The Legend of Bagger Vance (10 page)

J
UNAH BIRDIED TEN
, eleven and twelve. I can’t overstate the emotional effect that had upon the gallery, and not just the Savannah contingent. The sweltering thousands had shared Junah’s agony through the front nine…as golfers they understood his torment. Now the pendulum swung mercifully back; the gallery responded with a rush of glorious relief. None believed Junah’s spree would last. That he would fall apart again was inevitable, given how shaky he was. But at least, thank God, he had been granted these three holes. These would comfort him in memory. These we others could brag about, these we could tell and retell.

Junah’s pitch finished eight feet below the pin on ten; he rammed the putt dead down the throat. This sounds better than it was. In fact Junah’s stone-numb hands banged the putt like a jackhammer; had the ball not collided dead-on with the back of the cup, it would have shot four or five feet past. You could see
Junah clinging to what slight composure he had regained, desperate for some clear concrete focus to hold him together. I kept tight beside Vance as he strode at Junah’s elbow toward eleven. This was the first time I heard the caddie speak on the subject of the grip.

“You’re in your head, Junah, I need you to come down into your hands. Listen to me. Intelligence, I have told you, does not reside in the brain but in the hands. Let them do the thinking, they’re far wiser than you are. Be patient. Let the club settle. Don’t make a move toward the ball until the leather has found its proper nestle. Remember, the hands do not create the swing, they
find
it, they
remember
it. Do you recall in the East how the
sadhus
would sit, palms upturned in contemplation, making antennas of their hands? The golfer’s hands are his antennas too, searching the Field, drawing in the Authentic Swing.”

“What ‘Field’?” Junah interrupted impatiently. “I’m sorry, Bagger, I can’t absorb all this.” Vance nodded with patience, touching Junah gently on the elbow, steering him onto the next tee. Eleven was a short but severe dogleg left, across bunkers to a deceptively shallow fairway that could be easily overdriven into unplayable dunes beyond. The shrewd play was a driving iron of 210 yards, hit with spin to hold it where it struck; then a pitch or run-up into the tight, mound-collared green.

Junah went for the green off the tee. He didn’t want to. But there was Vance, holding out the driver with a look that brooked no possibility of retreat. A thrill coursed through the gallery. So this was how Junah would play it. Five shots back, behind champions who could be expected to pull farther and farther ahead, he
had no choice but to go all out. Junah focused. You could see him struggling desperately to relax, to let his grip settle and release the pressure of tension in his fingers. He swung. Not a thing of beauty, but a solid yardage-eating draw. The ball finished just shy of the apron, 270 from the tee; a chip and putt gave him a birdie.

He was gaining. Settling. Twelve was an uphill postage-stamp par three, 170 for the morning round, with the flag hanging slack beneath the mound backing the green. You couldn’t feel a breath of breeze; a bank of dunes coupled with the gallery’s mass to obscure it where the players stood. There was something moving up there though. A one- or two-club wind, up where an iron would fly. This, as you know, Michael, is what makes club selection so diabolical on a links course; there are no trees, no branches to sway, no way to sense the swirling currents high up. I saw Hagen take out a mashie, the proper club for a shot of 170 without wind. Vance wouldn’t bite; he handed Junah a three-iron, which the champion questioned briefly, then knocked stiff for a tap-in deuce. Hagen promptly replaced the mashie and took the club he intended to play all along, a three.

He too birdied. Jones had birdied ten and eleven. For all Junah’s heroics, he had regained but a single stroke on his rivals, who now stood tied at two under.

What else was Bagger Vance saying to Junah through these holes? And what did he say now, when momentum could so easily flag and that dire goddess, Collapse, again rear her hideous head?

“Listen to me, Junah. All sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of
yoga
, meaning union, union with the divine. But golf is supreme because it more closely mirrors the Reality of the way to Self-realization. Listen and I will tell you why.

“In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy. We seek by our actions to disable him. In tennis our stroke defeats him; in football our tackle lays him low. This is not the way to salvation, or, more accurately, it is at one remove. The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions. He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself. His little self. That yammering fearful ever-resistant self that freezes, chokes, tops, nobbles, shanks, skulls, duffs, flubs. This is the self we must defeat.

“Consider the golfer’s relation to the Rules, Junah. This too differs from every other sport. In baseball a batter, knowing a pitch to be over the plate, will argue vociferously with an umpire to the opposite effect, trying to avoid having a strike called on him. The tennis player will bitterly contest a line call he knows to be fair, the footballer vehemently declare his innocence of a penalty he knows he committed.

“In other words they will lie. Deliberately. To gain selfish advantage.

“It is only in golf, Junah, that players routinely call penalties on themselves. Look at Jones, striding there. Do you remember the ’25 Open at Worcester? That great man, your foe this day, lost by a single stroke, the result of his calling a penalty on him
self in the first round when his ball moved accidentally. Jones finished tied for first and lost in the play-off. Take away that selfenforced penalty and he would have won outright.

“The greatness of this is that it mirrors Higher Reality. There can be no cheating in the dimension in which the Self resides. There every action inexorably produces its result, every thought its consequence.

“Therefore, Junah, love your opponents. When I say love, I don’t mean hand them the match. I mean contend with them to the death, the way a lion battles a bear, without mercy but with infinite respect. Never belittle an opponent in your mind, rather build him up, for on the plane of the Self there can be no distinction between your being and his. Be grateful for your opponents’ excellence. Applaud their brilliance. For the greatness of the hero is measured by that of his adversaries. In this too the etiquette and honor of golf reflect the Reality of the Field. Those new to the game often cheer an opponent’s misfortune, but the player of wisdom who has entered into the soul of the game schools himself to feel and act the opposite. This too is the greatness of the game.

“But all this you know, Junah. I repeat it now only to focus your distracted mind under this excruciating pressure. To return you to the imperative to act.”

Here Junah, who had been listening with as much attention as he could muster under the circumstances, bridled and pulled up in midstride. “I don’t understand you, Bagger,” he said. “You order me to win, as if I could, but in the same breath you tell me
to love my opponents. Please be clear. I need to understand what you’re telling me.”

“Act, Junah, but act without attachment, as the earth does. As I do. The rain falls, with no thought of watering the land. The clouds roll, not seeking to bring shade. They simply do. And we must too.

“Therefore win, Junah. Hold nothing back. It was not by accident that I told you to hook that ball out of bounds, nor was it chance that made me tell you to hit the drive on ten with all you had.

“We’ve got Hagen and Jones right where we want them: so far ahead that they leave us no choice but to play all-out. To strike and act without fear or forethought.”

“You confuse me again,” Junah interrupted. “How can we act without forethought? What you’re saying sounds like mystical nonsense! Why did God give us a brain if not to think?”

“Watch and see,” Bagger Vance answered calmly. “I will show you the Field and the Knower.”

I
N THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES
, gallery ropes were rarely in use except around the tees; spectators were permitted to swarm down the fairway alongside the players, constrained from jostling the defenseless competitors only by their own good sense and the beefy shoulders of the occasional marshal. I was caught in such a stampede coming off the thirteenth and swept helplessly away from Vance and Junah. The Field and the Knower. What in the world was
that
? What was Vance telling Junah now? What was he showing him?

I was still a-bob in the maelstrom 150 yards later when I glimpsed, through a gap in the gallery, up ahead as they stood by Junah’s ball, Bagger Vance lay a hand on Junah’s shoulder. I knew that gesture. Junah seemed to reel under it, a sort of stagger; then his eyes blinked several times, like a man trying to recover focus after a blow. I lost sight of them again as the crush swelled over a rise and then, aided by several spectators who rec
ognized me as part of Junah’s party, was able at last to wriggle through into the clear.

I could see Junah up ahead. He was no longer blinking. In his eyes instead was an expression of awe and wonder; he looked drunk or, more accurately, moved. It seemed he might actually weep. What in the world was going on? I wanted to scurry that instant to Bagger Vance’s side but Jones, who was away after a drive of 245, was getting set to play. The gallery and I held ourselves motionless as he addressed the ball in his crisp no-nonsense manner, then ripped a beautiful three-iron, cut into the right-to-left wind, onto the putting surface 200 yards distant. I hurried to Junah’s ball, which was about ten yards ahead. Junah was staring at Jones, eyes following the master’s steps as if hypnotized. “Now watch Hagen,” I heard Bagger Vance say quietly, tugging Junah’s attention back. “Watch not just his will, but
how
he uses it.”

Junah turned obediently toward Hagen, who had a mid-iron in his hands and was stepping aggressively to the ball. The Haig planted his feet, waggled once, checked his line, then slashed a low screamer dead on the stick. Storm clouds had come up over the ocean; the hole spanned a rise unsheltered by the duneline and hard cross-gusts, heralding a blow, whipped erratically across the fairway. Hagen’s shot bored beneath them, rising only at the last instant to strike the turf twenty yards short of the green and scamper like a neatly nipped chip onto the surface, curling to rest thirty feet left and long, in perfect position. It was a shotmaker’s shot. The gallery showed its knowledge and appreciation with cheers and whistles.

Now it was Junah’s turn; the spectators’ attention swung
toward him. But his eyes kept following Hagen in awe. He blinked and blinked again, still staring. So intense was Junah’s look that it was actually making Hagen uncomfortable; the Haig winked and tipped his hat. This seemed only partially to snap Junah out of it. Vance tugged his elbow and set the bag upright before him. The shot was about 190 into the gusting crosswinds. Junah stepped up quick, set his spikes and cold-topped it. You could hear the blade cut the ball’s cover…. Ough! It bounded forward like a hot infield grounder, squirting into a bunker a full forty yards short of the green. Junah almost fell over; he looked dizzy and reeling, Vance actually had to steady him with a hand. Junah still didn’t move when the gallery surged forward; in moments he was swallowed, standing there, as if dumbstruck.

“What the hell’s that damn caddie doing to him now?” I heard Judge Neskaloosa River Anderson in the gallery behind. We pushed our way forward, Vance skillfully running interference for Junah, all the while speaking calmly and instructively into his ear. Observe this. Take notice of that. Junah looked like a man hallucinating. His eyes scanned the sweep of the fairway, becoming mesmerized by something he saw in the sand blowing from a bunker, or the dip of the flag in the wind. Even after his play from the bunker, which he nipped cleanly, finishing on the green just inside Hagen, he still strode in that bedazzled, intoxicated state.

I was getting frightened. Who
was
this Bagger Vance anyway? What powers did he have and how did he come by them? When we reached the green a part of me, fearful, began to hold back. It may have been my imagination, but I was certain that Vance
intuited this instantly. He motioned me with a reassuring wave to move beside him.

“Don’t be afraid, Hardy,” he said when I had crossed the apron and taken a position at his side. “Your role in this is as vital as Junah’s.”

This
what
? I wanted to ask. But I knew he’d only answer in his cryptic indirect fashion. Hagen was lining up his putt now. Junah stood behind and to the side, ready to learn what he could from the ball’s roll.

“Would you like to see what Junah is seeing?” Vance whispered.

A spook ran through me. I knew I had no choice. Then Vance’s warm hand was on my shoulder and the bottom blew out of the world.

Lewis Carroll was on to something with the metaphor of stepping through a looking glass. That sense of inversion, of everything being the same and yet its own opposite, that was what it seemed like as, under Vance’s hand, I slipped through an invisible membrane and stepped forth into another reality.

As near as I can, I will try to describe what I saw. What Junah had been seeing for the prior five minutes.

The scene itself—fairway, ocean, sky—remained the same. But all laws of color had changed. Grass was no longer green nor heavens blue. Everything shimmered instead with a vibrating chromatic iridescence, including those essences, like air, that we think of as possessing no color at all. More, those vibrations seemed to possess not just life but intelligence. The air had intelligence, the grass had intelligence. The ground beneath my feet appeared not like the
planet’s surface, but like the shifting bottom of a tropical sea; all currents and creatures became visible in brilliant light-pulsating life. Wind flowed over the land like shimmering rainbow-hued water; the galleries glowed in a mass of hotly vibrating auroras; the turf itself seemed vividly, organically awake. “Behold the Field,” I heard Vance’s voice, not as if it were speaking to me in reality, but in a dream, from within the dream.

Hagen putted. I watched the ball’s path mesmerized, as in the moments before an accident when the world slows down and you look on like a god or a somnambulist, in the world and yet above it. It was a thirty-footer with a double break, to the right down one slope to a flat, then left as it neared the cup. I could see every nuance of the break before the ball was even struck. Force lines, which I felt intuitively to be gravity or some form of supragravity, coursed as visibly as mercury around and down the slopes. It seemed almost redundant when the actual ball took the actual breaks, what seemed like an eternity later. “This is the Field,” Bagger Vance’s voice came to me from a distance, “you are the Knower.” I watched Hagen’s ball strobe, just slightly out of alignment with the force flow that hovered inches high along the green, and then his putt ghosted past on the low side. A groan from the gallery, then applause as the ball nestled, a tap-in away.

The next five holes passed in an instant or an eternity, it was impossible to tell which. Vance was instructing Junah by having him watch Jones and Hagen. They understood, he said. They knew how to use the Field.

“Focus your attention on the player’s will,” Vance instructed
Junah as Jones settled into his stance on the fourteenth tee. “Notice that it is not ‘willful.’ It is
intentional
but not willful. Do you comprehend the difference?”

This is what Junah saw.

Around Jones, encompassing his body in vibrating concentric fields, spread an aurora of energy. It seemed to
be
his body, but expanded, augmented. It was a field itself. Then there were other fields, an infinitude of them. You could see his will, as Bagger Vance said, his intention
select
the field he chose, which was the fairway and the target line. Lines of force, which were chromatic not just visually but aurally as well, vibrating like music, extended from Jones’ intentionality (that’s the best I can describe it) down the fairway to the target area. But there were at least two exceptional aspects to this will and to the force lines it apprehended.

First, the force lines seemed to exist outside time, independent of it. And second, they seemed to exert an intentionality of their own.

Let me try to be precise, for this is exceptionally important.

Jones waggled now and set himself over the ball. I saw his swing before he swung it. Much like seeing Hagen’s putt before it rolled. But it was not a single swing, as if predetermined; rather it was a number of swings, I would guess a hundred, two hundred, all vibrating simultaneously in Jones’ field, as if in alternative futures. Possible futures. They were all recognizably Jones’ swing. But some were duffs, tops, skulls, and so on. Bad swings. Now, Michael, this is the interesting part:

I could see Jones’ will
search among those swings
, like you or I
would hunt through a file drawer for a patient’s chart. Jones seemed to settle. To still himself. The auroras surrounding him consolidated. The bad swings fell away, evaporating like a dream; colors intensified around the swings he had intentioned, until there were only half a dozen very closely arrayed swings remaining. As Vance had said, intelligence seemed to pour from Jones’ grip, from his hands. Receptive intelligence, searching the Field, drawing from it and upon it. Then Jones swung. In actuality. You could see his motion in the physical dimension track along the motions he had intentioned, not perfectly, but very close to those pre-swings that existed outside of time (or so I felt certain). I was numb, dumbstruck; I couldn’t absorb it. The ball rocketed away down the lines of force, with everything humming and glowing and vibrating in some keen cosmic harmony.

Now I knew why Junah had looked drunk. This was too much to take, it was overload. I felt as if my nervous system were about to explode, strained to the maximum to handle the excessive currents coursing along it.

“Know that all that is,” Bagger Vance’s voice came again as if in a dream, “flows from the union of the Field and the Knower.”

“Who
are
you?” I heard myself asking, but my voice seemed to rise with ineffable slowness, as if hallooing up from the bottom of an endlessly deep well. I knew he wouldn’t answer. Instead he directed Junah’s attention and mine to Hagen, who now teed his ball and stepped to it.

“See how the player’s will searches the Field and finds his Authentic Swing.” I looked. I saw it, just as Vance said. “Now see
him harmonize with it. Not until then does he begin his swing in physicality.”

“Are Jones and Hagen seeing this too?” I heard Junah’s voice (perhaps only in my head, I couldn’t tell) ask Vance.

“Not like you and Hardy are. But yes. In their ways, yes.”

Now, Michael, let me address the second phenomenon. I wish I could recall it with more clarity. I wish I had been an adult then, with my physician’s training in detached observation. But I was just a boy and I was scared to death. This is the best I can do:

It seemed, watching Hagen as he stood over the ball, as if the process did not consist merely of his selecting from an infinitude of possible swings and possible resulting shots, but that the swing and shot, of their own intelligence, were beckoning to him. A very specific swing and a very specific shot.

The
best
shot.

It was as if before each swing lay an infinitude of futures, every possible way the shot could be struck, and yet pulling stronger than all others was
that which was most excellent
.

Have you seen an eagle soar, Michael? Or watched a shark glide through the water? Don’t you sense observing them that each bank of a wing, each trim adjustment of a fin, is its most optimum, its most excellent, the best and finest selection from an infinitude of possibilities? Don’t they, the animals, seem closer to God than we? Don’t they seem automatically tuned to His will, guided flawlessly by instinct?

Have you ever stood over a putt, Michael, and seen the line laid out as clearly as if it were drawn in chalk on the green? This was something like that.

The optimum, calling to you.

Excellence crying to be brought forth.

This is the best description I can put to it. You could see Hagen’s aurora, his intentionality, search the chromatic spectrum—the Field. His vibration stilled, harmonizing with that of the Field, centering in stillness in his chest and his hands. Simultaneously the Field
beckoned
to him; like two frequencies seeking each other in the ether. He wanted to play the best possible shot. And the best possible shot wanted him to play it. Wanted to be brought into physical existence by him. It already existed in some other dimension, but somehow, if you’ll permit me to speak in terms so far outside the scientific,
that was not enough for it
. It wanted to exist
here
, on the material plane. And it needed Hagen to make that happen. It needed a person. An embodied soul. A human being.

I wish I could say that I was observing all this in a detached scientific manner. But in fact I was terrified. In a way it was like one’s first surgery on a living human being, that first parting of the flesh and beneath it the revelation of another world, a pulsating breathing world that strikes terror in you at the same time that it beckons and fascinates. That was how it felt, only more daunting because I had no training, no preparation. I was just a boy. I felt as if the ground beneath me could no longer be trusted; every physical law was turned on its head. Would I fly up off the earth in defiance of gravity, would I die, was I dead already?

At the same time, it was utterly involving and hypnotic. I dreaded hearing Bagger Vance’s voice again, fearful of the mysterious powers he possessed, but at the same time I couldn’t wait
to hear more. Explain it to me! Tell me what I’m seeing! What in the world is going on here?

The course is the Field, he said, with its vectors, lines of force, tones, colors, harmonies, chromatic and somatic, magnetic lines extending above the earth, along its curvature, up into the stratosphere and soaring off into space, all of it organic and all interconnected. Our bodies were also the Field. This was the holiness of sport: that it opened a pathway via the body to the spirit. He kept instructing Junah in the proper use of the will.