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T H I S+W E E K American byways
Ode to the road D E P A R T M E N T S The Surreal Gourmet
Mondo Weirdo
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Tuesday, June 24 Hong Kong Diary
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T H E+S O U L+O F golf _____________
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+ + + + + + + + there's a nice spot beneath a tree in the Browns Mill Golf Course parking lot, and it's there that I eat my cheese crackers and sip my hyperglycemic coffee. I watch golfers, most of them black, pull in, open the trunks of their cars, extract clubs and coolers and assorted golf accoutrements, then sit on the railroad ties to lace up their spikes. Honestly, I'm just a little bit disappointed not to be the only Caucasoid on the scene, but if this is the way it is, this is the way it is. I transform my blatant honky face into something more boldly cosmopolitan and shamble to the pro shop to see about imposing myself on somebody's fun. There's a young black fellow operating the cash register, and he's announcing tee-off times into a microphone connected to a loudspeaker out by the putting green. "Good morning," he says. "You have a time already?" "Well, no I don't." I was hoping you could work me in with a twosome or a threesome. That sound like a possibility?" "Shouldn't be no problem at all." "Do you suppose you could put me with some golfers who are, uh, black? It's a long story, but if you could ..." "Lemme see what we've got out there," he says, and runs his finger down a column of names. "Hmmm ... hmmmm ... hmmmmm." Then he presses a red button on the microphone and informs one of the groups below that they've got company. "All set, if you don't mind a threesome," he says, "but you'd better kick it in gear because they're already on the tee." I thank him profusely, pay him the modest greens fee, and shake his powerful mitt, an act that causes a mysterious metacarpal crunching sound. He tells me to have fun out there. Then I dash across the parking lot to get my golf bag and shoes from the trunk of the car. In my sophomoric brain I manufacture a song that goes to the tune of "Marching to Pretoria." I hum it softly as I lace up my shoes: "I am golfing with some black guys, some black guys, some black guys ... la la la." My nervousness has apparently tweaked the latent dunce in me. They are sitting on the bench at the first tee, watching the group ahead hit their second shots toward the first green, a modest par five. I cruise up in my golf cart, feeling suddenly like a total interloper. Both of these fellows stand up and walk across the tee to introduce themselves. I customarily forget the names of people whose hands I shake, but I hone my concentration this time. Luther is a sixtyish fellow with a very strong, barrel-shaped body, and his friend Harry is smaller but quite substantial in his own way. They are cheerful and welcoming. I decide to tell them right away that they'll be immortalized in a golf book, and they give me a That so? look. "This is a comedy book, I take it," Luther says. "'Cause my game is a joke." Harry laughs heartily, and so do I. "We better get our butts in gear," Luther says, nodding to the parade of golf carts forming on the cart path leading to the opening hole. Luther and Harry both use Big Bertha drivers; in fact, they both employ the complete line of Big Bertha weaponry. It's an unusual coincidence, for sure, but I don't spend much time interpreting what this means, if anything. Harry waggles over his Top-Flite, takes a quick backswing, whips the club downward, and hits a high draw, short but decent. He has one of those swings that looks like the before in a before-and-after promo for a swing trainer. But the ball goes where it's supposed to go. Luther, despite his size, is not a huge driver of the golf ball, but he's out there on the cut-grass, too, past Harry. Due to lack of warm-up, I feel like a rusty farm implement when it comes my turn. This is definitely a four-wood moment, as there's no sane rationale for dragging out the big war club at this junction. A very curious, very secret, very shameful truth seizes me as I waggle nervously over my ball, and it is that I do not want to play my best today -- not that I want to be a total duffer, a white duffer, an effigy of white dufferhood. I just don't want to swagger onto their turf like a WASP golfing god and evidence some imaginary genetic predisposition toward this largely Anglo-Saxon pastime. White men can't jump; black men can't putt, and so on. I'm making way too big a deal of this, I know. Maybe the importance of the occasion has mutated beyond itself because I've allowed the transformation to occur; the matter has simply become too large in my mind. It dawns on me that I've been swimming in a smaller pond than I'd ever imagined, and this is the proof of it. Years ago, I went to a golf course in Toledo with my dad to see an exhibition match, among whose participants was Charlie Sifford, the only significant black player on the pro tour at that time. He wore yellow slacks and chomped a cigar, even while he was striking the ball. I recall how curious it was to me then, seeing a black man playing golf on fairways and greens normally forbidden to him. I recall that the caddies were black like him, even his own caddie. Everyone clapped and cheered wildly when he sank a putt or curled a five iron around a dogleg, as if he had performed a feat of magic. There was an undertone to the experience that I couldn't put my finger on at the time. Now, in some curious way, the subliminal truth of that experience is struggling inside my brain. I'm standing on the tee in front of two black men, who are just men like me, after all, yet I feel like an alien from the Planet Zork. Somehow, my swing passes through this fog of realization, connects with the ball, and sends it down the center of the fairway, beyond Harry's ball, beyond Luther's ball. "That's a heck of a nice drive, Bill," Harry says. "The blind pig finds the ear of corn once in a while," I say. We're three American golfers tooling down the cart path of a nicely wooded public course on the tattered margin of a huge southern city, almost, but not quite, beyond the reach of that real world on the other side of the hurricane fence. My golfing partners don't really belong to that world, of which they are no doubt weary. They've occupied it, of course, and surely it occupies them. Which may explain why they would leave behind their beautiful, predominantly white Peachtree City Country Club course so they can play a round of golf on this humble track on the border of chaos. They must surely be reminded of their native Motown with its Halloween arson and junkie killings and blighted street corners where young men hang out in front of convenience stores and drink beer and smoke and watch the world go by without them. Luther and Harry worked in Detroit's city park system, where they learned to play golf on the hardpan municipal courses. Finally, they had enough of it and retired together to the Deep South, mostly so they could play golf year round and live out their friendly lives together. I'm quite a lucky American golfer through the first half-dozen holes. A couple of misguided ten-footers, their errant courses corrected by the vagaries of a brown fungus, tumble into the cup for pars, and I'm dead level with three holes to go on the front side. Luther and his best pal Harry are locked in a good-natured competition that has raged unabated since they moved to Peachtree City from Detroit ten years ago. They hole out every putt, even lip-hangers, and meticulously record their scores. I feel left out, keeping my own score, playing my own game, racking up routine pars while they happily slalom their way from tee to cup. But on number seven, after Luther has hit his usual two-hundred-yard drive down the center and Harry has whacked his tee shot into the first cut of rough on the left, the world changes. My mind is on some absurd bit of imagery having to do with Vietnamese cuisine. Why, on the seventh hole of a golf course, miles from a decent restaurant, would my golfer's brain wrap itself around the sensory attributes of tran bien chicken? Honestly, I'm thinking about a plate of Vietnamese food served to me once at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. -- the smell of it, the luscious caps of mushroom and perfect slivers of ginger-flavored chicken. And that accounts for the fact that my golf swing goes extravagantly awry, sending my ball clean over the chain-link fence, where it takes a huge Wallenda hop on Browns Mill Road and bounds over to where my beer-drinking acquaintances are holding forth in front of the convenience store. It would be better for all concerned if the string of expletives hurled by Bill Hallberg into the steamy atmosphere of Atlanta went unprinted. Know, at least, that I couldn't stop myself once the dam broke. I slammed my bastard four wood against the hard-baked ground, cursed the day I bought the thing, berated God and motherhood and goodness and light, then wrapped everything in a scatological cocoon and hurled all of it into the mad heavens. When I turn around to elicit a little bit of empathy from Harry and Luther, they're totally spasmodic. This is definitely the happiest moment of their lives. I've just duck-hooked my golf ball into the lap of soul brother number three at the hangout on Browns Mill Road. I have just trashed a perfect round of golf. I have embarrassed myself before God and country. But for Luther and Harry, this is the merriest event in the history of Christendom. If they weren't holding each other up, they'd fall down laughing. Tears roll down their cheeks, and they've got their hankies out. Then a bolt of cosmic truth nails me from an odd angle, and I laugh, too. This is my catharsis. I can't outrun my fate nor exceed my humanity. Nobody in the history of golf has hit a shot more crooked than mine, nor with more poetic outcome. A member of the chorus by the 7-11 holds my golf ball aloft as if he were a bleacher bum and a moon shot from Ken Griffey, Jr., has landed at his feet. "Better tee up another one," Luther says, but he can barely get the words out. That my provisional ball also sails out of bounds is just a goofy denouement. I take yet another ball from my zipper pocket and I throw this one over the fence. "Damn this game to hell," I say. And now we are bonded. Harry and Luther and Bill. No pretenses to hide behind, no worries, no particular expectations. Each shot is just a question with ten wrong answers. At the turn, Luther shares lemonade made by his wife. He tells me how, on the day of his open-heart surgery, she crashed the car on the drive to the hospital and broke her leg. All the Peachtree neighbors made casseroles and mowed the grass and visited them both in the hospital. "That was the most wonderful thing, Bill. Just wonderful. I'm not going to tell you I haven't encountered some prejudice from time to time, but there's a lot of good people out there." He offers me a ham sandwich, but I'm not really hungry. My game comes totally undone after the turn. A couple of lucky pars come my way, but mostly it's a dreadful mélange of bad judgment and incompetence, spiced with misplaced bravado and mild insanity. But I'm having way too much fun to care. Harry, on a par three near the end of our odyssey, hits a beautiful five wood to within ten feet of the cup. The ball holds its line beautifully against the wind and very nearly lands in the hole on the fly. "Great shot. Awesome," I say. "Almost an ace," Harry says. "That would be my second one." "Don't ask him about the first one," Luther says. "You'll be sorry." "Let's have it," I tell him. "Well, a couple of years ago I went in to see the doctor for some problems I was having. They gave me tests, you know, scans and the like. Then when I went back a week later, they said, 'Hey, you got prostate cancer, and we've got to do surgery right away.'" "Yeah, but he had a golf game the next day," Luther says. "And Harry isn't' going to miss his golf game for nothing. Right, Harry?" "Right. So anyway, next day I'm playing at Peachtree and I get the first hole in one of my life. I think that's God's way of compensating." It seemed like a pretty bad trade-off to me, but I could see Harry's side of things. "So anyway, I had surgery on the day after that, and I haven't had a minute's problem since." "I'm sure glad about that," I tell him. On the last hole I've shanked my approach into the tall rough short and right of paydirt. Harry and Luther have already landed their shots on the green, but I'm foraging in the spinach for mine. They take pity on me and hustle down the slope to help me in my search, but we're really in no hurry to find the thing because doing so will mean that the round is over. We're just three guys, after all, having a day of it on the golf course. There comes a time, though, and it has arrived. Luther pulls a ball from his pocket and drops it in the rough. "Hit this one," he says. I take my mountain-goat stance and dink his Top-Flite into the greenside bunker. This incompetence is another source of mirth for my pals. In fact, they seem eager to witness any new species of foolishness I can manufacture out of my pancake lie in the sand. I certainly don't wish to let them down, so I dig to China with my cockamamy sand wedge. Wind throws granules back over me. The stuff is in my hair, clinging to my sweaty skin, it's inside my shirt ... The ball has only relocated on the precarious upslope of the trap. I slug the ball again, and this time it floats up onto the green, fifteen feet from the cup. Luther looks at Harry. Harry looks at Luther. These men who wouldn't concede a drop of rain to each other say in unison, "That's good." I pick the thing up and thank them. After drinking some more of Luther's lemonade in the parking lot, I take their pictures. Then Luther takes one of Harry and me. Then Harry takes one of Luther and me. Then, using the self-timer, I snap one of this happy trio we've become. Luther to my left, Harry on my right. We've got our arms around each other, and we're grinning like there's no tomorrow.
Copyright © 1997 by William Hallberg. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. + + + + + + + + Select |
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