The next morning, Bo called me at half past seven to ask me if I wanted to play golf. The idea of golf was triggering for me. Even though I’d grown up in New Jersey, I’d never touched a golf club, the very institution of golf seemed inexplicably connected to the threatening idea of an unwelcoming, colorless East Coast establishment. The convoluted rules and etiquette appeared designed to trip up outsiders and those who didn’t grow up with the sport. The Asian American kids I grew up with tended to gravitate toward tennis, with its clean, mathematical lines and video game–like cadence; a tennis racket was basically a stringed instrument.
I told Bo that I’d never played before and didn’t want to slow him down. Unsurprisingly, he dismissed that thought immediately.
“Don’t worry, Michael! We’ll start with the simulator, my honor to be your instructor. Meet me at the Hong Kong Jockey Club around 9:00 A.M.”
It was disorienting to see the Jockey Club in broad daylight, and I shuddered walking past the rooms I recognized from the last time I was here. Sporting a hat that read SHANQIN BAY GOLF CLUB, Bo brought me up to the third floor, where the golf simulator was set up in a high-ceilinged, oak-paneled room.
Bo flipped a switch that dimmed the lights. The projector whirred to life. An immaculate green vista materialized before us on the slightly concave screen, which seemed to draw us inside of it. From the surround-sound system came the sound of birds and somewhere, inexplicably, a scent of fresh pine. Using his remote, Bo glided us in bodiless ghostlike perspective over the eighteen holes of the course. Something about the terrain struck me as aggravatingly familiar, and before I could ask Bo told me it was Pine Valley in New Jersey.
Of course—Pine Valley, one of the most exclusive golf clubs in the world, where the wait list was ten years long. The Pine Valley hat was a staple accessory in Princeton’s dining halls.
“First, we just try to hit the ball,” Bo said. He showed me the proper way to form a grip, demonstrated the basic principles of a swing, and invited me to step up to the tee. I thought it didn’t seem so hard. I squared up in front of the tee, wound back, and sent my club slicing through the air. I swung again twice, missing the ball both times, and felt my face turn red.
“Not as easy as it looks, huh! That’s just a beginner’s mistake, easy to correct. Watch.”
Bo grabbed the remote and showed me a slow-motion replay of my last swing. The problem, he explained, was that I was pushing up with my legs slightly before the point of impact and straightening out my torso, which raised the bottom of the swing arc above the ball. He stepped up to the tee and demonstrated how to keep the body position stable throughout the swing, then invited me to try again.
I swung again more than a dozen times, trying to imagine my lower body as being planted to the ground. Finally, the club connected and the ball made a satisfying thwack as it collided into the screen. The impact sent a fleeting ripple across the surface of the simulation; now the ball was flying, and us with it, until it reached a stopping point on a hill 219 yards from the hole. The platform beneath my feet tilted slightly to reflect the gradient of the hill I was now hitting off of. Bo had me swap out the driver for the two hybrid and started gesturing excitedly about how to stage the next swing. Unfortunately, the next shot that connected sent us face-down into a pond. No matter—we simply rewound the simulation and transmitted ourselves back to the exact same point. Bo replayed my swing in slow motion again and showed me how I had loosened my grip and changed the angle of the clubface at point of contact. I tried again about fifteen times; the tilt of the platform was challenging and messed with my mental model of how the swing should complete. Finally, I got the ball onto a flat surface thirty-three yards from the hole. We played around with the putters for a few minutes then called it a day.
After we finished at the simulator, Bo and I headed down to the restaurant for a late breakfast.
“Not bad at all for your first day, Michael, I think you have some talent. Now you must be persistent. I recommend practicing three or four times a week; come back to the Jockey Club anytime and give them my name to use the simulator. After a few weeks, you should be ready for the real thing. If you’d like, I can even have them set you up with an instructor.”
“This was fun. I’ll definitely come back,” I said. Why not? It was something to do.
“Golf is still the language of international business. Meeting on the golf course means friendship and mutual respect. One day you will play with important people, so you must start learning now. Here in China, we are behind. Mao banned the game in 1949, calling it a ‘sport for millionaires.’ Golf didn’t become legal again until 1984, when I was in college. Of course, back then I had no money and the game was only for Party elites. I didn’t get to play my first round until I was thirty-four, the year that I sold my manufacturing business in Shenzhen and moved my family to Beijing to look for the next challenge. I remember one day watching the 2003 Presidents Cup on TV and seeing George Bush Senior shake hands with a Korean golfer named K. J. Choi. I said to myself, one day I will also shake hands with the US president on the golf course. I quickly became addicted. I only wish I had the opportunity to learn sooner, that’s why I started my son as early as possible.”
For some reason, it wasn’t a stretch for me to imagine Bo at Pine Valley shaking hands with the president.
“I see. Is your son an avid golfer as well?”
“Yes, he loves the game. And very talented. He is captain of his school team at Beijing No. 4 High School and probably a top ten student golfer in the country. In my opinion, it would be a waste not to send him to the US to play for a college team. The problem is that the coaches in the US don’t take him seriously. They won’t talk to us, even when we send official results from national youth tournaments in China, they say they don’t know what this is.”
“The college sports recruiting process makes no sense anyways,” I said. Then I told him about the thirteenth graders.
At Princeton, a not insignificant portion of the student-athletes each year came in with not four, but five years of high school. The “PG year,” as it was called, was common practice for wealthy families to get their kids into Ivy League colleges by sending them off for a year at one of the elite New England boarding schools that have deep connections with college coaches and recruiters. Of course, the true star athletes had no need for this system, could get admitted with abysmal transcripts and test scores. But for those whose athletic talents were more borderline, it helped the coaches save face with admissions by rebranding the potential recruits with a prestigious and ostensibly rigorous academic experience. Bo listened with fascination and shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” he said, somewhat crestfallen.
After breakfast, Bo and I walked out of the Jockey Club together. On my walk back to my apartment, I thought some more about the thirteenth graders. My freshman year roommate, Chip, had been a lacrosse thirteenth grader at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and when he explained the system to me, I too reacted with disbelief. Until that point in my life I had believed in very little besides the absolute supremacy of meritocracy as a mental model for explaining the world, an illusion that Chip ruptured with the lacrosse stick he kept in our shared bedroom. Chip often spoke about his fifth year of high school like it was some sort of traumatic penal experience, stuck with heaps of homework and no beer in a dorm with thirteen-year-olds in freezing New Hampshire while his lax buddies from back home in Westchester County were already “rawdogging life” at Bucknell, Trinity, or wherever else they had gone. Only Chip had the strength of character to suffer for delayed gratification, which was now paying off richly. To my shock, Chip’s supplementary high school experience was seen by our classmates not as a mark of shame, but a sort of social distinction. Apparently the really embarrassing way of earning a place at Princeton was just by being a regular nerd. Chip ascended quickly, and was often gone on weekend trips I only found out about after the fact on Facebook. The worst part is, he also had shockingly good grades and was nice to everybody.
After I got back to my apartment, I found myself watching YouTube swing tutorials and reading articles on Golf Digest, trying to familiarize myself with the sport while also attempting to distance myself from the notion that on some subconscious level I craved Bo’s validation and wanted to impress him. Somewhat pathetic, I thought, given the very premise of our relationship was Bo tricking me into working for him by pretending to believe in me. Nonetheless, the fact that Bo was a serious golfer and wanted me to become one too showed he saw a trajectory for me, and if I’m being honest, this felt good. The problem, of course, was that the potential he saw in me had been based off trade secrets spoon-fed to me by the FBI. Which meant that when the time came for me to drop the cage over him, I would have to face his disappointment.