COUNTRY GOLF
I DON’T HAVE many friends who have done one thing so well that they’re famous for it and could sit on their laurels if they wanted to, although I do know a woman who can touch her nose with her tongue, which she is famous for among all the people who’ve seen her do it. She doesn’t do it often, because she doesn’t need to, having proved herself. I also know a man who wrote a forty-one-word palindrome, which is about as far as you can go in the field of writing that reads the same forwards and backwards. And I know Chet Atkins, who is enplaqued in the Country Music Hall of Fame, in Nashville, and has a warm, secure spot in the history of the guitar. My own accomplishments fall into the immense dim area of the briefly remarkable, such as the play I made on a hot grounder off the bat of my Uncle Don, for which I felt famous one day in 1957. I backhanded the ball cleanly at third base and threw the aging speedster out at first, which drew quite a bit of comment at the time, but that was long ago and plays have been made since that put mine in the shade. It was a hot July afternoon at Lake Minnetonka, and the Grace & Truth Bible camp had spent the morning in Deuteronomy, where I have no competence at all, and then I went out and made that great play. I was not quite fifteen and generally unaccomplished, so it meant a lot to me. The ball took a low bounce off the soft turf, and I had to pivot, get my glove down fast, then set my right foot to throw. The throw got him by a stride. If you had seen this, you would remember it.
I first met Chet Atkins in 1982, backstage at “A Prairie Home Companion.” He was standing just back of the back curtain, humming to himself, and reached down and picked up his guitar, like a man slipping into a shirt, and put his right foot up on a chair and fooled around with a string of tunes that came to him, including the one he’d been humming. Then we made conversation about various things, and he asked me if I played golf. I said, “A little.” Golf isn’t one of my good subjects. I don’t have good memories of it.
He mentioned golf again the next time I saw him, and the time after that, and he told me to come down to Nashville whenever I felt like playing some golf with him, and finally, on a Sunday morning toward the middle of May 1984, I flew down for a visit, though golf was the last thing on my mind. In my hands, golf is a grim, catastrophic game that makes me into someone I don’t want my friends to know—a person who, in fact, I already was when I got on the plane. There had been a sour smell in the air around me for weeks, from a hard winter of sitting in a small room and throwing wads of typing paper at a basket and missing, and I went South to get rid of it. Whenever I feel bad, Southern voices make me feel better, whether it’s Dolly Parton or Grandpa Jones or a waitress in a café. When she says “Hi! Haw yew?” I am immediately just fine.
I met Chet about midafternoon at his office on Music Row, down the street from the studio where he made most of his albums and where he produced albums for Willie and Waylon, Eddy Arnold, Porter Wagoner, and dozens of other laureates, and we headed south in his black Blazer to the golf course at Henry Horton State Park, forty-two miles from Nashville, where he was going to play in the annual Acuff-Rose Invitational on Monday and Tuesday. He said he had flown in that morning from doing two shows in Denver with a jazz guitarist named Johnny Smith. “You remember him. He had that big record of ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ back in the fifties.” Acuff-Rose is one of the big music-publishing firms in Nashville, the first in the country devoted to country music, founded in 1942 by Roy Acuff, of “Wabash Cannonball” fame, and the late Fred Rose, Hank Williams’ mentor. Chet said that the tournament was just for fun. He had played in it for twelve years. “People in the music industry play, and friends of theirs. They see somebody on the street, they invite him. Everybody’s played in it, from the chief of police on down. You could play.” I said no thanks. He was in a foursome, he said, with Billy Edd Wheeler, the songwriter, and a banker from Columbia named Smalley and his old friend Archie Campbell, the comedian. “Archie was the one who got me first playing golf, back in 1958 or 9. I saw how much fun he had, and I liked to be around him, so I started. I was too old to get good at it, though. You have to start young.” Chet was thirty-four or thirty-five at the time, and he’s sixty now.
He pointed out Waylon Jennings’ house, and Eddy Arnold’s, and Tom T. Hall’s studio as we drove along, and a church where a woman singer got married whose wedding he played for when he had an upset stomach and who was now divorced. He put a tape in the tape deck. “This is one Billy Edd wrote,” he said. A song called “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” He said, “You remember that record Archie made? ‘Trouble in the Amen Corner?’ ‘Old brother Ira, singing in the choir’? It was a real tearjerker, but it sold a lot, so RCA wanted to put out an album on him—of songs, you know—and we had Boudleaux and Felice Bryant go to work to write him some. They were sitting around writing all these sad songs about the old dog who died and that sort of thing, and finally Felice got sick of it. She said, ‘Let’s write something happy,’ so they wrote ‘Wish that I was on ol’ Rocky Top, down in the Tennessee hills’ and that was ‘Rocky Top.’ The Osborne Brothers recorded it, but Archie takes credit for it. He said to me once, ‘They’d never have written it without me, Cock. Without me, there’d be no “Rocky Top. ” ”’
This pleasant monologue in Chet’s soft, East Tennessee tenor took us out in the country down Interstate 65 and to the motel at Horton Park, and included so such more—about musicians and golf, and an old radio faith healer who put his fingers in deaf people’s ears and yelled at them to hear, and a squirrel Chet kept for a pet when he was a boy (“He made a nest in our old upright piano and wouldn’t come out, so I sat down and played the Lost Chord and he shot straight up in the air and we never saw him again”)—that when I finally climbed into bed that evening I had long forgotten what it was that I was feeling bad about when I got on the plane.
When I walked over to the clubhouse after breakfast, it was obvious that Tennessee had had a hard winter, too. Frost had killed most of the Bermuda grass on the greens, where the flags stood in circles of light-brown dust like the spot in the schoolyard where we played Fox and Geese, and the fairways looked worn and ratty for so early in the season. The woods were lush and dense, though, and the foliage of the golfers around the first tee was positively inspiring, their pants in particular. Pinks and yellows and oranges, a pair of peach and one of lilac, and an assortment of plaids such as I’ve seldom seen outside of the circus, including one that looked like a test for color blindness. They were such a brilliant, cheerful sight I felt sheepish about my quiet good taste in tans. It seemed stingy.
Chet arrived a few minutes later in a blue shirt and bright-green pants, and while he went in the clubhouse to sign up, I sidled up toward the crowd for a closer look. Men in clothes the colors of extravagant good humor strolled around behind the tee, pressing the flesh, putting their arms around each other’s shoulders and patting each other on the belly and saying, “You’re looking good.” Being a writer, I took out my checkbook and made some notes on who was there—songwriters such as Whitey Shafer (“That’s the Way Love Goes”) and Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart (“Tennessee Waltz,” both of them) and Wayne Carson (“Always on My Mind,” “She’s Actin’ Single, I’m Drinkin’ Doubles”), and singers Mickey Newbury and Del Reeves, and Buck Trent, the banjo player, and pianist Floyd Cramer—and kept occupied, writing “Sunny, air smells fresh and green” and “1st hole 345 yards” and “F. Cramer sliced into sand trap,” until Chet appeared at my elbow, and men came over to pat him, including a tall, lanky man named Howard, who said, “I appreciate you, Chet. I want you to know that. I love you.” When Chet introduced me to him, he patted me, too, and said I looked good, which was good news to me. Mickey Newbury told Chet he looked good, and they got to laughing about a man they knew named Walter who promoted a public barbecue by flying over in a plane and dropping a pig in a parachute (“Didn’t hurt the pig. Pig got up and walked away”), and about a golf hustler named Titanic Thompson. “He’d make bets with you about anything,” Chet said. “He’d bet you he could pitch cards under a door and into a hat. He’d bet you he could toss his door key into the lock. He’d bet fifty thousand dollars on the exact circumference of a rock a hundred feet away. Once he bet he could hit a golf ball a mile, and he did it. On Lake Michigan, after it froze over.”
Meanwhile, foursomes of all colors and shapes of golfers straggled one by one up to the business end of the tee, posed for an official tournament photograph, took hefty practice swings, looked down the fairway, and teed off, to the great amusement of the bunch behind them. “God! He hit it!” someone yelled after Pee Wee King chopped a sharp ground ball up the middle. “You look nervous, Wesley,” a frizzy-haired man called to Wesley Rose, the son of Fred Rose and president of Acuff-Rose, decked out in green. “You look like it’s royalties time.” And to a fat man: “You don’t need anybody to play with—you are a foursome.” A drive hooked into the woods. “For his next shot, a McCulloch chain saw!” An especially fluorescent pair of orange trousers appeared and bent down to tee up the ball. “His handicap is his pants!” said a man whose own pants resembled wallpaper in a cheap restaurant. “Where’d you get those? From the Highway Department?”
Chet introduced me to Archie Campbell, whom I recognized right away from watching “Hee Haw,” and Billy Edd Wheeler, whom I remembered for a song the first few lines of which I’ve sung hundreds of times to myself (“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. We been talkin’ ’bout Jackson ever since the fire went out. I’m goin’ to Jackson ... ”), and who looked a little flushed in the hot sun. He sported a lilac ensemble and a yellow visor on his thick sandy hair, which at the moment he was adjusting. Archie, an elegant, silver-haired gent in navy blue with a distinguished black mustache, was smoking a foot-long cigar. “Nicaraguan,” he said. I was admiring both of them, the man and the cigar, when Chet said that the fourth partner hadn’t shown up yet. “You play,” he said. “You can play out of my bag.”
“You look like a golfer,” said Archie. “Either that or your dog just died.”
It occurred to me to say that golf makes me feel bad, but it also occurred to me that I was feeling good enough to afford some misery and that if I begged off I’d feel bad about it later, so when Chet put a driver in my hand and two balls—a white one and a green one—and a white Acuff-Rose tournament hat, I put on the hat, and posed with my partners. “Smile. Look like you’re winners,” said the photographer. I teed up the white ball, and tried to think of grace and ease. I imagined the ball, its tiny engines revving up, wanting to fly, imagined a long, perfect shot, and—as a hush fell on the gallery of pants, who didn’t know me well enough to give me a hard time—swung hard and sent a high pop fly about where the first-base bleachers would have been. It hung up in the air long enough for me to see more of it than I wanted to, took a fifty-foot-high bounce off the parking lot, and landed in tall grass between the lot and the highway. A bad moment, like a major soup spill, but someone said “That’ll teach ’em not to bring their Cadillacs!” and though it wasn’t a great line, some of the pants laughed, and I teed up the green ball and drove it a respectable distance into the rough and walked down the fairway to play some golf.
Second chances are fundamental to their game, I found out, including my redemptive second drive and also forgiveness of a bad lie. “Everybody gets to walk his dog in hillbilly golf,” Billy Edd told me. “Walking the dog” means moving the ball out of the trees or off of hard dirt and teeing it up on a tuft of grass. He kicked his out of a little hollow.
Archie looked at his ball and said, “I believe I’ll walk this one.”
“That dog needs walking,” said Billy Edd.
My green relief ball stayed in the game the rest of the way. I shot a 7 on the first hole, a triple bogey, and went on to shank a few and top some others, which leaked off at weird angles and made my partners look away and say, “That’s all right. We all do that,” and spent time in the woods shooting trees (klok!), and once or twice I thought longingly of my typewriter, which when I type “golf” prints “golf,” and not “pgwft” or “xxxxx,” but I also made par on one hole, sank a twelve-foot putt, and hit a drive that I still remember. When Chet hit a great drive on the long third, he said, “That felt better than sex and almost as good as eating watermelon.” Mine on the dogleg fifth didn’t feel as good as that, but I did feel something smooth and synchronized that started in my head and in my hips and came together at the ball, and I looked up to see it fifty yards out and rising, sailing, a tiny green star lighting up the bright-blue sky.
“That’s a beauty. That’s a good layup, hoss. You’re going to love that,” said Billy Edd. “You know, I could learn to admire you if I just worked at it a little.” He set his ball down, squinted, hitched up his lilac pants, wiggled his seat, and uncorked a high one that drifted slowly to the right. “Whoa! Hold up! Draw!” he yelled, dancing to the left to pull it back in bounds. “Work! Stay! Stay! Thou art so fair! Stay!” And it worked, drew back, stayed, and fell fair, and rolled in the short grass in the shadows of the tree line. “I didn’t hit that as well as I thought I was going to,” he said. “But then I didn’t think I was going to.”
Then Archie. He tossed his ball in the air, caught it on the back of his hand, let it roll slowly down his arm, flipped it up, caught it, and set it on the tee. “Watch this lick here, boys—the old pro is about to perform,” he said. He puffed on the cigar, spat, gave us a big footlight smile, and adjusted the bill of his blue cap to the right to compensate for a slight hook on his previous drive. He addressed the ball with a sweet slow swing, but the cap adjustment was perhaps too much or else the weight of the Nicaraguan cigar was off center, because his drive headed woodsward.
“Over the hill to Grandpa’s!” said Billy Edd.
Archie yelled “Don’t you dare!” and the white dot hesitated, drew back, hung up short of a stand of pine, and fell into the dogleg’s knee.
“Look at that! I believe he made it. It’s a show, isn’t it!” Chet said.
“If you’da hit that perfect, it would’ve been even better,” said Billy Edd.
“All right, I’m going to get serious again now,” said Chet. He stood over the ball, bent, took a long, slow backswing, and socked it a little beyond Archie’s. “That’s the greatest shot I ever saw in my life!” he announced, and added, “But the wind was behind me. And, of course, I’m young.”
Chet had told me that he feels a little guilty when he plays well, knowing he’s probably playing too much golf and not enough guitar. “The way I’m playing today, though, I guess I must be a pretty good guitar player,” he said. Hiking down the fairway in the sunshine, he looked loose and tan and happy. Archie cruised by in his white cart, trailing a ribbon of fragrant cigar smoke, and when we all got to Archie’s ball Chet and Billy Edd had put their heads together and were singing a song:
Son-a-bitch, I’m tired of living this way,
Gawdamighty damn.
“Let me take the baritone, Chouster,” said Archie, and the three of them sang it. It sounded so good they sang it again. And once more. Archie pulled out a 4-iron. He walked his dog a few feet. “Don’t you ever play by our rules with somebody else,” he told me, grinning. “You might get shot.” That reminded Billy Edd of a story about a hillbilly golfer who walked onto a green and picked up all the dimes. “I remember the first time I ever went on tour, I was with another musician and I picked up the tip he left on the table,” Chet said. “I’d never seen anybody leave a tip before. I don’t know that I’d ever been in a restaurant before.”
Archie said, “You’ve heard that one about Roy Acuff when he was touring with the Smoky Mountain Boys—the one where they were supposed to stop and have supper at the lady’s house?”
I had never stood around in the middle of the fairway listening to jokes before. I kept glancing back at the tee, expecting to see angry golfers waving clubs at us, but nobody appeared. We were all by ourselves, four men standing in the hot sun and laughing. Eventually, Archie shot his second shot, and then Billy Edd. My arms were turning red and my neck, too. I rubbed on some lotion that made me smell like a ripe peach. I stood over my ball, hitched up to swing, and smelled Archie’s cigar. I laughed on the backswing, my knees caved in a fraction, and I lifted a chunk of sod like a flying toupee and lofted a high fly ball that landed just short of the pin. It wasn’t the play that Uncle Don’s grounder was, but if you had seen it you would have clapped. I felt awfully lucky. Even a blind dog gets a little meat from the smokehouse now and then, as someone said later, I forget who.
