The Sand Trap (23 page)

“Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way
out,” Gord thought.

The harder part was calling all the staff
together to tell them he was retiring immediately. They were taken
totally by surprise and there were real tears and hugs all around.
For all his other quirks, Gord was a good boss. He cared for the
wellbeing of the mostly young people who worked for him. There was
not one who he hadn’t helped out in some personal way. He was
genuinely sorry not to be working with them anymore. It had been
fun and rewarding and he wished them all the best. They all said
they would have a going away party for him although he expected
that after the initial emotion they would all just go on with their
duties with a new boss. Only Monica remained mostly silent through
the reminiscing and the questions about where he was going now.

“See ya Gordy,” was all she said as she gave
him a warm hug and peck on the cheek.

And then he was back at his car carrying a
cardboard box with paper clips, pens with no ink, pins and bling
from universities around the world and his green tea stained Bodum.
All but the latter would last as far as the garbage bin outside the
Safeway he passed on the way to his empty house. He was feeling
freer by the moment, giddy with the weight of subterfuge and deceit
dissolved in an afternoon’s work. It was only early May, so 6 pm
was a little late to go to the golf course today. He was anxious to
get started at the practice schedule he had designed. Instead he
picked up a bottle of sixteen-year-old Bushmills Malt at the LCBO –
his only major consumption weakness – a take-out order of
Vietnamese spring rolls and Tom Yum soup – another weakness – and
decided to celebrate with a night of karaoke blues playing in the
basement, the only part of his house that remained furnished. By 11
pm, when he fell asleep on the basement couch, he was warmly drunk,
pleasantly full of exotic tastes and with a blues medicated glow
that brought a dreamless smile to his newly freed face.

For a moment when he woke up he wasn’t sure
where he was and jumped off the couch wondering if he had overslept
and would be late for work. Then he lay back on the couch and as he
remembered he put his hands behind his neck and smiled for a
moment. He stood up in his underwear and did his requisite one
hundred push-ups and the one hundred sit-ups. Still in his
underwear he practiced his unusual form of Tai Chi for half an
hour. He figured he didn’t need these skills anymore, but it was
such a part of his life now he would feel a little empty if his day
did not include these activities. This morning they helped with the
slight hangover he realized he must have when he looked at the half
empty Bushmills bottle. He went over and turned off the power to
his amplifier he had left on when he fell asleep last night. He
showered and dressed in golf clothes, taking great pleasure in the
fact that he was going to the golf course on a Tuesday morning. He
made his usual steel cut oatmeal, filled a travel mug with a
mountain oolong from Taiwan and headed for the course.

As the saying goes – he felt that today was
the first day of the rest of his life.

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“So, by the senior tour I gather you mean
the PGA Champion Tour? Right?” Bruce asked incredulously as the two
of them stood over a pile of balls at the range.

Bruce Downsview was the club pro at the
Ottawa River Country Club and had known Gord most of his
professional life. Like most other club pros he had once dreamed of
the professional tour life and actually had some success on the
Canadian tour before a wife, family, finance and reality bred some
common sense and he found another avenue to follow for a golf
career.

“Right. Although I suppose any senior tour,
…or event, would do. I realize that I’m probably not up to the
challenge of taking on the young guys today.”

Bruce could not help but laugh at the
seriousness with which Gord answered his question. He probed a
little farther and asked in as serious a voice as he could muster,
“So what is your goal? Your target? Your aspiration?” he paused.
“Fame? Money?”

“None of those things really,” Gord replied.
“I just always wanted to see how far I could go in golf, but work
and other things got in the way. So now that I have retired I’d
like to give it a try. I know you’re a long way from retirement
Bruce, and you are still into seeking as much from your career as
you can get. But I’m sure there are some things in your life that
you wanted to do but never had the time? I’ve retired while I am
still healthy enough to do some of those things and one of those
for me is golf. I need to see how far I can go and I’m willing to
dedicate the next year of my life to do it.”

Bruce didn’t even try to hide his surprise.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to qualify to even play in a
senior event as an amateur much less get a Champions Tour
qualifying card?”

“Sort of. I Googled the question last night
and all I could figure out was that ordinary people like me have to
apply to go in one of the qualifying tournaments they have across
the country and when I do well on a series of those I can get my
card. Entering a senior event as an amateur seems even more
complicated since most events have a list of those who are exempt
from qualifying; things like winning state championships, NCGA
winners, U.S. Amateur winners and stuff like that. I don’t have any
of those so I guess I’ll get there by skill not exemption.”

“All you have to do!” Bruce was incredulous.
“Listen Gord, you have to be one of the last five standing from
literally hundreds of golfers who enter these qualifiers and who
think that since they have reached fifty, much less your
fifty-eight, are their club champion, beat their buddies at four
ball on Saturday and carry the latest technology; they can have a
second career doing golf endorsements for Callaway while hobnobbing
with Freddy Couples, Bernard Langer, Hale Irwin, Andy Bean, Tom
Watson and the other inconsequentials who have spent their lives
polishing and refining their game! He paused to take a breath. “And
along with your application you have to provide your tournament
record. I’m sure they will be impressed that you and Sybil won the
Jack and Jill tournament last year. Your victory in the “Tombstone”
event on men’s day will really knock their socks off I’m sure. They
may even let you bypass the Monday qualifying!”

Bruce turned more serious for a moment. “I
know that you are a bright guy Gord. But a Ph.D. means squat on the
golf course. I also know that you are a good golfer.” Gord and
Bruce had played together many times over the past decade. “And I
know first hand that you are a fearsome competitor.” Gord won most
of the time. “But you’re not talking about playing against a past
his prime teaching pro or your lawyer friend. The guys who go for
this are all seasoned pros who have been working at their game and
have been waiting for most of their fifty years and a day for the
chance to apply for the Champions Tour.”

“That’s most instructive Bruce. Did you
learn positive reinforcement for your students at the last
professional development session the club paid big bucks to send
you to?” Gord didn’t wait for an answer. “Bruce, I only have two
questions. The first is rhetorical, at least for the moment. Can I
do it? The second is the important one. Your golf has slipped over
the years, but you are the most inspiring teacher I have ever seen.
Will you work with me to help me get as good as I can get?”

Bruce could now see that Gord was dead
serious. There was a resolute look in his eyes he had not seen
before when Gord was out on the course just enjoying his golf game.
He had thought that Gord represented everything that recreational
golf should be. A good club golfer with a wonderful temperament who
treated his times on the golf course as a distraction not an
avocation. It was in fact the shift to a more serious intent in
golf that ruined Bruce’s own playing career. When he went to the
U.S. on a golf scholarship ten years ago he had most components of
a champion's game. He had won most junior events that Ontario could
provide, and during his summers he entered the Canadian tour events
available. He didn’t win any of them but a sports writer at the
time wrote him up as Canada’s next great golf hope after Mike Weir
and Stephen Ames. Both were doing well. Weir would win the Masters
while Bruce was still at University and Canada celebrated
vigorously since it had been a while since a male golfer the likes
of Al Balding, George Knudson, Bob Panasik or Gary Cowan had
stormed the international golf scene. Canadian golfers were always
hungry for a new idol. Mike and Stephen both remarked on the talent
of the young Bruce Downsview. In his senior year at Clemson, it all
disappeared. His swing. His confidence. Even his degree. Some
called it burnout. When he quit the team in his senior year others
called it things less complimentary, but the truth was he was
suffering from depression and it took a very loving and patient
family in Ottawa to bring him back to health. He would never play
competitive golf again. He was a natural depressive by nature and
his intensity and the unfulfilled expectations he had for himself
pushed him over the edge. After he surfaced from his depression
that first time, he knew that playing golf had to return to
pleasure and distraction from competition and pressure. His father
found him an assistant teaching job at a local public course and he
discovered his pleasure. Now, after taking course after course and
achieving his CPGA Teaching Professional designation, he woke up
energized by the prospect of helping someone else find their own
Zen through the game of golf.

Early in his teaching life he had been
amazed at how so many unbelievably terrible golfers derived so much
pleasure from the game. At first he could not understand how
someone could whiff, slice, hook, lose ten balls a round, and still
come back for more. He gradually learned that golf was simply a
pleasant distraction for many of these people. The surgeon who cut
into people all day was hardly bothered by the triviality of a lost
ball. The judge who ruled on people’s lives did not want to be
judged on the golf course. These people were a pleasure to know and
teach and they represented the majority of golfers at the club.

There were of course many at the club who,
at least in his view, did not have the game in perspective. They
were the ones that cursed, threw clubs, clearly cheated and blamed
him and the grounds crew for their slices. They were the ones who
felt that the rules of the game were there, first and foremost,
simply to be enforced, not for the pleasure of the game.

His experience taught him there were two
types of golfers who were the biggest pain in the ass. The first
were those who thought they were far better than they were. These
were the better golfers in the club, maybe single digit
handicappers who had reached their “Peter Principle” but who were
still under the allusion that they could get good, really good. The
other group he had trouble with was the terrible golfers who took
the game far too seriously. He never thought of himself as sexist,
but most members of this group were women. There were many very
talented, single digit handicap women golfers at the club, but
unlike many of the similar scoring men they were modest and
pleasant – apologetic about their talent. Bruce enjoyed playing
with them and helping them with their game. But the others, the
ones with no apparent coordination, with indescribable swings which
Bruce had no idea where they learned or how they envisioned
themselves, who appeared to his eye at least to have a new golf
outfit and shoes for each nine they played; these were the ones he
dreaded.

Fortunately, the 'pain in the ass' golfers
were the minority and most of the five hundred members of the
Ottawa Valley Country Club were wonderful people with the right
attitude and approach to the game he loved so much.

Right now he wasn’t sure where Gord fit into
his classification of golfers.

The retirement bit shook him up a bit. He
hated to admit it but there was a third group of real pain men
golfers. These were the youngish retirees who suddenly had only
golf to fill a hole that career and office had previously occupied.
Many were new members with memberships he suspected were bought as
gifts by wives desperate to get retired husbands out of the house.
Most women retirees only took up golf to please their already
golfing fanatic husbands and they were a different group, since
given the choice, he didn’t see many suddenly retired career women
taking up golf. One retired woman doctor lasted through six lessons
and maybe a lesser number of rounds before she threw her clubs into
the pond, a serious rule infraction, and very cheerfully left the
course and her husband, never to be seen again by either. But the
retired men could certainly be his third pain in the ass group.