’t murder anybody.

So now he can resume his lonely but intrepid quest, searching every golf course in South Florida for the real killers.

Day 468

As if we needed more proof that golf is a pandemic disease, today a Russian cosmonaut used a gold-plated 6-iron to hit a ball off the International Space Station.

It wasn’t a scientific experiment but rather an exorbitant commercial stunt. A Canadian golf equipment manufacturer, Element 21, paid the Russian space agency an undisclosed sum to stage the shot, which was filmed for use in future advertising.

Unfortunately, the swing thoughts of cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin were agitated by a kink in a cooling hose that caused his space suit to overheat before he could line up the shot.

“Oh rats,” grumbled Tyurin, upon withdrawing to an airlocked chamber for repairs.

More than an hour later he tried again, this time laboring in his weightlessness to achieve a proper stance over the ball. At one point he was actually floating upside down, a sensation not unfamiliar to gravity-bound golfers.

Eventually the Russian was able to hold steady long enough to make a one-handed swing. The ball—weighing only three grams, and unapproved by the USGA—departed with a pronounced slice into the cosmic void. The script allowed for a mulligan, but the frustrated cosmonaut called it quits.

A spokesman for Element 21 boasted that Tyurin’s shot will travel for billions of miles and circle the earth for years—a typical golfing lie. NASA engineers calculate that the ball will orbit for two or three days before dropping into the atmosphere and burning up.

We should all live long enough to see a slice go up in flames.

Day 474

Tomorrow begins the Florida leg of the book tour for
Nature Girl,
a new novel of mine. I’ll be accompanied by Paul Bogaards, a vice president of the publishing company, who’s coming not to chaperone so much as to escape the current inclemency of the Northeast.

A boisterous golfer, Bogie has booked tee times at several tough courses along our route, and I’m already a mental wreck just thinking about it. He’s a much better player than I am, and the fact we carry comparable handicaps is a testament to the inscrutable rating system employed by the USGA.

To prepare, I’ve scheduled a lesson at Quail Valley with our unflappable Director of Golf, Steve Archer, who is familiar with my multiple swing glitches and free-floating neuroses.

I’m on the way out the door when the phone rings. Bad news: The only paved road to the course has been closed for emergency repairs by the Department of Transportation. The lone alternate route is a long dirt road, which, it turns out, has been transformed by heavy rains into a muddy roller coaster. A few cars have gotten stuck, and several others have turned back.

In my case, retreat is not an option. This is my last chance to pick up my clubs for the road trip.

Soon I’m skidding through a spitstorm of bile-colored mud. Fishtailing in front of me are two battered, enormous dump trucks, one of which offers a warning in crude block letters on its tailgate:
uninsured.

I struggle to keep a safe distance from the trucks, which isn’t easy in the absence of traction. At such moments I feel no guilt whatsoever about piloting an SUV. If I was in a Prius, I’d need a snorkel.

Twenty minutes later, I arrive at Quail Valley, where I’m greeted with stares of incredulity in the pro shop. No other golfers have made it to the course since the road was shut.

“How did you get here?” Archer asks.

“Four-wheel drive,” I say.

He laughs. “You still want your lesson?”

We spend an hour on the range in a cool drizzle. Then I stow the clubs in my splattered ride and plow back down the highway of mud.

Master of Disaster

A
common golfing myth is that the more frequently you play, the better you’ll get. Often the opposite is true, as anyone who lays off for even two or three weeks can attest. Over a seven-day road trip I was facing five rounds, all at unfamiliar courses. Bubbling with optimism I was not.

Bogie flew in from Newark and met me in Orlando, where he’d booked us at a Marriott that advertised, among other amenities, a Nick Faldo golf school. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), it was located very near the ChampionsGate facility operated by the teacher whom Faldo had made famous, David Leadbetter. I wondered if Nick, too, got $10,000 for a personal lesson. Having won so many tournaments, he could probably charge more.

However, Bogie and I were avoiding all instruction. The morning after my first book signing, we drove to a course called Grande Pines. There he announced that we’d be playing from the green tees, just one box short of the dreaded tips. Surreptitiously I previewed the scorecard, which listed a sobering Slope Rating of 135 and a distance of 6,612 yards.

Trouble commenced immediately, a flurry of three-putts and triple-bogeys. Before we reached the third tee, I’d lost two balls and Bogie had lost four. A vocal and exuberant competitor, he made no effort to suppress his disgust.

The fellow who’d been assigned to play with us, a taciturn radiologist we shall call Doc, seemed entertained by my companion’s purple eruptions. Doc was a good player and a nice guy, offering yardage readings from a handheld range finder. The way I was swinging, it didn’t help much.

While probing the underbrush for one of my errant drives, Bogie let out a cry and nimbly bounded away from what he claimed was a “huge” snake. It turned out to be a harmless black racer no more than three feet long, evidently a monster by New Jersey standards.

On another hole, I rescued a large slider that was crossing a dirt road used by utility trucks. While I was carrying the turtle to a safe location, it ungratefully peed all over my golf shoes, a fitting commentary on the day.

The course had been laid out to accommodate one of those typically charmless golf developments, boxy condominium buildings extruding within easy range of my banana slice or Bogie’s towering hook. On a couple of occasions it seemed certain that one of us had sent a flier into somebody’s boudoir, but there were no telltale sounds of breaking glass or human moans.

I believe it was the fourth or fifth tee where Bogie pointed down the fairway and made a sour yet profound announcement: “There ought to be a rule that you can’t put a golf course within sight of a theme park.”

There, rising forty stories in perfect line with the flagstick, was a garishly painted spire called the Sky Tower. It’s the main visual landmark of Sea World, home of Shamu the Killer Whale and other trained sea mammals. Visitors ascend the Sky Tower in elevator capsules that, according to the attraction’s Web site, offer a grand view of “downtown Orlando”—the highlight of any vacation, to be sure.

On the same day Bogie and I played Grande Pines, a killer whale at the San Diego Sea World got mad at his trainer and twice dragged him to the bottom of the tank, fracturing the man’s foot. No such drama broke out at the Florida theme park, where eagle-eyed tourists high in the Sky Tower had to settle for the sight of a middle-aged fool mangling a nearby golf course.

Bogie rallied for a 90, while I heroically parred the final hole for a 101. Trees were the problem. There aren’t that many at my home course, which has been shredded by recent hurricanes. If you miss a fairway at Quail Valley, you’re usually in the drink, the gnarly rough or a stand of saplings—but never, ever lost in a forest.

As the name implied, Grande Pines was
muy grande
with pines, not to mention palmettos and oaks. By the end of the round, the combined tally of lost balls was eleven—six for me, and five for Bogie. Our golf bags were noticeably lighter when we loaded them in the car.

Two days later, a Saturday morning, we were staring down the wooded maw of the impressive opening hole of Copperhead, at the Innisbrook resort north of Tampa. The course was packed, carts lined up at the first tee like buses at the Port Authority in Manhattan.

It was my first round on a course that hosted a regular PGA event, the Chrysler Championship, which K. J. Choi had won a few weeks earlier with a score of 13-under. Choi had made brilliant use of his driver, but mine would be staying in the bag. To minimize misadventures off the tee, I’d decided to borrow a page from Tiger’s playbook and stick with the 3-wood.

Bogie had been heavily lobbying to play from the tips, the same as the pros, but I told him to forget it.

“Okay, we’ll go from the golds,” he said.

The scorecard showed 6,725 yards. It promised to be a long,
long
day.

We were paired with a sturdy-looking couple from Oslo, Norway, who were characteristically polite and quiet. They flinched but did not complain whenever Bogie bellowed the f-word, which happened on more than one occasion. In a way I felt sorry for him, now outnumbered three-to-one by tightlipped Scandinavians.

He and I both started ignominiously, posting 7s on the same dogleg par-5 that Choi had eagled on the final day of the Chrysler. My ball visited three different bunkers, all superbly groomed, before landing anywhere close to the green.

The second hole was equally comical, Bogie and I racking up another nasty pair of 7s. The Norwegians played briskly and with purpose, spending little time mulling club selections or studying putts. We picked up our pace, so as not to be left in their dust.

On the front nine, a rare triumph: Bogie and I parred the hole known as “Snake Bite,” a long par-3 that had inflicted upon Choi his only double-bogey of the tournament.

Bogie made the turn at 49, while I shot 47 with three pars. I wasn’t totally displeased, but I feared the wheels would soon fly off—and did they ever. I debauched the back nine with three 7s and three 6s, on the way to a 53 and the malodorous sum of 100. My lag putting was so inept that at times Bogie seemed dumbstruck.

Only once were the Norwegians rattled, and not by us. Copperhead is home to a bizarre species of squirrel that looks like a cross between a howler monkey and a fox with thyroid problems. Agile and crafty, the squirrels specialize in preying upon unwary golfers by stealing snacks and slurping from unattended beverages. It was behind the 14th green where the Norwegians encountered one of the pointy-eared beasts looting their cart. They frightened it away with their only emotional outcry of the day.

Despite being terrified of the squirrels, Bogie played revoltingly well on the home stretch, finishing with a 42 that could easily have been a 39. As was his custom, he kept the scorecard to himself until we were in the car, when my hands were on the wheel and free of sharp lunch utensils. He endeavored to put a positive spin on my sorry performance.

“It’s better than you did last time,” he said.

“By one fucking stroke,” I pointed out.

“Hey, it’s a tough course.”

“Paul, for me they’re
all
tough courses.”

The next morning found us somewhere east of the Sarasota airport, hunting for the Ritz-Carlton Members Club. It turned out to be a stunning tract bordered by a nature preserve—and not a condo in sight. In fact, the clubhouse hadn’t even been finished.

A gloss of dew was still on the grass when Brian and Frank, our caddies, led us to the first tee. We were the only human souls on the course, which felt eerie but liberating after the traffic jams at Copperhead and Grande Pines.

Frank advised us to be cautious searching the woodlands for our wayward balls, due to a robust population of rattlesnakes. There were also wild boars, Brian added, fully tusked and disinclined to give ground. Bogie said we should make a pact not to venture off the fairways.

He was flying back to Jersey that afternoon and, because the following day was his birthday, I agreed to play from the tips. Even though the distance was intimidating (7,033 yards), I vowed to remain upbeat.

Like Quail Valley, the Members Club is a Tom Fazio design, which means man-made elevation, deep lakes and a plague of sprawling sand traps. I told myself that nearly a year of playing Quail Valley had prepared me for another Fazio challenge. Besides, an experienced caddy would be helping me pick my clubs and read the greens. Theoretically, there seemed no reason not to score better.

Again, I failed to factor in the most corrosive fundamental of golf, the Suck Factor. On any given Sunday, any course can be butchered.

The final damage was 105, the worst number I’d posted since buying my clubs. Even with Brian at my shoulder, I was putting like a caffeinated chimpanzee. The round included an especially macabre stretch of three three-putts, followed by a triplet of hard-earned 7s. Even Bogie ran out of encouragement.

Inexplicably, amid the carnage I managed to par the two longest holes on the course. Another sunny interlude occurred on the 15th, when I hit a rescue club 210 yards off a trampled ridge between two bunkers dotted with fresh tracks of feral pigs. The ball poinged over the green, but it was still an awfully crisp shot.

That I had not destroyed my Callaways by the end of the morning was, I felt, a sign of growing maturity. The hike itself had been glorious under a porcelain sky teeming with birds—cranes, wood storks, ospreys, curlews, swallows, blue herons and red-tailed hawks. There are worse places to play bad golf than on the edge of a wild cypress swamp.

After surrendering the scorecard for my review, Bogie left to catch his flight home. I was bitterly amused to see that, having miscounted my flails on the 16th, he’d given me 104 instead of 105. Dourly I corrected the mistake, which I hoped was not a deliberate act of pity.

With the Member-Guest tournament at Quail Valley only thirteen weeks, five days and eleven hours away, I phoned Leibo to warn him of my decline. He absorbed the news extremely well, probably because he’d shot 73 that afternoon.

It seemed impossible that only a few weeks earlier I’d been scoring in the low 90s—and bitching about it! Now I would happily trade places with Scooter Libby, just to break 100.

The gruesome gauntlet resumed at the melodramatically named Black Course at Tiburon (Slope: 138), a Greg Norman project in Naples. Playing alone, I made exactly one decent swing all day: a choked-down 5-iron from a waste bunker, uphill into a mean wind. The ball landed eight feet from the pin, but I squandered the opportunity by clumsily stubbing the putt.

At one point I found myself trapped in a construction site roaring with backhoes and bulldozers. A wide roadbed was being laid through the back nine, undoubtedly to accommodate future high-end homesites. It was an offensive but commonplace Florida scene—greed on the roll, a tide of concrete and asphalt where once there were tall pines and creeks.

A forklift operator eventually noticed me wheeling the golf cart in circles, and he hoisted an immense water pipe to clear a path to the next tee. By now, the din and dust from the earthmovers had pulverized the wispy remnants of my concentration. Queasy from diesel fumes, I hooked the next drive into a mesh-lined borrow pit, and sullenly moved on.

By the time I departed Tiburon, the state of my demoralization was complete and seemingly irreversible. I’d missed sixteen of eighteen greens, posting only two pars on the way to another rancid 100. The most exhilarating moment came when I almost flipped the cart while speeding along a boardwalk toward the 17th tee.

Back at the hotel, I began scheming cowardly ways to bail out of finishing the golf book. One possibility was to schedule another operation on my right knee, which would put me on crutches long enough to blow my publisher’s deadline. The only drawback to that plan was my profound aversion to pain—rehabbing a knee joint is no fun.

The following morning, I got up early and drove to Miami to appear on a live television program. The segment preceding mine featured a peppy performance by the cast of
Altar Boyz,
an off-Broadway musical about a Christian boy band. It was a challenging act for a novelist to follow.

Afterwards I headed to the Lago Mar Country Club in Plantation, not far from where I grew up. I was filling out a foursome with Al Simmens; Tommy McDavitt, another old friend; and Al’s stepson, Patrick, a nice kid and a sharp golfer. To make me feel better about my own erratic play, Patrick recalled that he’d once shot 109 a week after posting 76.

The story did cheer me up. The only reason I couldn’t top it was that I’ve never come close to shooting a 76.

When Al, Tommy and I were kids, the Lago Mar area of Broward County was the boonies, a vast and almost impenetrable stand of melaleuca trees. A papery-barked species that sucks water like a giant soda straw, melaleucas had been imported from Australia to drain the Everglades for development—a mission that flopped.

Many thousands of acres of native flora were displaced by the exotic pests, which wreaked mayhem on the ecosystem. The trees proved so durable and prolific that the state of Florida has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to eradicate them using helicopters that squirt potent herbicides.

The developers of the Lago Mar golf community came up with a localized solution to the melaleuca epidemic: They bulldozed an immense clearing in the trees. Hanging in the clubhouse was an old black-and-white photograph that showed a canal where I once fished for bass. If the waterway still existed, it was now irrigating acres of suburban backyards.

Despite the bittersweet memories, the round at Lago Mar was therapeutic. It’s hard to embarrass one’s self while playing golf with guys you’ve known since childhood. I couldn’t make sense of all the betting, which was just as well. I carded a 91 and Al had an 81, and somehow we collected $28 from Tommy and Patrick. More importantly, I broke 100 for the first time in a long, demeaning week. The relief was indescribable, and a bit pathetic.

After being brutalized in swift order by Grande Pines, Copperhead, the Ritz Members and Tiburon, Lago was a pardoning intermission. Afterwards I felt ready to go home and be punished by a familiar golf course.