The Franchise Babe: A Novel Read online

  There are times—and this was one of them—when a man wished he had gotten himself boxed before he arrived at the dinner party.

  The slouchy teenage girl in the dirty jeans who was taking drink orders didn’t look like she could handle a Bombay Sapphire gin martini with four olives. She wasn’t an Apache American or a Mexican American. She was more on the order of a High School Dropout American. I made it easy for her. I asked her to bring me a Budweiser. Thurlene asked for a glass of white wine.

  Hoyt Newkirk wasn’t free to join us, the commissioner said. A problem concerning the golf course would be keeping him busy for the next two days. “I understand it’s nothing strenuously important,” Marsha said.

  Thurlene said, “That would be the worst kind, wouldn’t it?”

  Two of the commissioner’s underlings were in attendance. Monique, I knew. The snooty interview lady. Monique Hopkins. The other one introduced herself. She was Claudia Bradley, a businesslike woman in her forties who could slide by as attractive if you like bangs.

  Claudia proudly told us that she was the LPGA’s new deputy commissioner, and she was excited about the “challenge.” She had “come over” from the U.S. Golf Association, where she had been an expert on rules. She could still play to a four, she said.

  When Rusty Morrison arrived I watched Marsha and Claudia engage in something of a footrace to see who could reach him first. Claudia let Marsha win.

  They led the Speedy Arrow VP of marketing over to me as soon as they finished hugging on him, or as soon as he could struggle free. Rusty was a smooth guy who may not have undergone more than one dewrinkle job. He wore creased jeans, Guccis, and no socks, and his sweatshirt might have distracted anyone who read “Eat Me” on the front and didn’t bother to notice the likeness of a Speedy Arrow Energy Bar under the words.

  By way of introducing him to anyone, the commissioner said, “Here he is—the man, the man, the man! Would we be here without him? No! Do we love him? Yes!”

  “Exactly!” the deputy commissioner said.

  Looking more or less unimpressed to meet either Thurlene or the writer from New York, Rusty Morrison said, “I have been in telephone purgatory since I arrived. Voices, voices! Life is a torture. An absolute torture. Why did Herman Einstein invent the telephone? Weren’t we happier with our carrier pigeons, our parchment, our quills? Time didn’t fly by, leave us so out of breath, my God! There was no twenty-four-hour news cycle where we can watch the world crumble away in ruins, hourly. People used to sail away on ships and stayed gone forever, didn’t they? And when they returned nothing had really changed, had it? I mean, people who stayed home were still wearing the same clothes! You see it in films.”

  “To be continued,” I said to Rusty, and pulled Thurlene away.

  It was surprising to find that two of the older golfers had been invited. Jan Dunn and Linda Merle Draper. They were standing in a corner talking with a short, slender gentleman in a dark blue pinstriped suit, dark glasses, and slicked-down black hair. He looked about half foreign.

  Thurlene whispered that Jan and Linda Merle had obviously been invited because they were the two current player reps on the LPGA’s board of directors. They’d been elected by a vote of the competitors.

  She explained that there were six other members of the board, none of whom were present. They were captains of commerce whose names wouldn’t mean anything to me. But I could be assured that they had been handpicked by Marsha Wilson and were safely in the commissioner’s pocket on every issue.

  I asked what a member of the board received in return for loyalty to the commissioner.

  “Free trips.”

  “What kind?”

  “Oh, golfing weekends to Pine Valley, Augusta National, Pebble Beach, St. Andrews. Take the whole family to Paris for a week. Or take them to London, Venice, Zurich, Hamburg, Athens. Travel on a corporate jet. Nothing but the best hotels. Mostly a variety of things the average person would kill for.”

  “Sounds like my life.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Except for the private jet—and I don’t have to go to meetings.”

  “Or run a corporation.”

  “That’s no trouble. Corporations are run by middle-age executive secretary ladies who wear black and drink lattes. They make one twenty-five a year but work seven days a week running the corporation so the CEO can make seventy-nine million a year and go to Pebble Beach and St. Andrews. Let’s go say hello to Jan and Linda Merle.”

  “Let’s.”

  Though I hadn’t formally met Jan and Linda Merle, they pretended to know me and said they were aware I’d been at the Firm Chick last week, and they understood I was working on a story about Ginger Clayton.

  Linda Merle’s hair was down, she wore a dress and heels, and she could have passed for a PTA mother. Jan was in slacks, shirt, blazer, and her hair was cut short, the kind of style that makes women look like they go to my barbershop.

  “Ginger is the next great player,” Jan Dunn said. “I don’t say this because Thurlene is standing here. Ginger has it all.”

  Linda Merle Draper said, “She can’t be anything but good for our tour…with her combination of looks and talent.”

  Jan Dunn said, “What do you know about our tour, Mr. Brannon, if anything? Aside from the fact that Ginger Clayton is a dish?”

  “I’m no big authority on it,” I said, “but I covered Annika at Colonial and found myself rooting for her to do good. I know something about your history…who your immortals are. I know Patty Berg won fifteen majors…Mickey Wright won thirteen including four U.S. Opens…Babe Zaharias and Louise Suggs both won ten majors…so has Annika. Betsy Rawls won eight, and she’s the only other player with four U.S. Opens. Juli Inkster and Karrie Webb have seven…Kathy Whitworth has six. You two have four each. Jan, you’ve won two Dinah Shores, or I should say Nabiscos, and two LPGAs. Linda Merle, if I’m not mistaken, you have an Open, a Dinah-Nabisco, and two LPGA championships.”

  Jan smiled. “You can stay in the room, Jack.”

  I said, “I think you people ought to right the wrongs of history…give Mickey Wright fourteen and Kathy Whitworth seven. They both won the Dinah before it was a major, but it soon was.”

  “I’ll go with that,” Jan said.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Linda Merle said. “You people haven’t met Francois! Thurlene Clayton, Jack Brannon…this is our distinguished visitor—Francois D’Auby La Foo.”

  That’s what I thought I heard. His actual name was Francois D’Aubigne Lagoutte.

  He didn’t offer a handshake.

  Jan Dunn said, “Francois is from Paris.”

  “Bordeaux,” he said.

  “That’s right, Bordeaux,” Jan said. “Which part?”

  “All,” he said.

  Linda Merle said, “I hope Francois doesn’t mind me saying that Forbes magazine lists him as one of the ten richest men in the world.”

  “Cinq,” Francois said flatly. Another correction.

  “Boy, top five now!” Linda Merle said. “We’re moving up. How about that, folks?”

  Thurlene smiled. I tried.

  Jan said, “Francois came here in his private plane from his home in France.”

  “Many homes,” Francois said.

  I wondered if he was making a joke.

  Jan said, “He has many homes in France. You have a Citation jet, don’t you?”

  “The Citation Deece.”

  Linda Merle said, “Francois came all the way here for the bombshell Marsha is going to drop tonight—and tomorrow at her press conference.”

  “Bombshell?” I said. “I’m into bombshells.”

  “You’re getting a sneak preview tonight after dinner.”

  “But it’s a bombshell? You promise?”

  “I’ll say!”

  23

  Over the years I’ve lived in trembling horror of dinner parties where the host might announce, “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken the liberty to order for all
of us.”

  At one time or another in my troubled dinner-party past, this has resulted in…

  Tripe and onions.

  Haggis.

  Prairie oysters.

  Gator tail.

  Fried liver.

  So it was that when Marsha Wilson said she had taken the liberty to order for all of us after we were seated at the table in the private room, I was prepared for the worst—and she didn’t disappoint me.

  Sushi tacos.

  By way of preparing for the worst, I had slyly taken the precaution of slipping the waitress, the High School Dropout American, a hundred-dollar bill and kindly asking her to run over to Fattest Woman on the second floor of the casino and bring me back a bean and cheese burrito.

  “Do whut…?” the waitress had said, gawking at the hundred.

  I repeated the request, slowly, clearly, and told her she could keep the change, and stressed that I hoped and prayed she would make it back to me in less than an hour.

  She did. No more than fifteen minutes passed before my bean and cheese burrito from Fattest Woman turned up.

  Headline: Man Avoids Idiotic Tacos.

  I was pleased to find that my burrito was only slightly larger than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s forearm.

  The waitress said, “This didn’t cost me nuthin’. Kin I still keep the hunnert you give me?”

  “You can,” I said.

  She said, “Dang, I’m quittin’ this stinkin’ job right now.”

  And she was outta there.

  Sitting between Thurlene and Jan Dunn, I took pleasure in watching them push aside their beet and okra salad with chipotle sauce, and then push aside their untouched sushi tacos, hence to accept the offer I made of part of my burrito.

  Most of us had passed on the banana daiquiri yogurt sundae for dessert by the time the commissioner stood up and rang on a glass.

  “Friends and loved ones,” she said. “The things I am privileged to tell you tonight are undoubtedly the most important words I will speak in my lifetime. In fact, I believe I will go so far as to say these words will be remembered as the most important words anyone connected with the game of golf will ever have spoken. When I say this news is enormously big, I stress big, big, big.”

  “Exactly,” said Claudia Bradley, sitting on the commissioner’s right.

  “Tomorrow morning,” the commissioner said, “a simple Friday in March, the world will awaken to the news on network TV, in the Wall Street Journal, and, well, heaven knows where else, that Le Compagnie Lagoutte has purchased Kraft Foods, the world’s largest manufacturer of food products, a division of Altria. Kraft Foods has been bought by Le Compagnie Lagoutte. Needless to say, the financial terms are known only to Altria and our special guest this evening, my dear friend Francois D’Aubigne Lagoutte. That’s right—I see you people nodding! Francois is an owner of Le Compagnie Lagoutte!”

  “The,” Francois said. “The only.”

  “Excusez-moi and correctomento!” Marsha said. “Francois is the owner of Le Compagnie Lagoutte!”

  Francois shook his head approvingly.

  The commissioner continued. “This news will be addressed in my press conference tomorrow morning here at the lodge, and so will the things I shall now share with you. By the by, Monique has arranged for a rather impressive list of media to be present…aside from our new good friend Jack Brannon with SM magazine. I believe we will have the Albuquerque Journal, the Roswell Record, the Clovis Daily, the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Los Alamos Exploder, the Ruidoso Bugle…the AP…and our capable Monique Hopkins will be filing for USA Today.”

  “Exactly,” Claudia Bradley said.

  “Where shall I begin?” the commissioner said.

  Rusty Morrison, who’d had more than one vod, interrupted to say, “I’m often tempted to begin by saying I come from humble orgins, but of course I don’t.”

  “Darling Rusty,” said Marsha. “Clever as always.”

  “Can we get to it?” Francois said in perfect English.

  Marsha did precisely that. The bombshells the commissioner dropped on her listeners were these:

  Le Compagnie Lagoutte, as we may or may not realize, was the world’s largest maker and distributor of horse meat and dog food, a fact that Francois was very proud of. Francois had many other “holdings,” but horse meat and dog food were his “storefronts.”

  In buying Kraft Foods, Francois acquired the Kraft Nabisco golf tournament and was increasing the prize money by $1 million. This meant $500,000 for the winner. The biggest first-place check of any of the four major championships.

  The LPGA’s board of directors had voted unanimously to allow Francois to change the name of the tournament to something that he, himself, came up with—Le Grand Cheval et Petit Chien Classique.

  Indeed, that was how next week’s first major of the season was going to be known, now and in the future. A hasty change, to be sure, but the pieces had been put in place behind the scenes. No doubt the press would shorten the name.

  Incidentally, the winner’s trophy would have a new name—the Lagoutte-Dinah Cup. Keeping Dinah Shore’s name involved was, of course, a way of paying respect to the past. This was something Francois generously gave in on during the discussions, after arguing, rather convincingly, that Dinah, after all, had been dead twenty years.

  The tour would be sad to leave Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage—where the championship had been played since 1972—but Francois had purchased Hollywood Dunes Country Club in Palm Springs, an old course that had been redone by Burch Webb. It would be a marvelous venue.

  Francois had played Hollywood Dunes and was particularly fond of the fourteenth hole, the ninety-nine-yard downhill par-three with no bunkers and no water.

  The commissioner concluded by saying, “Am I bothered by the fact that our tour now has a French sponsor that sells horse meat for human consumption? Not in the least. Francois hopes to popularize horse meat in this country, as his family has for years and years overseas. As Francois and I both say, if it’s good enough for France, Belgium, and Italy, it should be good enough for the United States. And by the way, isn’t the world becoming a more richly diversified place by the day? Well, there you have it. The whole ball of wax.”

  I raised a hand to ask a question.

  “Yes, Jack,” Marsha said.

  “My French is a little slipshod,” I said. “Does the new name of the tournament translate into the Dog Horse Classic or the Horse Dog Classic?”

  “Oh, Jack,” she said. “You are such a devil.”

  24

  Splashed across the front of the Ruidoso Bugle Friday morning was the wire story concerning women’s golf, Palm Springs, Dinah Shore, the wealthy Frenchman, and horse meat for humans. But the piece I found more intriguing was spread along the bottom of the front page. It dealt with the discovery of a historical event that occurred locally on August 23, 1881, and involved a fierce battle between a band of courageous Apache warriors and three dozen troopers from the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment.

  The headline said:

  SCORE ONE FOR THE HOME TEAM!

  The byline read:

  By P. W. (Pecan Waffle) Spurlock

  The writer opened up by saying that the battle took place on the very site of the Mescalero Country Club golf course. In fact, the thirty-seven doomed troopers that engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Apaches, including the commanding officer, Col. Bright Finnegan, were buried where they fell, which was underneath the eighteenth green, a par-four.

  The battle was known to most historians of the Indian Wars, according to P. W. (Pecan Waffle) Spurlock, as “Finnegan’s Folly.”

  There ought to be a monument near the eighteenth green at Mescalero, the writer suggested. Not a monument to honor the soldiers who paid the price for attempting to seek revenge for Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn, which had occurred five years earlier, but for the gallant Apaches “who won a big one for Native Americans of yesteryear and today as well.�
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  The writer said the people of Ruidoso and the surrounding territory should be proud to learn that two local residents were related to the biggest Apache heroes in the engagement.

  One was Limping Turkey, the great-great-grandson of Chief Sitting Turkey, who is credited with planning and leading the surprise attack on the arrogant troopers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. Limping Turkey was best known today as the pleasant fellow who retrieves your grocery carts in the parking lot at Wal-Mart.

  Smells a Possum, the other local, was the great-great-grandson of Tall Possum, the Apache brave who disarmed Col. Bright Finnegan and clubbed him to death with the colonel’s own fifty-two-caliber short-barreled carbine. Smells a Possum, the writer said, would be familiar to all those who have bought one of his wood carvings of a possum at Stuff & Things on Sudderth Drive, the main street in downtown Ruidoso.

  I was reading the paper over breakfast in the coffee shop. My breakfast consisted of three fried eggs over medium that had been served with the yolks already broken and seeping under the three strips of raw bacon while the cold, stringy hash browns had been plopped down on top of two slices of unripe cantaloupe.

  Hoyt Newkirk came in with a mug of coffee and sat across the table from me. He looked at ease with himself.