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ONE OF THE SECRETS of being a successful sportswriter is knowing when to take advantage of the perks.
On the golf tour, they are plentiful. During the tournament itself, the organizers are charged with providing ample food and drink for us working wretches of the press box. In the morning, that means heaped trays of pastries and cauldrons of steaming hot coffee. The better tournaments will have fresh fruit sections on ice. In the afternoon, the cold buffet is set out: sandwich meats, cole slaw, chips, perhaps an insouciant pasta salad. Better tournaments add cold shrimp and crab legs on cracked ice. Coolers are kept filled with drinks soft and hard. Most of us are able to pocket our corporate per diems for food and still not worry about gaining weight.
They do not set out food for the press during the pro-ams, but we are usually invited to attend the evening banquets which conclude these festive days. Players are not required to attend the banquet part of the day, so tournament organizes encourage the press to show up and mingle with the well-imbibed amateurs. We rank as second-class thrills. Between bites at the buffet, we usually manage to get in a little mixing and mingling.
Tonight, the hors d’oeuvres had a definite Low Country seafood theme. Deep-fried crab cakes, popcorn shrimp with a coconut-flecked batter, oysters on the half-shell. Plus, platters of spicy buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing, and ubiquitous wieners in a sweet-and-sour sauce and chicken livers wrapped in bacon. I stuffed my face while half listening to a dentist from Greenville sputter happily about his pulled drives, missed two-footers, and a hellish greenside bunker that caught him on number seven. I tried to nod sympathetically in all the right places.
As I worked my way down the buffet, I ran into Woody Johnson, who was smacking his lips after slurping down an oyster. They announced the sit-down dinner in the adjoining banquet hall. Woody and I looked at each other. “Overdone prime rib or Scotch?” Woody asked.
“I’m full,” I answered and we headed for the bar.
The developers of golf resorts have the ingratiating habit of spending large amounts of dollars making their bars cute. They hire foppish decorators named Wilfred who usually get carried away with the golf theme. Carpets are often some garish deviation of a Scottish tartan. The walls contain the same half- dozen tired prints of Olde Golfers on the Olde Links. Drink stirrers are little plastic golf clubs. Worst of all are the names they insist on giving these places: the Tam-o-Shanter lounge, the Wee Dram Room, the Niblick Bar, the Spoon and Baffle.
The Bohicket Country Club’s bar was named the Out of Bounds, and the entrance was framed by two seven-foot tall white stakes. Cute, huh? Woody and I sighed as we entered. Inside, at least, the Out of Bounds was comfortably dark and smoky. The carpet might have been a tartan plaid, but it was too dark to tell for sure. Still, it felt like a real bar.
Over in the corner, a nice-looking lady was tinkling the ivories. It was early, so most of the booths along the back wall were empty. Jean MacGarrity was sitting at the bar, idly stirring a martini with an olive pierced on a wooden pick. I pulled Woody over and we took two stools next to her.
“Hello, Jean,” I said cheerily. “Seen any good golf lately?” She turned her head slowly to look at me. I could tell by the deliberate way her head rotated that this was not her first martini of the day. “Hacker, siddown, siddown,” she slurred. “Wanna drink?”
I didn’t tell her I was already sitting. Woody called the bartender over and ordered two Scotches on the rocks.
“Golf ?” Jean suddenly focused on my question. “Golf sucks,” she said emphatically. “You wanna know what the trouble with golf is? They’re so busy playing with their little white balls that they forget to grow their own. None of ‘em got any balls. Know what I mean?” She leaned over and almost fell off her stool, spilling a bit of martini on the polished bar.
Woody made a growling sound in the back of his throat, picked up his drink and walked off to go listen to the piano lady.
I took a sip of my cocktail and put the glass down carefully on the bar. “Jean,” I said, “Before I became one of America’s foremost golf journalists, I covered the police beat back in Boston. I wrote about murders and drug deals and prostitution rings and political corruption. My subject matter was the generally depraved state of the human condition. Every time you think you’ve seen the apparent world record in what one person can do to harm another, someone comes along and breaks it.”
She was teetering a little on her stool. But she seemed to be listening.
“But even in this great moral morass in which we find ourselves,” I continued, “We are given a chance of salvation. Grace, maybe. And that’s called free will, self-determination, gumption...whatever. We each have a choice to be happy, or to be miserable. Most of us seem to choose miserable, and I can’t figure out why, except that maybe being happy takes a bit more effort. And you can’t blame anyone else.”
She was staring at her martini glass, half-empty or half-full. “He’s married, you know,” I said, quietly. “Very married.” “No shit,” she muttered, and drained her glass. She motioned at the bartender for another. He raised his eyebrows at me. I nodded my okay. Free will and all that. He went to make the drink.
“Bobby Jones used to say that the game is all in the book before a ball is hit,” I told her, and I hoped to God she wouldn’t ask who Bobby Jones was. “We just go through life as if we were rehearsed, the plot written and decided a million years ago.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” she said blurrily. Apparently, her martini binge had affected her powers of reason and intellect. They would have put me flat on the floor.
“Time for a reality check, darlin’” I said. “The job you’re after is filled. All that’s left is president of the fan club. Interested?” She reddened and turned to look at me. I didn’t like the angry, boozy flash in her eyes.
“That son-of-a-bitch,” she growled. “Sanctimonious prick. Chicken-shit bastard. I could kill the motherfucker.”
“C’mon, Jean,” I chided her gently. “You think you’re the first one ever lied to and left on a string? There’s a million stories in that city, babe.”
“He didn’t lie to me, shithead,” she glared at me. “He told me we were just friends right from the get-go. I did everything but hang a sign around my neck saying “Will Screw for Nothing,” but nothin’ doin’ for ole Saint John.”
I had to laugh. “Well, you should be thankful he’s got principles,” I said. She looked at me questioningly. “He sleeps around with you, he probably would sleep around on you, too.” She groaned and put her head down on her long slender arms crossed atop the bar. “Spike it, Jean,” I said. “Put him down under ‘F’ for ‘friend’ and forget it.”
Her head still resting on her arms, she mumbled something. I didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like “kill the motherfucker.”
“Well go ahead and kill him then,” I said. “’Cause until he’s dead and buried in your head, you’re wasting your time.” I threw some bills down on the bar and left.
It was still early evening, but suddenly I was tired. And my stomach hurt. I tried to convince myself it was from too many shrimp and crab cakes. Outside, the air had suddenly cooled in the evening darkness. An ocean breeze rustled the palmetto palms and the timeless smells of the marshes, a smell that carries both life and death, ordure and birth, wafted through the air. The ceaseless tides do their work, day after day, night after night. Cleansing and killing. Carrying both nutrients and predators. An endless cycle, mindless and yet somehow divine.
In the distance, I could hear the pounding of the surf. It sounded angry tonight, not peaceful. The waves were landing on the beach with an unpleasant hollow thud slapping on the wet sand, the sound of a bill collector pounding on the door late at night, or the thud of a cop before he hollers “Open up...police!” I shivered in the night chill, but put it down to sensory overload.
Hacker’s advice to the lovelorn, I thought. Perfect. Blind leading the blind. The emotionally wrecked guiding others through the shoals of life. Perfect.
Back in my own dark and empty villa, I found the pastel-and- beach décor, designed to be of universal appeal, totally offensive.
I turned out all the lights, turned on the TV and spent a couple of mindless hours sitting in the dark before I fell asleep.