"What a shot."
With Ron Haas (left) and Ken Nicholson (right),
the witnesses.
I was 26,040 days old last Tuesday, August 13, according to a novelty e-mail I received that same day showing me how to calculate it. It's also the day I had a Hole in One. It was, of course, a one-in-a-million shot--and it made me think back on my improbable golf life.
Off and on, I've been hacking around golf courses for something like sixty years. I was never very good at it, but I always loved being on the courses, even after running up a score too high to even mention without major embarrassment. But although I was clearly bad at this game, there were usually a few great shots, chips, or putts that brought me back. They were few and far between, but they always made me wonder why I couldn't get it right all the time. I knew I couldn't and wouldn't, but I had moments on a golf course that were so good that I couldn't help daydreaming about being good at this dumb game. This, of course, wasn't so much a daydream as a pipe dream.
I was given a set of clubs by an uncle when I was fourteen. He found them collecting dust in a pawn shop near his barber shop in Newark, he said, and so he bought them for me. I remember mumbling thanks, but I couldn't imagine what he was thinking of. I was a city boy from East Orange, New Jersey, a little kid who played sandlot baseball. Golf was as foreign and upper crust to me as polo. What, I wondered, would I ever do with these clubs?
Over the next ten years I occasionally took them out to a golf course, then gave them away. I was too awful to continue playing. I knew I needed lessons and clubs that suited me better than the pawned ones did. I had fallen in love with golf courses, but not the game itself because I was light years from being what I wanted to be: a so-so, average golfer who actually managed to break a hundred now and then. That's all I wanted, but it was painfully clear that even this modest goal was beyond my reach and that I had to give the game up. Which I did.
After a while, I'd get the itch again and get new clubs which I'd practice with for a while and eventually give up on. Again. I'd sell my clubs, then buy new ones at a garage sale as soon as a used set with a leather-looking golf bag caught my eye. Yes, I'd say to myself, let's give it another try. But then I would fail. Again and again. Sometime in my thirties, I gave the game up for good.
Then, several years later, a good friend cornered me and cautiously, almost secretively, asked if I didn't play golf, knowing full well that I did, sort of. No, I said, not really. I hadn't played in years, and at that point in time I didn't even have clubs, so when I said no, I really meant it. But he was a good friend and begged me to get him started--to go out to the course and play a few rounds with him. I was his only hope, he said, so I reluctantly agreed.
I stopped at a new golf store on Rte. 46 in Rockaway and was looking around at clubs when a short, heavy-set guy came up and asked if he could help me. He introduced himself as a card-holding PGA professional who was limiting himself these days to selling golf equipment and playing in the occasional tournament. I didn't want to have this conversation, but I was intrigued by his body shape and size, so much like my own, so different from what golfers look like on TV. I found myself thinking that if this guy could play, well, maybe I could too.
I wasn't sold on the idea of buying clubs (again), but then the golf shop pro closed the deal: "Hey," he said, "what have you got to lose? If you buy a set of clubs today, I'll give you free lessons to get you started." I perked up, said yes, took maybe a dozen lessons, and gradually began to improve until I got to be . . . just average. Exactly what I had always wanted to be. Just good enough to be able to hang around a golf course without causing myself horrible embarrassment.
That was some thirty years ago. When I retired to Dade City, Florida, into a golf community, I joined the club, bought a golf cart, and played my average game for another five years, breaking a hundred most days with a handicap of twenty-five. I was happy, more or less.
In 2011, however, I finished writing a memoir that had kept me bound to my desk for long stretches at a time for about two years. And when that book was published, I found myself without a project to devote all my attention to. That's when I decided to work more seriously, for the first time in my life, on my golf game. I took a few lessons, changed my grip, went regularly to the driving range, and began hitting all my clubs better. With all that work, my game improved, and my handicap crept down to fifteen, where it is today.
And then last Tuesday on the eighth hole at Scotland Yards, a 130 yard par three, I hit a beautiful, high-arcing, nine iron that had just the slightest draw, a perfect-looking shot. My friends murmured their approval, "Good shot!" And then it hit near the middle of the green, took a couple of bounces, and rolled to the back of the green and into the cup. None of us believed our eyes, but when we got up there, there was the ball snuggled down at the bottom of the cup. Our eyes had not deceived us.
It's really not so bad being 26,040 days old. I mean, who would believe that he'd be peaking as a golfer when he got to be 71.3 years of age? I shouldn't think this way, but who knows?--maybe I can look forward to living out another fantasy or two. . . .
