The Legend of Bagger Vance (13 page)

I told her I didn’t, with the exception of one rather mysterious occasion which perhaps would weave itself into this tale as it unfolded. Should I continue? I was ready to pick up where we left off, at the start of the second eighteen, when Michael spoke up.

“You ask what became of Bagger Vance,” he addressed Irene, then hesitated. “Perhaps I shouldn’t inquire at this point, but can you tell me, what happened to your grandfather? After the match, I mean. What did he do? Did his life change?”

Irene glanced once to me, almost as if asking permission to answer. She could see Michael’s curiosity burning, perhaps because that issue—what to do with one’s life—was so much on his mind at that moment.

“One thing I know for sure,” Irene began. “Immediately after the match he returned to Germany to collect my mother, who was five or six at the time. He brought her back to the States along with her grandmother who was raising her and settled them with him at the Aerie. From what my mother told me growing up, my grandfather absolutely devoted himself to her from then on. That, and his passion for navigation.”

Michael leaned forward at this. “Navigation?”

“My grandfather developed the first aircraft guidance system that wasn’t dependent on celestial, magnetic or gyroscopic orientation. It was called Polar Antivalence Navigation. I don’t know how technical you want me to get, but antivalence bases its guidance processes on—”

Michael broke in: “Lines of force. The fields of subtle energy surrounding the earth.”

“Yes, that’s it. How did you know?”

Michael didn’t answer, just glanced once, very quickly, in my direction. “Please go on,” he continued to Irene. “What exactly was your grandfather working on?”

“Don’t get me started,” Irene smiled. “I’m afraid I’ve become a bit obsessed with it myself, at least as it applies to music.” Michael and I had noted in the rear of the cottage a big under-construction studio packed with computer and synthesizer gear, along with ancient intruments, viols, lyres and theorbos.

“My grandfather was fascinated by the significance of vibration, frequencies, harmonics. He believed that surrounding the earth were numerous ‘flows’ and ‘meridians’ of energy, like magnetic fields but infinitely subtler, which could be used in navigation if we could develop instruments sensitive enough to detect them. He claimed that Nature herself already did. In a brain as tiny as a butterfly’s. He kept birds, hundreds of them. Migratory waterfowl. He had a regular wildlife refuge at the Aerie. The birds, he said, navigate along those subtle flows, and our planes could too.”

Here Irene’s handsome features grew darker. “My grandfather, as Dr. Greaves may have told you, was obsessed with the coming World War. He felt America must be ready and take up fascism’s challenge early and forcefully. This was not a popular belief at that time. My grandfather had become a flier by then, for his navigation research, and he tangled with Charles Lindbergh who as you know was a passionate isolationist, an America Firster. I’m afraid my grandfather came out on the short end of that stick.”

Irene was getting agitated. She shifted in her seat, then, rousing herself with a smile, asked how our coffee was holding up. Did we need a warm-up? She was on her feet now. “But please,”
she called back as she moved to the kitchen, “don’t let my ramblings tear us away from the story. I know that much of my grandfather’s subsequent life sprung directly from the events of that day at Krewe Island. Please go on, Dr. Greaves. Tell us what happened on the second eighteen.”

J
UNAH AND VANCE
headed for the first tee again.

The rain had stopped at least an hour earlier, but with draining and cleanup, bailing of the bunkers and the dispatching of crews with their twenty-foot bamboo whisks to whip the water off the greens, not to mention the players’ warm-up, another hour and a half had been consumed. It was past 3:00 before the officials declared the turf playable and almost 3:30 by the time the competitors shook hands again and finished obliging the relentless importunities of the news photographers. Would there be time to finish? Sunset was at 7:06, which should have allowed more than sufficient margin, though the marshals feared that the gallery, in the muck, could become unruly. But the wind was working strong at ground level, drying the fairways, and the linksland’s excellent drainage provided additional cause for optimism. All would be dry, it was hoped, by the turn and more than playable, if a bit damp, till then.

On the tee, Adele Invergordon thanked the galleryites for their patience, requested their forbearance amid the sloppy conditions and introduced Dougal McDermott to reconvene the competition. Junah had reagitated himself terrifically in the previous five minutes. Finishing the warm-up, he tugged Bagger Vance aside. “I can’t take any more of these mental fireworks. You have to give me something concrete. One simple thought, just to get my swing started.”

“As you wish, Junah,” Vance immediately acquiesced. Relief! You could see the tension drain from Junah. He moved in closer to his caddie as they started, amid the gallery, toward the tee.

“Every great player,” Vance said, “no matter how odd or unorthodox his swing, shares one crucial consciousness: an absolute awareness of the clubhead at all points in the swing. Jones achieves this with rhythm, Hagen with his hands and his timing. Your key, Junah, is your arc.”

This was true. As soon as Junah heard it, a tumbler seemed to snick blessedly into place in his brain.

“Under pressure,” Vance continued, “you tend to constrict your arc, as if you imagined that compactness would equate to control. Nothing could be more misguided. Under pressure,
extend
your arc. Let the clubhead go wide;
then
you’ll feel it. That’s why I keep telling you to hit hard, hold nothing back. Think of this over the ball, Junah: start wide and stay wide. Extend, extend, extend.”

This was the exact tonic Junah needed. Something clean. Something simple. You could see the confidence flow into him as he and Vance climbed the rise to number one tee.

The gallery was much diminished from the morning. What had been ten thousand, I would guess, was down to a third of that. This was still a prodigious mob to follow only one threesome, but contrasted with the hordes of the morning it felt almost intimate. Faces were becoming familiar. You knew that these, out again in the wet, were the diehards, the true lovers of the game.

This had a decidedly stabilizing effect on Junah. He joked easily with Hagen and Jones, scraping wet clumped grass from his spikes with a tee, then hip-hopping a ball up and down on the face of his driver.

“Gentlemen”—McDermott’s gesture swept down the open fairway—“play away!”

Number one was the straightaway par five that Junah had bogeyed in the morning round. (On the opening four, if you recall, he had fallen five behind.) Hagen was up first and ripped a beauty down the left side that bounced once, flung a plug of wet turf and dropped dead around 245. Jones followed, a little stiffly, with a rolling draw that hit with overspin and squirted forward on the damp grass, stopping close enough to Hagen’s that you could have covered both balls with a blanket. The hole was only 521, well within reach for any of the three, except for a sculpted 30-yard swale that crossed the fairway just in front of the green. Vance had had me trot out earlier to inspect this, so we knew there was runoff in the ditch; it had become a small “burn” as they say in Scotland, a stream crossing linksland to the ocean. In this muck a spoon shot aimed at the green, even after a drive of 260, would have to carry all the way, and that probably from a gloppy lie with mud on the ball.

Junah switched from a driver to a driving iron off the tee. The gallery let out a murmur of surprise and, from the Savannah contingent, disappointment. Their man was playing safe, they concluded. Trying just to hold on, bunt it around, keep within ten or twelve strokes and not disgrace himself too badly. I confess that was what I thought too. There was a collective sigh, and then Junah drilled a conservative shot down the right side, catching a downslope about 220 and skittering forward another 10 yards to a flat dry area on the edge of the fairway. From there a solid mid-iron put him about 80 yards short, on the flat before the ditch. An easy pitch to about 15 feet, a putt that burned the right edge and he had his par. Jones and Hagen took the same.

“Why isn’t he ripping it?” I asked Bagger Vance as we crossed to the second tee. The caddie kept striding. “He’s a shot better than he was this morning, isn’t he?”

Now, slowly, it began to happen. I know you’ve experienced the same, Michael and Irene, on a day when you go around a course twice. At each tee you can’t help but recall your morning score for that hole, and the sorrier it was, the more you’re inspired by the room for improvement. You know you can’t do worse, so you let it rip!

Surely this was what Junah felt on the second tee, remembering his bogey from the morning. He drilled another driving iron, a clean 220 to a dry level lie, then punched a niblick under the wind to six feet. The slower green took some of the break away; the ball tumbled in on the low side. Birdie. He had bettered this morning’s score on the hole by two shots. An improvement of
three already, in just two holes! You could see Junah gather yet more confidence. Simply matching the morning round the rest of the way would give him 73. For the two rounds, 76–73. Damn good for a soul thrown at the last instant into a battle of titans. Hagen and Jones had both parred two, so Junah had the honor on three. He had picked up a shot.

Junah parred three and four, with Hagen bogeying the fourth when he left an uphill putt short and lipped out from three feet. Junah had gained another on Hagen, to within four, though Jones was still an insuperable six ahead with fourteen holes left.

And Jones was playing superbly. Well within himself, swinging smoothly and full of confidence. His driver, Jeannie Deans as it was called, seemed incapable of striking a ball off-line, and each time Calamity Jane set down on a putting surface, first before the ball then behind it, you were sure Jones would drain it. On all four holes he had scorched the lip from beyond fifteen feet. These burners were sure to start falling sooner or later.

A break came in the opposite direction at number five when Jones, straining to cut the dogleg, plugged his drive into the face of a bunker and took two to get out. Double bogey to Hagen’s and Junah’s pars.

Suddenly Junah was within four.

I saw him look to Bagger Vance then. We were on the sixth tee and there was no doubt what the glance meant. He wanted to see the Field. Vance grinned, with a teasing glint.

“Think you can handle it now? Yes!
Now
your will is engaged. Now you
want
the prize.”

“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to want?” Junah whispered back, somewhat shaken by Vance’s teasing tone. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

“All I want is that you swing your Authentic Swing.”

Junah let out a breath, frustrated. “Please don’t confuse me again, Bagger. I thought you wanted me to
win
.”

“I couldn’t care less about winning,” the mysterious fellow answered. “I care about
you
.”

He put his hand on Junah’s shoulder.

Junah knew what was coming.

It did.

This time Vance did not ask me to share the vision; I remained on the outside, watching Junah much as a sober man may observe a drunk.

“We are speaking of a State of Grace,” Vance told Junah as they squinted up this gale-swept 230-yard par three, “which is by definition an aspect of the divine. You have blundered through this portal in the past, by my assistance and by happy accident, as every golfer has. Now observe it with eyes open. Learn from it….”

Junah seemed to stagger under this weight for a long moment; then, slowly, he found his feet and settled in.

Then came the stroke of the match, to that point.

The shot Junah hit, a drilled driver, unteed, cut into that stiff right-to-left gale, was beyond anything any of the players had yet attempted, let alone pulled off. Let me describe it briefly, as it remains one of the three or four greatest shots I have ever seen.

The sixth was uphill, 230 as I said, with the ocean hard by on
the right, across the short beach above a bluff. In the morning with the wind behind, all three players had hit driving irons; now, with the gale hammering into their faces, the hole played a full four clubs longer. The cup, which had been recut for the afternoon round, was perched at the extreme right, practically teetering on the bluff edge, with the wind bowing the flagstick thirty degrees over and making the fabric of the flag snap like a pistol shot. Getting close was out of the question. The only way even to strike the putting surface, if your nerves were steel, was to start the ball twenty or thirty yards out over the breakers and let the wind take it back. The problem was the long carry; it called for a full driver, which couldn’t be spun at all off a tee; by the time the gale-borne shot drifted back, what little spin it had would have been killed by the wind; it would plummet like a knuckleball and bound inevitably over the fast-drying green into the murderous bunker protecting the left—the same bunker Junah had had to play backward out of in the morning round. The smart shot was a bail-out, with a spoon or a driving iron, to the fairway short and left, relying on an up-and-down from seventy or eighty feet to make par. That was what Jones did, playing first. The gallery applauded his shrewd, immaculately struck shot. Hagen had a spoon in hand and was clearly intending to play with the same prudence.

Junah took Schenectady Slim. He set the ball cold on the turf, without a tee, and ripped a screamer that started out for the extreme right edge, the bluff edge, of the green. The wind pounded mercilessly from the right. But Junah had given the shot a hard solid cut,
into
the gale. The gallery watched, mesmer
ized, as the spun ball burrowed its nose dead into the wind’s teeth. It rose and held. Straight…straight…with the wind killing its momentum more and more, exactly as Junah had envisioned, till the driver, which without the gale would have carried twenty or thirty yards over, ran out of steam at precisely the right point, dead above the stick, and dropped as light as a leaf to the putting surface. The angle kicked it sideways another ten feet, where it curled to a stop a flag-length below the hole.

Hagen and Jones reacted as if struck a physical blow. This was not the shot of an amateur. Not a Trans-Miss level shot, not a Georgia State champion shot. It was as good as anything the two giants could have hit themselves on their best day, and maybe better. When Junah coolly rolled in his deuce, the match shifted upward to another gear.

Now that driving iron off the first took on a new significance. The gallery sensed it. Junah had not played chicken. It was not a give-up shot but a deliberate play of patience, the confidence of knowing there were plenty of holes left, nothing had to be rushed so early.

Now was the time to make a move, and now Junah made it.

On seven, with the honor, he teed a spoon and drilled a flawless draw a hundred yards past the bunker over which he had sniped his drive out of bounds in the morning round. The ball lit in a neck no wider than eight yards between two strings of pot bunkers, setting up an easy lofter approach which, the spectators sensed, he would stiff for another birdie.

A thrill began to build in the gallery. Junah’s play was a gaunt
let thrown down to Hagen and Jones. Still of course they anticipated his collapse. No amateur at his level, however lucky he might be on a given shot or even two or three, could expect to sustain that rarefied plateau over twelve more grueling holes. Junah would crash. He would crumble. But meanwhile, Jones and Hagen had to be thinking, the gallery had witnessed this fellow pull off a couple of blows that were beyond anything they, Jones and Hagen, had so far even attempted.

It ignited them.

Hagen took a driver off seven and powdered it thirty yards past Junah’s brilliant spoon, into a slot even narrower and closer to the green. Jones saved his genius for the approach, drilling a gorgeous side-spinning pitch into the left-to-right slope and curling it down to three feet, dead below the hole.

Vance had now backed away from Junah. His monologue ended; the caddie no longer poured a stream of inspiration into his champion’s ear. They only grunted to each other on the seventh green; a nod from Vance and Junah stroked his twelve-footer dead into the cup.

Who can say by what mysterious process news spreads over a golf course? The battle had been joined, and now the tom-toms began to boom. Fresh recruits swelled the gallery. Cars that had been departing suddenly pulled over along the muddy roadsides, their occupants hiking back to get in on the action. Others who had taken refuge in various grills and dining rooms now forsook these havens and braved the elements afresh. Still others, whose plan had been to stake out premium positions on the closing
holes, now rethought their strategy. They abandoned their prize vantages and began trekking the holes in reverse, to intercept the game and roll with it afoot.

How many of these surging reinforcements were there to cheer Junah? Probably very few. Only the Savannah contingent and a smattering who couldn’t resist cheering the underdog.

It was the action.

The battle.

The sense, communicated like quicksilver among the throng, that things were heating up. There was blood in the water.

Junah himself was electrified. Was he seeing the Field? Had he found his Authentic Swing? Yes and yes again. You could see it in his eyes, his stride, in the energy that radiated from him as he strode the fast-drying fairways. Reporters were now pressing closer, pencils scribbling. Cartoon illustrators craned to sketch him.