It was rapidly turning into one of those days. I was back in the newsroom at the Boston Journal the day after Labor Day, feeling as I did every September that time and the summer had passed all too quickly. Once, I felt awful after Labor Day because it meant I had to go back to school. Now I felt awful because it seemed everyone else was going back to school and I wasn’t.
A cold, early fall rain pelted against the ancient windows on the sixth floor just outside the city room. A summer’s worth of grime and grit had built up on the glass and the rain split into rivulets as it ran down the windows. I stared out at the urban vista of wet brick, boarded-up windows and overall gloom while the rain came down hard and Boston’s usually inspiring downtown skyscrapers drifted in and out of view in the wet white mist.
Part of my feelings of gloom could be laid to the fact that the golf season, for the most part, was over for the year. After the PGA Championship and one of the World Golf events, the golf season peters out. There were still tournaments scheduled every week until November, but they were not events worthy, in my editor’s eyes at least, of justifying the expense of my leaving this depressingly damp city to go cover. It was not a Ryder Cup year, so I didn’t have that biennial international madness on the schedule. In early November, the season-ending Tour Championship would dole out millions, but that was probably the only tournament left that I could get approval to attend. Mainly because my editor, the world’s largest jackass, had always wondered what it would be like to try and make a five-foot putt for a half-million bucks. “Jeez,” he’d say every year, “I’d never be able to pull the putter back for that kind of money.” I always resisted, so far anyway, the urge to tell him that if he took his overweight, under-exercised flabby body out on the first tee of a PGA Tour event, the stress would kill him dead in seconds.
No, after Labor Day, golf recedes into the background of American sports. There are still a few story lines: The handful of players trying to make it into the top-30 money list to qualify for that Tour Championship. But even that field is pretty much set by the end of August. Or the rush of the Tour’s wannabes and has-beens to make the top-120 money list for the year, so they can avoid going back to the Tour Qualifying School. That annual event is hardly a school, but a six-round do-or-die tournament that makes Chinese water torture seem like a refreshing soak in the hot tub.
The truth is that the fans of the golfing world, so attuned to the exploits and achievements of Tiger Woods and the ten or so pros who try to keep up with him, could care less if Hobie Millcot can somehow find the game to make a top-ten finish in the Texas Open and avoid going back to the Tour School for the sixth time in seven years. Hobie probably cares a lot, along with his wife, Mom and Dad and whoever is putting up the cash to keep him on Tour, but the rest of the world has trouble giving a rat’s behind.
I sighed, took another sip of the acidic black coffee in my Styrofoam cup and stared out the grimy window. My nine-month season of golf writing was about over. From now until Christmas, I would be doing fill-in duty. Sidebars on Boston College’s new ace quarterback, who couldn’t throw a neat spiral if they grafted Joe Montana’s arm on him. Personality features on the football coaches of the Yankee Conference (“Northeastern’s Hendrick ‘Spuds’ Deirdorff raises dinner-plate dahlia’s in the off season.”) Previews of hot new talent on the Bruins hockey squad. (“According to 18-year-old right winger Pierre LaChance, that PlayStation computer hockey game is ‘awesome, eh?’”)
I was contemplating prying open the window, probably for the first time in that window’s fifty years of existence, and dropping myself the six floors down to Dorchester Avenue, when I heard my name being bellowed.
“Hacker! Get in here!” The dulcet bark came from the office of my boss. I walked back down the hall towards the city room, bright with its rows of neon lighting, alive with the constant clang and clatter of telephones, reporters running back and forth, keyboards softly clicking as the staff of the Boston Journal cranked out yet another edition of the important news of the day to a waiting public of damp and unhappy citizens who didn’t, really, give a damn.
I turned into the last doorway on the left, home of executive sports editor Frank Donatello. His office overlooked the city room through an impressively large plate glass window, which helped block out most of the undercurrent of noise that enlivened the place. Frank’s office looked pretty much like every other newspaper editor’s office I had ever seen: an unmitigated disaster zone. The only unoccupied space was a small wooden folding chair in front of Frank’s desk. Every other usable square inch of space was covered with something: stacks of old newspapers, file folders spilling over with papers, printouts of stories ready for editing or ready to send back to the writer, pink telephone message slips, press kits, media books, dictionaries, telephone books, and Post-It notes. Growing out of this pile of stuff were Frank’s computer screen, his keyboard, a green-shaded desk lamp and his telephone, on which he was talking loudly as I walked in.
Frank’s appearance matched his office décor. He was fat and disheveled from his head to his feet. His face hung with thick jowls, which jiggled as he talked. His hair, thin, gray and greasy, was scattered atop his head in a style that was too chaotic to actually be termed a comb-over. His thick, bushy eyebrows fought for attention with his large ears, and the huge bulbous nose in the center of his face carried the evidence of many years of smoky, boozy late nights. He wore a short-sleeved blue dress shirt over a huge chest that expanded outwards as it disappeared below the desk line. Dark half moons of sweat had risen underneath his arms. He wore a loud necktie in a width that had been in style during the ’70s, with the knot loosened and pulled down to the second button. The collar was open, but still seemed to cinch against his thick and burly neck.
There was a waxy bag from Dunkin’ Donuts on top of the stack of papers on his desk, and an ashtray next to the telephone was filled with crushed butts, save for the one which sent a thin trickle of sickly gray smoke up into the air, in weak defiance of the Journal’s prohibition on smoking in the building. Frank Donatello had apparently been grandfathered in for most of the company’s new politically correct rules and regulations.
Frank ended his conversation and slapped the phone down. He took a final drag on his cigarette and tamped it out. With a smooth and practiced motion, he tapped out a new one from the crumpled pack on his desk and lit it.
“I believe the official smoking area is outside near the parking lot,” I told him helpfully.
He wagged his bushy eyebrows at me. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s raining,” he growled at me. “Put that in your official pipe and smoke it.” I just shrugged. I figured the more he smoked, the quicker he might die and get off my back.
“Hacker,” he said. “You like kids.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. I said nothing. But I didn’t like the sound of this. At all.
“We got a deal with the local J-schools,” he went on, waving his cigarette in little circles over his head. “Every term, they send over a half dozen kids who wanna spend a few weeks watchin’ what we do, working on small stuff … you know …”
“Interns,” I said, glaring at him. I really didn’t like where this conversation was headed.
“Whatever,” he waved his smoke at me again. “So, Human Resources got this one kid wants to be in sports. God knows why. Need to set him up with someone who can show him the ropes, y’know?” He took a drag on his butt and chased it with a bite from a jelly donut and a swig of cold coffee.
“I want you to do it,” he finally said.
“No.”
“Won’t be that bad…maybe a couple hours every other afternoon.”
“No.”
“Might get to like it, y’know? Like Big Brother or something. Bond with him.”
“No.”
“I ain’t askin’. I’m tellin’ ya.”
So I did what any mature adult would have done in my situation. I stood up, called Frank a few unprintable names, and went back to my desk to sulk.
The gloom of the day had finally and officially hit home. Bad weather, end of the golf season and now I had some snot-nosed college kid to babysit. I thought about calling my friend at Sports Illustrated to see if they had any job openings, but, as was always the case when I contemplated bolting for the big city, I quickly came to my senses.
Just in case, I flipped open my PGA Tour media guide to see where the boys were playing this weekend. The B.C. Open. I sighed again. Of all the places in the world I didn’t want to go — and with all that was coming down on me I would have gone anywhere — the B.C. Open in Endicott, New York was probably at the top of the list.
First of all, there is no there, there. Endicott is upstate and outstate New York, and about as far away as one can get without leaving the country. Between Owego and Johnson City and just down the road from East Boondocks, Endicott sits alongside the Susquehanna River, about eight million miles from anywhere.
Why the PGA Tour elects to hold a golf tournament there with all the Orlandos and Las Vegas’s and Los Angeles’s to choose from is one of life’s eternal mysteries. The En-Joie Golf Club, where the tournament is held, is not listed among the top courses anywhere, for any reason. It was originally built for the workers of the Endicott Johnson Shoe Company, the only horse in that one-horse town. When the shoe business went bad, the company sold the course to the town of Endicott. Money or some pretty detailed sexual photos of the commissioner of golf must have changed hands at some point along the line, is all I could ever figure, because the PGA Tour comes in every year. The tournament, now called the B.C. Open, is named after that prehistoric comic strip, yet another unusual distinguishing characteristic for a golf tournament on a Tour otherwise supported by multinational companies like Mercedes-Benz, Shell Oil, and American Express.
Most of my fellow golf writers, none of whom have ever covered the tournament on purpose more than once in their lives, agree that the tournament’s sponsor is appropriate: the place is a joke. There’s nothing to do out there in East Boondocks. Because of the lateness of the season, most of the marquee players have gone home to watch college football and practice a little for the Tour Championship. So the tournament frequently comes down to a close battle between the 68th and the 101st leading money winners, about whom nobody in the world of sports much cares. The only semi-interesting event of the entire week is the annual caddie tournament, when the loopers get to play and the players carry their bags. Fun, yes, but hardly the stuff of which daily newspapers are made.
In addition, there’s just one hotel in town, and it’s always booked solid with players and Tour officials. And it contains the only halfway decent restaurant within 30 miles. So everyone else scrambles for places to stay. The nice folks of Endicott try to help by offering spare bedrooms. But the one year I went, I ended up staying at the home of a single gentleman of late middle age who kept me up until two in the morning explaining to me in a cold dead monotone how it was that the U.S. Supreme Court had secretly converted all the Congress to Judaism and were awaiting just the right time to have the President and all the governors executed and bring in the Knesset. Or something like that. It was the most frightened I have ever been, and I have followed Boston PD SWAT teams into drug lords’ rat-infested tenements. I nodded politely through the guy’s monologue, finally interrupting him to tell him I had to get some sleep, and barricading myself in my tiny attic room for the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep a wink, and bolted out of there at first light, never to return.
I was musing on these and other charms of Endicott, New York, when a shadow fell across my desk. I looked up.
The kid standing there was tall and thin, with stringy, slightly greasy black hair spilling down over his forehead. He wore rimless glasses, a good case of acne and an attitude of sheer fright. He was dressed in light khakis, a solid brown sport shirt and a necktie underneath a high school letter jacket. He was a bit damp from the rain, and was hopping from one foot to the other as if in imminent need of the men’s room.
I stared at him wordlessly.
“Uh, they said you were Mr. Hacker?” the kid said, his voice thin and nervous.
I continued to stare.
The kid’s face turned red. “Uh, well, my name’s Zec? … Tony Zec? … And I go to Northeastern? And I’m supposed to, like, you know … intern here?”
He kept putting question marks at the end of his sentences, waiting for me to gasp in recognition, jump joyfully to my feet and embrace him into the brotherhood of journalism. Which I didn’t do. Hell, nobody embraced me into the brotherhood of journalism when I was a young punk.
I swiveled around in my chair to see Frank Donatello staring at me balefully through his plate glass window at the end of the room. Tony Zec started hopping from one foot to the other again.
“Sit down, kid,” I growled at him, pointing to the chair next to my desk. He practically leapt into the chair in relief and looked at me with the air of an expectant puppy. His eyes were round and wide behind those round, rimless frames. I think if I had said “Go jump out the window over there” he would have obeyed, instantly, gratefully and completely.
But I didn’t. “What kind of name is ‘Zec?’” I asked him. I knew it was politically incorrect and probably illegal to inquire about the kid’s ethnic background, but after all, this is Boston, where one’s family and religion pretty much determine one’s position in the pecking order. I wouldn’t have asked if his name was O’Malley, Pagliacci or even Cabot Lodge. But I’d never met a Zec before and I was curious.
“Armenian,” he said. “I think it was longer back in Yerevan. I live in Somerville.” It was the town next to Cambridge where I knew there was something of an Armenian enclave. Armenian-American enclave, I mean.
“You ever written anything?” I asked.
“Oh, yessir,” he barked happily, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a thin manila file folder, which he handed to me. My telephone rang as I opened the folder and extracted a thin stack of about ten clippings from the college newspaper. The first two were stuck together, with what substance I dared not imagine.
“Yo,” I said into the phone.
“Hack-hack-hack-Man!” sang a cheerful and instantly recognizable voice into my ear. Unconsciously, I broke into a wide grin.
“Jack-Off,” I replied. “What’s goin’ on?”
The caller was my longtime friend, former college golf teammate and occasional drinking buddy, Jack Connolly. “Got any extra tickets to the Red Sox tonight?” he asked.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s raining cats and dogs,” I reminded him. “Besides, don’t you own a skybox at Fenway?”
“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “I guess I do.”
That was Jack Connolly. One of the richest people I knew, Connolly was the publisher and sole owner of the Lowell Citizen, “The Oldest Newspaper in the Merrimack Valley,” as the front-page logo proudly proclaimed. That was probably the only positive thing one could say about the paper. Let’s just say the Lowell Citizen was not an odds-on favorite to win a Pulitzer Prize anytime soon. But it was also the only newspaper in a medium-sized town and, as such, a license to print money for its owner, Jack Connolly. After we had partied our way through college, I went out on Tour while Jack had gone home to Lowell where he found gainful employment at the publishing company long owned by his family, where they had to take him in. He had planned to work as little as humanly possible while drinking, screwing around and generally goofing off as much as possible until his father threw a monkey wrench into Jack’s career plans by unceremoniously pitching over dead from a massive heart attack. It was quite a shock when the lawyers informed Jack that his father had left the whole shooting match to his one and only son. There had been an uncle with a minority interest, but Jack quickly bought him out and took full control of the company. His next move was to sell the newspaper’s ancient downtown Lowell building and build a brand new and modern printing plant on the outskirts of town. Jack’s new presses spent only a small time every night printing the Citizen. Otherwise, they were busy three shifts a day cranking out brochures, annual reports, fliers, magazines and anything else that needed ink applied to paper.
The newspaper bumped along at break-even, but Jack didn’t care too much about its profit statements. The printing operation made millions. Jack used those profits to buy some radio stations, a couple cable-TV outlets, some small suburban weeklies and then, as the head of a mini-media empire in the Merrimack Valley, he returned to his original career plan. He turned all the operations over to loyal subordinates and began to travel around the world. I’d get postcards and post-midnight phone calls from the strangest places: British Guyana, the Canary Islands, North Efate. Jack loved the life of the international playboy, and I’d see his name in the paper now and then mentioning his exploits with some European countess or a Hollywood starlet. He did pretty much want he wanted to do, and didn’t care a fig about money. Which is why he could forget he owned one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in New England: an air conditioned, glassed-in, skybox suite at Fenway Park.
“Aren’t you tired yet of being filthy rich?” I needled him. “Why not sell everything, donate it to the poor and come work with me?”
Connolly laughed. He loved to laugh. “Up yours, Hacker,” he said. “Listen, I need your help.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just loaned my last million to the Russians.”
He laughed again. “No, really,” he said. “This weekend is the member-guest at Shuttlecock and I need you to be my partner.”
“Whatsamatter, Nicklaus couldn’t make it?”
He chuckled. “No, don’t be offended, but I first asked a buddy of mine from Tokyo to fly over. I thought I might be interesting to watch the dynamic between the bigoted Irish-Yankee establishment and the new economy from the Orient.”
That was like Jack Connolly too. Although his own family had struggled its way up the social ladder and ended up quite wealthy and solidly ensconced in what passed for the establishment in the small pond of Lowell, he never failed to try and tweak the comfortable class. Perhaps his eccentricities and strange behavior were the way he dealt with the inner struggle he felt in being one of the upper crust he professed to despise.
“But Tagaki couldn’t come – his bank’s in the toilet. So I thought of you,” Jack continued. “I figure, let’s bring in a ringer like Hack-Man, keep an ample supply of booze at hand and just have a blast. Whaddya say?”
It sounded great to me. Spending time with Jack Connolly, even though it usually resulted in a nuclear hangover, had never failed to be anything less than a laff riot. Furthermore, the prospects of playing a few rounds of golf at the Shuttlecock Club whet my appetite. Shuttlecock is one of those hidden gems, a course not famous for anything nor the site of any history-rich tournament, but simply a good, honest test of golf. The course is not overly long, nor particularly difficult, but it’s challenging in a great many subtle ways. Like many courses in and around Boston, it was the work of the peripatetic turn-of-the-century architect, Donald Ross, who never lets the golfer know he’s getting into trouble until he’s already there. Shuttlecock had all the elements of the master’s work: long par 3s, short 4s that seemed easy until the tiny crowned greens rejected an approach; and at least one Redan hole, with bunkers marching diagonally across the fairway. I began to play the holes in my head until I remembered Tony Zec sitting next to me, waiting expectantly for something to do. Dammit.
“When do you need to know?” I asked Jack.
“Cripes, Hacker …yesterday!” he replied. “I had to slip the pro a coupla hundred just to let us in; they cut off registration weeks ago. So … are you in or are you in?”
I drummed my fingers on the desk, thinking hard. Glancing down, I saw the PGA Tour media guide, still open to the page on the B.C. Open.
“Hang on,” I said to Jack.
“Zec!” I barked, making the kid jump. He sat bolt upright.
“Yess-sir?”
“You got a car that works?”
"Yess-sir?”
“You know anything about golf?”
“Uh-a little, I think.”
“Can you keep your mouth shut?”
“I-I think so.”
“Jack?” I said into the phone. “I’m in.”
“Far freakin’ out, Hack-Man!” Jack yelled. “Meet me up at the club on Thursday for lunch and a practice round.”
“Got it.”
I put the phone down and turned to face Zec. “OK, we got work to do,” I said, wagging a finger at him and enjoying the startled look on his face. “What you are about to hear and do is between you and me. You will not repeat any of this to anyone, or not only will I make sure you flunk out of Journalism 101, but I will arrange to have the interior line of the Patriots come beat the snot out of you. Is that clear?”
He couldn’t talk. His throat had tightened up. All he could do was nod, once.
I got busy.
First I called Suzy Chapman, the PGA Tour’s ever-efficient assistant press secretary, who was already in the newly set up press room at the En-Joie Country Club. I told Suzy I was sending a college intern up to do some golf pieces and interviews, and she promised to look out for him for me and try to find him a safe place to stay.
“Is he good looking for a college man?” Suzy asked, with a slight wistful tone in her voice that said she knew the pickings of non-scary men in Endicott, New York that weekend were going to be scarce.
I looked over at Tony Zec, whose greasy hair had fallen even further over his eyes, and whose acne-covered face had turned even redder since he first walked in.
“He’s a dreamboat,” I told Suzy and hung up.
Next, I called down to accounting and had them send up $250 from petty cash, which was the most I could get without Frank’s approval. They sent the money up in an envelope with a runner. Is this a great country, or what?
I gave Zec the money. “This is for gasoline, food and incidentals,” I told him. “Keep track of it and bring me back a receipt for everything including toilet paper. If you play your cards right, it won’t cost you much to eat. The pressroom will have free breakfast and lunch every day, and you can usually find some party to go to at night with pretty good eats. At your age, we won’t worry about cholesterol.
“Don’t play cards with the caddies—they’ll skin you alive. If you go out drinking, and you should, don’t flash your wad at any bimbo dressed in a black mini with thigh-length leather boots. OK? I do not want to be driving to Endicott, New York this weekend to bail your ass out of jail.”
His head was bouncing up and down rapidly.
I tossed him some reporters’ notebooks, the tall skinny kind that fit perfectly into your hip pocket, and a handful of Flair pens that are newsroom standard issue. I fished around in my desk drawer to find the embossed press card I hadn’t used in years, and handed it to him.
Then I told him what I wanted. Story a day. Tournament updates. Personality profiles on local players. Maybe a feature on the caddie tournament. Whatever. I wanted the kid out of my hair and busy for the entire weekend, so I loaded him up with assignments. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that none would see the light of day in the newspaper, since the sports desk, if they found space for the B.C. Open anywhere in the section, would just grab a couple graphs from the AP wire. He didn’t need to know this. He was just trying not to pee himself in excitement.
He wrote down his assignments, my cell phone number, and the telephone number for Suzy Chapman. I got him directions to the golf course, about a six-hour drive from Boston. Then I looked up the number for the clubhouse phone at the Shuttlecock Club and told him to call me there or on my cell phone every afternoon at 6 p.m. for an update.
“Go home, pack some clothes and get going,” I finished. “You want to get there a day early and get the lay of the land. Just watch what the other guys do and sort of follow their lead. Find Suzy if you run into trouble. Got it?”
“Yes-SIR!” There was no question mark this time. I looked up in surprise and saw the excited spark in his eyes. His shoulders and spine had straightened up. The kid was into it.
“OK. And remember…this is between you and me. Nobody else. You pull this off and you get an A-plus from me,” I told him.
We walked out of the newsroom together. As we passed in front of Frank Donatello’s window, he looked up at us, frowning, with the phone screwed into his ear. I smiled and put my arm affectionately around Tony Zec’s shoulders, and gave Frankie a little wave. His frown deepened.