Watching Myself Play Golf

In this story, I will watch myself play golf.  I will do this from outside my body, as a limited- omniscient narrator.  This gadget is common among writers not wishing to parade themselves about in first person or implicate themselves in anything embarrassing.  I will assume the voice of unnamed observer and relate my experiences playing golf with a person I will call “Steve,” but Steve will be understood as me, somewhat, though not completely.  I am actually a better golfer than Steve, and probably a better person, though I don’t properly exist, except in his mind.

The climax of this story will occur on the 13th tee at a course in Myrtle Beach, from which Steve will shank a low line-drive sharply to his left and straight into a muddy lake.  He has a habit, owing to his weight, of shooting his hip on his follow-through instead of turning into the swing, particularly when he gets tired.  Having done exactly that, he will now watch as his ball skips twice across the water, then sinks forevermore to the bottom.  

He will then snap his 3-wood over his right knee, just below the grip. The jagged shaft will neatly slice his thumb, which will then spew blood all over his shorts and shoes and the crisp blue golf shirt his wife bought him for his birthday, because she knows how much golf means to him, and she’s trying very hard to make up for the fight they had over the placement of the hydrangeas.

Enraged, he will then, in a manner not unlike an Olympic hammer-thrower, launch his ruptured 3-wood in the direction of the lake.  It will spin languidly through the sky like those slow-motion helicopter rotors in Vietnam War movies, plop into the water, bob a time or two, and then drift away toward the storm drain.

Thereafter will follow a pause as I contemplate my options.

I’ve known Steve for a long, long time.  We play together about twice a month, and I always beat him.  Sometimes I let him get close.  Sometimes, I’ll top a tee-shot so it dribbles down the fairway, just so he can outdrive me and cluck, “Huh! Look at that.”  Sometimes I’ll chip over the green a time or two and shake my head, and he’ll pat me on the back.  Steve and I go back a long way, I’m saying, and we get along okay, or we used to, but I think he takes golf way too seriously.  I think he takes everything too seriously.  Frankly he’s had kind of a difficult time just being Steve.  So at this kind of dicey moment I need to say just the right thing to keep the mood light.

So I say, in my best Scots, “she’s oot there still, oot on the loch.  Some seh you can see her joost in the morning mist.”  But almost immediately I know this is impolitic, because he turns and glares at me like a crow.  I don’t know why he looks like a crow but he does, his head cocked, his lips tight, his eyes sharp and steely, and as he does this, an actual crow in pine canopy overhead caws mockingly.

 “I’m taking a mulligan,” he says.

“Be my guest,” I say.

“Fuck you,” he explains.  “I don’t need your permission.  I’m taking a fucking Mulligan.” 

If this were a tournament on the Golf Channel, right about here the action would pause so we could watch a well-produced short segment on Steve’s growing up--a visit to his boyhood home, that sort of thing.   In this case, we would see grainy footage of young Stevie taking his first mighty swings with the plastic clubs his dad gave him for Christmas, and then, as a grade-schooler, gamely taking lessons with the local club pro, his father sort of looming in the background.  Later we would see him as a thirteen year-old, angrily spraying buckets of range balls left and right, and then, at home, reading a book about Tony Jacklin, the great English pro, winner of both the British and US Opens.  His dad bought him this book, and Stevie pores over it.  The pictures on the edge of each page form a kind of cinematograph if you riffle through them quickly with your thumb, and this Stevie does endlessly, admiring the silken elegance of Jacklin’s swing, his strong cheekbones, his hair, his zen clarity. 

In later footage, however, we would see that Stevie has none of Jacklin’s elegance. Nor can he muster any zen anything from his tortured adolescent psyche, particularly if his father is looming.  We would see him struggle through the try-outs for his high school golf team, topping his tee shots, chipping back and forth across the greens, yipping his putts.  We would feel his disgust with himself, and when the coach pulls him aside to speak to him, one hand on Stevie’s slumped shoulder, we would sympathize, and the segment would fade out as we cut to a Heineken commercial. 

So now, back on the course, Steve is teeing up his mulligan. According to the perfect logic of the male brain, Steve can completely undo the terrible vector and violence of his previous shot if now he takes a mighty mighty swing.  And so he does, actually huffing on impact, but of course he toes it, and his mulligan drifts off to the right and lands between two fairway traps.  He doesn’t even pick up his tee.  I then hit my two iron fat so it careens off in the general vicinity of his shot, and I say, “Huh.  Look at that.” 

In the cart, he tapes up his thumb, which will prove futile, because the gash is deep and the tape will become soaked with blood.  He is silent, his balding head glistening with sweat.

When we arrive, we get out of our cart and proceed to our balls, which are near one another in a lush furze.  “That one’s yours,” I say, pointing at the one covered in blood.  I will do this several more times on this hole and the next, but it turns out this too is impolitic, because Steve will abruptly pick up his bloody ball, throw it straight at my head, miss by a mile, then sling his bag over his shoulder and start walking back toward the clubhouse.

 “On come on,” I call.  “It’s just a game….”  And then, louder, “Come on, man, it was funny!” 

But it is not funny.  Not to Steve.  He is walking away forever, and this is the last time we will ever play golf.  So I suppose this moment is actually the climax: his realization that he will never be Tony Jacklin, never ever, and that some guys have it, and some guys just don’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Or, or: perhaps it is my realization, in hindsight, that perhaps that particular epiphany really shook him.  Perhaps he’s in a deeper funk than I know, and maybe I should cut him some slack.  Maybe I should have followed him to the clubhouse and bought him a bratwurst and a beer, though he can’t eat bratwurst any more, and he’s not supposed to drink beer either.  But maybe I should have done it anyway, and patted him on the back a few times, and watched the Golf Channel with him in the snack bar, maybe one of those old classic tournaments they show on Tuesdays.

I don’t know.  The truth is, I’m tired of Steve.  I mean I don’t know why I plop down seventy-five bucks twice a month just to watch him melt down.  So what I do is: I finish the round by myself, parring every hole, because golf has always come naturally to me.  I hit with tempo instead of power and I don’t shoot my hip and I keep my elbow in and I do all the things the pro’s tell you to do when you’re a kid.  The best round I ever shot was a two-under 70, and it would have been lower but two putts lipped out, but I didn’t lose my temper or get upset because maybe that’s just like life.  You know?  

Or, maybe the climax happens later.  Maybe it’s when Steve walks in his front door and his wife says, “did you have a nice time?”  And then, “why is there blood all over your clothes?”  And then, “you didn’t bleed in the car did you?”  Whereupon he will drop his bag, yank out his 9-iron, stalk back out to the driveway and smash all the windows out of his Chevy Impala.

Or maybe it happens this evening, when he’s sitting at the bar at Applebee’s, knocking back a bourbon-and-coke with a Heineken chaser, his belt cutting into his belly, noticing in the mirror a new liver spot on his temple, just like his old man, who died just as they’d started exchanging letters.  What’s worse, the bartender is a Scotsman, a real jovial fellow too, who says Scottish things like “dinnae fash yersel, boyo, I’m sure it’s nae as ill as a’ that.” 

Or maybe, as sometimes happens, the climax will come just two or three seconds after the story’s ended, when the reader sees it’s suddenly over.

Jon Tuttle is Director of FMU’s Honors Program, a Board of Trustee’s Research Scholar, and a specialist in Modern and American Drama, Playwriting and the literature of the Vietnam War. His own plays, which include The Hammerstone, Drift, Holy Ghost, The Sweet Abyss, The Palace of the Moorish Kings, and Boy About Ten, have been produced at Trustus Theatre (where he is Playwright-in-Residence) and at theaters across the country. His plays also have been published individually and in the collections The Trustus Plays and Two South Carolina Plays. He and his wife Cheryl, who is FMU’s Director of Student Housing, live in Florence and have three children and two grandchildren.