5

 

 

Ten days later, I was in Savannah, Georgia, preparing for the telecast of the Southern Plantations Open, which would be my first IBS tournament as the network’s color and history correspondent. Be still, my beating heart.

Most of the broadcast prep work, so far as I could tell, involved my fellow correspondents, a.k.a. the “talent,” heading out to play golf somewhere nice. On Monday, they all went up to Hilton Head and played Harbour Town at Sea Pines, that narrow, unforgiving course carved through the lagoons and pines by Pete Dye, aided and abetted with advice from a young Jack Nicklaus. Today, they were out at one of the courses out at The Landings, an exclusive, multi-course real estate development to the south of Savannah. Wednesday, they were scheduled to drive up into the South Carolina Lowcountry coast a ways and play a fancy private course called the Secession Club. Politically incorrect, but said to be a nice track.

I had not been invited to join the on-air personalities for all these golf outings. I wasn’t upset about that. After all, I was the FNG—effing new guy—and although I had met and knew most of the IBS crew, it was still their party, not mine. Besides, I wanted to spend some time focusing on my job—to provide some interesting color and history to the telecast. Because I didn’t want to get yelled at by the Assassin, Ben Oswald. Nor did my colon.

I had gotten a call from Arnie Wasserman, Oswald’s major domo, who told me that I had been assigned to work with Tony Sciutto, one of IBS’ longtime cameramen.

“Ben wants a three-minute segment,” Arnie told me.

“About what?”

He laughed. “He didn’t say,” he said, “But you’re the color and history guy, so I’m guessing something colorful about history.”

He was still laughing as he rang off. Arnie seemed to be one of those types who likes to stir the pot and watch what happens. Probably hoping for some fun colon stuffing.

I called Sciutto’s cell number. He was out at Plantation Pines, the private country club on the outskirts of Savannah where the weekend’s tournament was to be played.

“Oh, hi Hacker,” he said, “Listen, I got some stuff to do out here today. Can we hook up in the morning, maybe? Talk about the script for the weekend?”

“Script?” I said.

There was a moment of silence. Then I heard a chuckle.

“Sorry, I forgot,” he said. “You’re brand new to this game, aren’t you?”

“If you mean the television game, yes,” I said. “Golf I know something about.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” he said. “You’re a newbie. That’s OK, I’ve worked with newbies before. Not to worry. Do you have anything in mind for the history segment?”

“Not really,” I said. “Didn’t know until twenty seconds ago that I had to write a script.”

“That’s OK,” he said reassuringly. “We’ll sort it out in the morning. Just be thinking of some interesting things we can shoot. We’ll sort of wing it on this first one. I’ll make sure Becky Ann is standing by.”

“Becky Ann?”

“Becky Ann Billings,” he said. “She’s the best video editor we got. Fuckin’ Scorsese can’t cut film like she can. And don’t tell him, ‘cause we don’t wanna lose her.”

“Right,” I said. “Secret’s safe with me.”

“Beautiful,” he said. He stretched the syllables out: bee-yoo-tee-ful. “How about we meet for breakfast. Eight o’clock. Hotel cafe. Roger?”

“Ten-four,” I said. “See you then.”

So with nothing else to do except worry about writing a three-minute television script about who knows what, I headed out to wander around Savannah. Like most people who had visited Savannah casually, as a tourist, I was familiar with the city’s grid-like layout, broken up every block or two by a lovely public square, all shaded by gnarled-limb liveoaks draped in Spanish moss, with brick sidewalks and lots of public benches and the occasional spurting fountain or Confederate statue. Street after street is filled with rows of Georgian and Edwardian mansions, all brick and wrought iron, brass and gas-light, containing fortunes in treasured antiques and populated by as strange a collection of American weirdos as can be found anywhere in the lower 48. The people of downtown Savannah are not normal: they all have twisted Gothic pasts, they all drink like alcoholic fish and their interest in the rest of the world does not extend very far past Forsythe Park on the city’s outskirts.

Still, it’s a wonderful city to wander through on foot, and eventually you get down to the waterfront, where the old cotton warehouses overlooking the steadily flowing green-gray water of the Savannah River—coming down from Augusta and flowing out past Tybee Point into the Atlantic—now contain tourist shops, shrimp restaurants, boutiques, crab cake restaurants, boozy country music bars, a hotel or two, and a long, cobblestoned boulevard where an unsuspecting or drunk tourist can easily turn an ankle.

The grid-like street design of the city was the brainchild of its founder, the British General James Edward Oglethorpe, whose concept for the colony of Georgia he founded was to provide a place for all the men stuck in debtor’s prison back in London to come start a cotton farm and become fabulously wealthy. Good idea, but a bit ahead of its time, so Gen. Oglethorpe went back to Britain and helped defeat Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Rising of the ‘45.

A hundred years later, Savannah managed to avoid the torch from General Sherman, at the end of his long march downstate from Atlanta, who, instead of burning the place down, begged Mr. Lincoln to allow him the honor of presenting him the city as a Christmas gift back in 1864. Once that bit of unpleasantness was out of the way, Savannah slowly drifted into sleepy backwaterdom, its citizens drank, screwed and intermarried each other and the city threatened to rot away in the hot Georgia sun until an urban renovation movement took hold in the 1970s and turned the city into the tourism mecca it is today.

At mid-morning I went out to look at the Savannah Golf Club on President Street, separated from the Savannah River by acres of shipping and container facilities. They claim the club was founded back in 1792, which would make it almost a hundred years older than what the USGA claims is the country’s oldest golf club (St. Andrews, Yonkers, New York, 1888). The place reeked of old money and the current golf course, which actually dates from 1899, looked flat and boring, except for all those nice liveoak trees with their gnarled limbs draped in Spanish moss.

I parked my rental car and wandered around the back of the elegant brick clubhouse. There were rows of glistening green carts set out waiting for members to come and play, overseen by an elderly gentleman with ebony skin and white hair, working at a stand shaded by an umbrella.

“Heard this place has some history to it,” I said when I walked up to him.

“Oh, yassuh,” he said, nodding and smiling. “Plenty o’ that ‘round these parts.”

“Is this where Bagger Vance was a caddie?”

He chuckled, low and deep from his throat.

“Now, don’t you go talkin’ ‘bout that piece of mess,” he said. “Them movie fellers don’ always tell you the truth straight up.”

“So Will Smith never worked here, huh?”

The man smiled at me, his teeth bared.

“They was one part of that movie, where Massa Smith was a sittin’ on the clubhouse steps sippin’ hisself some nice ice tea,” he said. “If’n he done that back in 19 and 31, he woulda found hisself hangin’ from yonder trees.” He nodded down the fairway. “True dat.”

“Never thought about that,” I said.

“Uh huh,” the man said, shaking his head sadly.

A car pulled to a stop in the nearby bag drop area, and my friend shuffled over to help them unload their clubs. I looked around at the opening and closing holes, lying empty in the hot morning sun. I took in a big breath of air. It smelled of sulfur. Not because of the history lesson I had just received. It was the smell from one of the big paper processing plants on the outskirts of town. ‘The Southern smell of money’ an old friend of mine had once described the odor found throughout the Lowcountry where pine trees are turned into newsprint, paper towels and toilet paper.

“Can I help you, sir?” came a voice behind me. I turned. The voice belonged to a pleasant-looking man, about 50, who looked like a golf professional. Maybe it was the well-pressed polyester sans-a-belt trousers or the Savannah Golf Club logoed shirt or the FootJoy spikeless teaching shoes in a nice two-tone saddle style. Or maybe it was the official plastic name tag pinned over his heart, which said “Clark.”

I stuck out my hand. “Hacker,” I said. “I’m with IBS. Doing a little historical research for this weekend’s telecast.”

“Welcome to the club, Mister Hacker,” Clark said. He looked behind me, toward the parking lot. “You come with a crew?”

“Nah,” I said. “Just me. Scouting some locations.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. But it sounded official.

Clark nodded. “Got just the thing,” he said. “C’mon.”

He jumped into one of the golf carts and motioned for me to join him. “Clark Vickers,” he said as we tooled silently away from the clubhouse and headed out onto the course. “I’m the head pro.”

The course was tree-lined and mostly flat. As we circled a few of the greens, I noticed they were mostly raised and table-topped, falling away in all directions.

“Looks like Donald Ross was here,” I said, referring to the famous Scottish-born architect who worked in golf’s first Golden Age, around the turn of the last century.

“Good eye,” the pro said. “He re-did this course around 1927. He did a lot of work here in Savannah.”

“Who laid the place out in 1792?”

He laughed. “I like to think it was General Oglethorpe himself,” he said. “But nobody remembers. Probably just some of the members filled with grog knocking their balls around a field.”

He pulled the cart into a woodsy copse between two holes. I could hear the traffic from busy President’s Street nearby.

He pointed. “You see that raised hump over there? How it extends a bit towards the south? “ I looked, and could make out the shape he was talking about, covered with some shrubs and a few medium size trees. “That was a Confederate earthworks line,” he said. “Just north of us was Fort Boggs, which had a pretty big artillery battery to guard the river approach from the east. The earthworks line extended down through here, hooked up at another fort to the south of us, and then circled back around to protect the southern flank of the city.”

“Guess it didn’t stop Sherman,” I said.

“Naw,” Clark said. “He came in from the southwest. He captured Fort McAllister down on the Ogeechee River in about fifteen minutes and that was about that. The Union navy was anchored offshore, waiting to sail in and start bombarding, and the Confederate generals decided to take their troops up into the Carolinas and live to fight another day. When the Union troops marched in, we offered everyone a Planter’s punch, it being Christmas and all. Sherman thought that was nice, so he decided not to burn the place to the ground, like he did in Atlanta. There are some very wealthy real estate agents in these parts who are very glad our city fathers rolled over. Saved ‘em a helluva lot of excellent downtown inventory.”

I laughed.

“I was talking with your cart man about Bagger Vance,” I said. “He didn’t seem to have too high of an opinion about the movie.”

“Oh, that film was interesting in its own way,” Clark said. “But historically speaking, total crap. It was a retelling of an ancient Hindu myth, and they actually did most of the filming up on Hilton Head.”

We got back in the cart and headed to the clubhouse.

“Now if you want some real historical figures, there’s Gene Sauers and Hollis Stacy,” he said. “Both from Savannah and both played their junior golf here at this club. Did fairly well on their respective tours.”

I jotted down the names. “I remember Gene,” I said. “I think he played before me in college.”

“Hollis won the women’s Open three times, which is pretty damn good, you ask me,” he said. “Came from a big family, ten kids. Her younger sister Martha won the Mid-Amateur, played in it for years and years. Pretty strong golfing family.”

He was silent for a moment as we zipped along the cart path.

“True story,” he said. “Back in those days, the club wouldn’t let kids out on the course on their own, except for certain times. So Hollis, Gene and the other kids would chip and putt a lot instead. When Hollis was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, she thanked the members of the club for giving her a great short game!”

I laughed. “Funny,” I said. “And good material.”

Vickers dropped me off at the clubhouse. We shook hands and I drove back into town. It was just after noon, but I took a chance on getting in to Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House on West Jones. People start lining up in the morning to have lunch at this place, where the seating and the service is all family style: you sit down at a large table with lots of other strangers and everyone passes around the food: barbecue pork, fried chicken, meatloaf, plus dishes of mac n’ cheese, candied yams, collard greens, butter beans, rice and gravy, pickled beets, cole slaw and more, all washed down by huge icy glasses of sweet tea.

I was lucky enough to get in with the last bunch of lunchers, and stuffed myself silly. The people who have lived in this town for generations now may be crazy as hell, but they do know how to eat well.

Once I was loaded up with Southern comfort food, I staggered my way back to the big hotel on the waterfront where we were staying, managed to hit the correct button on the elevator and fell into my bed for the rest of the afternoon.