Chapter 20

THE BIRMINGHAM HILTON served green apple martinis in giant glasses with a Maraschino cherry and a slice of fresh apple. Even by Dixie standards it was a sweet cocktail, but they filled the glass halfway with gin (or, if you preferred, vodka), so no one asked any questions. David sat at the bar, nursed his drink and tried to distract himself by watching SportsCenter.

A portly man collapsed onto the barstool with a heavy sigh. A shiny shirt squeezed his neck and his necktie had been tied so short that its tail extended well below its blade. Though the hotel had the air conditioner on full blast, the man in the too-tight clothing sweated profusely. David imagined him to be in town for some convention. He’d peddled his wares all day—ball bearings or titanium steak knives, perhaps—and now wanted to take a load off and have a cold one. The man motioned to the waiter to bring him the same as David, offering a well-worn but honest smile to David as he did. Even before he extended his hand, David could tell that his new friend wanted to talk.

“Patterson’s the name. Art Patterson, from Montgomery.”

David’s handshake caused the pens in Art Patterson’s pocket protector to jiggle.

“David Howard.”

“Nice to meet you, David. What brings you to Alabama?”

In the past, David had experimented with lying in these situations. This had spared him some conversations, but whatever short-term gains he achieved were outweighed by the unforeseeable negative consequences, like running into someone at the course the next day and forgetting the phony name that he’d given them. These days, he stuck to the truth. “I’m a professional golfer,” David said. “I’m here playing a tournament this week.” “Don’t say. I’m on the road so much I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Hardly have time for the paper. How you hittin’ ’em?”

“Okay. Could be better. Could be worse.”

“That’s the game, right? Does golf have you on the road a lot?”

“More than I’d like. Let’s just say I’m very well liked in Buffalo.”

Art smiled and surprised David with his reply. “I got nothing planted myself. Not a thing in the ground. I’m on the road two hundred days a year. Oil filters are my game. Got all of Alabama and Mississippi for my territory. Used to have Louisiana too, but the company’s just getting too damn big and the competition’s tougher than ever. I try to see each of my vendors once a month—take them out for a beer and a lap dance. You know how it is. It’s the old way, but it’s the only way. Afraid I’ve seen more than my share of hotel rooms.”

The bartender set down a fresh martini. Art took a long drag.

“You have a car?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Mind my asking what kind?”

“Not at all. It’s a Chrysler LeBaron.”

“Mighty fine car.”

“Got it for a hole in one.”

“Don’t say? I got one of those myself. Catch this: I’m on a 150-yard par-three, hittin’ a five-iron off the tee. I pull the shit out of that sonofabitch. Thing goes fifty yards left of the hole, hits the trunk of a tree square, ricochets onto the green, and damned if the thing doesn’t go right in the hole. The other three guys in my foursome didn’t believe it. But there it was in the middle of the hole.”

“Still a ‘one’ on the scorecard,” David said with a smile. “Damn straight,” Art said. “Crazy game.”

“You can say that again.”

“Greatest game in the world, though.”

David nodded absently. The clock above the bar said nine thirty. Dawn would have been waiting for just about half an hour now. He figured she’d probably wait a little bit longer, but not much. His right hand reached into his pocket and rubbed the scrap of paper she’d given him. It had become slippery from being fingered so often. During the sleepless night after his round of 59, he committed every aspect of it to memory, from her swooping “T” to the tiny smiley face in the first zero in “o’clock.” It seemed odd that such a simple message could signal such a momentous fork in the road: Hilton Saturday 9:00 Room 631

David’s thoughts drifted to his clothes. There’d been no major shopping spree since he and Dawn had met at dinner. She’d doubtlessly be wearing an evening dress or something provocative from Victoria’s Secret. He still only had golf clothes. He wondered again what it said about a man to be 42 years old and not own a decent article of clothing without a corporate logo.

“Seems like you sure got a lot on your mind.”

“What’s that?” David had forgotten about his friend.

“I was asking if you had kids.”

“Sorry. I was looking at the clock.”

“Got somewhere to be?”

“Maybe. I’m supposed to be meet someone in a little bit. Nor sure whether I’m going.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you.”

“Not at all. I’d like to finish my drink.” For Art Patterson’s sake he added, “And our conversation.”

Art appreciated this. It was quite a thing to be well liked in Birmingham.

“So do you have any kids?” he asked.

“Yeah, I have two.”

“I’ve got three myself. I’ll tell you, they’re the only things that keep me sane on the road. I’ve logged eighty thousand miles so far this year. You could go insane spending that much time by yourself, but a man has to do what he has to do. I’ve got this little photo of the three of them taped to my windshield. My wife took it. It’s a picture of them hugging me after getting home from one of my trips. It’s from a long time ago, but some days it’s the only thing that keeps me going. My kids are seventeen, thirteen and nine. How old are yours?

“Twelve and six.”

Art nodded. “They grow up in the blink of an eye. My oldest girl just got her acceptance letter from Mississippi State. Seems like just yesterday she was in diapers.”

“You must be very proud.”

“I sure am. I’ve been putting aside $100 a month for college since she was a baby, but even still, I’m worried about paying. Are your kids with

you here in Alabama?”

“No. They’re home in Pennsylvania.”

“I always see those professionals on TV hugging their wives and kids after they win a tournament.”

“That’s only the big guys. Even Tiger and Phil only have their families with them when they’re in contention. The rest of us can’t afford to have the whole crew on the road with us every week. Gets awfully expensive.”

“I imagine it does. Does the wife get on your case about being on the road so much?”

“Sometimes,” David said.

Art nodded. “The little woman gets on me sometimes, too, but I always say that I ain’t gonna put bread on the table sittin’ home on my ass watching television. A man has to pay the bills, right?”

“Right,” David said. Art didn’t need to know about the job opportunity at Laurel Valley. David took a sip of his martini and checked the wall: 9:35.

On SportsCenter, Keith Olbermann narrated highlights from the day’s action at the Southern Southern Open, including Bobby Rancourt driving the green at the sixteenth hole, his eight-iron-on-a-string at seventeen, and David’s curling twenty-footer at eleven. David felt no connection to the man on the screen lifting his putter and fist to the sky. Then, because Olbermann was Olbermann, he showed David holing out for par at eighteen, followed by footage of him missing the tap-in to win the Open. Olbermann punctuated the clip by shouting, “Noonan!”

Unfortunately, Art saw the clip. He snapped his fingers.

“Holy mackerel, that’s you! You’re leading the tournament!”

“Unfortunately, they don’t hand out trophies on Saturday.”

“Say, mind if I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“You probably get this all the time.”

David knew that it would be The Question. After all this time, he could see it formulating in people’s minds before they even became conscious of their desire to ask it.

He’d heard every possible permutation of The Question, in every conceivable setting, with every imaginable tone. He’d been asked The Question by strangers, friends, friends of friends, family members, cab drivers, supermarket clerks, dry cleaners, pizza delivery boys, bank tellers, airline check-in agents, airline pilots, taxi drivers, toll collectors, meter maids, other parents, teachers, crossing guards, pro-am partners, tournament volunteers, corporate representatives, every reporter with whom he’d ever interacted, tour officials, caddies and even fellow pros.

He’d been asked before rounds, after rounds and during rounds. He’d been asked at putting greens, driving ranges, car rental agencies, hotel desks, hotel lobbies, barbecue stores, Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, beaches and bathrooms. Once, he’d been asked by a man in an adjacent toilet stall. This had seemed to be the theoretical maximum of intrusiveness until, during a family celebration of Scott’s tenth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s, a man pulled a chair up to their table—as they were eating cake, no less—and asked, “How’d you miss that? Even I could have made it.” Fans were uniformly convinced that, confronted with the same situation, they’d have made the putt.

Some people built up to The Question by making chit-chat. Others acted if they had a right to the information simply because David played golf on TV. The nice ones, like Art Patterson, asked permission before they asked.

David smiled and said, “Go ahead. I’m an open book.”

“Mind you, I’m not much of a golfer myself,” Art said, “but that putt you missed at the Open. I guess it’s about ten years ago now. It couldn’t have been more than two feet. Even I can make those. What happened?”

Over the years, David had responded to The Question in almost every imaginable way. Early on, he tried avoiding the question by pretending he hadn’t heard it. Surprisingly, this often prolonged the interaction. A surprising proportion of fans felt entitled to an answer. If he failed to respond, many berated him for being an arrogant celebrity.

Later, he tried a joke—“the wind took it”—but humor wasn’t really his thing. He experimented with turning the question back on the questioner, in a Socratic way, as in “Have you ever failed at your job?” Occasionally he responded with anger, as he did with the Chuck E. Cheese interloper. This approach inevitably ended badly. He finally settled on saying “I pulled it.” This was literally true, although it avoided the more interesting issue of underlying causation. For some reason—maybe it was the green apple martinis—David felt that Art Patterson deserved a more expansive answer.

“The irony is that what really did me in was the shot before,” David began. “It was an eighty-foot blind chip over a ridge and the green, which was smooth as glass, was running away from me. I needed to land it in the fringe to take the heat off the ball and let it trickle down to the hole. If I landed it too short, it would stay in the tall grass. Even a whisker too hard and it would run past the hole, maybe off the green. I’d never seen greens that fast in my life, not even at Augusta”

Art listened raptly.

“There were thousands of people surrounding the green and millions more at home,” David continued, “but I didn’t notice any of it. I just saw the shot. I had complete focus—a state of grace, the zone, whatever you want to call it. I opened up my sand wedge and pitched into the

green’s sideburn. The gallery thought it might stay there for a second, but I knew it had enough momentum, and sure enough, it bounded forward and crested the ridge. I couldn’t see the hole, but I figured it’d finish close. Then the crowd cheered, and I knew for sure. You don’t remember the pitch, do you?”

“No,” Art said. “Just the putt.”

“Right,” David said. No one ever remembered the pitch. “If you watch the footage,” David elaborated, “you’ll see me lift my hand to acknowledge the applause, but the truth is I didn’t hear it, or if I heard it, I didn’t notice it. The waving’s instinctual. Sometimes I even do it when I’m by myself on the range. It’s almost like it’s part of my follow-thru. For the entire round, the only noise I hear was my caddie telling me yardages, which he’d repeat three times each because he’s OCD.

“Even as I started walking up to the green, I still didn’t know where the ball had finished. I remember removing my hat and wiping my head with a towel, because it was hot as hell in Tulsa that summer. Then I put my hat back on, crested the hill and saw that the ball was about two feet from the hole. It’d have been better if I had a ten-footer left. I’d have kept grinding. Instead, I relaxed.”

David paused. “Are you a big sports fan, Art?”

“The biggest,” he answered. “I played defensive line in high school.”

“So you know how people say, ‘you need to be in the moment.’ In my twenty-two years as a professional, I’ve learned that’s one hundred percent true. But those are simply words. What do they mean exactly and, whatever that magical state is, how do you achieve it? That’s the tricky question.

“I’m not a particularly religious man, but I read a lot and I think the Buddha explained it best. The Buddha identified three poisons that are the root of all suffering: ignorance, attachment and aversion. I’m pretty

sure the Buddha must have been a golfer, because I’ve seen time and again that the instant desire filters in and a player loses focus on the shot in front of him, he’s sunk. The game is merciless.”

“Like when you start dreaming about a promotion that you’re up for.”

“Right, Art. You get it,” David said. “During those last few moments before I missed the putt, I played with all three poisons. When I saw how close my ball was to the hole, I felt as if the round were over—which, of course, is ignorance. And my thoughts began to drift to what the win would produce for me. I wondered what it would be like to have enough money to assure my kids’ college education and to give my wife some measure of luxury. I fantasized about finally being a first-class pro—able to choose the tournaments I wanted to play and to have automatic entries to the majors. Did you know you get a five-year exemption to the Masters?”

Art shook his head no.

“I dreamed what it would be like to stand on a first tee and hear the words ‘U.S. Open Champion David Howard.’ That’s attachment, of course.”

David smiled. “Mostly, though, I obsessed about my father. He was old and sick and I knew there wouldn’t be many more opportunities to win while he was alive. I kept thinking back to this round I played when I was a kid with Arnold Palmer at the Pennsylvania Open. My father was a tough asshole who never had a kind word. I don’t know why, but when I finished that day, I thought my father would put his arm around me and tell me he was proud of me for holding my own.”

“I take it he didn’t?”

“No. In retrospect, it seems pretty stupid that I thought he would. By the time I almost won the open at Oakland Hills, I understood that my father wouldn’t be putting his arm around me if I won the tournament. I wanted to hole that two-footer to spite him. I always tell people I pulled

it, but the truth is I played with anger. The next day in the playoff, I had no chance.”

Art had listened carefully. He thought for a while before speaking. “It’s just like life. You think you’ve got it all figured out, have everything under control, and then something slams you. Thing is, everyone has their breaking point. I’ve seen skaters trip over their feet at the Olympics. A guy I bowl with once threw a gutter ball when he needed five pins to win. Heck, my boss forgot the word ‘petroleum’ during a major presentation, and he runs an oil filter company. The limit’s always there—the only question is where it is.”

Art Patterson seemed to have a generous spirit, and it was a nice thing he’d said. David detected no undercurrent of the mocking derision he so often encountered. Nor did he seem to think that he’d have made the putt if he’d been given the opportunity. Art’s sole concern seemed to be making David feel better about himself.

But the analogy he’d offered was flawed. Art’s boss hadn’t dedicated his life to excellence in oil filters. He didn’t spend ten hours a day practicing the word “petroleum.” The level of sacrifice didn’t compare. David hadn’t treated golf as a job. He’d been on a quest for perfection. He could have spent three hours a day on the range instead of practicing until his hands bled. He could have played adequate professional golf and made it to parent-teacher conferences and Little League games. And the magnitude of his failure didn’t compare to the skater, who no doubt had tripped while executing a Triple Lutz or another uncommonly difficult jump. The analogy would have been apt if she’d lost a medal because she couldn’t tie her skates or if David had lost the Open because he’d dunked a four-iron in the water from 220 yards out to a tucked back-right pin.

Art’s analogy missed the exquisite humiliation of having sacrificed so much for one’s art and having failed so spectacularly. Throwing a gutter

ball in the bowling league championship was one thing. It was another to have climbed the tallest mountain and, when one step from the summit, to have faltered in plain view of the world. It was better to wonder about one’s own capacity to perform under pressure than to know that when the chips were down, a little voice inside your head would say that you weren’t worthy of winning and, worse still, to know that everyone around you knew this about you. To be transparently flawed was more than any man could bear.

David checked the clock, once more fingered the note in his pocket, and pushed back his stool. “You’re right, Art, everyone does have a breaking point,” he said, as he slapped a twenty on the counter. “It was nice chatting with you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an early tee time.”

“Good luck tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” David said, “but let’s deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”