Authors: Don J. Snyder
I want the match to be over! Get us in at four over par and we will be at the top of the leaderboard unless the weather improves for the late tee times. We throw away a stroke with a needless three-putt on 15 and make solid pars on 16 and 17, and here we are facing this damned island green on 18. Jack hits a drive up the left side, and it should cut back into the fairway but it doesn’t. I’m thinking, That’s in the water. It has to be. But when we get there, we’re on good ground, fifteen feet from the water. He hits a nice wedge from here, but it spins back off the green, and it’s rolling down the hill toward the water. Don’t break my heart, I’m thinking. And somehow it stops one foot from the water. We’re safe. From here Jack hits a lovely wedge, but it rolls past the hole, across the green, and it’s headed for water on the back side. No. No. It stops again. “Let’s just get up and down and get the hell out of here, Jack,” I tell him. He does. A bogey. We finish at six over par.
“You made the cut, Jackie boy,” I tell him when we shake hands. “You played well. It could have been a bloodbath.”
“Thanks to Glen,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He sent me an e-mail about my pre-shot routine. It helped me today.”
I smiled to myself and said nothing. Before Christmas, I wrote to old Glen in Canada and asked him if he would send an e-mail
to Jack about the importance of good practice swings before each shot. It was something I’d learned in Scotland and had relied upon as a caddie. Back in our hotel room, Jack showed me what Glen had written to him:
Jack, Would like to make a suggestion. This is from an old caddie who has looped for a number of pros. I was looking at all the scores of the boys on your tour. Not a single player’s scores fluctuate as dramatically as yours. I realize there is the good and the bad but what needs to be avoided is the great to the really lousy! Here is a thought for you if you want to turn this around after Christmas. Your father mentioned something in an e-mail to me that has bothered me. Shot preparation and that brings me to the practice swing. You need to start taking a good,
meaningful
, practice swing before each shot. Not a half assed, not committed one, but one that sets your swing in the proper groove and then repeats when you do hit the shot. If the first one does not feel right, take another
committed
one. Every good or great player I have worked for has utilized this technique, without fail. This might be a missing piece in you getting to the next level and it will breed consistency which I think must be presently lacking. The greatest player in my lifetime whom I have spent time with is Jack Nicklaus. You may have heard he can remember
every
shot he ever hit in a tournament. That is true. He remembered the details of at least 20 important shots I quizzed him on. He explained to me that, like many other successful players, he visualized every shot before he hit it and was thinking about that visualization during his
practice swing
. You obviously have all the shots to play this game at a pro level. No pro ever succeeded without this technique. Try it. My Christmas gift to you. Don’t throw it away. Fairways and Greens. Merry Christmas, Glen
Five in the morning. Cold again, but the wind has fallen off, and it will be much warmer by the time we tee off at ten. We finished yesterday at seven strokes behind the leader heading into round two. If Jack plays well today, he can move up and maybe win some money for the first time. I know that matters to him, but honestly some things happened yesterday that mean a great deal more to me. I saw that Jack is winning back some belief in himself here. By fighting hard in difficult conditions to make the cut and to finish high on the leaderboard, he earned back some of that belief. I could see it in the way he was carrying himself out on the course yesterday. Of course I could ask for more. God, yes, it would be terrific to see him gain the consistency in his play that would take him onto another tour so I could caddie for him until the day when I can no longer walk. Let this run on for fifteen more years so I can die with my boots on! Let them come and drag me off the course when I’m so senile I’m begging the beverage cart girl to marry me. Or worse. I would love that as any father would. But just to see Jack believing in himself again yesterday is worth more than gold to me. And there was something else. Before we left the course, Jack spoke with one of the players he has come to know here, a young man who has fought bravely to overcome drug addiction. He had not played well, and he had missed the cut by one stroke. Jack was really sad about this. Then late last night on the Adams Web site he discovered that because of the brutal weather conditions, the cut line had moved and the young man had made it to today’s round. I heard the excitement in Jack’s voice when he told me, and I could tell that he wouldn’t have been happier if it had happened to him. To be sure, this kind of generosity of heart
is not what made Tiger Woods such a winner in this game. But I think it has made Jack a good fellow. And I’ll take a good fellow for a son over a winner any day.
A friend wrote to me yesterday and asked how come the players on the tour were not all shooting par or better. I wrote him back:
The reason you are asking me how come these guys don’t all go out and shoot par is because all you know about golf is what you have seen on TV, and TV is never real. TV won’t show you the guys out there who make triple bogeys and fail to make the cut. Each week on the PGA Tour, there is a lot of failure you never see because it doesn’t look pretty on TV. I am guessing that you have no idea how often Tiger Woods is fined for failing to abide the pace of play rule. Rather than play by that rule, he plays at his own pace and pays the fines. The same is true of his cursing on the golf course for which he is routinely fined.
My time in Scotland taught me something about the game. It taught me that today Jack may lose some of what he earned yesterday, and then he’ll have to fight to earn it back the next time out. But as for Jack’s generosity of heart, he got that from his mother, and it runs deep in him, and I think it will stick.
Round two. Panther Trail Open. When you work as a caddie in Scotland you learn that every round of golf is another story. And the story of today’s round is that if you play well enough in round one to make the cut and finish well up the leaderboard, there is the chance that you will get paired up with one of the top golfers on the tour as Jack was today, playing alongside young Dustin Morris, who has won money and finished high in every tournament on this tour. And despite being three over par through eight holes, Jack was on
Dustin’s heels, just two strokes behind. On the 9th tee of the 578-yard par-5, Dustin striped his drive. Then Jack hit his first bad drive in weeks, spraying it up the right side. It hit a tree and kicked out of bounds. Meaning he is now hitting his third shot from the tee. He stripes it and has 259 yards over water to try to land the green in four and make a one-putt par save. He nails his hybrid, and it is perfect, never leaving the flag the whole way. But when we get to the green, we find that the ball has rolled across the green and is stuck on the side of a bunker in such a ridiculous lie that Jack has no stance. No chance. He doubles, and good old Dustin drains the putt for eagle.
As we headed to the 10th tee, I said to Jack, “Let’s give him a run for his money on the back nine, what do you say?”
Dustin promptly birdies 10 to follow up his eagle. And Jack drains a fifteen-foot birdie putt of his own to match him. All square after ten. Jack drops a stroke on number 12. Down one. Then Jack birdies the par-5 14th to pull even. But only for about five minutes before Dustin drains another eagle putt. So he’s two up on Jack on the back nine, but Jack isn’t giving up despite a bogey at 15. Now Dustin is up three going to the 16th tee, where he hits his first poor shot of the day and has his drive up the left side pinned against an iron fence. Jack nails his drive right up the center about 320 yards. Dustin has no shot. All he can do is turn his club backward and hit a left-handed shot that advances the ball only twenty feet. Jack is looking at 258 yards to land the par-5 in two. He takes his three-wood and rips it. It’s a heat-seeking missile that never leaves the pin. But it’s ten feet short of the green. Seventeen feet from the hole. Our eagle chance. Jack takes the putter instead of trying to fly a delicate wedge onto the green. A good call, I think. But his first putt rolls into a hole and almost stops. Leaving him ten feet to make birdie. He runs the putt six feet past. He takes a four-putt for bogey to match Dustin’s bogey. Dustin pars 17 and so does Jack, sinking a tricky six-footer. And now the dangerous 18th with the island green. Dustin drives straight up the middle. Jack does too, maybe 4 yards farther. Dustin lands the island green on his second shot. Jack’s ball lies 10 yards right, and so
he has a completely blind shot to the treacherous green. He nails a seven-iron, and the ball lands five feet from the hole and sticks. He’s eight feet inside Dustin, who three-putts and then watches Jack drain the birdie putt. Not bad. Not bad at all. We finished at five over. I took a minute to tell Dustin that he was one of the finest golfers I’d ever watched. Then Jack and I bought a couple of beers and sat in a cart behind the 18th green to watch his pal Gabe finish. The sun was on our faces, as warm as summer, and Jack was singing those words from an old U2 song: “I am not afraid of anything in this world.”
I slipped onto the Walden on Lake Conroe golf course in the late afternoon shadows after all the golfers had dispersed so that I could walk the ground the way I preferred to walk a new course for the first time—alone, and kicking a golf ball the entire way from the 1st tee to the 18th green while I paced off the yardages and wrote down distances in my notebook. This was a practice I invented in Scotland as a way of preparing to caddie at a course for the first time, and I had spent my share of Sunday afternoons when the Old Course was closed kicking a ball around while I committed the contours of the ground to my memory.
Walden is what is called target golf. Tight, tree-lined fairways with out of bounds left and right off almost every tee and with greens so small you could fit eight of them on the 13th green of the Old Course. Plus, enough water to make you feel even more restricted. With his power game, Jack will feel extremely uncomfortable here at first; instead of a slugfest, he is going to feel as if he’s stuck at a tiny card table playing bridge for the afternoon in his great-aunt’s parlor.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a course with five par-5s and five par-3s like this one has. And there are eight tee shots that are shrouded in deception; you stand at the back of the box, and when you look up the fairway, there appears to be plenty of room out there to land a driver. But when you pace off the distance, you discover that the fairways all end with trees, bunkers, or ponds at around 265 yards, which means that I will be handing Jack his three-wood on these tees and telling him to hit low stingers that will catch the downhill slope at around 240 yards and roll another 20 yards.
Even if you’re just walking alone, kicking a ball along, you can learn a lot out on a golf course, and only a small fraction of it is about the game of golf. I came down over the hill on the par-5 number 11, and as soon as I saw the first flash of blue on Lake Conroe, I thought of the ocean at home and I missed Colleen so much that I sat down on a bench and called her. The moment I heard her voice, I knew that I
needed
to talk with her about Jack. “It’s the same old story,” I said. “The history between Jack and me—it’s still hurting him. I’m almost certain that every time he looks at me standing beside him on a golf course, he has to remember that he was kicked off his team and let me down.”
“Why are you still worrying about that?” Colleen asked.
“Because I feel it, that’s why. He’s the only golfer on the tour with his old man standing beside him and all that damned history.”
“But you’ve already told him that it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Talk is cheap. If you or I had been unfaithful sometime in the last thirty-two years, sure we could talk our way through it and maybe we’d still be married, but it would never be the same. The betrayal would still be there.”
“He didn’t betray anyone.”
“He did. When he left home for college and made the golf team, I told him that I didn’t care if he never got to play in a single match as long as four years later, when it was over, his coach told him that he’d never had a player work harder.”
“That was you talking, Don.”
“I know. But Jack promised me.”
She listened to me for a while longer, then told me to talk with Jack. I knew that I wouldn’t do that. Instead, I wrote to Barry tonight. I told him that I had decided not to tag along for his practice round tomorrow with Jack. Then I wrote:
Maybe you can find out how Jack feels. I would be very grateful for this. Jack has five tournaments left now, and this might be the last time in his life that he can find out how well he can play this game. I might be standing in his way, Barry. If so, I need to know. And I don’t think Jack would tell me. Maybe he’ll tell you. Thanks.
On the range at 10:00 a.m., a few words with Barry, to thank him for playing a practice round yesterday with Jack. “We were even through seventeen holes,” he says. “Then Jack drove into a bunker on 18 and let me beat him. I enjoyed playing with him.” I told him to play well. “We’ll talk soon,” he said.
When we tee off at 11:20, Barry is two groups out ahead of us. My nerves are shredded this morning, and it really pisses me off. Why am I so nervous? Why can’t I just enjoy this? And here is Jack striding confidently onto the 1st tee in his dark banker’s trousers and his Oakley shades, and in front of all these people he goes first and nails his drive straight up the turnpike about 340 yards, and I am saying to myself, don’t ever forget this, you dummy. Don’t ever forget how Jack was able to do this. And I am certain that this is going to be his day. On this 460-yard par-4 all he has left is 135 yards to the green, and
he lands the right half easily and is looking at an easy two-putt par for a strong start. But somehow he drills the first putt nine feet past the hole and misses the comebacker and he’s one over par, and four hours later we are both stumbling around Walmart like two blind men, searching for Chicken McNuggets and some understanding of what the hell happened on the golf course. I hear Jack say, “It’s just so damned hard, man. I left ten lag putts at least eight feet short. Jenna could have done better.”