The Green Read online

  Also by Troon McAllister

  THE FOURSOME

  In memory of Jim Murray

  THE PAIRINGS

  Friday Morning: Alternate Shot

  United States Europe

  1—Jon Markovy Juan Castillo Licenciados

  Fred Asphal v. Andrew Firth

  2—Derek Anouilh Eric Swenborg

  Mack Merriwell v. Fabrizio Migliore

  3—Eddie Caminetti Jürgen Kurzer

  Enrico Senzamio v. Charles Woolsey

  4—Joel Fleckheimer John Wickenhampshire

  Paul DeMonte v. Jacques St. Villard (capt.)

  Friday Afternoon: “Best Ball”

  United States Europe

  1—Eddie Caminetti Eric Swenborg

  Enrico Senzamio v. Jacques St. Villard (capt.)

  2—Jon Markovy Jürgen Kurzer

  Fred Asphal v. Fabrizio Migliore

  3—August Hookstratten Eero Tukinen

  Derek Anouilh v. Mieczyslaw Piranewski

  4—Archie McWhirter Helmut Braunschweiger

  Tal Thomashow v. Andrew Firth

  Saturday Morning: Alternate Shot

  United States Europe

  1—Eddie Caminetti Eric Swenborg

  Enrico Senzamio v. Charles Woolsey

  2—Jon Markovy Jürgen Kurzer

  Fred Asphal v. Fabrizio Migliore

  3—Joel Fleckheimer Eero Tukinen

  Derek Anouilh v. John Wickenhampshire

  4—Mack Merriwell Juan Castillo Licenciados

  Tal Thomashow v. Andrew Firth

  Saturday Afternoon: “Best Ball”

  United States Europe

  1—Eddie Caminetti Helmut Braunschweiger

  Enrico Senzamio v. Jürgen Kurzer

  2—August Hookstratten Juan Castillo Licenciados

  Derek Anouilh v. Jacques St. Villard (capt.)

  3—Archie McWhirter Mieczyslaw Piranewski

  Tal Thomashow v. Charles Woolsey

  4—Jon Markovy Andrew Firth

  Fred Asphal v. Luc van Ostrand

  Sunday: Individual Matches

  United States Europe

  1—Robert Carmichael v. John Wickenhampshire

  2—August Hookstratten v. Eric Swenborn

  3—Paul DeMonte v. Charles Woolsey

  4—Archie McWhirter v. Eero Tukinen

  5—Tal Thomashow v. Mieczyslaw Piranewski

  6—Derek Anouilh v. Juan Castillo Licenciados

  7—Jon Markovy v. Fabrizio Migliore

  8—Mack Merriwell v. Helmut Braunschweiger

  9—Enrico Senzamio v. Jürgen Kurzer

  10—Joel Fleckheimer v. Andrew Firth

  11—Eddie Caminetti v. Jacques St. Villard (capt.)

  “You men, you treat golf as an emergency. Rain, wind, sickness, natural disaster… it just has to be played, regardless.”

  —HELEN GRUENFELD,

  APRIL 1998

  CHAPTER ONE

  This is a true story. It just hasn’t happened yet…

  My name is Alan Bellamy. Of course you already know that, otherwise why would you be bothering to read a story about golf? But in case you’ve been held hostage by a terrorist organization for the past nine years, you should know that I’ve won the U.S. Open, the British Open twice, and took third and second at the Masters along with a slew of wins at other events of only slightly less prestige, including a second at the Tournament of Champions. I was the leading money-winner twice and Player of the Year three times. It may sound immodest, but those are the facts. Most important, though, I was captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team last year, when it was played on American soil, and I was the one responsible for what happened.

  What you don’t know is how it happened, only that it was all my fault, but you don’t know why, even though you think you do. You think, as does everybody else, that it was because I put one Eddie Caminetti on the team, a two-bit public-links hustler who never played in a single PGA-sanctioned event in his life, and who had about as much business being on a Ryder Cup team as Ilie Nastase. You think that’s why things went a little haywire and, as a matter of fact, you’re right, but not for the reasons you think.

  First, a word about the Ryder Cup. If you’re not familiar with golf, you might think it’s just another of the dozens of barely distinguishable competitions that take place throughout the year, evenly spaced so it seems there isn’t a weekend that goes by without hour after tedious hour of footage showing generally out-of-shape men alternately smiling, groaning, cursing, jumping into the air, holding their heads in their hands, holding those same hands up in triumph, berating their caddies and basically acting as though what they did was actually important in the greater scheme of things.

  You’d be wrong. Not necessarily about your opinion of golf, which is shared by many, most of whom have never actually played the game but think they understand it better than the twenty-five million Americans who do, but about the Ryder Cup being just another tournament.

  First off, there are only twenty-four players in the Ryder Cup and not a single penny of prize money. The results don’t appear on any player’s PGA record, nor do they count for his official statistics. The rules are often capricious, the playing format is brutal, and, for professionals conditioned to withstand the agony of participating in the loneliest and most individual sport on earth, the sudden plunge into team play is confusing and unnerving. Who wants to give advice, counsel and succor to people who spent every waking moment of the previous two years trying to kill you and who will do the same within days of the Ryder being over?

  Ye t there is no contest in the sport that the players take more seriously, and being on the team is the highest honor attainable, even though the subsequent scrutiny and the relentless pressure are almost unbearable. The strongest and most mentally hardened among the competitors have been known to sneak off into the woods in the middle of a hole to throw up from the sheer tension. Once in a rare while, a player with an erratic game even declines to play on the team for fear of having an off day at the worst possible time.

  Why? Because the Ryder Cup is a biennial match pitting the best players in the United States against the best in Europe. It is played for honor, not money, and the players, like the Kagemusha of old Japan, are our designated warriors fighting their designated warriors on behalf of the entire U.S.A. Lose a major on the regular tour and you go home disappointed. Lose the Ryder for your team (as well as your country)— not an impossibility, since the entire three-day match can come down to a single putt—and it’s warm-bath-and-a-razor time. In some ways, making damned sure you don’t blow it for the team is vastly more important than winning it for them.

  I know. I’m the one who blew it five years ago when we lost the cup at the Congressional. The tournament site alternates between Europe and the United States, and, while it’s bad enough to lose over there, losing on your own soil is as bad as it gets.

  Hang on a second. You didn’t know I was the one who lost it. You thought it was Mack Merriwell, right? Missing his putt on the eighteenth during his match against Juan Castillo Licenciados with the entire tournament all square?

  No. It was me. Everybody thought it was Mack because his loss came on the last day, and mine came on the first. But the fact is, Mack and Licenciados had fought an awesome battle for eighteen holes, trading the lead so often neither of them was ever ahead for more than two holes in a row. They not only tore at each other, they tore at the course, crushing the formerly invincible Congressional beneath their cleats. Both of them would have broken the old course record of 66 had they been playing medal format.

  Again, for those of you unfamiliar with the Ryder Cup format, I should explain something. Just about every major golf event in the world is played according to the medal format, also known as
stroke play. Nothing could be simpler: At the end of four rounds over four days, you add up how many shots each player took, and the one who took the fewest wins. Period.

  What makes stroke play kind of interesting is that the players aren’t really playing against each other, they’re playing against the course. Most of the time, while you’re out there, you don’t even know for sure where you stand, at least not moment by moment, because it’s possible that your nearest competitor is half a mile away. If you were all square, and then he made a birdie at the same time you made par, it might be several minutes before the news reached you. And even then, if you already played seventeen holes and he played only thirteen, he’s got five more holes to try to improve his final score, and you’re pretty much done. So you’ll end up sitting in the clubhouse for an hour or two, helpless, waiting to find out whether you won or not without anything you can do about it anymore except pray, and, as any golfer will tell you, God doesn’t listen to golfers. When He invented this game, He was 100 percent well intentioned but only 75 percent effective. Remember the old one about whether God can make a stone so heavy even He couldn’t lift it? Well, when He invented golf, He created a game even He couldn’t play. As Lee Trevino put it when someone asked him why he was holding a one-iron aloft during a lightning storm, “′Cause even God can’t hit a one-iron.”

  When you play in a tennis match or a bowling tournament, you have to beat maybe six or seven other people, which is the total number of matches you have to play. But whoever wins a golfing event under stroke play has to beat everybody, every other golfer in the entire contest, without actually playing against any of them. So how you play has nothing to do with whom you’re playing against; you just try to get the lowest score possible all the time.

  Except sometimes. And those are the times when the game gets truly exciting. If your closest competitor happens to be in your group, and your group is the last one playing, all of a sudden you have to pay attention to what’s going on, because what the other guy is doing can have a huge impact on your game and how you play it.

  If that’s confusing, here’s an example: About six months ago, I was playing in the Nissan Prudential Fruit of the Loom Texaco Open in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. (It used to be called the Valley View Open, but that was back before corporations figured out how to provide gigantic perks to their officers and customers while telling their shareholders that sponsoring golf tournaments was good for business because, even though it seemed to cost many millions right off the bottom line, the truth was that the resultant “image marketing” reaped huge benefits, which, while difficult to quantify, were nevertheless quite real, as the officers and customers would swear vehemently.)

  The mercurial New Zealander Gerry Agnormo and I were paired on the last day. As we approached the seventeenth tee, he was leading by a single stroke, I was second, and Joel Fleckheimer, three holes back of us somewhere, was one stroke behind me through thirteen holes. Nobody else in the field was even close. That meant that Agnormo and I would be fighting each other down the stretch.

  Now you might say, what’s the difference—you’re each going to try to get the lowest score possible, right? You could be on two different planets and it shouldn’t affect how you play.

  But it does make a difference. Because trying to get the lowest score possible is very risky. Sometimes, in order to score a birdie, you have to risk making a bogey, whereas if you simply go for par, it’s almost a sure thing.

  The seventeenth at the Valley View Country Club is a devilish par-four, 420 yards “from the tips,” which means that the tees are set as far back as possible. The fairway is very narrow, thick stands of trees running down both sides of its entire length, but they’re not the real problem.

  The real problem is a lake sitting between you and the green. The front edge is 220 yards away, the back edge 260. So there are two basic ways you can play this hole. The first is obvious: Hit a long iron about 210 straight down the middle, laying up in front of the lake and leaving yourself 210 yards up onto the green and a likely par.

  Then there’s the other way: Smack your driver over the lake, so you can tuck a pitching wedge nice and close to the flag for a birdie opportunity. Nothing to it—so long as you can reliably whack your driver 280 yards, 261 of them in the air, and do it without hitting into the trees on either side. This is a fairly tall order for most golfers.

  Which one should you do?

  It depends. In my case, Agnormo had the honors and would hit off the tee first. Now, he was ahead of me by one, and he knew that the odds of my getting a birdie on this hole were very small, so he figured, why take a chance on going for birdie himself and risk mucking it up and losing his lead?

  After pondering this for a moment or two, and weighing it against the pressure of several thousand of his fans gathered around in hushed anticipation of something spectacular, he yanked a four-iron out of his bag and stepped up to the tee box. He took a long time staring at a spot in the middle of the fairway, then seemed to put it out of his mind completely as he focused on the ball alone. With perfect control, he brought the club back and whipped it forward with a slight grunt, then watched as the tiny white pill rose into the sky and headed straight for the trees on the left. As the purely ballistic motion of the ball started to give way to aerodynamic forces, the dimples on the surface began biting into the air as they spun clockwise at a high rate of speed.

  The dimples on the left side of the ball, moving toward the oncoming air, caused a lot more friction than the ones on the other that were spinning away from what aerodynamicists call the apparent wind. Gradually, this caused the ball to move to the right, just as Agnormo had intended. This is called a fade, and by the time the ball hit the ground, it had shifted a good thirty yards from its original path and come to rest dead center in the fairway, less than ten yards from the water’s edge.

  Agnormo couldn’t have played this shot better had he been allowed to walk the ball out to the fairway and place it by hand, and the crowd knew it. He acknowledged the cheers with a big smile and a nonchalant wave of the hand—Big deal, I do it all the time—and tried not to gloat as he cleared out so I could hit.

  Had Agnormo been down by one instead of up, there is little doubt he would have tried to blast one all the way past the lake in order to give himself a better birdie opportunity, which birdie he was not likely to get from his present position.

  I, on the other hand, had no choice, unless I wanted to settle for a sure second place instead of risking a disaster in order to try to win this thing. If I could make birdie here, we’d be all square going into the last hole. And of course there was always the chance that Agnormo could put his next shot onto the green close enough for a makable birdie of his own. Even if I put the tee shot into the water, I told myself, I still had a chance of putting my next shot close to the flag, one-putting for par, including my penalty stroke.

  To make a long story short, I put on my steely-concentration face for the benefit of the television cameras, took the driver, and, as they say, gripped it and ripped it. It was a mighty and awe-inspiring firecracker of a belt, about 290 smack down the middle and over the water as though the ball had onboard navigation radar.

  Agnormo, being farther from the hole than I, hit next, a beautiful, soft four-iron that rose lazily into the sky and plopped onto the green about thirty feet from the flag. My nine-iron landed on the other side of the hole, about the same distance away as Agnormo’s, and we both two-putted for par.

  Net advantage to me for my risk? Nothing. He was still up by one. But I had to try, you see, and that’s how a competitor can affect your game toward the end of the match.

  Actually, now that I think about it, what happened on the next hole illustrates the point even better. Because just as we were walking to the eighteenth, a tremendous roar arose from somewhere in the distance. Agnormo and I looked at one of the tour officials scattered around the course. The man had a walkie-talkie at his ear, then pulled it away and said, “Flec
kheimer.”

  Agnormo pursed his lips as I nodded my understanding at him: Joel Fleckheimer had just birdied the fourteenth. That meant he was now tied with me for second, one stroke behind Agnormo. I could see the gears working in The Kiwi’s brain: He had only one hole left to play. Fleckheimer and I, between us, had five. What Agnormo was thinking was, somewhere among those five holes, either Fleckheimer or I was bound to make at least one birdie, which would place that guy into a tie with Agnormo for first, forcing a playoff. Two birdies by Fleckheimer and he’d have the tournament. So what Agnormo was thinking was, I can’t play the eighteenth safe and risk a playoff or an outright loss. He had to birdie the hole.

  The eighteenth is a classic finishing hole, a beautiful 560-yard par-five that sweeps gently from left to right, ending with a lake in front of the green that butts right up against it. Hardly anybody tries to reach the green in two, because plopping into the lake is too much of a risk. Even if you smack a 300-yard drive, there’s still 260 to go, and it has to carry nearly all the way in order to get over the lake. Normally, The Kiwi wouldn’t dream of trying it.

  Normally. But now he was faced with the real possibility of blowing the Nissan Prudential Fruit of the Loom Texaco (formerly the Valley View) Open unless he pushed the outside of the envelope a little, since another player’s game had now affected his own.

  And the pressure was on me, too. Up until this point, I was alone in second place, and now I had competition from Fleckheimer. Would I have to try to get on the eighteenth green in two as well?

  The question became moot for me, because at that point my caddie did something that both Agnormo and his caddie had neglected to: He looked at the leader board through his binoculars, and then he said something to me as discreetly and unobtrusively as he could, and I almost fainted. But he squeezed my arm in order to make me keep my composure and not give anything away, and I stood as still as possible as Agnormo addressed his ball.

  Poised in his stance, The Kiwi let out a long breath and forced his shoulders to relax. Then he turned his head to the left and spent several seconds eyeballing his target, some tuft of grass or other landmark he had picked out on the fairway. Turning back to his ball, he took another moment to visualize exactly how this swing was going to look, then he hauled off and thwacked the ball just as hard as he possibly could.