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

  Ben Hogan gave the place even more stature when he turned it into “Hogan’s Alley” by winning the LA Opens of ’47 and ’48, and returning later in ’48 to win the U.S. Open with a record 72-hole score of eight under par that stood for fifty-two years—until Tiger Woods.

  WHAT MADE matters worse about my tragic putting stroke at Riviera, I was playing jam-up, lights-out tee to green. Smoking my driver, wearing out the clubface on my irons.

  “Hello, Golf.”

  Mitch said that over and over when I pulled the trigger in the first two rounds. But all I got out of it was a 71, even par, on Thursday, and a one-under 70 on Friday.

  Pured everything but came up empty. Putter disease.

  On Friday afternoon after the round, while I was experimenting with my grip and stance on the practice green, Mitch said, “Spin, we fixin’ to change putters. Where that old Armour of ours?”

  The old Armour was my Tommy Armour Iron Master, a bit of a MacGregor antique, a putter I once loved until it betrayed me and had to be sent to the museum, which is the storeroom in my garage. The Armour was a rear-shafted putter, too, a model that didn’t look much different from the Wilson 8802 I’d been using for three years. The one that was deeply into betrayal right now.

  I said the Armour was back in Fort Worth, in a storeroom at my townhouse, with about a hundred other clubs.

  Mitch said, “The Armour a little heavier, tad shorter blade. We better send for that Mother Goose . . . get us a new feel . . . change our outlook on this and that.”

  The next thing I knew Mitch had taken my cellphone out of his pocket and reached Cheryl Haney at her office in Fort Worth, telling her she needed to get on an airplane tonight—her and that putter—or else put the putter on an airplane tonight so we’d have it for the last two rounds of the LA Open.

  She must have said something about being busy in her real estate career, because Mitch said, “Girl, this is serious. The man not rollin’ his rock. You can be jackin’ with them houses some other time.”

  Mitch was only doing his job. Sometimes the caddy has to be your good friend. A tour caddy’s job is not just lugging your fifty pounds of mallets around. He has to know the yardages and pin positions and help read the greens on all the courses you play. He’s expected to be on time everywhere and keep the clubs clean and always be a positive influence and make sure your bag has all the necessary ingredients inside.

  My necessary ingredients consist of four new gloves at all times, two dozen Titleists, rainsuit, umbrella, rain cover, sleeveless sweater, slipover sweater, windshirt, a new Sahara golf shirt, two pairs of socks, spare towels, extra cap, hand warmers, Swiss Army knife, Advil, Mylanta tablets, GenTeal eyedrops, Alka-Seltzer Plus cold tablets, toilet paper, Band-Aids, tees, pencils, a bottle of Evian, two packs of Juicy Fruit, box of Milk Duds, and a box of Caramel Nips.

  A couple of years ago there would have been three packs of Marlboros in the bag as well. But I hauled off and quit one day after I saw myself in a taped replay of a tournament. There I was, me and my Marlboro, staring at the lighthouse on the eighteenth at Harbour Town. Mitch had to nudge me to remind me it was my shot.

  Right then I realized I didn’t look like Ben Hogan smoking—the cigarette was part of Hogan’s personality. I looked more like Bette Davis.

  Mitch does a great job and I’m lucky to have him. Which is why I pay him better than he could make if he bargained through the TBLA, the Tour Bag Luggers Association, although the TBLA has given us some balance out here. Before them, we didn’t have any Commies.

  I keep Mitch on a yearly contract of $80,000, but he pockets a piece of the prize money when I do good. He earns 7 percent of my winnings if I finish in the top ten, and 10 percent if I win the whole deal.

  There on the putting green at Riviera, with the big old Spanish-style clubhouse behind us, looking like something Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders had ridden up and shot at, I took the cellphone from my caddy.

  “Hey, Cheryl, what’s up, babe?” I said jovially.

  Then I listened.

  First she related how she’d checked the phone messages at my house and thought I’d be pleased to learn that the surgery on Terri’s mother had gone well—they’d found an extra appendix. But the operation was costing $2,000 more than Terri had expected, so please mail a check. Then I heard how the business Cheryl was in was as important to her as my business was to me—and how come I didn’t understand that? I learned she was on the brink of unloading a “cur dog” on El Campo for $700,000. No pool, no fireplace, no terrace. She was about to unload it on a red-faced couple from Atoka, Oklahoma, who’d just moved to Fort Worth—what did they know? The house was on a “tear-down” street in “Eastover Hills.” All the other houses on the block, most of them frame, would be torn down someday, and the “cur dog” was on the wrong side of Horne Street, on the east side of it. “Not by any stretch of the imagination is it in Westover Hills,” she said. The Atokas didn’t know Westover Hills from a Red Lobster. Didn’t know it was the city’s ritziest neighborhood. But they did know they could walk from the “cur dog” to Roy Pope Grocery and get the chicken and dumplings, like she’d bought them for lunch today. This would be a nice fee for her, in case I didn’t realize it. Naturally she wouldn’t receive the whole 6 percent commission, or $42,000. She’d have to split the fee with the broker, her boss, the prick Donald Hooper. He didn’t do anything but pay the office rent and take half of what his agents sold—his hardworking, drive-all-over-hell-and-back, deal-with-dumbass-clients, sweating, laboring, scrambling agents. That’s what being a Donald Hooper real estate broker-prick was all about. But the $21,000 she’d make wasn’t to be laughed at. All that aside, assuming she could even find the Armour putter in my storeroom, she wasn’t sure she could make a plane tonight—it was already three in the afternoon, Fort Worth time. And why would she want to come out to California, anyhow, with nothing to do but sit around in a Holiday Inn on some LA freeway?

  “I’ve moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel,” I told her.

  She said she could be there by nine o’clock—hold dinner.

  11

  I WASN’T AS RICH, TAN, fat-bellied, baldheaded, and goateed as the old boy I had fun looking at across the way, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have my own poolside cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fast-paced whip-out handled it nicely.

  Cheryl Haney and I had devoured our eggs Benedict for breakfast, our newspapers, and our McCarthy salads for lunch while the fat boy had about a hundred phone calls and visits from three briefcases and two shapely adorables.

  The briefcases stood at attention and took shit, then left. The shapelies talked on the phone themselves, wriggled out of

  their snug jeans and flimsy tops to reveal they were wearing bikinis and store-bought racks. They sunned themselves for a while, gave him lingering kisses, and left.

  The scene reminded Cheryl of another country song—“Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissin’ You Goodbye.”

  Cheryl spent most of the day in the sun on a recliner. Earlier, she’d wondered whether the plump gent across the pool was a gangster or a movie producer. I’d said I was sure there wasn’t much difference in the two, based on everything I’d ever heard about Hollywood. I said he did look rich enough to own a spare prostate.

  The handsome pool kid, in charge of spreading towels on reclining chairs for twenty dollars a pop until he got an acting job, straightened us out. The plump gent was president of Earthquake Records, we learned.

  I asked the pool kid what artists recorded for Earthquake Records. Figured he’d know, and I was right. He excitedly ran off the names of five rock groups I’d never heard of, but that was no surprise to me. If Patsy Cline or Louis Armstrong hadn’t sung it, I probably hadn’t heard it.

  Cheryl thought maybe she’d heard of Glow Dopers, but she confessed to being totally unfamiliar with Liver Transplant, Four Vaginas, Dripping Shit, and Piss on Mom and Dad.

  This was Monday. What we were d
oing at poolside was relaxing and resting and unwinding from my heart-stirring performance in the Los Angeles Open.

  We would be flying home tomorrow, where I was awarding myself two weeks off before I hit the Florida swing.

  I was dropping a bypass on the Sominex Match Play Championship at La Costa, even though I was among the sixty-four players eligible for it in the world rankings. While I was grateful to be in those rankings, I’ll never understand how they work. They’re based on some chink’s homework.

  I couldn’t see taking the trouble to go down to La Costa and unpack, settle in, play a practice round, then get dusted in an early round by some no-name chip-shot magician from Taiwan. The week after that, it went without saying, I’d be skipping the Tucson Open, leaving it to Mr. and Mrs. R. Ess and all the little esses in their complete Arizona family, may a goat stomp on all their heads.

  Cheryl and the Armour arrived safely Friday night, but not without the kind of difficulty that’s typical of your air travel today.

  First class was full on the American flight she took at 6 P.M., but she braved it in coach. Turns out it was duty beyond the call. The only good thing was, she had an aisle seat, 24-C.

  This was good because the passenger next to her in 24-B was Big Girl, a young woman in a straw hat, tank top, and shorts who was holding a pot plant with artificial flowers in it. Furthermore, Big Girl was so gigantically overweight, she removed the armrest in order to make room for all of herself.

  What this did in turn was permit Big Girl’s all-points flab to spill over onto Cheryl’s left side. Which meant that Cheryl’s left arm was rendered unusable, more or less buried, whenever she needed it for anything, like trying to put cream and sugar in her coffee or trying to dine on the cardboard deli snack that was served.

  Trapped in the flab, Cheryl found it equally difficult to turn the pages of the John Sandford paperback she was reading. She solved this problem by sticking one side of the book between her teeth each time she wanted to turn the page, then turning it with her free hand, then quickly clamping the book back down on the tray table. She said she got pretty good at it.

  The flight landed at LAX on time but Cheryl didn’t arrive at the hotel for four more hours, not until almost midnight.

  The reason was, she couldn’t claim her luggage, or my Armour putter, because none of the passengers on the plane could claim their luggage for three hours. Somewhat inconceivably in this age when people have been known to go to the moon, land on it, and hit golf balls on it, the airline couldn’t get the cargo door open on the aircraft.

  Every forty-five minutes, Cheryl said, the airline would make an announcement about the problem, say they were working on it, and loud cries of agony could be heard throughout the terminal.

  Cheryl eventually endeared herself to an American employee by saying, “You know what? I’ll bet we can find a terrorist around here somewhere who can get the goddamn door open in about thirty seconds.”

  The American employee told Cheryl she shouldn’t talk like that, she could get in trouble, and Cheryl told her what she could do with her airline.

  12

  I WAS SIX STROKES OFF THE lead after thirty-six holes at Riviera. Six back of Cheetah Farmer, child star, with three lurkers between him and me.

  Lurkers are your basic nobodies. They’ve never won a tournament. A magazine writer I know, Jim Tom Pinch, named them lurkers one time and it caught on with the rest of the media. As Jim Tom explained it, your lurker will lurk around the top of the leaderboard where big names are involved and occasionally win a tournament, thereby screwing up everybody’s story.

  I was once a lurker myself, of course,

  but I hauled off and won me a Milwaukee Open twelve years ago and became a non-lurker.

  The ever-popular Knut Thorssun was taking the week off. Oh, he was in the tournament, all right, but he was still taking the week off, slopping it around the course, out of contention, but enjoying himself.

  Every time I saw Knut out on a terrace or around the putting green or in one of the dining rooms, he’d be in the company of his Hollywood friends—a gathering of midgets smoking cigars and miniskirted, perfect-legged, rack-jiggling, hair-tossing shapely adorables who might even be actresses.

  The midgets, I assumed, made laser-beam and monster movies. The shapelies looked like they were primarily in the business of cock-diving. They’d do that for a few years—until they snared a rich husband—after which they’d shop their way into middle age and spend most of their time worrying about what to wear to parties.

  I happened to overhear one of Knut’s Hollywood midgets complain about how exhausting “the cotillion season” was. I nodded at him sympathetically and said, “Those damn cotillion seasons have worn my ass out a time or two. Have to drive in from the ranch.”

  That afternoon I’d been moving gingerly through the crowded clubhouse when Knut waved at me to come over to a table where he was sitting with his midgets and shapelies. I knew the only reason he wanted me over there was because I was among the leaders on the scoreboard and he wanted to show me off.

  What the hell, I stopped by the table for a moment and Knut made introductions. In my whole life, even though I’m a fan of old movies, I’d never heard of any of the famous people he introduced me to.

  I stood there while Knut told a joke. He asked all of his friends if they knew the definition of making love. They all looked at him inquisitively.

  Knut grinned and said, “Making love is what a woman does when you are fucking her!”

  Har, har. Bang fist on table.

  I walked away amid the roars and screams of laughter.

  Six off the lead with two rounds to go is no big hurdle if you can make a few putts, and thanks to Cheryl and air travel I had the old Armour putter in my hands. As Mitch had predicted, the Armour gave me a whole new outlook. Putting is all mental anyhow. That’s the rumor.

  Saturday I went out and holed almost everything I looked at, and shot me an Amarillo, Route 66, Upside Down 9’s. I waltzed past the three lurkers. It pulled me up to within two shots of Cheetah, who posted a 70 but still led. My round put me in the final pairing with Cheetah on Sunday.

  Cheetah’s size gives him a big advantage normally. He’s 6-3, 190, and only twenty years old. No wonder when you put him together with today’s technology, he can drive it 340. He’s longer than Tiger on the average—the morons love his length—but he’s not nearly as good a guy as Tiger, and not nearly the player, but who ever has been, or ever was, or is?

  Chandler (Cheetah) Farmer came to us from California as a three-time NCAA champion at Southern Cal, a U.S. Amateur champion to boot, and he’s already won three times on the tour in a year and a half. If he was ever a lurker, it only lasted five minutes.

  Cocky shitass doesn’t quite describe him accurately enough, and I’m not sure arrogant prick does either. Maybe if you combine the two.

  Buddy Stark says, what Cheetah is missing in personality he makes up for with his lack of humility.

  SUNDAY WAS one of those ideal sunny days that people who live in Southern California like to brag about, call your attention to, even take credit for—in the sense that they’re so smart to live out here and you’re not.

  I was standing on the first tee Sunday when Cheetah’s daddy, Hank, the burly crew-cut jerk who caddies for him, came over to me and said, “You’re in deep shit today, Bobby Joe. Cheetah brought his ‘A’ game.”

  I said, “I’ll try to stay out of his way, not hold you up too much.”

  Cheetah and I shook hands without smiling.

  While we were waiting to hit our tee shots, Mitch, looking serious, held out a piece of paper and a pen to Cheetah and asked him for an autograph.

  “I don’t sign autographs for free,” Cheetah said.

  “This for charity,” Mitch said.

  Cheetah said, “What charity is that?”

  Mitch said, “The United Negro Sandwich Fund.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Cheetah said, turnin
g away.

  Two holes decided it. We played one-under through the first five, me saving three pars, Cheetah missing two short birdie putts.

  When we came to the “donut” hole, the 170-yard sixth, the par three, I clubfaced an 8-iron in there about three feet from the pin. Evidently Cheetah wanted to show me he could gorilla a sand wedge 170 yards—Tiger style. Which was how far he hit it, but unfortunately for him the shot flew into the unique pot bunker in the middle of the green and buried.

  “Goddamn it, you fucking asshole!” Cheetah yelled at himself and slung the club over to his dad. Murmurs ran through the gallery around us on the tee.

  Walking to the green, I looked at Mitch and whispered, “Thank you, George C. Thomas.”

  “Who that be?” Mitch asked.

  “The architect who designed the course,” I said.

  “Man who put the bunker in the middle of this green?”

  I nodded.

  Mitch said, “Well, bless his goofy ass.”

  Cheetah took two to get out of the bunker, and by then he was so scalding hot and impatient he three-putted for a triple bogey six. When all that was over, I staggered in the birdie putt. It was a four-shot swing. Suddenly I wasn’t two strokes back, I had a two-shot lead.

  Now it was my tournament to win or lose. In that moment I’d have given $500 for a Marlboro, but I settled for a mouthful of Milk Duds.

  We both parred the next three holes, which sent me to the back nine with the two-shot lead over Cheetah—and no one else was in contention. The leaderboards on the course told me that everybody else in the field had put it in reverse, including the media-hated lurkers.

  The tenth at Riviera is one of the niftiest little par fours on the tour. It’s only 311 yards, slight dogleg right, and your big hitters are tempted to try to drive it. But the small green sits on a crown, and if the drive misses the green, the ball is likely to disappear down a steep slope and pull a kikuyu blanket over its head. That basically eliminates the birdie possibility and often even eliminates the par.