Authors: Don J. Snyder
I took the club back from him, cleaned it, and slipped it into the bag as we started walking.
“I should have listened to you,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “why don’t we take a test, Father? If your ball is not in the river, then that will be proof that there is a God and that you have lived a virtuous life.”
He smiled and said, “That’s putting a lot of pressure on God, don’t you think?”
“That’s what he’s there for,” I said.
Of course there was no sign of his ball on the green or in the two-yard band of sloping ground behind the green that fell off into the water. I took an iron from his bag and began fishing around in the narrow river, which had only a few inches of water in it. “A wee burn,” I said. “That’s what the Scots call these rivers.”
A moment later he called to me. “You have to come see this, Bob,” he said. So far he had called me Tom, Bill, and now Bob, though my name tag said Don.
Then I stood beside him looking down at his ball, which had rolled to a stop on a sprinkler head that was recessed maybe half an inch in the ground, just deep enough to stop the ball from continuing
down into the river. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Can you believe that?” he said.
He paid me too much, and as I carried his clubs to the taxi, I wished him the best. “I’m sorry about your friend losing his son,” I said.
I saw the anguish return to his eyes. It seemed to hit him all at once, as if the round of golf had made him forget what was waiting for him.
If he writes me an e-mail, I suppose I will tell him that I am the American writer who wrote the novel about Omagh. All the way back to Elie, I was thinking about that part of my life. I was up writing one August morning in 1998. News came over the radio of the bombing in the town of Omagh that killed thirty-one people, mostly women and children who were doing their back-to-school shopping in the town center where the blast took place. The summer before, when Colleen and I had taken our children on our family trip to Ireland, I fell in love with the Irish children, who all looked so much like my own, and later in the morning, when it was clear that most of the people killed in the blast were children, I knew that I had to go there and bear witness. Six hours later I was on a flight from Boston, traveling alone this time. I walked through the shattered glass and the puddles of blood on Main Street, and for ten days I stayed fifty yards from the center of the blast in the back of a hotel whose front half had been sheared off by the explosion. I attended thirteen funerals that week, joining the long processions from the victims’ homes to the cemetery. And I stood in the rain at Avril Monaghan’s grave, where she and her three children were buried. It was the only square grave I have ever seen. The following summer I returned for four months and spent time at the site of every IRA bombing in Northern Ireland in the thirty years of the Troubles before I wrote my book. That seems like another lifetime now.
My pal Glen Carter, from Canada, arrived today. I was able to get him a caddying job at the new Castle Course just up the road from Kingsbarns. Glen is an old veteran from the Nationwide Tour and the Canadian Tour, and he’s been suffering through the loss of his father, and I’ve been trying to persuade him to come over and walk off his grief.
Glen got a flat in Pittenweem. So we are now two towns apart, both of us riding the 95 bus route to work and back each day. I hope I get to see him often. When I came off the 18th green, he was standing there, waiting for me. Glen, the old basketball player with hands as big around as pie plates and the expressive eyes and sharp nose that stamp him as a duplicate of the actor Donald Sutherland. His was the first familiar face for me in three months. For a while in my life we had been neighbors in the small town of St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick, Canada, and he played golf the same way I did, with a deep longing to play better. I had not seen him in over two years, but as we walked a few holes at Kingsbarns under a high, bright sun, it seemed as if only a few weeks had passed since we were last together. He was a veteran caddie but he was apprehensive about this new job. “On the tour you know your player,” he said. “Out here, you’re with someone different every time around.”
“A blind date,” I told him. “But it comes down to the same thing you did with the pros. You are just trying to help each golfer believe in himself enough to make the next shot.”
“True, I suppose,” he said. “A blind date. I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
We rode the bus into St. Andrews, passing the new Castle Course
on our right, hidden beyond big green hills, so he could purchase his bus pass at the station. In the streets of St. Andrews today there were the unique sounds and scenes that mark this town as the home of golf—men walking the narrow streets, carrying their golf clubs. Close your eyes and you hear the clinking of irons on every block. Past the golf shops with the latest technology on display in the broad windows. And then the big surprise, you turn a corner and there it is, the Old Course. It comes on you suddenly and gives you the odd impression that even though you have been streaming through towns and cities and across continents for years, chasing after one enterprise or another, you were really only returning here the whole time.
“Look at this” was all Glen said. “Just look at this.” The 1st and 18th fairways an impossible shade of green, as if they were painted. Golfers waiting nervously on the 1st tee. A collection of pedestrians standing at the low green slatted fence watching three players make their final putts, one of them taking a full swing with his putter to send his ball up through the famous Valley of Sin. The granite steps rising from the back of the green to the Royal & Ancient (the golf-governing body of Scotland) with its blue-trimmed windows, where old men in blazers and ties stood drinking tea, enjoying one of the most exclusive views in the world.
“Arnold Palmer shot an 84 his first practice round here,” I said.
Glen the historian and sports statistician replied, “He had old Tip Anderson on his bag when he played his first open championship here in 1960,” his voice hushed as if we were standing inside a church.
“That’s right,” I said. “Palmer was making a charge when the R&A delayed the final round because of rain, something that had never happened before. Arnie was furious.”
“So he makes an impossible par save from the road on 17, then birdies 18,” Glen went on.
“Then loses to Kel Nagle by one stroke. And Palmer still says it was the greatest disappointment of his life.”
“Hell, he’d already won the Masters and the U.S. Open that year. He was on his way.”
We followed the narrow white path of crushed seashells, passing the short par-4s, talking about all the fabulous history that had taken place on a golf course that was remarkably modest and nondescript. “Kingsbarns is an art gallery,” I said. “This is like the course you’d set up behind the barn for your grandkids when you give them their first golf clubs.”
“Ah, it’s a museum,” he said.
We walked out onto the 4th green, and he marveled at the humps, as if someone had buried old trucks beneath the ground. “If you were here,” he exclaimed, “how would you roll this putt? To where? Where does it become a straight line?” I surveyed the ground and walked to a spot maybe four feet left of the hole. “I’d putt it to here,” I said. He thought about it then walked the line himself. “Yep,” he said. “I agree.” We were like two old carpenters checking the warp in a pile of boards.
“At sixty-one,” he said, “I imagine I’ll be the oldest caddie at the Castle Course.”
“I think I’m the oldest at Kingsbarns,” I told him.
“It’s a young man’s game,” he said gravely.
“You’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ve done a few doubles. Walk straight off 18, right back to 1. Turn-and-burn, the Scottish boys call them.”
“How are they treating you?”
“Great,” I said. “Best people I’ve ever known.”
As we made the turn, I told him about the winter I spent here writing my novel, living in the Rusacks Hotel on the 18th fairway. He had forgotten that I had played the course every day for almost two months. Today I named all the bunkers for him and told him their distances from the tees and showed him the lines on the blind shots. “Someday, Glen,” I said, “you and I are going to caddie together here.”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” he said.
There were tears coming down his cheeks then. We were just two more pilgrims who had followed an ever-narrowing path through fading dreams and somehow ended up together here on a luminous afternoon. I showed him the place where Jack and I had buried his
golf ball in the sleet that winter morning, vowing that we would return someday and that far out into his future he would bring a son or daughter of his own here to dig the ball out of the turf as some kind of proof that the past was real.
We spoke of Glen’s father. His death three months earlier is the reason Glen is here now. He needs the work to try to get through his sorrow. I hadn’t known anything about his father before today. Glen, at age eighteen, was the center of his father’s life and the source of his greatest pride when he went off to college on a basketball scholarship. And when he flunked out after his freshman season, a wide space filled with regret and recrimination opened between them for years. They managed to reach an understanding and were just beginning to draw close again when they ran out of time.
I rode the bus to Pittenweem to see his flat. He’s right in the harbor, just three doors down from a pub, where I bought my first pint in two months. When we told the bartender that Glen was going to be caddying at the Castle Course, he informed us that Prince Harry is going to be on hand for opening day.
I am Davy’s coverage this summer. Meaning I have volunteered to be here all summer, sitting outside on the lopsided picnic table or in the stone shed that is damp even on sunny days with a cold that insinuates itself right into my bones and joints, so that after an hour of sitting, it requires real effort to stand up straight. None of the other caddies can bear to sit here for longer than three hours waiting for
work. But because I am the outsider, the illegal immigrant working in this country, I told Davy that I will sit here every day, all day long if that’s what he needs. My little secret is this BlackBerry. I can do my writing here each day. Today I sat under the trees along the side of the practice range and began writing a new draft of
American Love Story
, one letter at a time. I’ve lived with the story for the three years it took me to write the book and the three years I’ve been trying to write the screenplay, but it wasn’t until Jack and I were in Carnoustie, when he gave me his take on it, that I began to see my mother and father’s love story in a new way. I am digging in again.
Here is a note to myself. Golf is distinctly
not
what you see on TV. No breathtaking fifty-foot putts that collapse with one final revolution into the center of the hole. No jarring the ball from bunkers with sand as white as sugar. Golf here in Scotland, where the game was invented, is anguish and slaughter. I was sent to Elie to caddie today, a place I will forever think of as my home course, and I stood on the tee box of the 214-yard par-3, and no man God ever invented, and no driver ever designed, could have reached the green in the teeth of the forty-five-knot wind that was howling in off the sea. What I have already learned here is that trying to play this game at some level of perfection is a dark ride to nowhere you want to be. Which has me worried about Jack. On the one hand, it still holds the elegant governing dynamic of one man against nature. A simple and perfect equation. But I wonder if Jack has the constitution to take the pressure on his mind. And now that I think of it, maybe golf is one of the reasons that the Scottish boys are humble by nature. You sit around with fifty of them day after day, and one thing that is missing from the chatter is the word “I.” They don’t speak about themselves very much. They love to tell stories, but they are not the central character in these stories.
A few days ago, Kevin, in his thirties with two small children, was asking me why there weren’t any great Scottish golfers on the
scene. I hadn’t considered this before, and I really didn’t have a clue. Neither did he. But maybe the golf has humbled the Scots in some way so that they can’t summon the arrogance it takes to win at the top and to stay there. If arrogance is required rather than self-confidence, then I hope Jack never wins at this game. And if he does become an arrogant man, then I will rue the day I first placed a golf club in his hand.
Trouble at home. I had an e-mail this morning from Jack saying that he had failed to make the cut in a tournament. “I don’t think I have what it takes to make it here, Daddy. I’m thinking of coming home. Why do we chase our dreams anyway?” he wrote to me. I was sitting on the bench inside the caddie shed when the BlackBerry buzzed across my heart. Beside me was one of the frontline boys, a big-shouldered fellow in his early fifties, I would say. He keeps to himself. I’ve never seen him speaking with anyone. He just sits with his head bowed until Davy calls his name to go up to the 1st tee.
A week ago or so I asked one of the other experienced caddies about him, and he told me that he had once been a championship golfer who won the Scottish Boys Golf Championship, then went on to make it through the qualifiers to the British Open a few years later. A regular phenomenon and hometown hero who was expected to become one of the greatest golfers Scotland ever produced, until the wrong girl and too much booze got in the way. His life fell apart until he began putting it back together by working as a caddie.
This morning after I read the e-mail, I turned my head slightly
and saw that he was just staring at the ground. I thought maybe he was trying to fall asleep and I should leave him alone because it was obvious that was what he wanted, but instead I said, “My son is in his first season at D1 golf in the States. Nineteen years old. He can’t make the cuts, and he just wrote me to tell me he is thinking of quitting.”