Miracle at St. Andrews Page 12

  Generally harsh conditions will separate the wheat from the chaff, but when it gets ridiculous and crosses over the line, it does the opposite. Unplayable is unplayable, whether you’re Thomas Bjørn or Travis McKinley or even Tiger Woods. The wind, I realize, will level the playing field, and as the worst golfer among the leaders, if not the entire field, any leveling favors me most of all.

  My ball flight is already low. I move the ball back in my stance, and I hit it even lower, like an intentional top. It doesn’t go fifteen feet off the ground but has an enormous amount of top spin, and on my first several drives it rolls twenty yards past the much younger and stronger Bjørn, making him an even more melancholy Dane. I open with five consecutive pars. When I get my first glimpse of the leaderboard at the 6th tee, I see that that’s enough to put me alone in first, and when I par the next four, my lead swells to three strokes.

  I bogey 10, 11, and 12 but stay safely tucked inside my head as if in that becalmed space behind the dunes. On the next leaderboard, I see that my rivals did worse and my lead has stretched to four. I par out for 75, the best round of the day so far, and my lead is up to five strokes. Tied for second are Tiger Woods and Tom Lehman, who are just finishing on 18.

  As I huddle with Seamus and try to digest the reality, a British reporter sticks his microphone in my face and asks who I would rather be paired with, Lehman or Woods? The reporter is about my age, and I recall my own short-lived attempt at on-course reporting, and how difficult it was to get golfers to say something/anything.

  “I want to be paired with Tiger,” I say. “No disrespect to Tom or anyone else, but if I’m going to choke my brains out, I want to do it in front of the best golfer who ever lived.”

  As I blather on like a candid fool, Tiger pours a twelve-footer dead center and punches his ticket for the final group. I think of something my mother used to say. “Be careful what you wish for, Travis. You just might get it.”

  50

  LATE SUNDAY MORNING, I get a call from Seamus. “Same time, same place” is all he says. By 2:30, the two of us are sitting on our usual bench by the monument sipping our coffee and gazing off into the horizon like a pair of pensioners.

  “Beautiful day,” I say morosely.

  “Tell me about it.”

  With the wind gone, the last round will be a test of skill, not survival, which is unlikely to favor yours truly. “So where you taking me today?”

  He points at the water, takes two last gulps, and tosses the empty cup in the trash. I do the same and follow him down off the bluff, across the putting green, and down the cement stairs to the beach. A wet breeze is blowing in off the whitecaps, and gulls circle overhead.

  “Remember that opening scene from Chariots of Fire? Of course you do. All those pale overbred British types in retro activewear sprinting barefoot on the sand. They’re running at the waterline where the sand is nice and packed and sometimes the waves wash over their feet and that great soundtrack by Vangelis swells up under it. Something about the combination of that music with those images makes you bawl—it’s pretty much automatic.

  “That scene, that opening sequence from the movie, was shot right here where we’re standing now on West Sands, and I can’t think of a more appropriate place to share my last bits of wisdom and inspiration before we head out for the last round of the Open Championship. You know what, humor me, let’s take our shoes off so we can really get into the spirit of the scene. We don’t have to get our feet wet, just walk barefoot for a while.”

  I don’t want to seem like a bad sport. Seamus has obviously gone to a lot of effort to come up with the right message and delivery. One side at a time, I pull off my shoes and socks and stuff the socks in the shoes, and it’s harder than you might think while standing on one foot. Also, the sand feels a lot colder when you’re not sprinting and the blood isn’t flowing and you’re fifty-four and haven’t run for anything but a cab in twenty years.

  “All night and morning,” says Seamus, “I’ve been thinking of what to tell you. The best way to send you out into battle. At the same time, I want to keep it simple so there are not too many ideas bouncing around in your head. Six hours from now, a golfer will win this tournament. He will thank the R&A and the sponsors for putting on the best tournament in the world and raise the Claret Jug, which comes with the designation ‘Champion Golfer of the Year,’ which you got to admit has a pretty nice ring to it. Then he will put his lips to it and turn to one side and then the other so the photographers on both sides can get that shot of him kissing the trophy in profile.

  “The most important thing, which you’ve got to realize and keep in mind all day, is that golfer is not going to be you. There is no way a fifty-four-year-old journeyman refugee from the Senior Tour is going to hold off Tiger for eighteen holes on Sunday to win a major. The universe and Tiger Woods are not going to let that happen. It’s a nonstarter.”

  I had to take off my shoes and socks and prance around in the freezing sand for this? Somewhere on Ibiza, Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, aka Vangelis, is puking into the Mediterranean.

  “Travis, you’re not going to win this tournament. There’s no way at the end of this round that Sarah and Noah and Louie are going to come racing out onto the eighteenth green. By the way, wives and children should not be encouraged to run out onto the course. Who the hell came up with that one? Golf is not about family. It’s about golf and that’s plenty. If anything, it’s about getting away from your family for a few hours. Maybe that’s why the wives and children are so excited when they get out there on the green. They haven’t seen the guy in so long. ‘Johnny, that’s Daddy, remember him?’…‘Kind of.’ In any case, unless Tiger has a wife and kids no one knows about, I assure you, the eighteenth green is going to be a wife-, child-, and dog-free zone.

  “Last night, as you lay in bed, did you hoist the jug in your dreams? No. Well, it’s not going to happen in real life, either. So relax. Enjoy every last minute of this round, of playing in the last group on the oldest course in the world where the game was invented by some bored shepherd. No matter what happens today, Travis McKinley will be part of golfing history. You are a golfer, a damn good one, and you are part of this wonderful mostly male tradition of people who have pissed away the better part of their lives trying to develop a repeatable golf swing.”

  Six hundred years is a long time and no doubt there have been a lot of lackluster pep talks delivered by caddies to golfers over that span, but I can safely say this has to be the worst ever. Not only is it depressing, it’s tedious and goes on forever.

  Or maybe it’s the best and one day they will teach it at Harvard Business School. And maybe Seamus, bless his schizoid soul, is a stone-cold genius, a natural-born leader of men in Softspikes, and like Vince Lombardi, they will name a service area after him on the New Jersey Turnpike. Because ninety minutes later, when the starter clears his throat and announces the arrival on the tee of the final pairing of the day, starting with “The U.S. Open Champion Tiger Woods from Windermere, Florida,” and soon after, through the same public-address system and brogue, utters the words “Travis McKinley from Winnetka, Illinois,” and I step on the tee in front of six thousand spectators, I discover that I can walk and breathe at the same time.

  And when I stick my tee into the hallowed turf, my hand shakes so slightly that my Pro V1x doesn’t topple off and cause several hundred people to snicker. No, it stays right up there on the tee where I put it. And as I take my last practice swings, I find that I can also breathe and swing at the same time. Not only that, I can concentrate. Instead of thirty things I shouldn’t be thinking about, I’m just thinking target and tempo, like at the back range at Creekview Country Club.

  As a result, I don’t whiff or top it, or produce the shot whose name can never be spoken aloud that begins with s and ends with k but flush it dead center. The ball flies straight at the gorse bush by the burn like it has the three days before and with a wink at Sarah and a nod at Noah, we’re off.
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  51

  DRESSED IN HIS CONQUISTADORIAL Sunday red and black, Tiger struts off the first tee as if he’s the one sitting on a five-stroke cushion, instead of me, and Seamus and I chase after him. My opening salvo, a hybrid-3, stopped five yards short of Tiger’s 5-iron.

  “Ninety-eight yards to carry the burn, one hundred and five to the flag,” says Seamus, and along with my fifty-four-degree wedge, he repeats the same unequivocal vote of no confidence he delivered with such brio on the sands. “Travis, you are not going to win this tournament. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Then put a nice little swing on this puppy, drop it somewhere on the dance floor, and see if we can’t two-putt.”

  As you probably know, a five-stroke lead on the Old Course is nothing. With these blustery winds and Daytona-esque greens and the title of Champion Golfer of the Year up for grabs, that kind of lead can vanish in a heartbeat. They’re like crumbs from a crumpet on a picnic table in a hurricane. Which is why I’m grateful that I follow the first part of Seamus’s directions and ignore the second, and when I roll in my eighteen-footer for birdie and Tiger lips out his five-footer for par, the two-shot swing fattens my lead to a more robust seven strokes.

  Not that a couple of measly insurance strokes means Bo Diddley to Seamus. “You’re not going to win this,” he repeats with a patronizing smile as if that birdie/bogey exchange didn’t happen, and for the next two hours he never veers off message. Sometimes he breaks the bad news with a shake of his head. At others with a Brooklynese “fuhgeddaboutit,” and if he senses for even a minute that despite his drumbeat of negativity, I’m starting to daydream about a vessel used to hold red wine or hosting delusions that maybe, just maybe, this could be my lucky day, God forbid, he lays a hand on my shoulder like the Grim Reaper and says, “Read my lips—will…not…happen,” and then he hands me whatever club is called for, whether driver, wedge, or knockdown 8, and says, “Now put some smooth on it.”

  When I make the turn in thirty-three and Tiger in thirty-seven, I’ve nursed and nurtured my lead to nine strokes, but Seamus has been so vigilant that my expectations are no more unrealistic than when I pulled into the parking lot of the St. Andrews School of Economics Wednesday evening and found that perfect only slightly illegal parking space. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to be entirely immune to the knowledge that I’m sitting on nearly a two-digit margin with nine holes to go and unlike the Great Wallenda, I’m working with a net. In such rarefied air, I don’t have the strength of character to resist a moment of eye contact with my old TV antagonist and Tiger’s caddy, Steve Williams.

  Williams, I am pleased to report, is not taking this well. In his carriage and expression, he barely resembles the man who came marching up the fairway four months ago to threaten me with bodily harm. On the contrary. His face is pained and paled and his lips are pursed, and he looks like someone with a highly inflamed hemorrhoid who has just shoved a microphone up his own ass. Unfortunately, on the back nine of a major on Sunday, these little indulgences don’t come for free and this one results in my first lousy swing and bogey of the day. As we make our way to No. 11, my lead has been whittled to eight strokes.

  Oh, well.

  52

  ALTHOUGH ONLY 174 YARDS, the No. 11 has earned its reputation as one of the most diabolical threes in the world. It’s the steep tilt of the green from back to front, and the way the Hill and Strath bunkers guard the front, and the sickening regularity with which even well-struck irons can trickle off the putting surface into one or the other.

  For the first time all day, Tiger has honors, and it’s actually a disadvantage. The elevated green backs onto the Eden Estuary, and in the short time it takes to walk from the 10th to 11, the temperature has dropped ten degrees and the wind, manageable till now, has freshened dramatically. It blows straight off the water into our faces with gusts up to forty miles an hour. Out of respect for its strength, Tiger pulls 6, a club he normally hits 220 yards. Perhaps it’s that little bit of momentum he picked up on No. 10, or his sense that this is a hole with possibilities, because his swing is as solid as any I’ve witnessed at close range. It looks like Iron Byron with a crimson sweater and produces a low hard fade that shrugs off the elements with disdain.

  For 172 yards, it augers through the wind like a motorized machine with a propeller behind it. At the tail end of its flight, however, as the ball loses speed, the wall of wind knocks it down, and instead of dropping in the middle of the green and working right toward the hole, it lands closer to the front. For an instant it stays put. Then wind and geography and gravity take over and the ball rolls back, spills over the edge, and dribbles into Strath bunker.

  To see how shabbily the wind and slope treated Tiger is sobering. If Tiger’s pured 6 wasn’t enough, what do I need? A 4-iron? A 5-wood? An army surplus howitzer endorsed by the NRA? Apparently, it’s even more sobering to Seamus, because he places his palm on the head of my putter.

  “A bit soon for that, don’t you think?”

  “Nope. I want you to roll it. You saw what the wind did to Tiger’s shot?”

  “Unfortunately. I tried to avert my eyes but it was too late.”

  “So I don’t have to tell you how well he hit that. Hogan couldn’t have hit a better six in his dreams. We don’t want to be right next to him in that bunker.” He pulls out his yardage book and studies a drawing of the hole. “I want you to aim just right of Hill bunker, the one on the left, and let the ground slice do the rest. It should leave you just short of the green between the two bunkers.”

  “Seamus, you’re embarrassing me. I have an eight-stroke lead and I’m hitting putter off the tee? In case you’ve forgotten, this is televised. Simon is watching with his girlfriend and my pals are watching at home. And so are my former colleagues at CBS.”

  “Travis, last time I checked you were a professional golfer. Worrying about what anyone else thinks is for amateurs. Besides, this is links golf,” and then in his best imitation brogue, “It’s Sinandrooze. Not some dog track in Hialeah. I want this ball shipped by UPS via standard ground delivery. And have fun with it.”

  Seamus pulls the putter and when the gallery realizes what he has just handed me, the volume of murmuring forces him to wave his arms for quiet. I can handle the murmuring. It’s the snickering that pisses me off. And as I take my practice swings, or practice strokes, whichever you prefer, I feel like I’m standing up for Seamus as much as myself. Barely turning my shoulders, I beat down on the ball with my wrists. Somehow I strike it solid and the ball skitters down the hard fairway. By the time it approaches Hill, the murmuring and snickering have been replaced by rapt silence, and when, as Seamus predicted, the slope kicks it right, by thunderous applause. When it rolls up the bank and onto the green and stops eighteen feet above the hole, the crowd goes apeshit.

  “Still feeling embarrassed?” asks Seamus.

  “No, just blushing.”

  “Good, because they’re going to be running that on ESPN for as long as there is life on earth.”

  53

  WHILE THE BEDLAM SUBSIDES, Tiger studies the putting surface for the best place to land his bunker shot, then retreats down the slope like a miner trudging off to work. First his sweater drops from view and then his Nike cap, and I don’t see anything until the glint at the top of his backswing. An instant later, there’s an emphatic thump and a spray of sand and the ball rises straight up out of the bunker as if levitated. It lands on the spot Tiger had stared at, rolls uphill ten feet, and drops into the hole for a birdie two. As he plucks the ball from the hole, he turns and asks, “Hey, Travis, still glad to be paired with me?”

  The bunker shot heard round the world, and the only one Tiger has had to hit the whole tournament, sets off another round of hysteria, and Seamus and I wait for things to calm down before we survey my putt. Would I like to answer his birdie with a birdie of my own? Sure, but I’m not that stupid. I don’t think. I’m only eighteen feet from the hole but it’s the
wrong eighteen feet, all of them steeply downhill, and I’d be thrilled if I could stop it anywhere near the hole.

  “Just breathe on it,” says Seamus.

  If only that were an option. Unfortunately, I have to hit it, and with the same piece of solid metal I just used to propel it 180 yards. How do I even begin to calculate the difference required? Should I try to tap it a billion times softer?

  After some unseemly stalling, I touch the belly of the ball with the toe of my putter, intentionally hitting the ball off-center to lessen the impact. Seamus and I read in two inches of break from left to right but the ball is traveling too fast to take all of that and rolls over the left edge. It trickles past the hole by a foot, pauses, then trickles another foot, then picks up just enough speed to roll off the green and down the bank into the bunker that Tiger just vacated and my good buddy Steve Williams just raked.

  Now I’m laying two in Strath, the bunker I hit putter off the tee to avoid. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, like one of those enormous yellow multivitamins, but I remind myself I still have a substantial lead. The first priority is to get the ball safely out of the bunker and I do. But it carries ten feet too far, bounces off the back of the green and into a third bunker called Eden, which I saw no reason to mention until now. That was a mistake in storytelling as well as golf course management, because for the next ten minutes, without ever hitting an egregiously bad bunker shot, I ping-pong back and forth between Eden and Strath three times. When I finally get a chance to mark the ball again, I’m lying 10 and my entire lead has been squandered.