The Legend of Bagger Vance (6 page)

I
T WAS PAST ONE O’CLOCK
and by no means warm. The wind cut sharp and damp off the Atlantic, making me shiver. “You’re cold,” Bagger Vance said. “No, I like it,” I told him. He smiled and again put a hand on my shoulder. Immediately I was glowing like a furnace. Even when he took his hand away, the flush remained, coursing powerfully through the bloodstream, warming me to my toes! “How did you do that?”

“Stop here,” he said, indicating a level spot on the first fairway. “Let me see you take a stride.”

It was becoming clear that Bagger Vance never answered a question directly. He always diverted you, or changed the subject, and yet you felt that he
was
answering somehow, in some delayed-action elliptical style of his own.

I took a few strides under his critical eye. A little longer, he directed…shorter now, that’s it. One stride equals one yard.

We began pacing off yardage. From the middle of the second tee to carry the fairway bunker on the right: 243 yards. From the hummock fronting the sixth green to the upper level of the green itself: 41 yards. Vance took it all in. As I strode off, earnestly pacing some yardage he had directed, he would linger in a greenside bunker, wriggling his soles down into the sand to sense the firmness; then, as he raked the area flat, nodding to himself as he filed the information away. He kept it all in his head, no notes. On the seventh and ninth greens, he had me putt balls across the various quadrants, up this slope, across that hogback, while he absorbed their wet-spinning paths in the dew. “The grain will shift tomorrow as the blades of grass follow the sun.” His hand traced an arc east-to-west in the sky. “The same green will break differently in the afternoon than in the morning.”

At the ninth green he knelt thoughtfully, gliding his fingertips across the nappy grass. “They’ll mow the back nine late, probably only a half-dozen holes ahead of us, then remove all the greens between eighteens at lunch. Keep that in mind, Hagen and Jones will.”

We strode swiftly through ten, eleven and twelve (apparently Vance felt he could get a sufficient sense of them just from a quick look) and were just commencing the six inward holes when I saw him pull up and squint back behind us. A man was coming. I could make out a white shirt and jacket, with the moon rising behind him. Oh hell. “What is it, a marshal? Should we run?”

“Look again,” Bagger Vance corrected me. “Can you see who it is?”

The man was two hundred yards off; an owl with cat’s eyes couldn’t have recognized him. “It’s Mr. Jones’ friend,” Bagger Vance spoke, “Mr. Keeler.”

Sure enough, it was O. B. Keeler. He came toward us in his necktie and spectacles, peering with a certain apprehension at first, then relaxing, apparently with recognition, as he got closer. “I’m relieved to learn I’m not the only lunatic out here at this hour.”

He was walking the course too. With a pedometer on his hip and a notepad in his pocket. He came up to Bagger Vance and held out his hand. “I’m O. B. Keeler. You’re Mr. Junah’s caddie, aren’t you?”

Vance introduced himself and me. There was a bit of polite talk about yardages. Keeler felt you could never trust them as indicated on the card. “No one ever actually paces them or puts the transit to them. The architect eyeballs them once on a flying visit and that’s what you’re stuck with!” He chuckled to himself. “You can’t go to school on your opponent’s bag either. Tomorrow Sir Walter’ll hit full mashies 140 yards and choked lofters 150, as if no one’s caught onto that trick.” Keeler was clearly a patrician, scholarly fellow; I was certain he would excuse himself quickly from a colored man and a boy. To my surprise he didn’t. Instead he sighed, folded his arms across his jacket and peered out thoughtfully over the duneland.

“A golf course is a different place at night, don’t you think? I’ve walked a thousand of them. Some revert to nature the second the sun sets. They lose their identity as products of man. Deer graze on the fairways and bunkers seem absurdly artificial.”
He glanced at Vance; then, satisfied that he was being seriously listened to, continued. “Then there are other courses, the great ones I’ve found, that remain themselves even under a foot of snow, their character is stamped so strongly upon them.”

“Which class would you place Krewe Island in?” Bagger Vance asked.

The faintest flicker crossed Keeler’s face, a shadow of surprise at the depth and intelligence in this soft-spoken caddie’s voice. “This is an odd one,” Keeler answered after a pause. “My sense of it is more like a battlefield than a golf links. Can you feel it? The presence of ghosts. I’ve had the same feeling at Shiloh, walking among the stones of the dead.” He shivered, as if to shake off some unwonted apprehension. “And yet the course herself is a beauty. I’d rank her in the world’s top ten already, and she’ll only get better as she matures.”

Keeler finished. A kind of loneliness seemed to come from him, standing there in the chill. “Would you like to walk along with us?” Bagger Vance said.

“It would be my pleasure,” Keeler answered with genuine warmth.

He and Bagger Vance walked on, talking. I missed most of what they said over the next two holes because Vance had me off pacing yardages. They were talking about the swing and chuckling. You could see Keeler still didn’t know what to make of this self-effacing yet obviously extremely intelligent caddie. On the fifteenth tee, they were waiting when I scurried back with the yardage from a fairway bunker.

“Let’s see you take a cut.” Bagger Vance held out Junah’s driver to me.

“You mean hit one?”

“Just give us a few swings.”

They had apparently been discussing some theory, and I was to be their guinea pig. I didn’t mind. I took the big deep-faced driver that Junah called Schenectady Slim, planted my feet and gave it a wail from my soles. Once more, Bagger Vance requested. I swung again. When I looked up, he and Keeler were both chuckling merrily.

I felt like a fool, half ready to slam the club down and storm off, when Bagger Vance again caught my shoulder with that warm strong hand. “We’re not laughing at you, Hardy,” he said.

“No,” Keeler followed, “more at our own poor selves, I fear.” Keeler explained, “We chuckled out of envy, envy of youth and fearlessness.” He declared that if he had torqued his spine through half the turn I had just taken, it would put him in the hospital for a week.

He spoke thoughtfully for a few moments about a boy’s natural swing, any boy’s. The big raw pivot, enormous arc, the natural sense of balance, release and turn.

“May I take it, sir,” Bagger Vance said when Keeler had finished, “that you believe there is such a thing as the Authentic Swing?”

You could see Keeler cover his astonishment. Apparently Bagger Vance had hit on something Keeler
had
thought about,
and was deeply interested in. “The Authentic Swing, did you say? Yes, I do.”

He looked at Bagger Vance deeply, solemnly, still more than a little amazed to be addressed so seriously and with such intelligence by this odd, mysterious man.

“Tell me, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,” Keeler said, “what are your thoughts on it?”

“H
AVE YOU EVER SEEN
identical twins take up golf? Their swings from the very first are radically different. Isn’t that odd?”

Keeler absorbed this from Vance, nodding thoughtfully. Yes, he had seen twins swing. Yes, how interesting that their motions were so different….

“Or,” Bagger Vance continued, “have you ever watched a boy pick up a club for the first time and swing? I mean his first swing ever. And then seen him years later as an accomplished player? Isn’t his mature swing virtually identical to the one he took the first time he picked up a club?”

“That is so,” Keeler agreed enthusiastically. “Please continue.”

“Or consider a professional instructor trying to alter a student’s swing to fit some preconception of the proper motion. It’s virtually impossible, is it not?”

Keeler agreed. “I see you’re driving at a point, sir.”

Vance paused. Keeler stood, absolutely attentive. “I believe that each of us possesses, inside ourselves,” Bagger Vance began, “one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone. It is folly to try to teach us another, or mold us to some ideal version of the perfect swing. Each player possesses only that one swing that he was born with, that swing which existed within him before he ever picked up a club. Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak.”

Keeler broke in with excitement. “Then our task as golfers, according to this line of thought…”

“…is simply to chip away all that is inauthentic, allowing our Authentic Swing to emerge in its purity.”

We had reached the sixteenth green. Keeler paced beside Vance as he strode the putting surface, examining its slope and grain. “That’s why a boyhood swing like your young friend’s here is so fascinating. We marvel at its raw purity and unselfconsciousness. It’s why we laughed involuntarily when we saw it. It shamed us, in a way.”

“Think of a swing like Hagen’s,” Bagger Vance resumed. “That lurching slashing motion, could you teach that to anyone else? Could anyone other than Hagen even make contact with the ball? And yet for him, it’s perfect. It is authentic. It is he. The swing he was born with, the swing that is the true expression of his existence.

“Have you noticed, Mr. Keeler, the endless praise and even adulation that is heaped upon your friend Mr. Jones’ swing? To
watch it evokes emotion, does it not? One might even say love; and do you know why? Is it not because we, in some deep intuitive part of ourselves, recognize Jones’ swing as Authentic? The pure expression of his being, his inner grace and nobility, his power, his concentration and even his flaws and imperfections? Jones’ swing embodies every aspect of his being like a perfect poem or symphony, and, if I may guess, has embodied it from the start.”

Keeler assented emphatically. “I believe you’re on to something, sir! I’ve known Bobby since he was thirteen and, do you know, his swing today is virtually identical to the one he possessed then and, I’ll wager, to the swing he had at ten and eight and even six. Probably the first swing Bobby ever took would be recognizable to us, had we film of it.”

“And before that,” Bagger Vance declared. “Before he ever picked up a club. Before he was even born.”

Vance paused, realizing that Keeler had a notepad in his hand. “Do you mind if I take some of this down?” Keeler asked. Bagger Vance hesitated, but continued.

“Consider the swing itself,” he said. “Its existence metaphysically, I mean. It has no objective reality of its own, no existence at all save when our bodies create it, and yet who can deny that it exists, independently of our bodies, as if on another plane of reality.”

“Am I hearing you right, sir?” Keeler asked. “Are you equating the swing with the soul, the Authentic Soul?”

“I prefer the word
Self
,” Bagger Vance said. “The Authentic Self. I believe this is the reason for the endless fascination of
golf. The game is a metaphor for the soul’s search for its true ground and identity.”

“Self-realization, you mean?”

“If you like. We enter onto this material plane, as Wordsworth said, ‘not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.’ In other words, already possessing a highly refined and individuated soul. Our job here is to recall that soul and become it. To form a union with it, a
yoga
as they say in India.”

“You’ve been to India, sir?”

“Many times,” Bagger Vance replied. “In the East, men are not embarrassed to speak openly of the Self. But here in the West, such piety makes people uncomfortable. That is where golf comes in.

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once—one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle—and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They
are
gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”

Keeler was now utterly in Vance’s thrall. We had passed off the sixteenth green and were climbing the rise to the seventeenth tee. Ahead we could see the ballroom lights and hear the orchestra music, faint scraps of it coming to us on the air. “Tell me, Mr. Vance. How does one find, if that’s the correct word…how does one find his own Authentic Swing?”

“I will answer that, Mr. Keeler. But before I begin, let me make an important distinction. The wild fearless cut we saw young Hardy take a few holes ago, that was
not
the Authentic Swing. It is a precursor, a foreshadowing. To reach the Authentic Swing, a player must pass through three distinct stages.

“First the pure state of unconsciousness, or preconsciousness. Pre-self-consciousness. This is the state in which our youthful companion resides now. He doesn’t think about what he’s doing, he simply picks up the club and swings. This demonstrates deep wisdom, because it expresses faith in the existence of the Swing, it launches itself fearlessly into the Void. Unfortunately this pure state, like youth itself, cannot last. It must by Nature’s law pass on to the next stage.”

“Self-awareness”—Keeler strode step-for-step beside Bagger Vance up the rise—“self-consciousness.”

“Exactly,” Vance acknowledged. “In this stage, we realize that we possess an Authentic Swing, but we can’t repeat it. Some days we can’t find it at all. Our frustration mounts. We begin to study, to seek instruction, to strive by dint of effort to mold and control our motion. This as every golfer knows leads only to despair. We cannot overcome golf by force of will.”

Vance stopped at the pinnacle of the teeing ground for the seventeenth. He looked out pensively over the dark duneland that stretched for a thousand yards along the night shore. His focus seemed to have wandered, to have left Keeler and traveled to some distant shore in his mind.

“You said there was a third stage,” Keeler prompted. “A stage, one assumes, beyond self-awareness.”

“Few reach that level, as we well know.” Bagger Vance smiled, returning from whatever inner land he had journeyed to. “And then only briefly. It is as elusive as Enlightenment. Merely to realize we possess it makes it fly from us. And yet paradoxically it is always there, nearest of the near, closer to us than our own skin.”

“But how,” Keeler pressed, “how do we get to it?”

“It gets to us,” Bagger Vance said. “Surrendering to it at last, we allow it to possess us.”

“The Self, you mean?”

“And then we can play.”

A soft chiming sound interrupted us. Keeler tugged a silver railroadman’s watch from his vest pocket. It chimed its last sweet beat. “My goodness, it’s four
A.M.
I must get at least an hour of sleep.” He was torn, you could see, wanting to stay up and listen to Vance all night.

“Sir, could you briefly, as we walk in, expound on this subject just a little more? Is there a path, a Way, that leads us to the Authentic Swing?”

“There are three,” Bagger Vance said.

Unfortunately I missed most of what he said, for he had me
pacing yardages on these two last and most important holes. I scooted out quickly, with Vance shouting after me not to rush but to keep my strides uniform, then scurried back as fast as I could while still being true to the yardage. I confess that a part of me was distracted, held spellbound by the grandeur and majesty of these two spectacular closing holes—“Prudence,” number seventeen, a 444-yard par four, uphill and awesome in the moonlight, and eighteen, “Valor,” which tracked the phosphorescent surf for 541 grueling brilliant yards. In a state of near rapture I caught what I could of the instruction Vance gave to Mr. Keeler.

The first path, I heard him say, was that of Discipline. It had something to do with beating balls, with endless practice, an utter relentless commitment to achieving physical mastery of the game.

Second was the path of Wisdom. I heard practically nothing of what Vance said here (I was checking yardage to three separate bunkers off the eighteenth) except, I believe, that the process was largely mental—a study of the swing much like a scientist might undertake: analysis, dissection, and so on.

Third (and this I heard most of) was the path of Love.

On this path, Vance said, we learn the Swing the way a child acquires its native tongue. We absorb it through pure love of the game. This is how boys and girls learn, intuitively, through their pores, by total devotion and immersion. Without technically “studying” the swing, they imbibe it by osmosis, from watching accomplished players and from sensing it within their own bones.

“All three of these paths embody one unifying principle,” Vance said. We were now approaching the eighteenth green.
“That of surrender. Surrender of the Little Mind to the Big Mind, surrender of the personal ego to the greater wisdom of the Self.

“The path of beating balls defeats the player, as it must, until he surrenders at last and allows his swing to swing itself. The path of study and dissection leads only to paralysis, until the player likewise surrenders and allows his overloaded brain to set down its burden, till in empty purity it remembers how to swing.

“In other words, the first and second ways both lead to the third. Love is the greatest of these ways. For in the end, grace comes from God, from the Authentic Self. But to plumb this mystery would take us far more than a night and, I’m sorry to see, we have reached the final green. You must be very tired, Mr. Keeler.”

On the contrary Keeler was energized, electric. “I won’t sleep a wink after this,” he said, “but I suppose I must try.” He extended his hand. “Mr. Vance, it has been my good fortune to encounter, and I may say to interrogate, many of the most profound thinkers on the game alive today. You, sir, tower above them all. We must meet again and continue. It would be my fondest wish to have you discuss these thoughts with Bob.”

“I have,” Vance declared cryptically. When Keeler reacted with surprise and inquired eagerly to know when, Bagger Vance evaded the question in his usual pleasant but firm manner, remarking only “Before you met him.”

They took their leave at the eighteenth, Keeler striding off vivid with energy, squinting to read his notes by the late moon. Across the dunes, the orchestra had finally retired; at last the
shoreline slumbered. I looked up at Vance, who had resumed his distant expression, gazing out again over the silent linksland. For many moments he remained in this pose, motionless and rapt. Some thought or resolution seemed to crystallize inside him; I could see him return to the present and become again aware of me, still in attendance beside him.

“Mr. Keeler’s instincts are truer than he thinks,” Bagger Vance spoke quietly, once again placing that warm powerful hand on my shoulder. “A battle
was
fought here, once, long ago.” I followed his hand as it swept across the rolling dunes, indicating a plain along the shore and including, it seemed, a vast expanse out over the water.

“In the days when the austral constellations hung visible in this Northern sky, before the Great Ice retreated to the pole, this ocean we call Atlantic withdrew as far as the Afric shore and gave birth to a brilliant continent, a land called Mu. Its peoples were mighty warriors, artists and magicians whose knowledge of the subtle powers far surpasses anything our so-called moderns possess today.”

His hand indicated the land from the seventeenth, back down to the twelfth, then stretched out over the water, which apparently had been dry land then. “There, where you see, great armies once clashed in battle lines that stretched as far as the horizon. Blows thundered heavenward, steel upon steel, and horses and men cried out in victory and death.” He paused. “That was nearly one
yuga…
twenty-one thousand years ago.”

It sounded, of course, completely fantastic. And yet I believed him. “How do you know all this?” I asked.

“I was there,” Bagger Vance answered casually, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

He looked down at me, to see if I believed him. I felt the power of his eyes, their warmth and even love for me. I was held as if by the sun.

“Junah was with me as well,” he smiled, still touching my shoulder. “And do you know what, young Hardy? You were there too.”