And On The Eighth Day, God Created... - Patrick Sean Lee (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

And On The Eighth Day God Created...

GOLF


My two older brothers decided one day to take me golfing with them. I was thirteen. Mike was fifteen, and Jim...I don’t know…he was a lot older than either of us. Now Jim and Mike were very good at the sport, very patient, very looking forward to 18 holes, and then the joy of reliving their (and my) successes at the 19th hole.

I had never golfed, but I was pretty good at football—not so good at baseball. An ok fighter in the ring, although I was always afraid to hit my opponent very hard for fear of hurting him. Which was impossible due to the fact that, A) we were small kids. B) we wore 16 ounce gloves. For those of you who don’t know what those are, they’re much like pillows with soft leather coverings. The pros use 8 ounce gloves, which are very similar to molded blocks of cement. I never wanted to get that far in my short career in the ring.

Anyway. I’d never golfed, but Mike and Jim were certain I could master the game under their tutelage. They both had very nice sets of clubs, polished golf shoes with the painful spikes on the soles and heels, and shiny new Titleist balls. The brand name of that golf ball embarrassed me for many years. As I read it, it must be pronounced “Tit-Least”, which sounded terribly sexual for a golf ball, or anything else for that matter. I was in my third year of college, in an upper division English Grammar class, when the correct pronunciation of Titleist finally stuck me. By then my desire to learn the game had long faded from my short list of lifetime goals. But now it’s Title-ist, and it makes perfect sense, except in my case.

So. I had none of the mental essentials, because that’s what golf is all about (I’ve learned). But I did have a very positive attitude, and the easily pronounced word “Fore!” in my vocabulary.

You’ll do just fine,” Jim assured me. “Just do what I tell you, and concentrate when we get to the first tee.”

Yep. Okay.

We loaded ourselves and the equipment up into Jim’s 1955 Ford Crown Victoria that pleasant summer morning and headed off to Wellshire Municipal Golf Course out in southeast Denver. Rolling in grand style into the parking lot and pulling to a stop, I was informed that I could use a set of Jim’s old clubs, and that he’d give me half a dozen of his old balls. The ones with smiles in them, in case I lost one in the rough.

So far, so good.

On the way into the clubhouse I was given a very short verbal tutorial concerning the finer points of the game. The guy with the lowest score wins, which at first made no sense, but okay. The object was to throw a ball on the ground—actually tee it up—and then smack it straight down the “Fairway” as hard as you could. Kind of like baseball (which, as I said before, I sucked at), only you didn’t have to put up with ninety-five mile per hour pitches, curves, spitballs, or sliders. The ball would just sit there for you. How easy, I thought.

I blame a lot of what happened next on my raggedy old Converse All-Stars and the smiley-balls. You have to have the right equipment.

The tutorial having ended, our green fees taken care of, we wandered outside toward the first tee. On the way, Jim told Mike how proud he was of him for having hit two homeruns the previous week, one with the bases loaded. My position on the bench in the dugout during that game (and every other) got lost in the conversation; I suppose rightly so. At that moment I determined to make my older brothers proud of me, Converse all-Stars and smiley-balls notwithstanding.

We arrived at the first hole.

Jim teed up first. I needn’t tell you how the professionals do it, but that’s how he looked. He did all the right things (which looked very simple from where I stood), and soon enough whacked the ball. I had no idea where it went when it rocketed away because that was before I had gotten my first pair of glasses. I was very nearsighted. But both he and Mike "Ooohed".

Mike teed up next. Another pair of golfers gathered behind us and waited their turn. Mike did about the same, although his swing was a bit different than Jim’s—more abrupt; something approximating a swing by Mickey Mantle at a low, fast, inside pitch. Still, I heard the “Thwack!” and squinted to see if I could follow the ball.

Pointless.

“Okay, Paddy, you’re next. Get over here,” Jim said in a very brotherly way.

“Which one of these clubs should I use first?” I teed up. The guys behind us waited.

“Try the 3 Wood,” Jim said.

“Which one is that?”

The two guys waiting snickered.

Jim came over and pulled the biggest looking one out of the bag and handed it to me. “This one.”

“Can I use one of your new balls? This one is crappy. It has a big gash in the side of it.”

“No. It’ll work fine. Just get over there and address the ball.”

I had NO idea what addressing the ball was all about. Was I supposed to speak to the little white wood thing sitting beneath it? Talk to the ball itself? Probably neither, I figured, so I just did what I remembered seeing him and Mike do.

“No, no, no,” Jim muttered as I stood there with the tip of my tongue clenched between my teeth, looking down, shaking my skinny hips a little, getting ready to send the smiley-ball into orbit. “It’s grip! You don’t have a bat in your hand. You’re holding a club! You have to interlock the index finger with the pinky.

Oh.

He showed me.

After several more, “No, no, nos”, some stance and arm adjustments—all of which made me feel like I was being tied in knots—after a few grumbles from the two guys waiting, I addressed the ball properly and rared back to swing.

“Fore!”

Five frustrating minutes later, with half the grass around my tee chopped to smithereens and the two guys grumbling loudly, I connected. It was as hard as I could swing the club, and it was a miracle I hit that ball that suddenly looked like a marble hiding on top of a needle. But it sounded solid. I quit cussing and squinted down the fairway.

“Ah, Jesus Christ,” one of the waiters said.

Jim and Mike both walked over and patted me on the back, saying, “That’s okay, we’ll find it.” Jim turned to the pissed-off guys standing beside the little bench behind us and half-apologized for my ineptitude, “You fella’s go ahead and play through.”

On the way to search for the smiley-ball, Mike informed me that I’d been way behind in my swing, or something like that, and that that’s why I’d sliced it so badly.

“What if I’d been way ahead of my swing?”

“Then we’d be tromping through the overgrowth on the opposite side of the fairway. But thank God it didn’t go too far.”

That was true, and a good thing I suppose. We only had to walk twenty yards off the tee into the rough. My brothers had twenty-twenty vision, or else God only knows if we’d ever have found the damned thing.

But we did eventually find it, hiding under a huge cottonwood tree. Right between a pair of gigantic roots.

“It’s gonna’ be pretty hard to hit this thing, sitting where it is,” I said to them.

Jim being the oldest and best golfer of the three of us, and knowing the rules and how to break them when the necessity arose, spoke first.

“Pick up the ball and toss it out here into the grass, then go ahead and hit it from wherever it lands.”

Mike said, “He’s going to forfeit a swing anyway. Just let him throw it back out onto the fairway. Nobody’s watching.”

Jim was adamant, though. “No. He’ll have to learn how to play out of the rough sometime. Might as well be right now. Pick it up, Paddy. Just give it a little toss. Over here.”

He was standing with one foot cocked over the other, kind of leaning on his club, in thick grass up to his knees. I looked at the grass around him, and then beyond it to the fairway.

“Why don’t I just do like Mike said and throw it out there? Maybe down about thirty yards so I don’t have to hit it so hard to get it up to the tee?”

“The cup,” Mike corrected me.

“Yeah, that. Why’s it called the cup?” I asked, generally.

“It just is,” Jim answered. “Some goddam’ Scotchman invented the game. If the Irish had…just pick up the ball and throw it over here! Forget about tees and greens and cups. Let’s get moving.”

By then a foursome had walked up to the first tee. Two men and two women. “Play through!” Jim yelled. The pissed off guys who had waited on us were long gone by then, and I got busy shredding the grass in the rough.

Jim turned his attention back to me. “Here,” he said, a little put out. “You’re doing it all wrong.” He stepped behind me and started twisting me into different kinds of knots, a lot more painful than the ones I endured back up the hill on the tee, or the cup, or whatever the Scotchman named it.

“Now, concentrate. Focus on the ball.”

“I can’t see it.”

“Well then squint. Christ-All-Mighty…” And he went on. I got to thinking about him cussing, and how Sister Mary Dolorine at school would smack you hard if she heard you saying those kinds of words, and then march you off by the ear to the Principal’s office. I was thinking about that and, oddly enough, Kathy Horvat, my girlfriend, throwing me kisses as I was herded out of the classroom door. My body hurt because of the unnatural way Jim tweaked it. I was not, however, concentrating very well on that blurry object smiling up at me.

“I think that’s the same problem he has when he’s at bat,” Mike offered. “Concentration.”

That wasn’t it at all. How can you concentrate on hitting something you can’t see?

I did finally hit the ball, and it rolled about two feet, stopping at a pile of dead grass I’d managed to pile up with my…I think it was a nine iron.

“Topped it,” Mike announced.

“Ah for Chr…” Jim started up.

In the end I wound up carrying the ball until we got to the spot where they’d clobbered their balls twenty minutes ago. Jim kind of softened on the way, and actually put his arm around my shoulder as we walked. He lectured me about how the head of the club was really only an extension of my arms, and that eventually my fingers would act just the same as when they were caressing a girl’s…you know. I returned to Kathy and lost the rest of what he was saying.

“Got it?”

“Yep.” Well, someday maybe I would, but for now that stuff was a mortal sin. I assumed it was, at least, and I envisioned Father Stone’s confessional. Huh-uh. Later, maybe when I was twenty-one or so.

“Play through!”

I got better, though, at hitting the ball after only four or five swings, and sometimes it went pretty straight and pretty far. Even thinking about Kathy, I