The Franchise Babe: A Novel Read online

  “Why did you quit?”

  “The cigarette police wore me down. I live in New York City and it’s too much trouble now. You have to go down to the street and freeze or melt if you want a smoke. I could have moved to Europe—they arrest you in most European cities if you don’t smoke. But Europe has its drawbacks too. Soccer, for one thing.”

  She said, “You’re welcome to try a Capri.” She offered the pack to me. “They’re very mild.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “But I hear they do cure emphysema.”

  She laughed. Good sign.

  “I may want to write about your daughter,” I said. “Who’s she signed with? CSE? IMG? William Morris?”

  “We haven’t signed with anyone yet.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. “You must be fighting them off with hand grenades. You have a franchise on your hands here. But you need to be careful. One thing agents know, athletes are naive…gullible…even stupid when it comes to money. Like writers. Does Ginger have a swing coach?”

  “Me. I’m the entourage.”

  “You…?”

  “I was a pretty good golfer once…The agents who hound us the most are Howie Daniels with CSE and Sid Lasher with LTG…Logos to Go. Do you know them?”

  “I know them. Howie the Dart and Smacky Lasher. People learn to hide their wallets when they come in a room.”

  “Howie offered us a million dollars over three years if Ginger would go pro when she was sixteen. It wasn’t easy to turn down, but we did. We took the gamble. We gambled on Ginger’s confidence in herself and our confidence in her. Her father represented her. He thought he should be Ginger’s agent and manager—for her own protection. That didn’t work out too good, although he did arrange some ‘what-if’ deals when she was still an amateur with Nike, Mastercard, Wild Honey Cream.”

  “Is he here?” I asked casually.

  “Pete Clayton?” she said with a frown. “Hardly. We’ve been divorced for two years. It should have been sooner.”

  “You guys divorced while he was handling Ginger’s career?”

  She said, “It’s more accurate to say we divorced while Pete was stealing our daughter’s money. Listen, I’m going the back nine with ‘Lolita.’ It was nice meeting you, Jack Brannon.”

  “In those?” I said, looking down at her shoes. They were wedge-heeled sandals with an ankle strap.

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess I would have noticed eventually. I was at a luncheon for parents in the hotel.” She pulled a pair of sneakers out of her shoulder bag and changed into them.

  “How did you know who I was, by the way?” she asked, bracing herself with a hand on my shoulder while she changed shoes.

  “That lady over there told me.” I pointed to Ann Wendell.

  “You asked Ann Wendell about me?”

  “I think that’s her name,” I said, detecting a note of displeasure. “Is there a problem?”

  “She’s Debbie Wendell’s mother. Debbie and Ginger came out of the academy at the same time. They’ve been rivals forever.”

  “How good is Debbie Wendell?”

  “She has potential. But she’s on the small side…and she only has one speed. She can’t take anything off of it.”

  Golf lingo. Debbie couldn’t hit three-quarter shots.

  “It sounds like she’s not in Ginger’s class.”

  “Not even close. Ann Wendell knows this and hates it. Debbie’s a year older but she’s never beaten Ginger one time…amateur or pro. And Debbie is envious as hell. That’s why the little brat tried to poison my daughter last year!”

  4

  Your basic journalists come in two categories. There are the point-missers, who seem to be multiplying, it’s sad to report, and there are—I think I can say this without sounding too boastful—the rest of us.

  If a point-misser had heard Thurlene Clayton say Debbie Wendell had tried to poison her daughter, the point-misser’s immediate question would be, “How long has Ginger played Callaway clubs?”

  When Thurlene walked away after dropping that news on me, I called after her and said we needed to chat some more on the subject.

  She said, “You’re staying here in the Villa, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The cactus and I.”

  “We’ll chat,” she said, and jogged off to catch up with the kid.

  How so many point-missers manage to get into the business of sportswriting is a good question. Maybe some of them learn it from their university professors in more or less the same way that others learn to become left-wing radical anti-American commie socialists.

  I speak of the academic loons who prefer to call terrorists “freedom fighters” even though terrorists hate golf, football, barbecue ribs, and enchiladas, and want to cut off our heads.

  But that’s a subject I only think about when I’m shouting at a bearded academic loon on TV who’s blaming America instead of Grantland Rice for pestilence, famine, death, and destruction.

  I first heard the term point-misser from Jim Pinch. That’s when he was at SM. Jim was my guru, my godfather, in the profession I’d always wanted to be part of.

  I grew up reading Jim’s stuff the same way I grew up reading my other sportswriter heroes—Damon Runyon, John Lardner, Red Smith, Jim Murray. I still reread their collections even though they’re reminders of how inadequate the rest of us are. I smile at…

  Jim Pinch saying, “If Arnold Palmer took the game of golf to the people, John Daly takes it to the people in the RV parks.”

  Runyon saying, “Al Capone was quietly dressed when he arrived at the courthouse this morning, bar a hat of pearly white, emblematic, no doubt, of purity.”

  Lardner saying, “When the Giants won the pennant Leo Durocher’s license to think was renewed for two more weeks.”

  Red saying, “Rocky Graziano stirred up a bobbery in fight circles by not mentioning not taking a hundred-thousand-dollar bribe before not throwing a fight that was not held.”

  Murray saying, “Willie Mays’s glove is where triples go to die.”

  And I grew up reading my dad, Jackson Brannon, a general columnist for the Fort Worth Light & Shopper for twenty-five years. He wasn’t the first guy to say that politics was showbiz for unattractive people, but he was the first I ever read say that politics was where failed lawyers go to wear ugly suits and let the government pay their rent.

  Jim Pinch and I were both from Fort Worth. Jim had read my stuff in the Light & Shopper, his old paper, and recommended me for the job of golf writer at SM when Cloyce Windham retired.

  That was twenty-two years ago. I was twenty-five. It was four years after I’d graduated from the University of Texas, where I wallowed in the successes of the Longhorn gridiron gladiators and left Austin before the loon-dancing professors could turn me into a deep-fried liberal.

  The idea of replacing Cloyce Windham was intimidating. His name was identified with golf. But Jim said I’d have no trouble. He guaranteed that despite Cloyce’s knowledge of golf history and precise use of the language, he was the high priest of point-missers and a master of burying the lead. Jim liked to cite the time that Jack Nicklaus won the ’78 British Open in dramatic, last-round fashion but the top half of Cloyce Windham’s story rambled on in high literary style for 1,500 words about the marvelous day four centuries ago when the storms and seas and other forces of nature created the Old Course at St. Andrews.

  The Firm Chick pressroom was off in a wing of the Enchanted Villa. I was drinking coffee and had finished my conversation on the phone with Gary Crane, the latest managing editor of SM.

  “Jackie-boy,” he said when I reached him. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I’m out here in California at the ladies golf tournament I told you I was going to,” I said.

  “You did? When did you do that?”

  “Two weeks ago. I’m checking out the babes.”

  “Women’s golf?”

  “The LPGA Tour.”

  “I wonder if anyb
ody reads women’s golf?”

  “I wonder if anybody reads anything. Listen, I think I’ll stick with the ladies for a while. There’s a young babe out here who can really play. She’s hot. Think lingerie model plays golf. This girl could make a cover. She’s eighteen. Her name’s Ginger Clayton.”

  “Ginger,” he said. “Ginger…Ginger. Good name. Might give us a catchy cover billing. Ginger. Rhymes with danger.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  The managing editor had to run. Another lunch with some members of Old Port Country Club. He was close to being invited to join after four years of proving to the members that he wasn’t black, Jewish, Spanish, crippled, or in debt. Old Port was in a serene, manicured, leafy part of Connecticut that screamed money at you. It consisted of a charming old-fashioned golf course, a beach club, and a harbor where the wait to obtain a slip for your boat was ninety-five years.

  The conversation with Gary Crane made me dwell on how good my life was when Nell Woodruff ran the magazine.

  Gary was as qualified to be m.e. as any other guy who learned his journalism from a college professor with a beard. He’d been a big-time point-misser as a staff writer on the magazine. He covered the NBA in the winter and track and field in the summer. It was Gary who wrote that he wouldn’t trade Dennis Rodman for Michael Jordan. It was Gary who wrote that Shaq would never make it. And it was Gary who wrote that slalom kayaking was the most exciting event in the Summer Games.

  He was the third m.e. I’d suffered since Nell Woodruff retired. The other two were Roddy Burke and Parker Trace. They’d climbed to the top the same way Gary had. They’d worn three-piece suits and looked deeply concerned when they carried clipboards down the hall—as if on their way to a vital story conference instead of the coffee bar.

  For their efforts of not totally ruining the magazine by ordering dizzy layouts and hiring more point-missers to write for it, Roddy Burke and Parker Trace had each been rewarded with promotions to loftier titles and higher salaries within the company. Gary was trying to follow in their footsteps and doing it quite well.

  When I’m not on the road I work in a different Manhattan skyscraper than the one I started in—the TPG Building on Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. This was because The Sports Magazine and the other holdings of the Padgett Group—TPG—had been bought by SDC, another conglomerate.

  SDC, which stands for Sandford, Davenport & Camp, owns thirty-six newspapers you’ve never heard of, seventeen other magazines you’ve never read, all of them targeting teenage girls and celebrity publicists, and fourteen radio stations you’ve never listened to because they specialize in talk shows on which sportswriters with jagged hair yell at each other about crap that doesn’t matter to anybody but the scary people who paint their chests and faces in team colors and wear animals on their heads.

  I did like the renovated tower that SDC had acquired and moved us into. It was the old Time-Life Building on Forty-eighth Street that borders the ice rink. Not many people today can name the ten original tenants of Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, but I can. In a bar, for money.

  They were Time-Life, RCA, Associated Press, RKO, Eastern Airlines, U.S. Rubber, Sinclair Oil, Radio City Music Hall, and Roxy Theater.

  In a bar for money I could also give you Ben Hogan’s first name (William), Byron Nelson’s first name (John), Jimmy Demaret’s middle name (Newt), Gene Sarazen’s real name (Eugenio Saraceni)…I knew Babe Zaharias’s birth name was Mildred Ella Didrickson, and Mickey Wright’s was Mary Kathryn Wright.

  I could name every U.S. Open golf champion and the course he won on without missing Alex Smith in 1906 at Onwentsia in Lake Forest, Illinois. I could name all of the PGA winners and where they won without missing the tough one, Tom Creavy in 1931 at Wannamoisett in Rumford, Rhode Island.

  I could even stray into baseball, not my strength, and position the great Brooklyn Dodgers lineup defensively: Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, and Gene Hermanski in the outfield. Gil Hodges at first, at second number 42, the incomparable Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese at short, and the flawless-fielding Billy Cox at third. Campy behind the plate, Branca on the mound, and we’re set to deal.

  I’d dwell on such trivia in my twelfth-floor office with a view down to the ice rink on days when I’d be having trouble getting from one paragraph to another on a feature that would immortalize yet another athlete who was going to make more money by waking up in the morning than I would make in a year. I’d be having trouble on the piece because I could no longer rely on Marlboros—and the Milk Duds, sour balls, and chewing gum weren’t doing it for me.

  The pressroom was the first one I’d been in where I didn’t know anybody. But people introduced themselves.

  I met a gentleman with a white handlebar mustache who claimed he wrote for the Palm Springs Desert Sun. I met a radio guy who said he was “the voice of the Valley.” A strange girl named Tisha introduced herself as a writer with Golf for Women. A guy came in lugging his golf clubs. He shook my hand and said he was on the staff of Golf World. I didn’t meet the guy from AP. He was busy on the phone, cussing.

  All the others were PR and publicity women who were alarmingly thin and wanted to tell me about Firm Chick skin cream, or the LPGA, or a new sand wedge with a double-angled sole, or the Enchanted Villa.

  The one who represented the Enchanted Villa was in her thirties. She said her name was Allison. That’s all. Allison. Period. It made me recall reading somewhere that young people stopped using last names in the sixties and seventies—it was asking too much of somebody who was stoned or wired to remember last names. Allison of PR handed me an invitation to a reception in the hotel that evening.

  I made a habit of ducking those affairs when I was covering a classic on the PGA Tour. The last one I’d attended, the only fun I had was picking on certain sportswriter friends who’d made themselves look foolish a while back over Tiger Woods…when they fell into a trap of tour propaganda and wrote rhapsodizing stories about Tiger winning seven tournaments in a row.

  But the streak spilled over into two calendar years and was interrupted four times by Tiger losing foreign tournaments he entered.

  I’d point out that when Byron Nelson won his record eleven in a row in ’forty-five, it occurred in one year, and Nelson happened not to have lost any other tournaments while he was at it.

  Sometimes my very own media embarrassed me.

  I said to Allison of PR that I might be busy working, but then I accepted the invitation after she informed me that most of the contestants and their families would be attending—and so would Toppy and Connie Pemberton.

  5

  Two chunko South Koreans shot inscrutable 66s and led after the first round of the Firm Chick Classic. Kim Yim Yum and Soong Sang Sung. Close enough.

  Thurlene Clayton was pleased with Ginger’s four-under 68, which left the kid only two strokes back, but Ginger herself said the round was a piece of shit and the greens ought to be chopped up and fed to the homeless.

  Words to that effect.

  We were at the reception. It was in the Villa’s grand ballroom, which may have broken the world record for tall ice sculptures.

  They rose up from buffet tables of unidentifiable party food, except for the rich man’s caviar, to which I did serious damage, on toast squares.

  In the far wall of the grand ballroom as you entered there was a bandstand and a dance floor. A small tuxedo-clad orchestra was at work, and I was instantly taken with the agility of the couples on the dance floor, who must have been in their seventies, minimum.

  Close friends of Toppy and Connie Pemberton from La Jolla, I guessed. The men were deeply tanned, gray-haired, brightly blazered. The women were hickory shafts with leather headcovers for faces, but their gold lamé frocks sparkled.

  I enjoyed watching them swirl around the dance floor, recapturing their moves from the swing dance and jitterbug days when they did the Lindy hop, the Hollywood shag, and the Harlem shuffle.

  They kept up with the beat of the ba
nd and the husky voice of a buxom, middle-age redhead vocalist who explained through the lyrics of the number that she was most assuredly sittin’ on top of the world, just rollin’ along, just singin’ a song.

  Thurlene Clayton looked exquisite in a pale blue cocktail dress and heels. She found me almost immediately—with her daughter in tow.

  I’d gone with my standard uniform for social occasions. White open-collar button-down shirt, black double-breasted blazer with gold buttons, gray slacks, cordovan loafers.

  Thurlene acted as if it might have been an accident that we ran into each other, but it was my belief that she wanted the kid to meet the golf writer from SM. Over the years I’d found that the calling card of a national magazine did have its advantages.

  “Hi, I’m Ginger,” the kid said before the mom could make an introduction.

  Ginger had a look that combined mischief with confidence. Her eyes were radiant. Her hair was down, longer than her mom’s. She was suited up in white slacks and a tight-fitting cream-colored V-neck designer sweater that struck me as better-looking than most golf togs.

  It didn’t take me long to conclude that if there was a prettier babe in the room than the mom, it was the daughter.

  They grabbed us a table in a corner while I went to one of the five, six, or eight bars and fetched our drinks. A white wine for Thurlene, a Coke for Ginger, and a straight-up Bombay Sapphire gin martini for me, rocks, with four green olives.

  I had no intention of getting boxed that evening, but I did want to factor in wit and brilliance.

  “Four olives?” Ginger said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Old habit,” I said. “I do it out of fear there might not be anything on the menu but a wounded sparrow on a clump of fern.”

  “What does that mean?” She tossed her long hair. Good for tossing.