Authors: Don J. Snyder
He looks worried. But he gets it up and out. We face a downhill putt, fifteen feet. I tell him, “This one will be fast.” He hits it poorly, and we’re six feet past the hole. Another bogey. Damn. Our second bogey in two holes.
Two under par now after twelve holes.
Hole 13. A 369-yard par-4.
A short but dangerous hole. He hits a bad three-wood. It goes right and lands behind trees. It feels like a stake right through my heart. Ever since I thought about calling Colleen to tell her that her little boy was leading this tournament, we have played like yellow dogs.
We make our third straight bogey. We’ve given away three of our four strokes in the last three holes. There is a point like this in every match under competition. I know this. We just have to play through it.
One under after thirteen holes.
Hole 14. A 150-yard par-3.
I say to Jack, “Fight hard, man. We’ll get back in this.”
He doesn’t say anything. But he makes a good swing and lands eight feet from the hole. A missed birdie. A tap-in par. “Good par, Jackie,” I tell him.
One under after fourteen holes.
Hole 15. A 473-yard par-4.
A wicked hole from the tee with water up the left, right in our landing area. I hand him his three-wood instead of his driver and remind him that we hit three-wood from this tee yesterday in our practice round. He takes the three-wood and nails it up the right side. Good. Good.
One hundred and fifty-four yards left to a green that slopes right to left, with big bunkers up the right. Jack takes a nine-iron and hits it straight at the flag. The ball never moves off the flag the whole way. I hear one of our playing partners yell, “Wow!” I run up the hill to have a look. It looks as if it’s two feet from the hole. It’s not. It’s one foot. An easy birdie. We are back! “That’s how you fight back, Jackie,” I tell him.
Two under par after fifteen.
Hole 16. A 392-yard par-4.
And Jack is thinking now; he takes a four-iron on this short par-4. Right up the center. I want to calm him down, so I start talking about Teddy again. How since we canceled our telephone landline to save money, there’s no longer an answering machine, and I always thought that when Teddy was left home alone, he must have loved hearing the voices on the answering machine—his beloved Cara saying, “We’re not home right now to take your call …” Jack makes a solid par here. He looks good.
Two under par after sixteen.
Hole 17. A 602-yard par-5.
“We are going to get there in two,” Jack says as he takes his driver. He nails it a mile. We have 237 left. I want him to hit a four-iron and let it run onto the green. But there’s wind in our faces, and he wants the hybrid.
He hits it too far; it flies the green. A bad mistake. We don’t even know what is over there behind the steep mounds and the bunkers.
It’s not good. It’s the worst ground we’ve been on today. Soaking wet. I hand him his wedge and say, “Just get it on the dance floor, Jackie.”
He leaves it short. Then two bad putts and we throw away a stroke.
He is steaming mad at himself now. And I’m just trying to hold on. Hold on.
One under after seventeen holes.
Hole 18. A 455-yard par-4.
Into the wind, but I still hand him the three-wood. There’s water left and woods right. He nails it right onto the plateau, the only flat good ground out there. Here we go. A simple 167-yard nine-iron to the last green. We have hit every fairway off the tee but one. And every green but two.
He flies a beautiful shot, but when it hits the green, it has too much juice on it and spins off thirty feet down a hill.
I feel the bogey coming. And it comes. We lose another stroke and our chance of shooting an under-par round.
Even par after eighteen holes.
I am thinking, Two months ago in our first tournament we shot a 90 in round one and didn’t make the cut. Today for about an hour we
were four under par through ten holes, and no one on this tour was playing any better.
But Jack is just miserable. “I can’t believe I pissed away a great round like that,” he says. And he doesn’t say another word. I want to sit and have a beer with him at the bar outside the clubhouse where they shot the movie
Tin Cup
.
He wants to get out of here. So off we go. Speeding all the way back to the hotel. Bruce Springsteen at top volume. Not a word between us.
But here’s the deal. Jack will no longer wonder if he belongs on this tour. I’m just going to let him figure out how to feel. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so tired in my life. We might have a new lesson to learn now: how to play when you’re on fire and leading the tournament. I have no experience with that, so I’m going to have to turn to some friends for advice.
Round two tomorrow. They say it will rain hard all day. The first full day of rain here in about eleven months. I hope it pours. That’s our kind of weather. And I will get to watch Jack again in his Carnoustie rain jacket.
Four in the morning. I am remembering the Old Course, the evening before the British Open in 2010, when I walked all eighteen holes with Ray, who was caddying for Ricky Barnes. We had just finished, and I was rounding the corner of Golf Place, when I ran into a group of noisy, middle-aged women, twelve or fifteen of them, all worn-out-looking housewives in matching red shirts, who had flown
to Scotland from the States to form a cheering section for Tiger Woods. I was stunned. By then the whole world knew that Woods had betrayed his wife and children. This didn’t matter to these ladies. They loved him. They couldn’t wait to get a glimpse of him the next day. I suppose no one loves winners the way Americans do. It’s fine if you have no love in your heart, but if you end up living with your family in a Studio Plus hotel, you cannot be pardoned in America. Finishing in the money is what counts.
I can remember when Jack was six or seven and he first began to excel at hockey and baseball and I told him that no matter what kinds of wild celebrations took place after winning, he had to be the quiet kid who just walked up to his coaches and shook their hands and thanked them for the chance to play. And I remember the spring evening he hit his first baseball over the fence at Bailey Field when I told him that all the truly great athletes know that you learn more from losing than from winning.
That’s not going to help him today. Whatever lesson he might learn from losing today, he’s not interested.
It has just begun to rain.
By 9:00 a.m., it is a cold rain on gusting winds, like a hundred Scotland mornings I remember. All the golfers on the practice range look a little stunned, as if someone were playing a trick on them. The only thing I say to Jack are the words we memorized years ago from
Band of Brothers
. Captain Winters to his men in the 101st Airborne just before they board the planes the morning of D-day. “Listen up. Good luck. God bless you. I’ll see you in the assembly area.”
But when Jack doesn’t acknowledge me, I’m a little annoyed and I call to him. He turns back. And I decide in that moment that I will keep my silence. I will just be his caddie today, not a philosopher or a father, though most caddies I knew in Scotland are about the best philosophers I’ve ever met. And a lot of them are damned good
fathers too. I am thinking in this rain that I wish Malcolm were here to roll my cigarettes for me in the wet today, a skill I never mastered. And I am thinking about Davy Gilchrist, my caddie master at Kingsbarns who gave me my first chance. He remains one of the most decent people I’ve ever known. I watch Jack walk away. It’s cold and wet enough now for him to be wearing his proper rain jacket. The beautiful light blue Duke’s Course jacket I bought him with the first tips I earned as a caddie. I am thinking of David Scott, who runs the Duke’s and has such great insight into golf and life. I wish he were here today. And old Glen up in Canada. I have a bad feeling standing in the rain. I just wanted Jack to be grateful this morning for the round he played yesterday, but when I tried to talk with him on the ride in, it didn’t go so well. All he had to say was “I played nine good holes yesterday. And nine lousy ones.”
“We made the cut,” I said. “We’re back to fight another day.”
“Not good enough,” he said.
I went on. “I just think if a man is grateful in this life, then his heart is set in the right place.”
“I don’t buy it,” he said. “In golf it’s about making the swing. If you make a good swing, you play well. If not, no excuses.”
“You don’t have to buy it,” I said. “I’m just an old man now, and nobody cares what an old man thinks about anything. I’m just telling you what I believe. If a man isn’t grateful, he can’t be calm. And in this game if you’re not calm, you’re dead.”
That was the end of the talking.
I wish we could have spent the day talking instead of playing golf. It was that kind of day, starting with the first drive, when Jack made the worst swing I’d seen him make in Texas. The ball flew perhaps 100 yards, never more than two feet off the ground. With 260 yards left to a narrow green perched on top of a mound and surrounded by bunkers, Jack hit a miraculous shot and saved par. He hit another miserable drive on the 2nd and then made another miraculous par save after hitting a towering seven-iron—a completely blind shot—over a stand of tall trees blocking our view of the green.
We dropped shots on 3, 4, and 5, then recovered with a nice par on the 6th hole before the wheels fell off in a miserable run of bogey, bogey, double bogey. Yesterday in round one we finished the front nine at four under par. Now we stood at seven over.
I suggested we just try to make some birdies coming in for Colleen, and though he was trying his best, things just got worse. I stopped keeping score after eleven holes. I think we hit two good shots from there on in. It was another embarrassment for Jack. There are many ways to lose a golf tournament. You can stink on the first day and fail to make the cut. You can have one blowout hole. You can putt like an idiot. You can drive the ball out of bounds. For us, it was none of that really. Just one poor shot after another, shots that missed being good by a yard or two. A slow bleeding away of our hope and expectations.
Standing alone in the fairway on the 15th hole, I thought again about Scotland. Suddenly my mind was soaring across the Atlantic, back to the ground that I love. When I was last there, I was writing hard on a new novel from 4:00 each morning until I got on the bus to the course to go to work. My agents had sent the novel out to Hollywood—how many weeks ago was it now? I’d lost track. But the silence could mean only one thing.
“You don’t understand how it feels,” Jack said to me when we were walking back to his truck. “It hurts bad. Playing that way.”
“I do understand,” I told him. “You spend three years writing a novel, and then you realize it’s not nearly good enough. That’s been my story for the last thirty-seven years.”
“I don’t know, man,” he said.
Instead of music on the ride back to the hotel, we talked. It came down to me telling him that he has all the shots and enough talent to play well on this tour. “It’s in your heart,” I told him. “What I said to you this morning about being grateful. That’s what I’m trying to learn now as I grow old. I think the only way you can grow old gracefully is to be grateful enough to be calm. And that’s funny, because when you and your sisters were little, that’s the one thing your mother insisted on. That you all were grateful.”
“I have to start all over when we get back here after Christmas,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “We’ll take what we’ve learned and do the best we can on the second half of the tour. But you don’t have to start over.”
Maybe I didn’t believe that when I said it. I wasn’t sure. We have a long struggle ahead of us, and we might never climb the leaderboard again. I know that I have wondered before if someday I’m going to look back on my time as a father and see it as a long run of fixing things. I am pretty certain that I’ve learned here during our first run on the tour what is broken in Jack. I know he’s going to have to fix it himself.
We are halfway through the tour now and facing three days of practice rounds before the two-week Christmas break. I am trying to take inventory early this morning. And trying to figure out what the hell happened yesterday. One reason golf is such a brutal game on the mind is that it is a game of uncertainty. But I think that part of my job as Jack’s caddie is to cut through all that is uncertain and try to nail down some essential truth that we can carry with us onto the second half of the tour. If such a truth exists.
And I believe it does. I studied my notebook from yesterday’s disaster and discovered that on seven holes where we earned bogeys and worse, we might have had quite simple pars if we had gone to the center of the green instead of at the flags, where missing left or right by two or three yards, as we did, placed us in great difficulty. That might have been a swing of seven to eleven strokes. The difference
between a humiliating score and a respectable score, which is all that Jack was fighting for after the poor opening nine. Going for the flags is Jack’s game, and that is what accounted for his outstanding four under par on the front nine of the first round. But it may also have accounted for the disappointing four over par on the back nine. Which makes it a difficult equation with reasonable arguments on both sides. Just as you might argue that a writer who spends three years trying to write a novel determined to reveal some important truth about the human condition that no one ends up reading would be wiser to spend those three years in law school. So what can we conclude with certainty here? We began this sixth tournament planning to just be content with the center of the greens, but when the rain softened them, Jack decided to go for the flags. That is his game. It has always been his game. But the figures from today’s round tell a certain truth, I think. When you drive the ball as well as he has, and putt as well, maybe you consistently shoot respectable rounds by just going for the center of the greens. And so, it may be that when we return after our two-week Christmas break, Jack will have to consider changing his game.