The Money-Whipped Steer-Job Three-Jack Give-Up Artist: A Novel Read online

  It stems from my last name, Grooves. I never liked my name much as a kid—it would have made me happier to have a normal name. Anderson, Johnson, Smith. Hogan wouldn’t have been bad. That’s a joke.

  The nickname attached itself to me back in ’89 when this big controversy came up concerning the grooves on the Ping Eye2 irons. Back when the officials

  of the USGA and the PGA Tour put on their braid, saluted themselves, and declared the grooves on those clubs to be illegal.

  A lot of players on the tour agreed. They said those “square” grooves give you a greater “spin rate” on shots—more control, in other words—particularly when you hit a shot out of damp rough.

  All kinds of tests were made, pro and con, but tests are like surveys. They prove whatever the test-givers or the survey-takers want to prove.

  I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another—I play Hogans. However, from time to time I did observe that a guy with a Ping could occasionally hit a pitch shot that danced like Fred Astaire.

  The debate raged in the newspapers and magazines, and in locker rooms and on putting greens, but it struck me as silly for the simple reason that the difference between the spacing in the Ping Eye2 grooves and the grooves in other irons was about the width of a gray hair on a geezer’s head.

  The pros who argued that it made a difference are the same pros who think that what they do on the golf course is brain surgery. Like a single blade of grass on a fairway can cause a flyer. Like they can read the grain on a bent green from as far away as Istanbul.

  The Ping people finally made the controversy disappear. They sued the USGA and the PGA Tour and vowed to spend five hundred billion dollars on legal fees, whatever it took, to make those organizations feel like they’d been fucked like tied-up sheep. That’s when the USGA and the PGA Tour folded their tents.

  Nicknames in golf go way back. I suspect they go all the way back to Harry Vardon. Most likely there was this wit in Vardon’s day who nicknamed him Grip, seeing as how he invented the overlapping grip.

  “Yo, Grip, how’s it lapping?”

  It’s even money the Scots may have nicknamed him something else. The Bloody Prick is a good guess. That’s because Vardon was an Englishman and had a habit of kicking Scottish butts in the game the Scots invented. Near as I can tell, your Scots don’t really like anybody who’s not a Scot, except maybe Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones and Tiger Woods.

  Sportswriters popularized nicknames in the 1920s.

  If you didn’t have a nickname back then, you couldn’t hit a home run, knock anybody out, scamper for a touchdown, or win a golf tournament—you might as well buy a monkey wrench and crawl under somebody’s sink.

  It was in the ’20s that the golf world saw Bobby Jones become The Emperor Jones, Walter Hagen become The Haig, Gene Sarazen become The Squire, Tommy Armour become The Silver Scot, and Horton Smith become The Joplin Ghost, apparently because Smith came from Missouri and was tall and thin and could outputt a preacher. Made sense to Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and them.

  After that, here came Slammin’ Sam Snead, Bantam Ben Hogan, who was also the Hawk and the Wee Icemon. Lord Byron Nelson, Golf’s Mechanical Man, Mustachioed Lloyd Mangrum, the Riverboat Gambler, Dutch Harrison, the Arkansas Traveler, Methodical Dr. Cary Middlecoff, the Golfing Dentist, Jaunty Jimmy Demaret, Golf’s Goodwill Ambassador, and Tempestuous Tommy (Thunder) Bolt.

  Then here came Arnie’s Army, Buffalo Billy Casper, Gene the Machine Littler, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Super Mex Trevino, Craig (The Walrus) Stadler, Greg Norman, the Great White Shark, and Ohio Fats, alias Jack Nicklaus, who trimmed down to turn into the Golden Bear.

  On up to Tiger Woods and Cheetah Farmer, who, if they went by Eldrick and Chandler, probably couldn’t win doodad.

  But of course none of that has anything to do with how I’ve come to be known to some people as Spin, as in spin rate, as in Grooves.

  ALL THIS came up when I was standing in the parking lot at Torrey Pines, rearranging the luggage in the trunk of my rented Lincoln, preparing to risk my life on the freeway to LA.

  Since my performance hadn’t been exactly splendid at Torrey Pines, I’d already cussed all twelve names the tournament’s had, a tour record. And it’s been proved for whip-out that I’m the only guy in the locker room who can name them all. The tournament started in 1952 as the San Diego Open, and since then it’s been the Convair–San Diego Open, the San Diego Open Invitational, the Andy Williams–San Diego Open Invitational, the Wickes/Andy Williams San Diego Open, the Isuzu/Andy Williams San Diego Open, the Shearson Lehman Brothers Andy Williams Open, the Shearson Lehman Hutton Andy Williams Open, the Shearson Lehman Hutton Open, the Shearson Lehman Brothers Open, the Buick Invitational of California, and now it’s the Buick Invitational, where I shot straight up.

  Behind my back, the voice came out of the sky. Or off the Pacific Ocean, about a hundred feet down from the cliffs of Torrey Pines, where some of my putts had tried to go.

  “Hey, Spin, how’s it going?”

  I turned around to find a young punk in baggy shorts, hairy legs, sneakers with no socks, faded golf shirt, soiled baseball cap, bottle of water in his hand. I didn’t need to notice his “working press” badge to know he was with the media.

  “It was okay until now,” I said, going for wit.

  If I hadn’t already calmed down from playing so bad, I would have said, “Aw, I’m doing all right, I guess, for a lockwrist cage-case who didn’t make a putt in four rounds, only broke 70 once, finished tied for fifty-second, and leaves this bungee jump with only $7,000 for the week.”

  But I’d cooled off, like I said.

  The punk introduced himself as Irv Klar and said he worked for a paper “in the LA area,” but he expected to be offered a job with the Los Angeles Times or Sports Illustrated pretty soon, or possibly he’d go in the movie business, be a studio executive. He stated that he was way too good for the dead-end paper where he now worked. He added that this had been his first golf tournament to cover.

  “Kind of cool,” he said. “But not like, you know, a real sports event. Too much whispering . . . standing around.”

  “I agree,” I said. “More guys out here ought to get high-sticked . . . chop-blocked . . .”

  Ignoring that, he said, “I’ve never played golf. I might take it up, though. It doesn’t look so hard. I have a good baseball swing.”

  “That’ll help,” I said. “But in your case, I’d say the hardest part might be getting into a country club.”

  Missed him completely. He was swinging an invisible bat.

  He said, “Buddy Stark . . . I was interviewing him earlier . . . he told me to talk to you, call you Spin. That’s your nickname, right? Cool.”

  “Buddy’s a thoughtful guy,” I said.

  “I want to do a piece on nicknames,” he went on. “Buddy says you’re a good source. I tried to talk to Cheetah Farmer on the practice range yesterday. He said, ‘This is my office, do you have an appointment?’ Can you believe that? He never said anything else . . . and he knew I was with the press. Fucking asshole.”

  “Asshole gets a lot of votes,” I said.

  “So where’d he get the name Cheetah?”

  “Tiger was already taken,” I shrugged.

  “Hey, that’s good. I can use that,” he said, and made a note.

  Irv Klar looked like he planned to hang around awhile, so I figured the only way to get rid of him was drop all that nickname lore on him. After I finished off the immortals, him taking notes as fast as he could, I moved into the present.

  I said Buddy Stark’s nickname is Austin Memorial. Austin is Buddy’s home. He still lives there, loves it, but mourns the fact that it’s being ruined by developers who are succeeding in making it as big and congested as Atlanta. I said that Buddy and I first met on the Texas amateur golf circuit, but we didn’t become close friends until we wriggled through the Q-school together. Back then, we’d discovered we shared mutual interests in things other than golf�
��ladies, bridge, dimly lit corner taverns.

  There aren’t many close friendships on the tour like Buddy Stark and myself. Guys don’t hang out anymore. The closest they come is watching their children turn over glasses of milk in a motel dining room.

  Buddy averages one win a year, same as me, he’s majorless, same as me, and he’s had the same luck in marriage as I have. He’s been involved with a variety of women over the years, ranging from local news anchors to aerobics instructors. Not long ago he said he was thinking of zeroing in on chicks who wore glasses—he was totally exhausted from crawling around looking for contacts.

  I passed along to Irv that the nickname for Jerry Grimes, my other good friend out there, is Cloyd Highway. Jerry’s from Cloyd, Tennessee, which is basically a highway going past Cloyd.

  Knut Thorssun’s nicknames might be Thor and Nuke to the morons in the gallery, I said, but the players have other names for him. Mule Dick, for one. Wagon Tongue, for another. And Woodrow. Woodrow was inspired by Knut himself, bragging that a lingerie ad was all it took for him to produce “a woodie a cat can’t scratch.” This was after he’d heard that old expression for the first time—har-har, bang fist on table.

  Irv said, “If I wrote for Playboy I could get Mule Dick in the piece.”

  I said the name Buddy Stark and I preferred for Knut didn’t have anything to do with his hard-ons. We called him Better Deal.

  Having not gone to Harvard, I said, I couldn’t begin to count the number of times Knut had better-dealed me on dinner plans. I’d almost come to expect it if I saw in the paper that a “celebrity” was in town. Could be a movie star, rock star, sports star, United States senator, or some kind of Arafat. Didn’t matter. I’d learned the hard way that good old Knut would be with that celeb at dinner somewhere when he was supposed to be having dinner with me or with Buddy and me.

  It was a joy to remember the night I went to meet Knut for dinner at this tough-ticket joint called Piece of the Gross in Santa Monica. He’d told me to get there early to grab a table, which I did. I stood in line for thirty minutes before I was finally seated by this snotty little bitch I wanted to strangle. She had sunflowers for eyes.

  I sat there nursing a Junior and feeling foolish for thirty more minutes, and when Knut eventually came in he glided right past my table, didn’t even nod, and went on to another table—him and Wayne Gretzky.

  Another fond memory was the evening during the Doral in Miami when Knut arranged for Buddy Stark and I to meet him for dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab. We arrived first and waited an awkward forty-five minutes before he waltzed in with this couple. Ignoring us completely, he went to another table with his good friends Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  Knut’s never embarrassed when he does shit like that. He thinks everybody’s supposed to understand how he has these social obligations, being a supercelebrity himself. On the other hand, Mitch, my caddie, says when Knut does that kind of thing, somebody ought to “bitch-slap the motherfucker upside the head.”

  “What do you think about the ruling Thor got today?” Irv Klar asked.

  That was the first I’d heard of it. I knew Knut was the Mother Goose who won the tournament. He shot four rounds in the 60s, closed with a 66, nipped Phil Mickelson by a stroke. But that’s all I was aware of. Ever since I’d finished my own round I’d been alone out in a corner of the range, working on some things. “What ruling?” I inquired.

  “They’re still showing the replay in the press room,” Irv said. “I don’t know anything about golf rules. Some guys in the press room are trying to turn it into a scandal. What’s the big deal about a drop off a cart-path?”

  I gradually pulled the story out of him.

  It seemed that a TV viewer had phoned the tournament office Saturday night to report what Knut did. The viewer was one of those rules junkies—every country club has one. The rules junkie said for the officials to go back and look at the telecast of Knut at the sixteenth hole on Saturday.

  They did that, and what they saw on TV was Knut lift his ball off a cart-path, where it had come to rest, and take a free drop of one club-length, no nearer the hole. All well and good, perfectly legal—you’re allowed a free drop from an immovable obstruction.

  But then when Knut played the shot, he’d kept one foot on the cart-path. Clearly a violation. Should have been a two-stroke penalty. Thus, Knut didn’t win the tournament. In fact, he’d signed a scorecard with a lower total than he should have had Saturday. He should be disqualified. Not even collect second-place money. He should get zippo, Circle O Ranch, Xerox.

  Knut was shown the videotape of his infraction before the prize-giving ceremony and was even reminded that Craig Stadler had been disqualified in the same tournament in ’87 for placing a towel under his knee before he hit a shot—you can’t “build a stance.” Some rules junkie watching TV had called that one in, too.

  According to Irv Klar, Knut insisted that there was a very good reason involving “crowd safety” for his keeping one foot on the cart-path. Had he kept that foot off the cart-path, he’d have been forced to change his aim more toward a pack of spectators, and a mis-hit shot, he argued, might have seriously injured or even killed someone.

  Bullshit. I was willing to bet my stack that Knut had obviously liked his lie where it was, knowing he had a better shot at the flag with one foot on the cart-path. But since Knut Thorssun was a foreign star, the gutless tour officials and tournament committee hadn’t wanted to cause an “international incident” by disqualifying him, so they accepted his explanation. He was still the winner.

  Nevertheless, I grinned all the way to LA, knowing that Knut had garnered another nickname for himself. Cheater.

  10

  YOU CAN FALL INTO A BAD PUTTING streak out here that’s so frustrating, it makes you cuss Mary Queen of Scots for inventing the game. Her and everything she stands for. Kilts. Bagpipes. Blood pudding. I’ve suffered bad putting streaks that lasted longer than a tune on a bagpipe.

  Change putters is the first thing you do. The second thing you do is change putters again. There’ve been guys on the tour who’ve changed putters five times in one month. There’ve been guys so desperate they’ve changed the kind of underwear they wear. Changed caddies. Changed cars. Grown beards. Studied

  Zen shit. Buddy Stark likes to say he even changed wives one time, but there was a little more to it than that.

  Buddy’s first wife was Laura, a frisky Dallas stew. After three years of what he thought was a happy marriage, he fell into a bad putting streak when he found out that Laura was sleeping with various major league baseball studs and NBA stalwarts.

  That’s when he canceled out Laura in a divorce and married Trudy, the frisky nurse. Buddy and Trudy stayed happily married for about a year, until Buddy fell into another bad putting streak when he found out Trudy was sleeping with Todd Everett, another tour player. Buddy divorced Trudy and Todd Everett divorced his wife, and Trudy and Todd got married and now Todd has his own putting problems.

  For over a year now, Buddy’s been going with Emily, a well-packaged young chick in Austin. Emily doesn’t travel with him much, preferring to complete her education. Once an aerobics instructor, she’s taking classes in English literature at the University of Texas. “Far as I know,” Buddy says, “she’s not fucking anybody but me and Hamlet.”

  I was in a lethal putting funk when I suited up for the LA Open at Riviera. Inconvenient, is what it was. Inconvenient because it’s a tournament and a golf course I hold in high regard—lot of history involved. I’d never won it, but I’d always played well in it. Finished in the top 5 once, the top 10 four times.

  Riviera was designed by George C. Thomas, a wealthy aristocrat from Philadelphia. First architect to put a pot bunker in the middle of a green. It’s still there at Riviera’s sixth, a par three. He also did Bel-Air, the course with the best elevator in golf—it gets you from the holes down in the bottom to the holes up on top. And he did the North Course at Los Angeles Coun
try Club, the finest course that’s never held a major. Also a club you can’t join if you’ve ever been in the movies. Bing Crosby once lived across the street from the course but could only play there once a month as a guest. Randolph Scott did become a member after he retired from Hollywood, although some would argue that Randolph Scott was never an actor in the first place.

  George C. Thomas was originally a banker and a gardener and was led to golf course design by what he called the landscaping possibilities. Today’s millionaire designers might find it astounding that Thomas designed those three wonderful courses—Riviera, Bel-Air, and LA Country Club—and never accepted a fee for his work. He quit golf course design in the late 1920s. Went back to growing roses.

  It’s part of Riviera lore that it held the first big-money golf tournament in history, which was the inaugural LA Open in 1926. All the Grantland Rices rode trains out to cover it. All the Walter Hagens played in it. All the Mary Pickfords galleried it. “Lighthorse Harry” Cooper won the thing and received a whopping $3,500 check. At the time, that amount was seven times more than any pro tournament had ever paid for first place. Harry Cooper once said in an interview, “Don’t tell me I never won a major. All the boys would have traded a U.S. Open for that kind of dough.”

  Riviera is in Pacific Palisades, another rich-guy residential area you run into on Sunset Boulevard after you leave Beverly Hills and you’re going west toward the ocean.

  Turn in a lush tropical drive and you come to a clubhouse that’s almost as big as a TV producer’s home. The course is down in the canyon below, down there with the barranca running through it, with the towering eucalyptus trees that line and darken the fairways, and the weird kikuya grass that sits the ball up pretty good in the fairway but hugs it like a bear in the rough.

  I always like walking around in the clubhouse, peeking into all the alcoves and dining rooms and nooks and crannies. It’s easy to imagine the time when Riviera was the “home of the stars,” when such Hollywood figures roamed the premises and took divots on the course as your Mary Pickford, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Johnny Weissmuller. That crowd.