Fancy Pants (5 page)
The New World
Chapter 3
Dallas Fremont Beaudine once told a reporter fromChapter 3
Sports Illustrated
that the difference between pro golfers and other big-time
athletes was
mainly that golfers didn't spit. Not unless they were from Texas,
anyway, in which case they pretty much did any damn-fool thing they
pleased.
Golf Texas-style was one of Dallie Beaudine's favorite topics. Whenever
the subject came up, he would shove one hand through his blond hair,
stick a wad of Double Bubble in his mouth, and say, "We're talking real
Texas golf, you understand . .. not this fancy PGA shit. Real down and
dirty, punch that sucker ball upwind through a cyclone and nail it six
inches from the pin on a burned-out public course built right next to
the interstate. And it doesn't count unless you do it with a beat-up
five iron you dug out of the junkyard when you were a kid and keep
around just 'cause it makes you feel good to look at it."
By the fall of 1974 Dallie Beaudine had made a name for himself with
sportswriters as the athlete who was going to introduce a welcome
breath of fresh air into the stuffy world of professional golf. His
quotes were colorful, and his extraordinary Texan good looks spruced up
their magazine covers. Unfortunately, Dallie had a bad habit of getting
himself suspended for cussing out officials or placing side bets with
undesirables, so he wasn't always around when things got slow
in the press tent. Still, all a reporter had
to do to find him was ask
the locals for the name of the seediest country-western bar in the
county, and nine times out often Dallie would be there along with his
caddy, Clarence "Skeet" Cooper, and three or four former prom queens
who'd managed to slip away from their husbands for the evening.
"Sonny and Cher's marriage is in trouble for sure," Skeet Cooper said,
studying a copy of
People
magazine in the light spilling from the open
glove compartment. He looked over at Dallie, who was
driving with one
hand on the steering wheel of his Buick Riviera and the other cradling
a Styro-foam coffee cup. "Yessirree," Skeet went on. "You ask me,
little Chastity Bono's gonna have herself a stepdaddy soon."
"How you figure?" Dallie wasn't really interested, but the flickering
of the occasional pair of oncoming headlights and the hypnotic rhythm
of I-95's broken white line were putting him to sleep, and they still
weren't all that close to the Florida state line. Glancing at the
illuminated dial of the clock on the dashboard of the Buick, he saw
that it was almost four-thirty. He had three hours before he had to tee
off for the qualifying round of the Orange Blossom Open. That would
barely give him time to take a shower and pop a couple of pills to wake
himself up. He thought of the Bear, who was probably already in
Jacksonville, sound asleep in the best suite Mr. Marriott had to offer.
Skeet tossed People in the back seat and picked up a copy of the
National Enquirer.
"Cher's
startin' to talk about how much she respects
Sonny in her interviews—that's how I figure they'll be splittin' up
soon. You know as well as I do, whenever a woman starts talkin' about
'respect,' a man better get
hisself a good lawyer."
Dallie laughed and then yawned.
"Shoot, Dallie," Skeet protested, as he watched the speedometer inch
its way from seventy-five to eighty. "Why don't you crawl in the back
and get some sleep? Let me drive for a while."
"If I fall asleep now, I won't wake up till next Sunday, and I have to
qualify for this sucker, especially after today."
They had just come from the final round of the Southern Open, where
Dallie had shot a disastrous 79, which was seven strokes over his
scoring average and a number he had no intention of duplicating. "I
don't suppose you got a copy of
Golf
Digest
mixed in with all that
crap," he asked.
"You know I never read that stuff." Skeet turned to page two of the
Enquirer. "You want to hear about Jackie Kennedy or Burt Reynolds?"
Dallie groaned, then fumbled with the dial of the radio. Although he
was a rock-and-roll man himself, for Skeet's benefit he tried to pick
up a country-western station that was still on the air. The best he
could get was Kris Kristofferson, who'd sold himself out to Hollywood,
so he put on the news instead.
". . . Sixties radical leader, Gerry Jaffe, was acquitted today of all
charges after having been involved in a demonstration at Nevada's
Nellis Air Force Base. According to federal authorities, Jaffe, who
first gained notoriety during the riots at the 1968 Democratic
Convention in Chicago, has recently turned his attention to
anti-nuclear activities. One of a dwindling group of sixties radicals
still involved in activist causes . . ."
Dallie had no interest in old hippies, and he flipped off the knob in
disgust. Then he yawned again. "Do you think if you try real hard you
could sound out the words in that book I got shoved under the seat?"
Skeet reached over and pulled out a paperback copy of Joseph Heller's
Catch-22,
then set it aside.
"I looked at this one a couple of days ago
when you was out with that little brunette, the one who kept calling
you Mister Beaudine. Damn book don't make sense." Skeet flipped the
Enquirer
closed. "Just out of
curiosity. Did she call you Mister
Beaudine once you was back at the motel?"
Dallie popped a piece of Double Bubble in his mouth. "As soon as she
got her dress off, she mostly kept quiet."
Skeet chuckled, but the change of expression didn't do much to improve
his appearance. Depending on your viewpoint, Clarence "Skeet" Cooper
had been blessed or cursed with a face that made him pretty much a dead
ringer for Jack Palance. He had the same menacing, ugly-handsome
features, the same pressed-over nose and small, slit eyes. His
hair was dark, prematurely threaded with gray, and worn so long he had
to tie it in a ponytail with a rubber band when he caddied for Dallie.
At other times he just
let it hang to his shoulders, keeping it away
from his face with a red bandanna headband like his real
idol who
wasn't Palance at all but Willie Nelson, the greatest outlaw in Austin,
Texas.
At thirty-five, Skeet was ten years older than Dallie. He was an ex-con
who'd served time for armed robbery and come out of the experience
determined not to repeat it. Quiet around those he didn't know, wary of
anyone who wore a business suit, he was immensely loyal to the people
he loved, and the
person he loved most was Dallas Beaudine.
Dallie had found Skeet passed out on the bathroom floor in a run-down
Texaco station on U.S. 180 outside Caddo, Texas. Dallie was fifteen
years old at the time, a gangly six-footer dressed in a torn
T-shirt
and a pair of dirty jeans that showed too much ankle. He also displayed
a black eye, skinned knuckles, and a jaw swollen twice its normal size
from a brutal altercation that would prove to be the
final one with his
daddy, Jaycee Beaudine.
Skeet still remembered peering up at Dallie from the dirty bathroom
floor and trying hard to focus. Despite his battered face, the boy
standing inside the bathroom door was just about the best-looking kid
he'd ever seen. He had a shock of dishwater blond hair, bright blue
eyes surrounded by thick, paintbrush lashes, and a mouth that looked
like it belonged on a two-hundred-dollar whore. As Skeet's head
cleared, he also noticed the tear streaks etched in the dirt on the
boy's young cheeks as well as the surly, belligerent expression on the
kid's face that dared him to make something of it.
Stumbling to his feet, Skeet splashed some water in his own face. "This
bathroom's already occupied, sonny."
The kid stuck a thumb in the ragged pocket of his jeans and thrust out
his swollen jaw. "Yeah, it's occupied all right. By a stinkin' piece of
no-good dog shit."
Skeet, with his slitted eyes and Jack Palance face, wasn't used to
having a grown man challenge him, much less a kid not old
enough to have much more than a weekly date with a razor. "You lookin'
for trouble, boy?"
"I already found trouble, so I guess a little more won't much hurt me."
Skeet rinsed out his mouth then spit into the basin. "You're about the
stupidest kid I ever seen in my life," he muttered.
"Yeah, well you don't look like you're too smart, either, Dog Shit."
Skeet didn't lose his temper easily, but he'd been on a bender that had
lasted nearly two weeks, and he wasn't in the best of moods.
Straightening up, he pulled back his fist and took two unsteady steps
forward, determined to add to the damage already done by Jaycee
Beaudine. The kid braced himself,
but before Skeet could strike, the
rotgut whiskey he'd been drinking got the best of him and he felt the
dirty concrete floor give way beneath his wobbly knees.
When he woke up, he found himself in the back seat of a '56 Studebaker
with a bad muffler. The kid
was at the wheel, heading west on U.S. 180,
driving with one hand on the wheel and the other hanging from the
window, beating out the rhythm of "Surf City" on the side of the car
with his palm.
"You kidnappin' me, boy?" he growled, pulling himself up on the back of
the seat.
"The guy pumpin' super at the Texaco was getting ready to call the cops
on you. Since you didn't seem
to have a legitimate means of
transportation, I couldn't do much else but bring you along."
Skeet thought about that for a few minutes and then said, "Name's
Cooper. Skeet Cooper."
"Dallas Beaudine. Folks call me Dallie."
"You old enough to be drivin' this car legal?"
Dallie shrugged. "I stole the car from my old man and I'm fifteen. You
want me to let you out?"
Skeet thought about his parole officer, who was guaranteed certain to
frown on just exactly this kind of thing, and then looked at the feisty
kid driving down the sun-baked Texas road like he owned the mineral
rights underneath it.
Making up his mind, Skeet leaned back against the seat and closed his
eyes. "Guess I might stick around for a few more miles," he said.
Ten years later, he was still around.
Skeet looked over at Dallie sitting behind the wheel of the '73 Buick
he now drove and wondered how all those years had flown by so quickly.
They'd played a lot of golf courses since the day they'd met at the
Texaco station. He chuckled softly to himself as he remembered the
first golf course.
The two of them hadn't traveled for more than a few hours that first
day when it became evident that they didn't have much more than the
price of a full tank of gas between them. However, fleeing the
wrath of
Jaycee Beaudine hadn't made Dallie forget to toss a few battered clubs
into the trunk before
he hotfooted it out of Houston, so he began
looking around for signs that would lead them to the next country club.
As he turned into a tree-lined drive, Skeet glanced over at him. "Does
it occur to you that we don't
exactly look like country club material,
what with this stolen Studebaker and your busted-up face?"
Dallie's swollen mouth twisted in a cocky grin. "That kind of stuff
don't count for shit when you can hit
a five-iron two hundred twenty
yards into the wind and land the ball on a nickel."
He made Skeet empty out his pockets, took their total assets of twelve
dollars and sixty-four cents, walked up to three charter members, and
suggested they play a friendly little game at ten dollars a hole. The
charter members, Dallie declared magnanimously, could take their
electric carts and their oversize leather bags stuffed full of Wilson
irons and MacGregor woods. Dallie announced that he'd be happy as
a
clam walking along with only his five-iron and his second-best Titleist
ball.
The members looked at the scruffy-handsome kid who had three inches of
bony ankle showing above
his sneaker tops and shook their heads.
Dallie grinned, told them they were yellow-bellied, shit-stompin',
worthless excuses for women and suggested they raise the stakes to
twenty dollars a hole, exactly seven dollars and thirty-six cents more
than he had in his back pocket.
The members pushed him toward the first tee and told him they'd stomp
his smart ass right across the border into Oklahoma.
Dallie and Skeet ate T-bones that night and slept at the Holiday Inn.
* * *
They reached Jacksonville with thirty minutes to spare before Dalliehad to tee off for the qualifying round of the 1974 Orange Blossom
Open. That same afternoon, a Jacksonville sportswriter out to make
a
name for himself unearthed the staggering fact that Dallas Beaudine,
with his country-boy grammar
and redneck politics, held a bachelor's
degree in English literature. Two evenings later the sportswriter
finally managed to track Dallie to Luella's, a dirty concrete structure
with peeling pink paint and plastic flamingos located not far from the
Gator Bowl, and confronted him with the information as if he'd just
uncovered political graft.
Dallie looked up from his glass of Stroh's, shrugged, and said that
since his degree came from Texas A&M, he guessed it didn't really
count for much.
It was exactly this kind of irreverence that had kept sports reporters
coming back for more ever since Dallie had begun to play on the pro
tour two years before. Dallie could keep them entertained for hours
with generally unquotable quotes about the state of the Union, athletes
who sold out to Hollywood, and women's "ass-stompin'" liberation. He
was a new generation of good ol' boy—movie star handsome,
self-deprecating, and a lot smarter than he wanted to let on. Dallie
Beaudine was about as close as you could get to perfect magazine copy,
except for one thing.
He blew the big ones.
After having been declared the pro tour's new golden boy, he had
committed the nearly unpardonable
sin of not winning a single important
tournament. If he played a two-bit tournament on the outskirts
of
Apopka, Florida, or Irving, Texas, he would win it at eighteen under
par, but at the Bob Hope or the Kemper Open, he might not even make the
cut. The
sportswriters kept asking their readers the same question: When was
Dallas Beaudine going to live up to his potential as a pro golfer?
Dallie had made up his mind to win the Orange Blossom Open this year
and put an end to his string of bad luck. For one thing, he liked
Jacksonville—it was the only Florida city in his opinion that hadn't
tried to turn itself into a theme park—and he liked the course where
the Orange Blossom was being played. Despite his lack of sleep, he'd
made a solid showing in Monday's qualifying round and then, fully
rested, he'd played brilliantly in the Wednesday Pro-Am. Success had
bolstered his self-confidence—success
and the fact that the Golden
Bear, from Columbus, Ohio, had come down with a bad case of the flu
and
been forced to withdraw.
Charlie Conner, the Jacksonville sportswriter, took a sip from his own
glass of Stroh's and tried to slouch back in his chair with the same
easy grace he observed in Dallie Beaudine. "Do you think Jack
Nicklaus's withdrawal will affect the Orange Blossom this week?" he
asked.
In Dallie's mind that was one of the world's stupidest questions, right
up there with "Was it as good for you as it was for me?" but he
pretended to think it over anyway. "Well, now, Charlie, when you take
into consideration the fact that Jack Nicklaus is on his way to
becoming the greatest player in the history of golf, I'd say there's a
pretty fair chance we'll notice he's gone."
The sportswriter looked at Dallie skeptically. "The greatest player?
Aren't you forgetting a few people
like Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer?"
He paused reverentially before he uttered the next name, the holiest
name in golf. "Aren't you forgetting Bobby Jones?"
"Nobody's ever played the game like Jack Nicklaus," Dallie said firmly.
"Not even Bobby Jones."
Skeet had been talking to Luella, the bar's owner, but when he heard
Nicklaus's name mentioned he frowned and asked the sportswriter about
the Cowboys' chances to make it all the way to the Super Bowl. Skeet
didn't like Dallie talking about Nicklaus, so he had gotten into the
habit of interrupting any conversation that shifted in that direction.
Skeet
said talking about Nicklaus made Dallie's game go
straight to hell.
Dallie wouldn't admit it, but Skeet was pretty much right.
As Skeet and the sportswriter talked about the Cowboys, Dallie tried to
shake off the depression that settled over him every fall like
clockwork by indulging in some positive thinking. The '74 season was
nearly over, and he hadn't done all that bad for himself. He'd won a
few thousand in prize money and double that in crazy betting games—
playing best ball left-handed, betting on hitting the middle zero on
the 200-yard sign at a driving range, playing an improvised course
through a dried-out gully and a forty-foot concrete sewer pipe. He'd
even tried Trevino's trick of playing a few holes by throwing the
ball
in the air and hitting it with a thirty-two-ounce Dr Pepper bottle, but
the bottle glass wasn't as thick now as it had been when the Super Mex
had invented that particular wrinkle in the bottomless grab bag
of golf
betting games, so Dallie'd given it up after they'd had to take five
stitches in his right hand. Despite his injury, he'd earned enough
money to pay for gas and keep Skeet and him comfortable. It wasn't a
fortune, but it was a hell of a lot more than old Jaycee Beaudine had
ever made hanging around the wharves along Buffalo Bayou in Houston.
Jaycee had been dead for a year now, his life washed away by alcohol
and a mean temper. Dallie hadn't found out about his father's death
until a few months after it had happened when he'd run into one of
Jaycee's old drinking buddies in a Nacogdoches saloon. Dallie wished he
had known at the time so he could have stood next to Jaycee's coffin,
looked down at his father's corpse, and spit right between the old
man's closed eyes. One glob of spit for all the bruises he'd earned
from Jaycee's fists, all the abuse he'd taken throughout his childhood,
all the times he'd listened to Jaycee call him worthless ... a pretty
boy ... a no-account . . . until he hadn't been able to stand it
anymore and had run away at fifteen.
From what he'd been able to see in a few old photos, Dallie got most of
his good looks from his mother. She, too, had run off. She had fled
from Jaycee not long after Dallie was born, and she hadn't bothered
to leave a forwarding address. Jaycee
once said he heard she'd gone to Alaska, but he had never tried to find
her. "Too much trouble," Jaycee had told Dallie. "No woman's worth that
much trouble, especially when there are so many others around."
With his thick auburn hair and heavy-lidded eyes, Jaycee had attracted
more women than he knew what to do with. Over the years at least a
dozen had spent varying amounts of time living with them, a few even
bringing children along. Some of the women had taken good care of
Dallie, others had abused him. As he grew older, he noticed that the
ones who abused him seemed to last longer than the others, probably
because it took a certain amount of ill temper to survive Jaycee for
more than a few months.
"He was born mean," one of the nicer women had told Dallie while she
packed her suitcase. "Some people are just like that. You don't realize
it at first about Jaycee because he's smart, and he can talk so nice
that he makes you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. But
there's something twisted inside him that makes him mean right through
to his blood. Don't listen to all that stuff he says about
you, Dallie.
You're a good kid. He's just afraid you'll grow up and make something
of your life, which
is more than he's ever been able to do."
Dallie had stayed out of the way of Jaycee's fists as much as he could.
The classroom became his safest haven, and unlike his friends he never
cut school—unless he had a particularly bad set of bruises on his face,
in which case he would hang out with the caddies who worked at the
country club down the road. They taught him golf, and by the time he
was twelve he had found an even safer haven than school.
Dallie shook off his old memories and told Skeet it was time to call
it. a night. They went back to the motel, but even though he was tired,
Dallie had been thinking about the past too much to fall asleep easily.
With the qualifying round completed and the Pro-Am out of the way, the
real tournament began the next day. Like all major professional golf
tournaments, the Orange Blossom Open held its first two rounds on
Thursday and Friday. The players who survived the cut after Friday went
on to the final two rounds.
Not only did Dallie survive Friday's cut, but he was
leading the tournament by four strokes when he walked past the network
television tower onto the first tee on Sunday morning for the final
round.
"Now, you just hold steady today, Dallie," Skeet said. He tapped the
heel of his hand against the top of Dallie's golf bag and looked
nervously over at the leader board, which had Dallie's name prominently
displayed at the top. "Remember that you're playing your own game
today, not anybody else's. Put
those television cameras out of your
mind and concentrate on making one shot at a time."
Dallie didn't even nod in acknowledgment of Skeet's words. Instead, he
grinned at a spectacular brunette standing near the ropes that held
back the gallery of fans. She smiled back, so he wandered over to crack
a few jokes with her, acting like he didn't have a care in the world,
like winning this tournament wasn't the most important thing in his
life, like this year there wouldn't be any Halloween at all.
Dallie was playing in the final foursome along with Johnny Miller, the
leading money winner on the tour that season. When it was Dallie's turn
to tee up, Skeet handed him a three-wood and gave his final words of
advice. "Remember that you're the best young golfer on the tour today,
Dallie. You know it and I know it. How about we let the rest of the
world figure it out?" Dallie nodded, took his stance, and hit the kind
of golf shot that makes history.
At the end of fourteen holes, Dallie was still in the lead at sixteen
under par. With only four holes to go, Johnny Miller was coming up
fast, but he was still four strokes behind. Dallie put Miller out of
his mind and concentrated on his own game. As he sank a five-foot putt,
he told himself that he was born to play golf. Some champions are made,
but others are created at the moment of conception. He was finally
going to live up to the reputation the magazines had created for him.
With his name sitting at the top of the leader board of the Orange
Blossom Open, Dallie felt as if he'd come out of the womb with a
brand-new Titleist ball clenched in his hand.
His strides grew longer as he walked down the fifteenth fairway. The
network cameras followed his
every move, and confidence surged through him. Those final-round
defeats of the past
two years were
all behind him now. They were flukes, nothing but
flukes. This Texas boy was about to set the golf
world on fire.
The sun hit his blond hair and warmed his shirt. In the gallery, a
shapely female fan blew him a kiss.
He laughed and made a play out of
catching the kiss in midair and slipping it into his pocket.
Skeet held out an eight-iron for an easy approach shot to the fifteenth
green. Dallie gripped the club, assessed the lie, and took his stance.
He felt strong and in control. His lead was solid, his game was on,
nothing could snatch away this victory.
Nothing except the Bear.
You don't really think you can win
this thing, do you, Beaudine?
The Bear's voice popped into Dallie's head sounding just as clear as if
Jack Nicklaus were standing
beside him.
Champions like me win golf
tournaments, not failures like you.
Go away,
Dallie's brain
screamed. Don't show up now! Sweat began to
break out on his forehead. He adjusted his grip, tried to loosen
himself up again, tried not to listen to that voice.
What have you got to show for
yourself? What have you done with your
life except screw things up?
Leave me alone!
Dallie stepped
away from the ball, rechecked the line,
and settled in again. He drew
back the club and hit. The crowd let out
a collective groan as the ball drifted to the left and landed in
high
rough. In Dallie's mind, the Bear shook his big blond head.
That's exactly what I'm talking
about, Beaudine. You just don't have
the stuff it takes to make a champion.
Skeet, his expression clearly worried, came up next to Dallie. "Where
in hell did that shot come from? Now you're going to have to scramble
to make par."
"I just lost my balance," Dallie snapped, stalking off toward the green.
You just lost your guts
, the
Bear whispered back.
The "Bear had begun to appear in Dallie's head not long after Dallie
had started playing on the pro tour. Before that, it had
only been Jaycee's voice he had heard in his head. Logically, Dallie
understood that he'd created the Bear himself, and he knew there was a
big difference between the soft-spoken, well-mannered Jack Nicklaus of
real life and this creature from hell who spoke like Nicklaus, and
looked like Nicklaus, and knew all Dallie's deepest secrets.
But logic didn't have much to do with private devils, and it wasn't
accidental that Dallie's private devil
had taken the form of Jack
Nicklaus, a man he admired just about more than anyone else—a man with
a beautiful family, the respect of his peers, and the greatest game of
golf the world had ever seen. A
man who wouldn't know how to fail if he
tried.
You're a kid from the wrong side of
the tracks,
the Bear whispered as
Dallie lined up a short putt on
the sixteenth green. It lipped the edge
of the cup and scooted off to the side.
Johnny Miller gave Dallie a sympathetic look, then sank his own putt
for a par. Two holes later when Dallie hit his drive on eighteen, his
four-shot lead had been reduced to a tie with Miller.
Your old man told you you'd never
amount to much,
the Bear said as
Dallie's drive sliced viciously to
the right.
Why didn 't you listen?
The worse Daliie played, the more he joked with the crowd. "Now, where
did that miserable golf shot come from?" he called over to them,
scratching his head in mock bewilderment. And then he pointed
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