The Legend of Bagger Vance (4 page)

J
UNAH WAS IN
.

Hagen and Jones would arrive the day after tomorrow; there would be a practice round that afternoon, banquets at Krewe Island in the evening, then the actual match the day after. Seventy-two hours to marshal an operation on the scale of the siege of Vicksburg.

The city’s madness expanded exponentially. Special trains had to be added, then more and more after that, to handle the multitudes arriving, not just for the match but to serve those arriving for the match. In those days, Michael, the wealthy didn’t travel on their own, lugging their carry-on bags through airports and heading to Hertz for a rental car. They traveled with entourages, all of whom needed rooms and food and towels and hot water. Now entourages were arriving to serve the entourages. Freelance cars and drivers flooded in from Atlanta, Columbia, Mobile; men hired themselves
out as chauffeurs, footmen, guides, bodyguards, porters and bellmen. Waiters and chambermaids poured in; every able-bodied man, woman and boy was pressed into service. I remember my friend Billy Utaw’s mom’s cook, Addie, being chosen by lot to be chambermaid for the suite that Bobby Jones would share with O. B. Keeler. It was like they’d all just been called to the head of the line for heaven. Billy’s head swelled so you couldn’t talk to him, and his mom began putting on airs like the Queen of Sheba.

My brother Garland was out all that first night cornering the market in grape snowball syrup. I myself was held down almost literally by my mother, who insisted that I get my sleep before I took sick and ruined my own and her chances to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I would never have forgiven her except that, that morning, I encountered greatness for the first time face-to-face.

Arnold Langer took a room with us.

Mother had agreed finally to allow some of the descending locusts, as she called them, to stay under our roof. She refused however to accept compensation, insisting on giving the space, plus breakfast, dinner and supper, as a pure gesture of hospitality. One thing she insisted upon, however: that her home would not be open to mere rubbernecking tourists, but only to working people with a legitimate purpose for being in Savannah. As luck would have it, that included journalists. Sportswriters.

Langer covered sports for the
Atlanta Constitution
. My dad had taught my brother and me to read by poring over the great wordsmith’s columns. Langer came with a friend from Boston, a former classmate from Harvard who was an actual book writer;
they took over both spare rooms upstairs as office space, plus Garland’s room which he vacated, moving in with me.

It was barely nine in the morning when their cab arrived from the station, and they were already lathered in sweat, their white shirts sticking to their undershirts, which were wringing wet beneath their wool jackets. They stunk of cigarette smoke and sweat and pure literary glamour. Both of them chain-smoked and coughed and hacked and when I carried their coats up to Garland’s room which would now be theirs, I felt the weight of whiskey flasks in the pockets.

Sitting to breakfast, Langer’s friend asked for his eggs softboiled, the first time I had ever seen eggs cooked any way but scrambled or sunnyside up. I watched mesmerized as he set a steaming uncracked egg upright in its little porcelain cup, rapped it sidewise with a butter knife to knock its crown off, then spooned the gooey innards right from the shell, to vanish with a worldly slurp beneath his mustache. It was the most glamorous sight my eyes had ever beheld.

Over coffee, the journalists regaled my mother with tales of Jones and Hagen. How Jones never traveled to a tournament without his friend and Boswell, O. B. Keeler, who was a newspaperman himself, covering sports for the
Atlanta Journal
, and a true scholar of science and history, almost mystical in his study and appreciation of the game. Jones, in fact, gave Keeler half the credit for the 1930 Grand Slam and insisted when posing with all four trophies (and the Walker Cup, which the Jones-captained team had won that same year) on Keeler’s standing beside him as an equal.

Hagen traveled with a staff of five, headed by his caddie-cum-valet Spec Hammond, whose responsibility it was to supervise the shining of the Haig’s thirty-eight pairs of shoes and the pressing of his seventy pairs of slacks and plus fours. Hagen habituated the Savoy in London, dined on oysters and champagne for breakfast, and never had his hair cut except by his own personal barber from the Detroit Athletic Club, whom he either flew personally to visit or had flown in, worldwide, at his own expense.

In the cool of the screened rear patio, Langer lit a Chesterfield and began to turn the subject toward Junah.

Did we know of Junah’s exploits in the Great War? That he was a bona fide hero? Of course, my mother replied; our city had produced numerous men of valor, and certainly no less could be expected of a man of Junah’s background and breeding. Langer smiled as my mother recited the names of Junah’s forebears and their heroism at Antietam and the Wilderness, Shiloh and Bermuda Hundred. Langer acknowledged appreciatively the South’s long record of bravery and the fine fighting men she had produced. But, he said, he had never heard a story quite like Junah’s. Did we know what happened to him in the Battle of the Argonne Forest, and how he reacted afterward? Langer’s memory was fresh because he had looked up the accounts and dispatches in the news files before leaving Atlanta. He thought they might somehow work in to the reports he would file on the coming match.

My mother declared that she—all of us in the city, in fact—were familiar with aspects of those wartime events, but the full
picture remained rather mysterious and unclear. Something about a French wife who died and Junah’s daughter, now being raised by
grand-mère
in France.

The journalist corrected her: it was a German wife. And a queer story behind it.

It seems Junah, at some desperate point during the battle, faced with being imminently overrun by the enemy, had called in artillery fire on his own position. He and one machine gunner were the only two still alive, cut off from their unit, behind their single gun whose barrel had actually warped from the furious fire it had put forth. They were in fact overrun, Junah and his gunner surviving only after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle with bayonets and entrenching tools. Junah himself was gravely wounded and required nearly two years in the hospital, in England and the States, to recover.

Junah’s heroism involved killing eleven Germans in this encounter; they were found dead around his position when the attack ended. He and his gunner were awarded the Medal of Honor, which Junah, for himself, refused to accept. His brigade commander was compelled to claim it for him, with Junah intractable in his hospital bed.

After the armistice, Langer continued, Junah was transferred stateside to a veterans hospital in upstate New York. Upon his release in 1920, he chose not to return to Savannah, or even to remain in America, but took ship immediately for Germany. There, in the ruins of that shattered nation, he sought out all eleven families of the soldiers he had killed. Most had suffered terribly. Some rebuffed him, some slammed doors in
his face, others broke down and embraced him with appreciation for his gesture and his courage.

“Of all things,” Langer addressed my mother, “Junah wound up marrying the sister of one of the soldiers he had slain. Apparently they were very much in love, had a daughter within a year, and were planning on returning to the States. Then Junah’s bride herself died tragically in an outbreak of typhus. It’s not clear exactly what happened with Captain Junah over the next several years. Apparently this final death was more than he could bear. Something broke inside him. He turned over his infant daughter to the care of her Bavarian grandmother and vanished into that seething ferment that was postwar Europe. Reports placed him in Paris for a time, among expatriate artists and writers, then traveling by ship, working his way it seems. He was in the East, India, Ceylon, the Himalayas. He returned briefly to Savannah in ’27, as you know, and tried to pick up the threads of a normal life, even campaigning with some success on the amateur golf circuit. But this attempt apparently failed to quell his restless questing. He set out again two years ago, traveling, reading, studying, seeking heaven only knows what.

“Throughout these peregrinations, Captain Junah, it seems, has been accompanied by a mysterious servant who, though technically in Junah’s employ, is said to exercise tremendous influence over him. The fellow appears and reappears at random intervals; no one knows when or where he and Junah first became acquainted, or even the man’s name….”

“You mean Bagger Vance!” I blurted. “He’s here now. He’s caddying for Mr. Junah in the match!”

Both Langer and his friend reacted with instant interest. “You mean the fellow really exists,” Langer queried, “and is still in Junah’s employ?”

I confirmed this with vehemence. “Heck, if it wasn’t for him, Mr. Junah wouldn’t even be playing tomorrow! When I got out to his house last night, he was dead drunk. Two in the morning and couldn’t hardly stand….”

I became aware of my mother clearing her throat rather dramatically. Both scribes’ eyes were wide open now, bony shoulders thrusting forward like vultures. I saw at once my faux pas. My mother’s hands were tugging me from my chair, explaining to my interrogators that her son must study (even though school had been let out for the rest of the week) and how they, as experienced interviewers and journalists, must know never to put credence in a young boy’s tales, which are so notoriously exaggerated. Langer, ignoring this, was just framing his next question when the screen door banged open and the day was saved by my brother Garland, bursting excitedly in.

“Get your shoes on, boy! Jones and Hagen, they come in early!”

“What? How…” I stammered.

“They’re sneaking in on an early train, to duck the crowds. Come on now or we’ll miss ’em sure!”

With my mother pushing, we bolted straight outside, smack into the Messner twins’ dad’s hired man Albert whose ancient Ford stakebed was creaking by with a load of green melons. Garland shouted to him if he’d give us a scoot to the station. Albert laughed and told us they already was about sixteen million folks
jammed in there, packing the streets and spilt over onto every porch, stoop and rooftop. “Y’all boys won’t see jack squat a-racin’ there. Climb on the truck with me, for the motorcade.”

“What motorcade?”

“Don’t y’all know nothing? The motorcade out to Krewe Island!”

T
O UNDERSTAND BOBBY JONES’ STATURE
in the South at that time, you have to remember that the War of Northern Aggression (as we called it in our family), or Civil War as the Yankees preferred, had by no means then receded into the benign past. Its memory was fresh as a still-open wound. Not so much the war itself, for the South had achieved abundant glory on the battlefield, nor even the fact of defeat, for in surrender the nation yet maintained a certain grim dignity. It was that obscene and lingering hell euphemistically labeled Reconstruction that rent the Southland’s soul and ground her honor into the dirt.

As recently as the 1870s, private property was still being confiscated under the Domestic Reparations Act. My own grandfather had all his weapons, including two antique shotguns and a Tennessee long rifle forcibly taken from his house by Federal officers in ’79. I still recall the cold rage of that proud gentleman
when he spoke of the helplessness and despair he endured in that moment. Families were still being put off the land in the 1880s, and the poor agrarian Negro, who of all was most blameless, was still being exploited by that element of shameless Northern locust known as the carpetbagger.

Then must come the admission that in each Southerner’s private heart, even the most ignorant cracker and peckerwood’s, lay hidden the dishonorable truth that our side, however valiant its champions, however noble its defense of sacred home soil, was the side that stood in line with human slavery and fought for its preservation.

This secret knowledge of our collective guilt, which none but the most courageous would give thought, let alone voice to, lent an added agony to our nation’s vanquishment and prostration. My father said many times that the wonder wasn’t that the South expressed so much rage, as that she expressed so little. Compare her to Weimar Germany, after its mortification at Compiègne.

It was that same pain, the loss of national manhood, that the South felt so keenly. Not just the men, whose culture had been built on a beau ideal of manly pride and virtue, but the women, children and servants whose psychological security depended upon the stability and power of their fathers, brothers and sons.

The Great War helped. The heroics of Southern warriors like Alvin York of Tennessee and General Black Jack Pershing. But even their spectacular exploits were performed beneath the stars and stripes of the hated Yankee flag. As late as the 1920s, the South had not produced a champion with the combined virtues of spectacular achievement and Southern purity.

Not until Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., of Atlanta.

Permit me, Michael, passing over his scores of lesser triumphs, to recall only the major championships Jones collected over a brief seven years.

In that brilliant span, Jones won 13 of the 21 national championships he entered. He won all three of the British Opens he played in and one of the two British Amateurs. In nine U.S. Opens from ’22 to ’30 he finished first four times and second four times. So dominant was he in his prime that the two professional titans of the day, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, never won an Open championship, in Britain or America, in which Jones was also entered.

Bobby crowned this incomparable stretch, surely the most glorious ever in American sport, with the Grand Slam of 1930. He retired from competitive golf then at the pinnacle, at age twenty-eight.

I remember the city of Savannah, and no doubt the entire
South, glued to the radio broadcast of the ticker-tape parade down Broadway, when Bobby returned from Britain with the first two legs of the Grand Slam. You could hear the cheers and the music, the harsh Yankee voices of the broadcasters describing the scene. Then the microphone was placed before Jones. Over the air came that soft Georgia accent. My father had to turn his face away to hide his emotion. My mother wept openly.

Here at last was our Grail Knight, our Parsifal. Jones’ triumphs, the very fact of his existence, seemed all by themselves to recall the South from decades of ignominy and exile. His graciousness, his gentility, the fact that he was not a coarse Northern striver but a gentle-born chevalier, an amateur. Jones embodied the finest qualities of Southern manhood and he had not just whipped the Yankees but the whole damn world.

And now here he was. In our city. Crossing the causeways in an open car toward our own Krewe Island. From our perch atop Albert’s watermelon truck, my brother and I could see the glistening wetlands extending ahead for half a dozen miles and, rising out of them by the sea, the towers of Krewe Island’s grand hotel. It was a pilgrimage. The motorcade stretched a hundred cars ahead and hundreds more behind; Model A’s and Plymouths, Reos and Auburns and Packards, crawling, sputtering, backfiring from their sizzling-hot, trembling exhausts. Farmers’ wagons choked the route. Autos would overheat and stall and be pushed out of the way by the onswarming pilgrims, sometimes straight into the wetland muck, like casualties being shouldered aside by an advancing army.

Hagen was up there beside Bobby, suntanned so dark he
looked wood-stained, grinning to the girls and favoring the matrons with a little cavalier gesture of his hat. Flowers were being tossed into the open back of the car. Bystanders pressed apples and pears on the heros. “Bobby! Bobby!” they cried, even the barefoot swampers for whom golf, or the idea of sport period, was as alien as some notion from the moon.

Bobby was their knight too. He had crossed the ocean to take on the world’s best and come home bearing not just their silver cups, but their admiration and respect as well.

Jones stood on a par with the other titans of the decade—Lindbergh, Dempsey, Tilden, Ruth—and, in the eyes of many, surpassed them all.

But where was Junah?

Had anyone contacted him? Did he even know that Jones and Hagen had arrived? Would he miss the practice round? I strained my eyes in every direction but saw no sign of the Ford or the Chalmers.

At Krewe Island, the scene broke down into pure merry bedlam. Cars parked anywhere they could, on fairways, levees, raw gooey muck; a mass surge swept Hagen and Jones on toward the hotel and the tented pavilion that had been erected outside. Garland and I wriggled forward, worming our way through the crowd. With a leap and a hand from Judge Anderson, we were home free. Up there! On the podium.

There must have been fifty reporters, plus every political scalawag for 500 miles, all jostling for position in front of the cameras. Adele Invergordon was up front, looking glamorous and mouthing words of welcome which were utterly lost in the feed
back and echo of the microphones sputtering for power. It took almost ten minutes for something resembling order, not to mention electrical current, to arrive, and Garland and I used every second to wriggle our way closer. I was scuffling with one meaty fellow, right up near the mikes. He stepped on my foot, just about breaking my toes; I turned to curse him and saw his huge suntanned hands. It was Hagen.

He squeezed through, up to the mikes, just as Adele Invergordon finished introducing Bobby. I couldn’t take my eyes off Hagen’s suntan. It was the darkest, most glistening and flawless I had ever seen. Even the crinkles around his eyes were bronze. This was in the days, remember, when men did everything to stay out of the sun. Hats were universal, collars high; to see a man bareheaded outdoors was a rarity and being tanned or burned was a sign of low station, of one whom necessity forced to labor in the heat of the sun.

Yet on Hagen, that tan shone like a badge of honor. It evoked sun-drenched fairways and Côte d’Azur beaches, deck chairs on the
France
and champagne at concours d’elegance. Every kid within eyeshot vowed instantly to spend each future second in the sun, till he too had achieved that godlike luster.

The Haig was thirty-eight then, with his name engraved on the trophies of nearly a dozen major championships, a seasoned master at the peak of his maturity and power. More exciting still was his arrogance, his cocksure self-confidence. He radiated a roguish swashbuckling deviltry, which made him even more a brilliant match for the gentle knight Jones.

But it was Bobby who was speaking now before the mikes.
From the far side, at last we saw Junah arriving amid an escort of troopers with Bagger Vance striding powerfully beside him. They made their way swiftly through the crush, Vance helping Junah ascend to the platform, then himself withdrawing among the crowd. Jones noted Junah’s arrival with a cordial nod, gesturing for the others on the podium to clear a space. A reporter called out, “Sir! Mr. Jones!” It was Arnold Langer, just below Bobby in the crush.

“You’ve been quoted as stating that golf is actually three different games. Golf, tournament golf and major championship golf. In which category, sir, would you place this match?”

Jones smiled and the throng chuckled with him. It was a good question.

“There is always one measure by which any match can be evaluated. That is the skill and courage of one’s opponents. When a man’s foes are worthy, every match is at championship level.”

Hagen grinned broadly and made a little impromptu bow. The crowd roared with affection and approval.

“My worthy adversary here, for example.” Jones gestured not to Hagen, but to Junah. “I’ve never actually had the pleasure of competing head-to-head with Mr. Junah, but he and Jess Sweetser did skin five dollars from myself and Watts Gunn in a practice round before the ’28 Walker Cup.” A surge of laughter and applause from the throng. “I don’t believe Mr. Junah missed a putt under ten feet all day—and certainly not when there was money to be made!”

The crowd roared with delight and appreciation. Many of them, no doubt virtually all of the out-of-town arrivals, had never
heard of Junah and almost certainly regarded his inclusion in this event as a rather embarrassing sop to local pride. Now they relented somewhat in this harsh appraisal. It was Jones’ doing, deliberately, being the gentleman he was, to include Junah and set him in the light of a credible opponent.

On Junah’s face could be seen acknowledgment and gratitude for this gesture. Yet still his emotion, if a word must be given to it, was mortification. He seemed self-conscious and uncomfortable, standing there as the cheers of the locals rang around him and Jones’ smiling gesture turned to the other side of the platform. To Hagen.

“As for this fellow”—Jones’ soft accent reverberated through the loudspeakers—“whose name for the moment escapes me…”

Deafening laughter and applause. Hagen beamed. Jones had won the crowd utterly. With a modest wave (you could see he relished the act of public speaking not at all), he stepped back and turned the microphone over to Hagen.

A fresh surge of enthusiasm swept through the crowd as the Haig came forward. He was wearing gray plus fours with matching argyle socks and the type of two-tone shoe we used to call “spectators.” His linen shirt was white, with a dove-gray tie the precise hue of his plus fours. Everyone else was wringing and sopped. Hagen’s shirt betrayed not a smack of sweat.

“It is indeed an honor,” Hagen spoke slowly and clearly into the mikes, “to compete against a man whom many consider to be the greatest ever to pick up a club. A man not only blessed with
matinee-idol good looks and animal magnetism, but also one of the truly fine gentlemen of the era. But enough about
me….
”

The crowd roared. Jones was laughing with genuine enthusiasm, I could see Keeler rocking appreciatively and nodding his head.

Hagen, it should be remembered, of all the knights who ever strode the fairways, ranks behind only Jones and Jack Nicklaus in number of major championships won. Eleven in all, ahead of Hogan, Snead, Palmer, Watson, ahead of all save the two greatest ever. The Haig took the U.S. Open at Midlothian in 1914 and at Brae Burn in ’19. He captured the British four times, at Royal St. George’s twice, in ’22 and ’28, at Hoylake in ’24 and one final time at Muirfield, 1929.

Then there was the PGA, which was held at match play in those years. Hagen transformed this championship into his own private fiefdom, winning first in ’21, then four times in a row, ’24, ’25, ’26, ’27.

Then there was that royal shellacking he gave Jones in their first head-to-head exhibition match in Florida. The fans hadn’t forgotten it and neither, the bet was sure, had Bobby.

As I watched that brilliant pair up front on the podium, a thought, or more precisely an emotion, struck me then with a power that has not left in all these years.

I had the profound sense of these two, Jones and Hagen (and even Keeler in an odd way), as being
something other than mortal
. They seemed a breed beyond. A finer, higher order of being. Creatures who inhabited a nobler, loftier plane than we mundane
humans; beings bordering on, and perhaps at times crossing over into, being gods.

I looked at Hagen, beaming with his glowing dark skin and brilliantined hair, holding the multitude enthralled with his power and magnetism. You could understand how this man had defeated 22 opponents in a row, 22 of the finest players in the world, over four consecutive PGA championships, all of which he had won. It was a function not so much, one felt, of his skill as a player, as of his power as a competitor. He was daunting, intimidating, overwhelming.

I turned next to Jones. There are two things that photographs, and even films of him, never quite depict. First was his athleticism. Even at his modest height and size, even with the air of intelligence and gentlemanliness he projected, even in his shirt and tie when he seemed more a figure for a veranda than an arena, he exuded a youth and strength that were frightening. His shoulders underneath his cotton shirt were broad and powerful; he stood like a supple god. There was something almost Greek about him, and yet at the same time consummately American.