Carl Hiaasen Read online

  And the times I fail aren’t nearly so aggravating, the sting of the drubbed shot being mitigated by the satisfaction of having just saved myself four bucks. That’s the sort of pitifully contorted reasoning to which the insecure and inconsistent golfer clings.

  Acquaintances who are excellent players deride the water-ball tactic, saying it fosters a defeatist attitude. They claim that taking a premium ball out of the sleeve and slamming it over a gator-infested lagoon builds character and self-confidence.

  Well, I’ve tried that, and guess what? Hooking a new Pro V1 into the drink is like totaling a Testarossa while pulling out of the sales lot. It makes you want to puke.

  Luckily, friends with connections at Titleist arranged for me to receive a couple dozen Pro V1s, which, because they were free, I fearlessly began to tee up on water holes. One set of balls even bore my initials, although they are difficult to read when submerged at depths greater than five feet. Perhaps the icosahedral design deflects the light off the lettering.

  Once I realized how rapidly my freebie Titleists were disappearing, I transferred the survivors out of the water-ball pocket in my golf bag. Of particular concern were the monogrammed specimens, which I knew could be retrieved from the inkiest grave by eagle-eyed golfers wielding telescopic ball scoopers. I’d seen these characters in action, patrolling the banks and shorelines while they played, dipping their scoopers among the darting carp and cringing turtles. I imagined them chortling every time they salvaged a shiny Pro V1 stamped with “CH.”

  Less than half a dozen golfers at the club have those initials, but it’s unlikely that the scavengers would try to track down any of us in search of the ball’s rightful owner.

  And even if they did, I’d deny it was me.

  Day 153

  Another promising lesson at the club with Steve Archer, after which I scribble furiously on blank index cards:

  “too much lower body movement”

  “practice with a baseball swing”

  “time downswing with weight shift”

  “on short irons, shift weight to the left; use right hand”

  “Rotation—left shoulder over right knee”

  “Setup posture, shoulder tilt more right”

  “FINISH!”

  Day 164

  From a sarcastic e-mail to Leibo: “Shot a 49 yesterday on the front nine. No pars, four 3-putts—very inspiring.”

  Leibo responds: “Shot a 75 today with 35 on the back. Very inspiring.”

  My reply: “Rub it in. I almost killed a turtle with one of my drives.”

  Day 165

  From another e-mail to Leibo: “Sorry I missed your call. I was on the back nine at Quail, pouring gasoline on my nuts. I’ve now gone eighteen holes without a par.”

  Day 175

  Four three-putts and innumerable stupidities on the back nine.

  At some point my sand wedge comes helicoptering out of a bunker, well in advance of the ball. Fenia, who’s riding along with me in the cart, wishes she’d worn a disguise.

  Day 202

  The pitfalls of Senior Golf—somehow I’ve hurt my back, and I can barely bend to tie my shoes.

  Yet searing pain seems to be the antidote for my swing ailments, because I knock the ball as straight as a cannon on the practice range. I decide to play nine holes and, despite the agony, I’m scoring much better than usual.

  Then calamity strikes: For no good reason, my lumbar muscles relax on the par-5 seventh. I’m lying two, only eighty yards from the pin, when suddenly the pain in my back vanishes.

  What happens next unfolds with a bleak inevitability. I skull a half-wedge into a sidehill bunker, overfly the green into the lake, and end up taking an 8, the dreaded “snowman.”

  And on it goes….

  Before every round I should have Fenia wallop me with a crowbar at the base of the spine. I play much better with tears in my eyes.

  The Loneliest Number

  Soon after my relapse, friends began lecturing me on the importance of establishing a handicap. This is a number calculated to rate a golfer’s level of performance, under parameters set by the United States Golf Association. The higher one’s handicap is, the more strokes that he or she is awarded toward par during a round.

  The purpose is to enable mediocre players to compete evenly against much better players, a charitable tilting of the field that doesn’t occur in most other sports. It’s like giving a lousy bowler three extra frames to catch up.

  A golfer with an astronomical handicap can shoot 95 and still take money off a low handicapper who shoots 80, which has always struck me as a somewhat hollow victory and not much to brag about. The pros typically play to positive handicaps (Tiger Woods’ hovers around +8), meaning that in a friendly match they actually must forfeit strokes to par. It seems absurd.

  I can understand the attraction of a mathematical formula that permits a duffer on his greatest day to “beat” a pro on his worst, but it dances around the rather glaring truth that the two of them don’t belong on the same golf course together, much less in the same foursome.

  The main reason I’d resisted handicapping my scores was that the system brands hackers such as myself with the numerical equivalent of a scarlet letter. This, I feared, would corrode my new, fragile truce with the game. I knew very well what a crummy player I was; double-digit documentation wasn’t necessary.

  Among sports, golf is uniquely driven by a quest for numbers that are low, not high. Many golfers don’t always keep score, and on those days they’re undoubtedly the happiest. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Silverman argued eloquently for tossing out the scorecards and pencils, and he lamented the symptoms of “lead poisoning” that afflict so many of us:

  “We become so hostage to the accumulation of the 2s and 3s and 4s and 5s we covet, en route to the 70s, 80s or 90s we aim for to validate our golfing selves, that the point of the pencil begins to leach into our swings. Our arms grow heavy. Our grips tighten. Our teeth clench. Our spirits sag…and our numbers spike like a fever.”

  Silverman described the liberating joys of numberless golf—the time freed for quiet reflection, bonding with nature and experimenting whimsically with new shots. It’s an idyllic scenario, but back at the clubhouse somebody is bound to nail you with the most ancient question in golf: How’d you shoot?

  And they’ll expect you to cough up a number, not a sonnet.

  When I was a teenager, my friends and I kept score although we never bothered to calculate our handicaps. There was no reason; being perpetually broke, we never bet when we played.

  The grown-up world is different, I was warned. It’s not cool to be guessing at one’s handicap when cold cash is involved.

  As it happened, I’d been saving my scorecards in order to track my progress, or lack thereof. Many of the outings were nine holes, because that’s all I usually had time to play after work.

  One June morning, after stern rebukes from Leibo, Lupica and others, I sat down at the computer and painstakingly began entering my scores online. When all the numbers were tabulated, I was stunned: My home course handicap was 17, and my USGA index was 14.2.

  It seemed impossible, since I seldom shot better than 92, twenty strokes over par, and occasionally I ballooned above 100. When I complained to my friends that the computer had screwed up, they explained that the ranking system weighs a golfer’s best scores disproportionately while discarding the worst.

  “It’s easy to bring your handicap down,” Lupica said, “but it’s much harder to make it go up. Don’t ask me why.”

  According to the USGA, the handicap system “is based upon the potential ability of a player rather than an average of all his scores…. [The] average player is expected to play his Course Handicap or better only about 25 percent of the time, average three strokes higher than his handicap, and have his best score in 20 be only two strokes better than his handicap.”

  That was a surprise. Naively, I’d assumed that my handicap index would be th
e disparity in strokes between my average round and a score of even par. In fact, the method for determining individual handicaps is so convoluted that your head will split open like a bad melon if you try to decode it.

  Of your twenty most recent golf scores, your ten lowest receive a “handicap differential,” which is your “adjusted gross score” minus the USGA Course Rating (usually a couple strokes either side of 72), multiplied by 113 and then divided by the Slope Rating (somewhere between 55 and 155). The differentials are then averaged, and the sum is multiplied by .96 and rounded to the nearest tenth.

  Wouldn’t you love to know the handicap of the pinhead who cooked up that equation?

  Another reason for my incongruously low handicap was the relative difficulty of the golf course, as indicated by the assigned Slope Rating. The USGA considers a slope of 113 to be of “standard” hardship. The course I play, Quail Valley, is rated 133 from the blue tees, meaning that a score of, say, 90 is weighted for handicapping purposes the same as a lower score on a less demanding layout.

  If all that wasn’t sufficiently confusing, it turned out that my handicap index was artificially suppressed because so many of my early scorecards covered only nine holes. As any bumblefuck knows, it’s easier to play like a star for nine than it is to sustain a streak of competence for the full eighteen.

  As is true in sportfishing, golf for some men is basically a dick-measuring contest. Lying inevitably occurs, some of it clever and some of it clumsy. Among true devotees of the sport, honor is prized because there are no referees or judges on the course; each player is relied upon to be truthful. Consequently, it’s easy for a common shitweasel to nudge his ball out of the rough, cheat on his scorecard and churn those bogus pars into a lower, more impressive handicap.

  That’s the nature of many, though not all, clubhouse lies. A more cunning tack of deceit, I learned, is to present oneself as a worse golfer than one actually is. This is achieved by withholding your lowest scorecards, thereby falsely inflating your handicap. The hotly scorned practice, known as sandbagging, results in extra strokes being awarded to the dishonest player, enhancing his chances of winning and/or collecting on a tasty wager.

  “Enter all your scores,” Mike Leibick told me. “Good and bad.”

  And that’s what I’ve done, with no small measure of pain and humility.

  Day 209

  It’s taken seven months, but I finally break 90.

  The scorecard is bizarre: three birdies, five pars, two bogeys, six doubles and two triples. I’m quite certain that I’ll never again make three birdies in a round as long as I live.

  Bill Becker’s observation: “You hit the ball in places where you’re in no danger of being in somebody else’s divot.”

  Day 215

  My first, and probably last, eagle!

  Naturally, there are no witnesses. That’s because I’m playing alone, as I often do, being pathologically terrified of embarrassing myself in front of other players.

  The wonder shot takes place on the seventh hole, a par-5, where my drive slices to an adjacent fairway. I recover with a solidly struck 6-iron, though it lands in a yawning trap, 145 yards from the middle of the green.

  I can’t even see the flagstick over the manicured lip of the crater. Needing serious loft, I take a 9-iron and set up the way Bill Becker had once coached me, with the ball well back in my stance. Amazingly, I pick the shot so clean that hardly a grain of sand is disturbed.

  Hurrying down the fairway, I scout in vain for a gleaming white speck on or near the green. I’m left to assume that the ball bounced over the putting surface and into the lake, which really pisses me off.

  I search the shoreline, swearing viciously. The couple on the next tee are giving me an odd look, and I wonder if my long bunker shot nearly beaned them. However, they seem more amused than angry.

  As I’m preparing to take a drop, a ludicrous thought crosses my mind. Just for the hell of it, I walk up to the pin and peek inside the cup….

  And there’s my Titleist.

  I know it’s mine because of the Grey Goose logo—Leibo had sent me a box of freebies from Bacardi. I pluck the ball from the hole and euphorically scratch a “3” on the scorecard.

  Thanks to the eagle, I end up shooting my best nine ever—a 41, and that includes a tragicomic 9 on the third hole.

  My fifty-third birthday was a couple of days ago, so this is a nice present. I allow myself to imagine that I’m actually getting better at golf.

  Day 238

  Paul Bogaards, a good friend and big shot at my publishing company, arrives for a promised round at Quail Valley. The wind is blowing mercilessly from due east, and I’m swinging like a woodchopper.

  On the fifth tee I do my famous Babe Ruth impersonation, pointing down the edge of the fairway to the precise location where my drive will veer over the watery ditch, out of bounds.

  I take a big swing, and there she goes. Paul is impressed.

  He cards an 89, while I gimp home with a 97.

  Day 246/Los Angeles

  Dinner with my friend Wil Shriner, the television and movie director. He introduces me to big Dan Boever, a professional stunt golfer and long-drive contestant. One of Dan’s tricks is driving a ball through a piece of plywood. Another is hitting it three hundred yards with a putter.

  He would be a fun partner for the next tournament at my club, although I’m not sure the other members would approve.

  Day 256

  Scorching hot and nearly dead calm. My card is 43-45 for an 88, after tripling the last two holes (including an ignominious four-putt on No. 18). Another clutch finish for The Kid. Whatever the reason—tiredness, tension or just nerves—I always seem to melt down on the home stretch whenever I’m playing well. It’s uncanny.

  Overall, though, it’s been a good day, including as it did a surreal string of five consecutive pars. Once again I find myself encouraged, though a dark inner voice warns that I’m fooling myself.

  Day 262

  Sure enough: A swift descent into the bowels of hell. I lose seven balls in nine holes, which is the only score I keep.

  With a northeast wind howling like Satan’s own hound, every aspect of my game disintegrates. By the end of the afternoon, I’m too drained to kick the golf cart, much less bash it with my driver.

  The Mystic Link

  One day, after a particularly disheartening round, I turned on the Golf Channel and became transfixed by an infomercial touting a product called the Q-Link, a basic-looking pendant that was said to hold marvelous powers. According to the manufacturer, the device contained a special “resonating cell” that would “eliminate stress and improve focus” on the golf course.

  The idea sounded so loony that I found it irresistible. The Q-Link Web site promised that the pendant would fortify my “biofield” and improve mental acuity. It was also a trendy fashion accessory: “Sleek and chic, with a dual-tone design, this beveled-edge triangle has two distinct sides, each making a unique statement. It can be worn by both men and women as a signature piece, dressed up or down. Designed by internationally acclaimed designer Neville Brody…the result is leading-edge attitude and supercharged power.”

  Brody is a hip young British typographer and graphics innovator, but nothing in his biography suggests that he knows squat about the stressfulness of golf. Nevertheless, I took the bait.

  No sooner had I dialed the 800 number than the fellow on the other end clued me in on a hot deal—the solid gold Q-Link just happened to be on sale for $899!

  “No thanks,” I told him.

  “The titanium model is available for $269,” he said. “Today only.”

  “I don’t think so.” I ordered the Q-Link in basic black ceramic for $129, and contemplated what I would tell my friends if my golfing skills mysteriously improved.

  Leery though I was, opening the package was still a letdown. “Golf’s secret weapon” appeared to be a simple copper coil encased in plastic and attached to a very ordinary leather s
tring. It looked like a bovine intrauterine device.

  I looped the dorky thing around my neck, discreetly concealing it under my shirt, and headed for the practice range. Nothing mystical occurred except that I began hooking my metal-woods in a screaming, knee-high arc that defied Newtonian law.

  Later, standing at the first tee box, I adjusted the lanyard to make sure that the coil was centered above my sternum, as the instructions recommended.

  Then I took out my driver, addressed the ball……and promptly hammered it far into the nastiest patch of the heaviest rough. I double-bogeyed the hole, feeling as stressed out and unfocused as ever. I staggered through the front nine awaiting the promised embrace of serenity, but my Q-Link failed to resonate even faintly. I caught myself wondering if I should have sprung for the titanium upgrade.

  I finished with a bruising 97 that included six three-putts and only two pars, a sorry-ass performance even by my sorry-ass standards. It was tempting to blame the $129 cow IUD around my neck, but I wanted to be fair. Perhaps I had deployed it improperly.

  Upon returning home I carefully reviewed the instructional video that had come with the pendant. The presentation was made by a man named Robert Williams, identified as the Q-Link’s inventor. Looking more like a Napa vintner than a scratch golfer, he explained that we each have unique life forces that are disturbed by electromagnetic frequencies from coffeemakers, microwaves, computers, televisions—presumably even the televisions upon which Williams’s commercials are aired. He said that the Q-Link “harmonizes” these human biofields using a patented method called Sympathetic Resource Technology.

  Inside the plastic triangle was more than just a coil of common copper; there was also a miniature tuning board and the aforementioned resonating cell. Williams asserted that more than twenty-five “scientific” studies had shown that the Q-Link had a salutary effect on stress, fatigue and even human blood. (According to a disclaimer, the device would not cure diseases or even minor medical problems, but I didn’t care. If it could heal my putting woes, I’d deal with the arthritis.)