The Franchise Babe: A Novel Page 13

  “I like to stand next to rich people. See if anything falls off.”

  “It don’t usually,” Fay said.

  Hoyt said, “Good thing my older brother wasn’t here. Hank is eighty-three and he still remembers how much he don’t like the French. I was too young for the war, but Hank volunteered when his time come. He was in the Fifth Infantry Division, the Red Diamonds…part of General Patton’s army. Got his butt shot a time or two in France. I’m kind of proud of him.”

  I said, “He wasn’t injured seriously, I hope.”

  “Aw, he got him some Silver Stars and Purple Hearts. But when Hank come home all he talked about was how much he hated the French Underground. He’d go to a movie and couldn’t understand why Hollywood liked to glorify them phony assholes. Hank said the only thing the French Underground did for him was point him toward the gray suits.”

  Hoyt said his wife, Miyuki, would be back from shopping in time for dinner. He invited us to join them.

  “They serve a good chateau briggan in the Tomahawk Room,” he said. “Bring Sweet Baby Doll along if you want to.”

  Thurlene said, “Thank you, Hoyt, but ‘Sweet Baby Doll’ likes to have room service the night before the last round. I’ll dine with her.”

  I said, “A chateau briggan sounds good, Hoyt, but I have work to do. The computer beckons.”

  “Y’all take care then,” Hoyt said. “Tell Sweet Baby Doll hidy.”

  “Chateau briggan,” I said as Thurlene drove us away. “I like that.”

  “You’d never guess Hoyt was from Texas.”

  “I like ‘Sweet Baby Doll’ too. That may stick.”

  “Well, you can un-stick it,” she said.

  There was a message in my room to call Gary Crane.

  It was six forty-five in New York, but I knew he’d be in the office at SM. On the average of two Friday nights a month he liked to pretend he was compelled to work late. This was to keep him from having to go home and take his wife, Alicia, to a dinner party in Old Gun Barrel, Connecticut.

  He would spend the night in the apartment the company kept at the Lowell Hotel, and take a researcher to dinner. One of the newest young ones who might have already reached the conclusion that her best career path was giving upper echelon blowjobs.

  “Jackie-boy!” Gary said on the phone. “How’s the weather in Aspen?”

  “I can call and ask. I’m in Ruidoso.”

  “Ruidoso,” he said. “Ruidoso…Sounds like a dance craze. Everybody do the Ruidoso.”

  “What’s on your mind, Gary?”

  “One of my legionnaires passed along the news about this French character. The chap who bought the Nabisco thing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We should get it in the book. Could you give us sixty lines by tomorrow? We’ll slip it into ‘Hots and Nots.’”

  Gary Crane and all of my recent managing editors had spoken the same language. A legionnaire is an editor. As opposed to one of the shock troops, who are the writers. But an editor can also be a reader, as in first reader, second reader, last reader. One of the guys who pulls up your story on his screen and tries to ruin it before it goes to print. Two or three years ago our baseball writer leaned on the old cliché and wrote, “Derek Jeter is a legend in his spare time.” But a bow-tie editor named Hodges Colby changed it to read, “Derek Jeter is a legend when he’s not busy.”

  Researchers like to be known as reporters, but mostly they’re checkers. Checkers of facts. Photographers are still shooters. The book is the magazine. But if you’re on the publishing side of the book—like if you sell ads—you look upon everything the editorial side does as “fill.” Something between the ads. A bridge from one ad to another. I was therefore a shock trooper who provided fill.

  “I can do the sixty,” I said. “I met the guy.”

  Sixty lines was roughly a page and a half of copy, which was words.

  “You met him?” said Gary. “What do you think?”

  “Another guy in a five-and-a-half shoe.”

  “Maybe we can leave that out. How’s it going with the babe yarn?”

  “The babe yarn?” I said. “It’s spinning right along. It looks like she may win her second tournament in a row tomorrow.”

  “Heather, isn’t it?”

  “Ginger.”

  “Right, Ginger. Rhymes with danger.”

  “If you insist.”

  27

  The chanting that came from the crowd around the eighteenth green didn’t sound much different to me from a rapper spewing out his uplifting message to society, but I doubted the Apache phrases could be translated into “rape your girl, shoot heroin, kill a cop, steal a car, rob a store, your mama’s a ho.”

  Not everyone in the crowd was an Apache, but it was hard to miss Limping Turkey and Smells a Possum. They were the fellows in the feathered headdresses.

  Sinking Canoe and Smokes Loco Weed were also easy to spot as they stood among the fans, many of which were golf fans.

  Sinking Canoe wore a purple pinstriped suit and a shirt and tie and a Mescalero Country Club golf cap. If he’d been wearing an NFL football helmet instead of a golf cap with his suit and tie, he would have looked like a congressman in a photo op.

  Smokes Loco Weed was the guy in the Dallas Mavericks warm-up jacket, a pair of Bermuda shorts, black socks, high-top tennis shoes, dark glasses, and a Humphrey Bogart hat. A man’s hat.

  The chanters were only warming up. It was early. No group had come to the last hole yet.

  Thurlene and I were in our cart on the veranda near the eighteenth green, waiting for Ginger and Debbie Wendell to tee off on number one.

  We heard another low chant.

  “Ah na, oh na ah, nindy otay yooma tak.”

  Sounded like.

  Thurlene said, “What do you suppose they were saying that time?”

  “Unless my Apache fails me,” I said, “it’s something on the order of ‘O Great Father of the Wind and Sun, we are grateful you gave us so many soldiers’ butts to kick.”

  “I thought that’s what it might be.”

  The mom was worried about the day. Ginger was cocky. The kid was thinking all she had to do was put it on cruise control. Debbie would do her predictable fainting spell somewhere during the round.

  “A four-stroke lead is nothing,” the mom said. “One bad shot followed by a bad decision and it’s a new ball game. Was it last year when Sheila Dozier blew a five-shot lead on the last three holes? How ’bout when Marian Hornbuckle had a three-shot lead with one hole to play? She hits a bad drive, has to take a penalty, flubs a pitch, scoops a chip, then three-putts, and someone nobody’s ever heard of wins. It happens.”

  I said, “You have to help it along. Like Snead helped everybody with the eight at Spring Mill…like Palmer helped Casper at Olympic…like Norman helped Faldo at Augusta. If she doesn’t play good, she won’t deserve it.”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  The weather was no problem. It was a sunny, calm, shirtsleeve day. Ginger was decked out in short, low-riding yellow shorts, a white shirt with blue stripes, and yellow cap. Debbie wore white slacks, a red shirt, and a white visor.

  On the first nine holes the pins looked a little severe to me, and four of the tees were set back to make it a longer course.

  Ginger didn’t help her case by three-putting twice for bogeys while Debbie scratched out par after par. When they turned the front nine, Ginger’s lead had dwindled to two strokes.

  “This is exactly what I was afraid of,” Thurlene said.

  “She swinging good,” I said. “She’s playing the best golf.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be helping her much…and what kind of a head pro is it who can’t read his own greens?”

  I said, “Tyler Hughes isn’t the person with the putter in his hands.”

  She said, “Thanks for the reminder. At what point are you going to tell me it’s only a game?”

  “Soon, probably.”

  While we
stayed out of Ginger’s eyesight as much as possible, we couldn’t help noticing Ann Wendell in the gallery. She was as close to Debbie as she could manage from behind the ropes, staring at her with a murderous look, practically daring her daughter to hit a bad shot.

  Hit one bad shot, her look said, and I will personally peel that tattoo off your belly with a butcher knife.

  The crowd following the leaders numbered about five hundred and was scattered along the fairways and up ahead around the greens as Ginger and Debbie went to the back nine.

  Thurlene commented that we hadn’t seen Tang Chen anywhere in the gallery. I said she was more than likely on the practice range, hoping to perfect her duck-slice-top-scrape shot.

  Extremely visible was Claudia Bradley, the deputy commissioner. She had designated herself the official referee for the final twosome. She was the lady in the blue blazer, khaki pants, and white bucket hat. The person weighted down with walkie-talkies, cell phones, badges, credentials, and armbands. The only thing missing from her blazer was the braid.

  A golf cart moved along slowly behind her. The driver was Rusty Morrison, the always-clever Speedy Arrow VP. He was talking on his cell. Each time the cart stopped, Rusty would climb out and walk around in a harried circle and keep talking on his cell. Life was a torture.

  Ginger and Debbie both parred the first five holes on the back nine, the tenth through the fourteenth. Ginger was still two strokes ahead of Debbie, and when the kid drove it in the fairway on the long, narrow fifteenth hole, a difficult par-four, Thurlene sighed with relief.

  The mom said, “Gin needs to play one shot at a time, one hole at a time…take care of business. I can’t believe the way Debbie is hanging in. She’s never done this before. She would be perfectly happy with second or third. Why doesn’t she go ahead and make her double or triple and get out of our way?”

  I said, “Sometimes golfers try to find a way to lose without looking like they’re choking. Make it look like rotten luck. If I were Debbie, I wouldn’t want to humiliate my mother again.”

  “I wish she’d hurry up and think of something.”

  Here was where Ginger walked hurriedly off the other side of the fairway from us, ducked under the gallery ropes, and disappeared in the trees. We assumed she was heading for a Port-O-Let.

  Nothing unusual about it. There’s never been a professional golfer, woman or man, who hasn’t found an occasion to use a Port-O-Let during a competitive round.

  However, when Ginger didn’t reappear after five or six minutes, we left the cart path and drove down a slope and stopped next to the deputy commissioner in the fairway.

  “Does the LPGA have a Port-O-Let rule?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Claudia Bradley said.

  “A time limit?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ll have to consult the rule book. I believe the USGA has it under delay of play. I would think it’s something like ten or twelve minutes.”

  I said, “Unless it’s Hogan, Nicklaus, or Tiger. Then it would be indefinite, wouldn’t it?”

  “Is that an insinuation of something?” the deputy commissioner said.

  “More like a statement of fact. You’ve never heard of a big-name player receiving special treatment under the rules?”

  “Not on my watch,” Claudia Bradley said.

  Thurlene said, “I want to go check on Ginger.”

  She drove us over to the edge of the trees. We left the cart and walked up an incline toward the Port-O-Let, part of which we could see through the limbs and leaves.

  We found Ginger a few feet from the front of the Port-O-Let, sitting in a pile of dirt and rocks, rubbing on her left knee and the back of her neck and cussing.

  “What in the world happened?” said Thurlene, kneeling beside her.

  “Somebody knocked me down,” Ginger said.

  “Who knocked you down? What are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t see who it was. They hit me in the back of the head and I fell on these damn rocks.”

  Mom: “Where did this somebody come from?”

  Daughter: “I don’t know. I never saw anybody. I did hear a yell from up in the trees. It sounded like an Indian. Yelling something like ‘Tinde tomma naka yacky’…some shit like that.”

  I said, “If an Indian ambushed you, he was either drunk or betting on somebody else.”

  Thurlene said, “It wasn’t an Indian. It was that Chinese girl!”

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “It’s obvious.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The hell I don’t!”

  Ginger said, “I have to stand up.”

  I helped her to her feet.

  “We have to take you to a doctor,” Thurlene said.

  “I’m not quitting,” Ginger said.

  “Your knee is going to swell up by the minute.”

  “I’m not quitting, Mom! I can play. I’m okay.”

  Claudia Bradley, the deputy commissioner, came up the path.

  “Had a little mishap here, have we?” she said.

  “I fell down,” Ginger said.

  “That’s not exactly what happened,” Thurlene said, “but this isn’t the time to discuss it. I’ll be taking it up with Marsha, you can be sure.”

  “What are we talking about?” the deputy said.

  Thurlene said, “I will discuss it with the commissioner.”

  “As you wish,” Claudia said, and turned to the kid. “Are you able to continue play, Ginger?”

  “Yes,” Ginger said.

  “No!” said Thurlene.

  Ginger pulled her arm away from her mom and said, “I’m playing, Mom. Jesus!”

  28

  Where would I rank Ginger Clayton’s performance over the last four holes of the Speedy Arrow Energy Bar Classic?

  Would I put it up there with three other amazing golf moments I’d seen with my own eyes and written about with my own fingers? Would I put it up there with Jack Nicklaus winning his sixth Masters in ’86 when he overtook Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros, and Tom Kite in the final round? Would I put it up there with Ben Crenshaw’s tearful victory at Augusta in ’95 only a few days after the death of Harvey Penick, his close friend and mentor? Would I put it up there with Tiger Woods having his way with Pebble Beach when he lapped the field and won the U.S. Open of 2000? I couldn’t compare it with anything Ben Hogan did, seeing as how I’d made the mistake of not being born yet.

  I might, however, compare it with a scene from that old black-and-white movie about Ben Hogan, Follow the Sun, where Glenn Ford is cast as Hogan. Although I never saw Hogan play, I know he didn’t have a swing like Glenn Ford’s, and I was reasonably sure he never wore a golf cap that was too big for him.

  But there’s this scene near the end in which Hogan is making his comeback from the car crash and Glenn Ford trudges up a steep fairway at Riviera. Limping, hurting, but hanging on gamely. It’s the Bataan Death March of golf. Mood music by some death march composer guy.

  I couldn’t help thinking of that scene as I watched Ginger hit courageous golf shots despite her swollen knee and the scratches and scrapes on her arms, and the lingering trauma of having been bushwhacked.

  Ginger’s first gimp shot was her 180-yard approach to the fifteenth green. She went with a five-iron, but her knee wouldn’t let her put as much strength into the swing as she needed.

  The shot wound up ten yards short of the green. But that didn’t seem to matter, because Debbie’s second left her off the green and facing a difficult chip to a pin that was all the way across the green.

  When Ginger pitched up to a foot of the pin for a gimme par, Thurlene whooped, clapped, rocked the cart.

  The mom’s jubilation was short-lived, however. Although Debbie chipped her ball too strongly and it was heading over the green and even down a slope and out of sight, it struck the flagstick, bobbed straight up in the air, and plunked down into the cup for a birdie three.

  “T
hat’s outrageous!” Thurlene yelped. “Destiny sucks!”

  In the crowd on the other side of the green, Ann Wendell could be seen punching the air with her fist. Once, twice, three times. Her daughter was now only one shot behind Ginger with three holes to go.

  “Debbie Wendell is going to win this tournament. I know it! You don’t hole out a shot like that without Destiny sticking a nose in things. It’s tragic, is what it is.”

  “It’s not over,” I said. “Do you see a fat lady anywhere?”

  “Do I see what?”

  “The fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” I said. “Find me a fat lady in the crowd, I’ll throw a body block on her before she can sing.”

  “Cute.”

  She drove us across a bridge that was built to accommodate fans and carts to a spot behind the sixteenth green, which was a dangerous par-three hole requiring a long carry over a deep, you-don’t-want-to-know-what’s-down-there canyon, gorge, barranca thing.

  I had this crazy idea that when Burch Webb—or Afraid of Dogs, as he was known locally—designed the hole he may have been a big fan of the fifth at Pine Valley, the sixteenth at Cypress Point, the tenth at Bel-Air, the thirteenth at Black Diamond, or the ninth at Jupiter Hills.

  Having the honor, Debbie prepared to hit first.

  Thurlene, in a low voice, said, “I don’t suppose she could top this one, could she?”

  “It’s too early to start begging,” I said.

  I didn’t know whether or not Thurlene was buying my nonchalant act. The truth of the matter was, I had this lab rat running back and forth in my stomach, and Ginger wasn’t even my kid.

  Debbie was forced to go with a three-wood off the tee. It didn’t sound like she got all of it when she took the swing, but the ball cleared the canyon and found the green. It came to rest about forty feet from the flag.

  “I hate this hole,” Thurlene said. “A wood is too much and an iron may not be enough if she doesn’t nail it.”