That afternoon, I decided to trail around the golf course after Mary Beth Burke. She was playing a practice round with a younger player I didn’t know. “Burkey” was a favorite of mine. And a few million other fans. She came onto the LPGA scene a few years after Big Wyn had established her domination. Where Big Wyn played a stunning power game. Mary Beth had won our hearts for her pluckiness. Back in the day, she had reminded us of that mythical girl next door: small, tousled-haired, freckle-faced. She played the game with a ready, toothy grin and a never-say-die attitude.
There had been a handful of monumental, last-day battles between Mary Beth Burke and Big Wyn. Big Wyn slashing her furious drives and pounding long irons into tight pins. Mary Beth hanging tough, keeping her ball in play, draining those exciting no-brainers -- long putts that no one expects to make. It had been legend-making golf on the order of Palmer vs. Nicklaus or Hogan vs. Snead, mainly because neither rival was viewed by the public as the bad guy. Big Wyn’s style was power and dominance and was hugely admired by her fans. Burkey was all heart. With her happy grin and tousled hair combined with that inner determination to keep, by God, trying…well, you couldn’t ever root against her, either.
While Mary Beth was a few years younger than Big Wyn, her best golf, too, was probably behind her. She still played a fairly active tournament schedule, but I knew she was also spending more and more time teaching younger girls. I imagined she’d be good at teaching: never critical in a harsh way, always stressing the positive and always planting the seeds of her indomitable desire to do better.
Her hair was still tousled, but it had gone a bit gray in places. Her grin was still there and so were the freckles. I had interviewed Mary Beth the first time when she had won the U.S. Women’s Open and ran into her from time to time over the years.
I strolled out to the first tee where she and her playing partner were loosening up, waiting for the group ahead to clear the fairway. There weren’t many fans out to watch the practice rounds, so I walked right up and caught Mary Beth’s eye.
“Hacker!” she cried and came running over to the ropes, that incandescent grin lighting up her famous face. “Oh, it’s good to see you again! I heard that you were down here this week. What’s it been. Two years?”
I kissed her on the cheek and returned her hug. “At least that much,” I said. “They don’t let me out much anymore. Mind if I tag along for a few holes?”
“That’d be super!” she said. “As long as you promise not to write anything about my bad shots. There are too many of them these days.” She waved to the other golfer to come over. “Carol, c’mere. This is Pete Hacker from Boston. He’s a golf writer and a damn good one, too. Hacker, meet Carol Acorn. She’s been working with me lately.”
“Then she must be a damn good one, too,” I said. Carol and I shook hands. She was a rangy blond whose straight hair was pulled back in a pony tail and tucked behind her golf visor. She had the broad shoulders and long, tanned arms of a golfer. Her crisp white golf shorts emphasized her powerful legs. Her eyes were a clear, no-nonsense blue.
“C’mon, Carol, hon,” Burkey piped. “Let’s whack ‘em.” Mary Beth drove first, coiling her short but powerful form slowly, then releasing into the ball with a furious motion that sent the clubhead rocketing into the ball. To the sound of a resounding whack, her tee shot took off down the fairway straight and true. The other few fans and I applauded and were rewarded with the patented Mary Beth Burke grin and a soft wave of thanks.
Carol Acorn then took the tee. She stood behind her ball and focused those clear blue eyes at her target before stepping up to the ball. Once settled in over the ball, she paused again for several long moments, waggling once or twice and turning her head to look down the fairway twice. Her swing, as it unfolded slowly before me, looked technically correct, but I noted a few subtle twitches and a discernable stiffness in the motion. It did not look natural to me like Burkey’s time-honed swing. It was the golf swing of a robot, not a dancer. Programmed by computer, not inspired by the Muse. Uptight, not relaxed. Still, the result was fine, a long, high-arching drive down the middle. We applauded for her, too.
Mary Beth motioned for me to come inside the ropes and walk with her. Since it was practice and no one was around anyway, there was no problem. Between shots, we caught up on old times. Burkey told me she’d been divorced for a few years, but comfortably so. “Hell, poor old Benny was in a lose-lose situation,” she told me. “If he stayed back home in Texas, people would talk about him lettin’ his woman roam the world without her man. If he came out on tour with me, he became Mr. Mary Beth Burke. He spent a couple of years bein’ miserable until I finally told him it was time to do something else. It was like letting a man out of jail, Hacker,” she laughed. “We’re still the best of friends, now that the pressure’s off, and when I’m home in Odessa, we spend a lot of time together. Maybe in a couple more years, when I retire for good, we can try again. He’s a damn good man.”
“And you’re a hell of a woman,” I told her. She rewarded me with another hug.
Maybe it was just the pressure-free environment of a Tuesday practice round, nothing on the line, few fans around. Maybe it was the attention she was giving to her student as they played. Maybe it was the fun she was having talking to me about golf and golfers we both knew. Whatever, I certainly didn’t see any erosion in her golf skills that afternoon. Without even trying hard, she was playing a brilliant round. Never one with great length off the tee, she kept her ball in the fairway. Then she rifled crisp iron shots right at the pins. On the few occasions when she missed a green, her short game was flawless, getting her up and down out of bunkers and rough with ease. And her putting stroke seemed tuned in. Burkey was a player.
On the tenth fairway, we stood together and watched Carol Acorn prepare her seven-iron approach to a well-guarded green. Again, there was the deliberate pre-planning followed by the robotic swing. Again, the results were satisfactory, if not spectacular. Carol’s shot hit the green, but a good twenty-five feet from the pin.
“There’s a touch of stiffness in that swing,” I commented as we walked out of Carol’s earshot up to the green.
“Absolutely A-One correct, Hacker,” Mary Beth nodded. “The girl is a golfer. Knew that the minute I laid eyes on her. But I’m having a god-awful time trying to get her to let go and just swing the club. You’ve noticed that she hasn’t said one word to either of us yet. She’s wound up way too tight.”
It was true. Mary Beth and I had been chatting and joking between shots, carrying on a nonstop conversation. But Carol Acorn had kept to herself, speaking only briefly to her caddie and otherwise concentrating only on her golf game. Her eyes remained hidden in the shadows of her visor. Burke laughed. “Once, on the practice tee, I asked her what she was thinking before and during her swing. Y’know, we all usually have some kind of swing thought. Like ‘Smooth it,’ or “Slow back,’ or something like that?”
I murmured agreement.
“Well, this girl starts rattling off all the things she was trying to think about while she swung her golf club. I mean, she was telling herself not to cup her left wrist and to maintain the proper angles with her arms and to feel the clubface open going back and moving her left knee three inches to the right. My God!” Burke shook her head and laughed. “After fifteen minutes of this crap I almost took my driver out and smacked her with it! Good God Almighty…this game is hard enough without cluttering up your head with all that other shit!”
I laughed. “What was it that Bobby Jones used to say? If he was thinking about two things before every swing, he might shoot par. If he only had one swing thought going, he said he felt he always had a chance to win the tournament.”
“Damn right,” Burkey said. We reached the green. Carol’s ball was away. She began stalking her putt. First she crouched behind it for a long minute. Then she began walking in a 360-degree circle around the hole, studying the angles, the break, the grain. Then, back at the ball, she took about six practice strokes.
I heard Mary Beth audibly sigh. “Hey Carol,” she called out. We both looked over at her. Mary Beth cocked her head over, curled her fingers next to her ear as if she was grasping an imaginary drain plug and pulled, making a loud popping noise as she did. She held the drain plug open for a while, cocking her eyebrows at her student.
Carol Acorn and I both laughed, and understood the pantomime. ‘Empty your head,’ she was saying. This is only a practice round. Stop thinking and just do.
Carol backed away from her putt for a moment and then, still smiling, laid her putter behind the ball, took one brief peek at the hole and stroked the putt. It rolled, with that uncanny inerrant accuracy that well-struck putts always have, right into the heart of the hole. Mary Beth shouted “yeah!” and pumped the air with her fist. Carol laughed.
She also loosened up immeasurably after that and began to sharpen up her game. Her swing smoothed out and her shots began to land around the pins as if guided by radar. She even began to walk with an extra spring in her step, buoyant and confident. Mary Beth watched her student relax and play better and glowed with pride.
It was on the sixteenth hole that I accidently crossed her wires. The sixteenth on the White is a medium-length par-three over a large pond that fronts the green. The green is slightly raised and fronted by a low stone wall that rises out of the water. Deep bunkers cut into both sides, but in the back of the green, and down the entire left side along the pond’s edge, the greenskeeper had planted beds of flowers. The riot of colors softened the effect of the hole, reflecting off the still water of the black pond. But it was still a difficult shot to that narrow green, requiring about a five-iron.
Carol had just made a lovely birdie on the par-five fifteenth and I walked with her though a pine glade on the way to the sixteenth tee.
“Your game is looking better by the hole,” I said to her.
“Thanks, Mr. Hacker,” she said, a happy lilt to her voice. “Mary Beth is a wonderful teacher. When she can get me to relax, I always play much better.”
“How do you like the life of a professional?”
She blew out her breath in a whoosh. “It’s been quite an experience,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought college golf was tough, but this is an entirely different level. I’ve played in eight tournaments so far this year and thought I was playing pretty well. Missed the cut in four and my best finish is a tie for eighteenth! But the other girls have been real nice…encouraging, y’know? I’ve had a good time and I think I’m getting better every week.”
“Have you ever played a round with Big Wyn Stilwell?” I asked.
She reacted to my question as if I had slapped her full across the face. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me, her face drained of color. Her eyes went suddenly dark and cold.
“Wh-what did you say?” she asked, her tone dead. “Wh-what do you mean by that?”
Mary Beth, who had been trailing us by a few steps, came up and we both stared in amazement at the look in the girl’s eyes.
“I mean, have you played with Big Wyn yet in a tournament?” I said, more than a little perplexed. “Has she seen your swing yet?”
“No,” Carol snapped and abruptly walked on. Mary Beth cocked an eye at me in silent wonder and hurried to catch up with her protégé. To give them a moment, I wandered over to a water cooler and filled a paper cup.
Thanks to her birdie on the last hole, Carol teed off first. I could tell she was still upset about something. Her preshot routine was forgotten. She grabbed a club from her bag, teed her ball and took a quick, hurried swipe of a practice swing. Her quick, angry jab dug up a hefty divot. She took two more practice swings. Two more thick divots flew through the air.
“Hey honey,” Mary Beth cracked. “Leave a little turf for the rest of us.”
Carol didn’t respond. She looked at the hole, stepped up to her ball and swung. Along with her composure, Carol Acorn had also lost her golf swing. Her backswing was hurried and off plane. She never paused at the top, but rushed her downswing and tried to compensate for an incomplete backswing with a pulling move. On top of that, her hips were all out of rhythm with the rest of her body, and she ducked her head downwards at the last moment.
It was an ugly, ugly swing with an ugly, ugly result. The clubhead got hooded, moving from outside-in, and it jammed heavily into the turf. The ball flew sickly to the right at about a forty-five degree angle, carried at most about fifty yards and dropped into the pond with a sickening plop. It was the worst shank-swing of a twenty-eight handicapper, a twice-a-monther. It was the sort of golf shot that occurs almost daily at country clubs and municipal courses across the land, and almost never at a professional event. It was shocking.
There were maybe six people standing there watching. I heard one universal, sharp intake of breath. The two caddies stared at their feet. I didn’t know what to say. Mary Beth stared at her young student, unbelieving. I know she wanted to say something funny to break the tension, but she seemed to understand that humor wouldn’t work right here, right now. She was shocked into silence.
Carol held the pose of her finish and watched the ripples spread slowly out from the entry point of her ball. Those terrible, ever-widening circles that were indelible proof of a disasterously bad shot. Then, she slowly lowered her club, walked silently over to a bench at the side of the tee, sank down heavily on it, buried her face in her hands and began, silently, to weep. Her broad shoulders shook.
Mary Beth hurried over, knelt down, and began to comfort the girl in soft, whispered tones. Carol seemed unconsolable. She couldn’t talk as wave after wave of some deeply buried sadness came bursting forth. That it was all so silent was even worse.
I was stunned. And I felt terrible. Obviously, something I had said had triggered this. I followed Mary Beth to the girl’s side.
“Carol,” I began, “If I said something that upset you, I’m really sorry.”
Her head came up out of her hands for just a moment. I saw the red, angry splotches on her face. And I saw into her eyes. In that brief moment, I saw an unspeakable torment. Eyes from the Inferno. Eyes that revealed a terrible anguish and begged for relief from her private hell. But it was just for an instant, because she buried her head in her arms again, turning away in misery, another wave of silent, shoulder-shaking sobs overtaking her.
Mary Beth, who seemed as perplexed as I, waved me away. There was nothing I could do. “I’ll catch up with you later,” I told Mary Beth and turned away.
I felt awful as I trudged back to the clubhouse. I wondered what it had been that set the girl off so dramatically. Had the ugly brutality of that one bad shot been enough to send her over the edge? Did she take the game that seriously? Had our small talk upset her in some way. What had we been talking about?
Big Wyn. I had mentioned the name and she had received a psychic jolt. Big Wyn Stilwell. There must be something there, hanging between the two. Big Wyn and Carol. Something that would cause the gates of hell to open for the younger girl and let whatever demons she had inside come dancing out with the red-hot pitchforks and fiendish cackles and burning hot eyes and chase that girl’s mind down and down into a region of boiling cauldrons and steaming, unrelenting heat.