The Downhill Lie (13 page)

I missed Quail Valley’s turtles, the mutant carp and even the savage 18th hole.

And, of course, there was a tournament to prepare for.

Day 484

A jolting and unforeseen complication:

“Guess what I’m doing next Wednesday,” my wife says.

“What?”

“Having my first golf lesson.”

“Really?” Me, thinking:
Easy now. This will pass.

Day 488

A Christmas card arrives from the David Leadbetter Golf Academy: Santa Claus wearing a golf glove and sunglasses. He’s carrying a bagful of swing aids and other clubhouse goodies bearing the Leadbetter brand. Call me Scrooge, but the greeting fails to put me in the holiday spirit.

Meanwhile, Fenia is seeking fashion advice for her upcoming lesson. I tell her to dress comfortably.

The skirt she chooses is cute, although she’ll have to be careful when teeing up the ball.

As for footwear, I advise her to wear sneakers. She is reluctant, because she doesn’t want tan lines on her ankles.

“They won’t let you wear flip-flops,” I say.

“How come?”

“They just won’t.”

Day 489

Today’s the day—my wife’s first lesson. Afterwards she calls from the car to say she had a grand time, which catches me off guard.

“I was using a pitching wedge,” she reports proudly.

“That’s great. It’s very important around the greens.”

“What’s a green?” she says.

Me, thinking:
One step at a time.

“Did you schedule another lesson?” I ask.

“Not yet. It’s kind of expensive.”

I hear myself saying, “You should do it again, if you enjoyed it.”

“It was fun!”

After Fenia says goodbye, I immediately phone Lupica for advice. He can hardly stop laughing.

“She liked it?”

“Apparently so,” I say.

“This is the greatest,” he cackles. “I was just thinking: How many different ways can golf screw you?”

Although I love spending time with Fenia, Lupica’s right—the golf course can be dangerous territory for a marriage. The last thing a struggling hacker needs is a spouse who wants to learn the game, and the last thing a beginner needs is advice from a spouse who’s a struggling hacker. Delicacy and reserve—not my strong suits—will be necessary to ensure that the conjugal relationship survives our relationship with golf.

Sensing that my days of solitude at Quail Valley are numbered, I head straight to the club and tee off—alone—under overcast skies. During the round I soak five balls, but on the upside I one-putt four consecutive greens, a personal best. The final damage is 93, which, after my calamitous road trip, shimmers like a gem.

Day 491

Baffling but true: After posting those four humiliating triple-digit scores from the book tour, I watch my USGA handicap rise a measly one-tenth of a stroke, to 15 even. Einstein couldn’t unravel this tangled formula.

Day 497

Delroy Smith is back in town after a season of caddying at Burning Tree, the premier power-golf venue in Washington, D.C. I’m hoping for tales of dissolute congressmen galloping naked with their bimbos on the fairways, but Delroy says the summer was routine.

His eyebrows hitch when I tell him I’ve signed up for the Member-Guest Invitational.

“Okay,” he says, “this is important for the tournament: Always make sure you know which holes you’re stroking on.”

“Stroking” is one of those terms that has come to mean something entirely different in middle age than it did when I was young.

“I’m still not sure how that works,” I admit.

“Say your handicap is eighteen—is it eighteen or fifteen?”

“Eighteen on this course.”

“Okay, let’s say you’re playing a guy who’s a nine. That means you get a stroke on nine of the holes.”

I stare as if he’s speaking Slovenian.

Delroy patiently takes out the scorecard and pencils an asterisk below the holes that are handicapped 1 through 9, in descending degrees of difficulty. I’d just parred the first hole, which—because I was “stroking”—would count as a birdie in a match.

The system, which is actually quite simple, rewards average players who play well on the hardest holes. Unfortunately, I customarily save my double- and triple-bogeys for the easiest holes, which in competition would nullify the benefits of stroking.

Although it’s mid-December, the temperature in central Florida is 79 degrees and a hard wind blows from the southeast. The greens at Quail Valley are so dry and fast that every downhill putt becomes a runaway train. I limp home after another body blow to the handicap.

“We’re peaking at the same time,” Leibo quips when I check in. “Remember when I was a five? Now I’m a seven, with a bullet.”

When I gripe about the pace of the greens, he chuckles. “As bad as they were today, I promise you they’ll be worse for the tournament. Same with the pin placements.”

A survivor of many club tournaments, Leibo tells me to prepare for the “pucker factor,” referring to the nervous and involuntary constriction of a certain orifice.

The puckering, I assure him, has already commenced.

Day 498

An improbable scene: My wife in the backyard swinging the Fred Funk–endorsed Momentus Training Club.

“This thing really is heavy,” she comments.

“Forty ounces,” I say. “That’s why it did a number on those rats.”

Fenia frowns in disgust
. “This
is what you used on the rats?”

She shoves the Momentus into my hands. Practice is over.

Earlier, she and young Quinn each had a golf lesson.

“Dad, I hit a bird!” Quinn announced excitedly when he got home. “But don’t worry, it flew away.”

“How did you hit a bird?”

“I don’t know. The ball went really high.”

My wife confirms the incident. Her own lesson, she reports, was uneventful.

Day 503

Fenia and I head out to practice, a trip fraught with volcanic risk. Following the stern counsel of experienced golfers, I keep my mouth zipped until my wife shows an interest in my advice, which on occasion she does.

For clubs she’s using loaners that are too long, although she doesn’t complain. She whiffs a few balls, tops a few and yet remains undiscouraged; in fact, she acts like she’s having a blast. Such a healthy attitude seems eerily out of place on a driving range.

Afterwards, at Fenia’s urging, we try a short par-3, her first-ever complete hole of golf. She’s so stoked that we play another. On the way home, we stop at a golf store and she picks out shoes—but only one pair, an act of retail restraint that I accept as a small miracle.

My friends are of two views regarding spouses who take up golf. One faction thinks it’s very cool, while the other believes it’s Shakespearean tragedy.

“Unacceptable,” David Feherty weighs in by e-mail. “As they say in Spanish,
‘Feliz Nueva Anus!’
”

Which he translates loosely to mean, “Congratulations on your new orifice.”

Day 508

New Year’s resolutions:

1. Improve my short game.

2. Find an antacid that works.

Lupica’s got his whole family scouting magazines and catalogues for lame golf gimmicks that I can purchase under the guise of “research.” Son Zack has triumphantly unearthed an advertisement for Visiball sunglasses, which supposedly filter out greenish hues so that you can locate missing balls in deep rough or heavy woods.

According to the manufacturer, “Visiball glasses are equipped with a specially designed lens that blocks out the majority of the foliage and grass from your field of view when you are looking for your lost golf ball. With the foliage and grass out of the picture, your lost golf ball stands out like a sore thumb.”

The product carries an intriguing warning:
“Visiball lenses are NOT golfing sunglasses. In fact they are not meant to be worn while playing. They are designed to be worn only when searching for a golf ball.”

This could be a hot item on the South Beach party scene.

At $40, the X-ray-like shades look like a bargain compared to the expensive and disappointing RadarGolf system. However, the online demonstration of Visiball is lame. The “missing” golf balls are conspicuous in the Before picture, and only slightly more so using the special blue-tinted lens.

“I’m not falling for this one,” I tell Lupica.

Day 509

After a week of diligently practicing chips, bumps and lobs, I disgrace myself around the greens. Two positive notes: I’m suddenly driving the ball well and also executing decent bunker shots.

These trends are, like all progress in golf, ephemeral. At this point I couldn’t make the Flomax Tour.

Day 513

On my wife’s birthday, the entire clan descends on Quail Valley’s par-3 layout. There are only six holes, but—because Fenia is new to the game, and Quinn has short, first-grader legs—it takes us an hour and a half to finish.

Still, everybody’s cheery and content, walking in the sun. We’re like the flipping von Trapp family, minus the harmonies.

Day 514

Candid appraisal from Jack, another veteran caddy at Quail: “You can play, you just can’t score.”

Which is better, I suppose, than being told that you can’t score
and
you can’t play.

Day 516 / Key West

From an African-American juggler performing at Mallory Square:

“Hey, folks, what do you call 150 white guys chasin’ a black guy?”

Crowd: “What?”

“The PGA tour.”

Day 519

The seventh fairway is lousy with jumbo-sized crows—hundreds of the raucous pests, clotting the trees and blackening the rough, cawing, “Ugh-uh, ugh-uh, ugh-uh.”

They’re right, too. I get mired in a bunker and double the hole. It’s a Hitchcock moment, the crows scoffing as I flee toward the next tee.

Day 523

We’re slogging along the front nine when Delroy spots a young bald eagle wheeling over one of the lakes. The bird banks to the north and alights beside its mother in the top of an oak, where it poses with spread wings and fanned tail.

“Two of them! I wish I had my camera,” Delroy says.

“When you’re fishing, eagles are always good luck,” I tell him, and smoothly par the next two holes.

No sooner are we out of sight of the birds than I double-bogey the 10th.

Delroy remains a stalwart envoy of positive thought. “You’re getting better, much better,” he says. “I know where you came from, pro. Remember the first time I caddied for you?”

“Yeah, but I still can’t score.”

“That’ll come. It will.”

In an unbelievable stroke of good fortune, Delroy has consented to caddy for me and Leibo during the upcoming Member-Guest. It’s a major coup, because Delroy usually caddies for the very top golfers, including the current club champion (age seventeen).

“I’ve been working hard on my short game,” I assure him.

“You’re doing the right thing,” he says diplomatically.

Two more pars, a nasty trio of 6s, then I scramble home with a pair of hard-won (and welcome) bogeys.

Walking off the 18th green, where I’d improbably landed a 6-iron on the upper tier, Delroy smiles and says, “I’m impressed.”

“That was fun,” I hear myself say.

The f-word? On a golf course?

Despite skulling five wedge shots (including one that flew forty yards out of bounds), it was sort of fun.

As my kids would say, how sick is that?

Day 524

In Fenia’s presence, I boldly carry a demo putter to the practice green. She is surprisingly open-minded.

“Why don’t you buy it, if you like it?” she asks.

Today she’s being fitted for her first set of clubs. Possibly this accounts for her libertarian mood.

It’s now official: My wife is taking up golf. The decision has potentially seismic implications for our union, not to mention my handicap.

Another comforting e-mail from Feherty: “You’re doomed.”

Day 525

I’m not good enough for you.

That’s what I murmur to the Cameron putter that had been a gift from Fenia. Discreetly I lean it in the back of my locker, next to the banished blue Ping.

I’ve fallen for a fresh new face, the one with which I openly dallied on the practice green. It’s a TaylorMade Daytona Rossa CGB, an offset model with a 3.5 degree loft and a headweight of 335 grams. I have postponed breaking the news to my spouse.

According to TaylorMade, the Rossa has twelve anti-skid grooves and a “Titallium insert” designed for “exceptional forgiveness on mis-hits.”

I have no idea what Titallium is, or exactly where it’s been implanted into the head of the putter. I am, however, painfully familiar with the concept of a mishit. The promise of exceptional forgiveness holds great appeal.

The deal goes down in a dark corner of the pro shop. Rossa isn’t as sleek or as elegant as the Cameron, but her raspberry grille and shiny tungsten plugs exude a brash, saucy attitude.

She certainly livens up my bag.

Day 526

Titallium sounds like it should appear near titanium (Ti) in the Periodic Table of Elements, but there isn’t a trace of it anywhere on the chart.

Research reveals that no such substance occurs in nature; Titallium was formulated by the TaylorMade company explicitly for insertion into putters. A Google expedition confirms the fact.