SEVENTEEN IS A BEAST, a 237-yard par 3 with a bunker right and out of bounds left that’s as long and tight as anything we face all year.
“What a nasty hole,” I mutter, “even without this wind. We’re seniors, for fuck’s sake. We’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare soon. We’re not supposed to play holes like this. It’s not good for our cholesterol. And what does it say about a country that it shows such little compassion for its elderly?”
Abate responds to my whining with a blank stare. “You done?” he asks. “You parred it yesterday. You can do it again.” He sees no good reason to bring up my bogey on Friday.
The last five holes of Islandside Golf Club run alongside Longboat Key’s only major road, Gulf of Mexico Drive, and the Sunday traffic back from the beach has slowed to a crawl. The cars are progressing at the same pace as we are on foot, and after grinding our asses off all day with nothing to show for it, and not knowing if any of it will even matter, it’s hard not to see the stalled traffic as a metaphor for our predicament. Certainly, we’re as hot and cranky and frustrated as the drivers in their sticky seats.
“And by the way, those frigging horns don’t exactly help,” I say.
“I can’t see how they would,” says Abate, who, after countering my negativity all afternoon, is taking a different tack. “Maybe you should walk over and smash a few windshields.”
“Might be just what I need. Release the tension. Free me up.”
Abate’s decision to cut me some slack and let me vent pays instant dividends, and I respond with my best shot in months—a low penetrating 4-wood that never gets more than twenty feet off the ground and holds its line in the wind before stopping just short of the green.
“Golf shot,” says Johnny A, doing his best to conceal his surprise. I’m still forty feet from the hole, but they’re all uphill so I can give it a good rap, and for the second hole in a row manage a relatively straightforward two-putt par.
“Proud of you,” says Abate, and as we stand on the back edge of the green, waiting for our playing partners to finish up, the breeze that fought my 4-wood brings encouraging noise from the gallery up ahead on 18.
First comes an abrupt collective gasp, echoed thirty seconds later by a deep groan. When they are followed soon after by the most pitiable soundtrack in golf (although from our point of view the most uplifting), which is the embarrassed, anemic applause of fans who have just witnessed golfing hara-kiri, Abate and I gape at each other like wide-eyed children.
With the urgency of unexpected hope, he stoops over and yanks at the zipper of the side pouch that holds the binoculars. In the last several hours of overuse, the zipper has lost a third of its teeth, so it requires multiple violent tugs and what feels like twenty minutes before he can rip it open, extricate the field glasses, and refocus them yet again on the leaderboard.
“Talk to me, John. I’m dying here.”
Abate doesn’t respond, just screws his fists deeper into his eye sockets, and as he digests the latest data on the big board, his mouth stretches into a lascivious grin, so that now he looks less like a bird-watching hobbyist than a demented peeping Tom.
“Actually, you’re very much alive. Summerhays and Gibson must have rinsed their second shots on eighteen.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Summerhays and Gibson both doubled eighteen. The fat lady has laryngitis. We’re back in the hunt.”