Miracle at Augusta (5 page)

IT SNOWS FOR TWENTY-FOUR
hours, and when I look out the window Thursday morning, Winnetka has rarely looked better. All the tacky details and worst pretensions of suburban architecture have been whited out. What's left is the snow-topped geometry of rooftops and telephone lines and the poetry of trees.

Just as lovely is the muffled quiet, and so in its own way the rattling and scraping of the first wave of municipal plows. Then the local citizenry wheel out and rev up their snow-moving toys. To escape the din, I grab my golf bag from the garage and haul it to the basement.

Downstairs, I pull out all the clubs and lean them against the wall of my workshop. It's been almost a week since I've touched my sticks, and I miss them. What happened in Hawaii wasn't their fault. At least, not entirely. Arrayed by height, from my homely Big Bertha to my lovely ancient bull's-eye, they look like the multiple generations of a large, eccentric family gathered for a portrait.

I'd clean the clubs, but Johnny A took care of that before we packed up, and the shaft, grip, lie, and loft of every one have already been tweaked and fitted to within an inch of their lives. I consider adding a couple of degrees of loft to my 4-iron to close the gap between it and my 5-wood, but decide instead to replace the grips on my wedges, which is equally unnecessary but at least not destructive. I've got my gap wedge in the vise and the old grip half off when Louie starts imitating a watchdog.

Upstairs, I open the front door to a tall, pudgy teenager, about seventeen, whose face is scarred with acne. He holds a shovel and, despite the cold, wears only a sweater, scarf, and hat, all three of which are made of the same coarse green wool and are far too sturdy and singular to have been purchased at the local mall.

“Sorry to interrupt your pliering,” says the boy, referring to the pliers in my right hand. “I was hoping I could shovel your walks and driveway.”

“I'd appreciate that.”

“Does twenty dollars seem fair?”

“Not to you,” I say. “There's at least two feet of snow, and it's wet and heavy.”

“Your points are all well taken,” responds the boy with a goofy grin that outshines his acne, and his European accent underlines the arcane diction.

“Let's make it forty dollars.”

“Excellent,” says the kid, extending a large hand reddened by the cold. “We have a verbal contract and a handshake agreement.”

Then he turns his back and starts shoveling, and while he digs his way from the front door to the driveway, I return to my subterranean busy work. In total, I manage to kill almost an hour. I replace the grips on all three wedges (twenty-five minutes), polish and clean my big white Mizuno bag (twenty minutes), then do the same to my golf shoes (ten minutes).

When I climb out of the basement, the sun is blinding and the smell of hot chocolate wafts from the kitchen. Outside, the kid has finished the walk and is attacking the driveway, and as I watch from the living room, Noah, with Louie trailing, emerges from the side of the house bearing two steaming mugs. After the shoveler accepts his, the pair chink cups and sip their warm drinks in the winter sun, chatting like old pals. Then the boy hands back the empty, makes a courtly bow, and returns to work.

“I like Jerzy,” says Noah, back in the kitchen. “He's good people.”

“I like him, too.”

Jerzy shovels for three hours. When he returns to the front door, he holds the plastic bag containing a day-old paper. “An artifact excavated from the base of the driveway,” he says. “Perhaps it will be of some interest.” More conspicuous than his accent is his delight in his new language, as if every word and figure of speech is inherently amusing.

“Thanks, Jerzy. You did a hell of a job. I'm Travis.”

“I know who you are, Mr. McKinley. You're Winnetka's most notorious professional athlete.”

“I guess you heard about the suspension.”

“It struck me as rather draconian.”

“Ditto. You play?” I ask.

“Unfortunately not, but I spectate via television.”

I pull two twenties and a ten from my wallet and, as I hand them over, notice that the acne on his forehead camouflages a nasty gash.

“This is too much,” says Jerzy.

“Not at all. You earned it. What happened to your head?”

“Tripped on the ice. Unfortunately, both my feet are left ones.”

“Well, good luck getting back. And thanks again.”

I RIP THROUGH THE
wet wrapper, and without so much as a glance at the world, local, business, and cultural news, apply myself directly to Sports. An unseemly amount of the first page is devoted to the exploits of Michael Jordan, who led the Bulls to victory last night in Texas, and there's a photo of him throwing one down over San Antonio's rookie center, Tim Duncan.

I'll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to see how Earl is faring in Tampa. Among the box scores and standings, I find the leaderboard for the GTE Suncoast Classic, where order has been restored. Tied for the lead are Hale Irwin and Gil Morgan, and four strokes back is Earl Fielder. It looks like Earl is going to have to wait another week before getting that first
w,
but back-to-back 69s are nothing to sneeze at and almost certain to lead to his twenty-fifth top ten in a row. There's no sign of Stump. Most likely, he took the week off to enjoy his victory and give his face a chance to look more presentable.

I sip my coffee and study the small type like a tax attorney searching for loopholes. From the box score, I learn that Jordan scored thirty-five points in thirty-three minutes, shooting eight for fifteen from the field, four for nine from three-point range, and seven for seven from the line, and Pippen was one assist and two rebounds short of a triple-double. My scrutiny shifts from the NBA standings to the Blackhawks box score to the college basketball results (Eastern Michigan 68, Northwestern 52) before alighting on “Transactions.” If the agate are the crumbs of the sports section, then “Transactions” are the crumbs of the crumbs. But where else would I learn that the Bears have agreed to a four-year contract with outside linebacker Boswell King and waived (football is even crueler than golf) defensive lineman Simon Briggs and placed Ted Keating on injured reserve? Or that Phil Jackson has been fined $10,000 for criticizing the officials after last week's loss in Portland, which strikes me as rather draconian?

What, you may wonder, is so interesting about an endless succession of contrived contests staged day after day, night after night, in gyms, rinks, and arenas? For one thing, they're easy to digest. Someone won. Someone lost. Someone, like yours truly, screwed up, and someone, like Hank Peters, didn't. The rest of the paper is never that clear, and even if you learn what happened, you don't know what it means. Maybe you'll know in a week or a month. More likely, you never will.

I spend over an hour of the only life I'll ever have poring over scores, standings, and minutiae, and just when I think I've extracted every last bit of infotainment from these four pages of newsprint, I stumble on half a dozen paragraph-sized morsels herded under “Briefs.” The headline for the golf item reads:
CADDIES INJURED IN CRASH.

The news that Earl is without a caddy jolts me upright. Suddenly restless, I get up and wash out the saucepan Noah used to make the hot chocolate and place it in the drying rack. Outside the kitchen window a black squirrel clings to the top of the bird feeder. Hanging upside down, he struggles to extract a couple of seeds, an athletic challenge with more at stake than any of those I read about.

As the bird feeder swings back and forth, I recall the fateful day when Earl and I were paired in the second round of Q-School, and how my immediate comfort with him helped me through the round. Then I think of our even more important meeting four days later, after I squeaked through and he fell just short, when he volunteered to carry my bag for my rookie season.

If the situation had been reversed, and he had gotten through and I had narrowly missed out, would I have even considered making him the same offer? I know the answer, but why not? Earl is single, with a pension and an impressive stock portfolio, so I would have needed a job more than him. Is it because I'm a snob who considers caddying beneath him? And is part of that snobbism based on race? More likely, it's because I would have been sulking too much to think objectively.

What I would or might have done years ago is interesting, at least to me. The more pressing question is what am I going to do now? Before I have a chance to chicken out, I grab the phone and call Earl.

THREE DAYS LATER, WEARING
a white bib with
FIELDER
pinned to the back, I'm standing like a statue behind the first tee of the Longboat Key Club & Resort, site of the Greater Sarasota Intellinet Challenge. Although my only immediate responsibility is to make sure Earl's bag doesn't topple over in the middle of his backswing, I'm more nervous than if I were the one teeing it up, and as Earl takes his practice swings, I thumb the corner of the index card in my back pocket like a security blanket.

Due to the blizzard, I couldn't get a flight out of Chicago till this morning and didn't screech into the parking lot till forty minutes ago. That was barely enough time to fill out that index card with the distances Earl hits all his clubs and grab a yardage book, and as Earl settles behind the ball, I tap them both again to make sure they're still there. Then Earl pipes his drive down the center, and I hoist his bag over my right shoulder and hustle after him.

The lack of time to prepare certainly contributes to my agitation. A bigger factor is Earl's reaction when I volunteered my services. Let's just say he didn't jump at the offer. After ten seconds of awkward silence, the best he could come up with was “You sure you want to do this? The bag's pretty heavy.”

“I know,” I said. “I just carried mine down to the basement.”

“Imagine what it will feel like after six miles.”

“You didn't have any trouble.”

“Yeah. Well, I'm not you.”

That night at dinner, Sarah and Noah were just as skeptical about my suitability for hard anonymous labor. An informal poll of best friend and family yielded the unflattering consensus that I was too much of a pussy and too much of a prima donna to happily hump a forty-pound bag with another man's name on it.

I don't say a word as I escort Earl down a tight fairway lined with modest houses and screened-in swimming pools. Pacing off yardages, pulling clubs, and reading greens will be enough of a challenge without engaging in small talk, and I want to make it clear from the outset that I'm not here to hang out but to work.

Despite my determination to exceed everyone's low expectations, I narrowly avoid disaster, and it happens on the very first hole, after Earl follows his perfect drive with a crisp 7-iron that leaves him twenty-two feet below the hole. One of the great perks of being a professional golfer, right up there with not having to work for a living, is that eighteen times a round, you get to flaunt your good fortune by performing a simple ritual permissible only for pros—the mark and toss. Upon finding your ball on the green, you saunter up behind it, mark the spot, then toss the ball to your caddy, who wipes it clean with a damp towel.

Every pro performs this little sequence in his own inimitable fashion, but always with as much nonchalance as he can muster with a straight face. Some players release the ball without even a glance at their caddy, like a look-away pass in basketball. Others lob it like a baby hook. Earl's signature is to put a bit of air under it, and when he flips it to me, perhaps as a joke or perhaps as a kind of initiation, he puts even more than usual, and the height of the toss gives me way too much time to consider the consequences of booting it.

Mainly, I'm thinking about the pond, directly behind me at the base of a closely mown slope, and the fact that the surface is coated with opaque green slime. If I yip the catch, not only will Earl's ball end up in the soup, but there'll be no way to find it, and based on my rereading on the flight down of that page-turner known as
The Rules of Golf,
I know that if Earl has to putt out with a different ball than the one he just threw to me, I'll go down in looping lore as the rookie who cost his player two strokes on his first hole. As a result, I brace myself for this little pop-up as if it were a vicious line drive and, with two hands extended and Earl's clubs bouncing around on my back, am barely able to corral it.

“Nice catch,” says Earl.

Six holes later, I find another way to amuse my new boss. Because it's a muggy Florida afternoon, I'm careful to stay hydrated, so careful I'm soon in need of a bathroom. I put it off as long as a man of a certain age can, but when there's a wait at the par-three 7th, I jump at the chance and scurry to the small white stucco structure discreetly tucked among a cluster of shading palms. Unfortunately, a tournament official got there first and tacked a sign to the door:
FOR PLAYERS ONLY
.

That leaves the plastic Porta-Potty roasting in the sun ten yards away. “Enjoy the facilities?” asks Earl when I get back.

“Immensely. Thanks for asking.”

EARL SHOOTS 71 IN
the first round and 71 in the second. Then again, Earl's rounds often mirror each other. That's why he's the Joe DiMaggio of senior golf, with twenty-four consecutive top tens and counting. The man doesn't make bad swings or hit squirrelly shots.

Earl's got one of the most repeatable swings on the planet. I've always known this, of course, but witnessing it up close and personal is a little disconcerting. Again and again, I pace off the distance to the nearest sprinkler head, do the math, and come up with the same number to the center of the green on Saturday that we had on Friday. Once, I'm quite certain, his ball came to rest on top of his old filled-in divot.

For his caddy, it's as frustrating as it is impressive, because despite his otherworldly ball-striking, we're a whopping two under. He doesn't make bogeys, but he doesn't make birdies, either. He's the human unhighlight film.

So where does Earl drag me after the second round is in the books? The driving range, of course. Like everyone else, Earl likes to practice what he's good at. It reminds me of the greasers in high school who would spend all afternoon waxing and polishing their already gleaming Camaros and GTOs.

“You know how many fairways you missed the first two days?” I ask, after I've seen one too many perfect 5-irons.

“Not a lot.”

“One. By six inches. You also missed twenty-four putts inside twenty feet. And guess how many you got to the hole?”

“Not enough.”

“Two.”

“Wow, Travis. You're actually paying attention.”

“That stuff you said about how you would trade all those thirds and fourths for one win. Was that bullshit?”

“No.”

“Then put that club away and follow me.”

To my relief, he does, and we spend the next three hours on the practice green performing one drill. From anywhere from eight to sixty feet, I drop six balls, and he has to get every one to the hole. If he doesn't, we start over.

Want to know the results of this three-hour master class? I was afraid you might. On Sunday, Earl doesn't make a putt over six feet and leaves just as many short. Thanks to my meddling, he shoots 72 and finishes out of the top ten for the first time in a year. I violated the caddy's version of the Hippocratic oath, which is not to make things worse. And yet, as I throw my bag in the trunk and motor south, I'm buoyed by an almost giddy sense of optimism.