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  The speed of the ball coming off the clubface was indeed a sight to behold, but the effort he put into his swing had thrown him slightly off balance, and the ball was heading to the left more than he would have liked. Since the fairway curved to the right, this added maybe twenty yards to the distance to the green for his next shot, even though the ball landed safely in the fairway with a nice, clean lie. The enthusiastic applause for his 310-yard blast betrayed the crowd’s ignorance of what Agnormo had intended to do: While his lie was quite good for getting on the green in regulation three, it was horrendous for reaching it in two. It would require at least 270 yards of pure carry over the water before it hit the ground. Agnormo, as keenly insightful about the game as any golfer alive, naturally expected me to try the same, but, as I said, my caddie had looked at the leader board, and so we both knew something that Agnormo didn’t. So when I played a nice 260 pop safely down the center of the fairway, I could sense him shaking his head slightly in mild derision of my cowardice and willingness to settle for a possible third place.

  The rest made the front page Monday, and not just the sports section. Mustering all his reserve, Agnormo took a driver out of his bag and tried to smack the ball onto the green. His shot was incredibly straight, but too low, and as the ball screamed toward the lake, everyone watching knew he was in trouble. His ball touched down in the water about fifty yards short of the greenside bank of the pond, and then, amazingly, took a huge skip and rose back up into the air. Several thousand hearts stopped beating as it appeared that the ball was going to land on the opposite shore, but it came down short again, and again skipped and jumped into the air, landing short once again, but this time staying down and dying beneath the rippling of the pond.

  Agnormo closed his eyes and tried hard not to betray his dismay. I looked away, took hold of an eight-iron and laid my ball up about twenty yards short of the water. Agnormo took his drop, put the ball on the green and two-putted for a bogey six. I pitched up and two-putted for a safe par, now tied with him for first, and that’s when Agnormo happened to glance at the leader board, the horror of it zinging into his brain with such force I thought he might fall over as he just learned what I had known back at the tee box.

  Fleckheimer was still two shots behind. He hadn’t birdied the fourteenth at all, he just parred it. But his second shot had gone into a bunker, with a rotten lie that afforded him practically no backswing, and he had hit an astonishing shot that dropped his ball onto the green, although still thirty feet from the pin. He then sank the putt to save par. That was what all the screaming from the crowd had been about, and Agnormo’s failure to verify his assumption about what had happened had forced him to attempt a near-impossible birdie, leaving him with a disastrous bogey.

  His glance at me at that moment was murderous. He knew instantly that I had been aware of Fleckheimer’s status all along, which was why I had played the eighteenth safe. Fleckheimer never did make another birdie, and Agnormo and I found ourselves in a playoff for first place. The format was that we would both play the eighteenth over and over until somebody won it. Neither of us was willing to risk going for birdie, so each of us parred the damned thing four times, waiting for the other guy to make a mistake, which Agnormo did on the fifth go-around, missing an eight-foot par putt. I made my six-footer, and that’s how I won both the Nissan Prudential Fruit of the Loom Texaco (formerly the Valley View) Open and the eternal enmity of Gerry Agnormo, who never forgave me for violating what he considered to be one of the gentlemanly canons of the game.

  All that by way of illustrating how one man’s play in this loneliest of sports can affect another’s. I won, despite the fact that Agnormo was frankly the better golfer. Thank God he wasn’t European and couldn’t play in the Ryder to exact revenge on me.

  How’d I get started on this? Oh, yeah, that’s stroke play we’ve been talking about. But the Ryder Cup is match play, and that’s an entirely different game. In match play, the favorite format of most golfers and fans, it’s one player against another, mano a mano, and the overall scores don’t count. They play hole by hole; lowest score wins the hole, then you wipe the slate clean and the next hole is a brand-new match. The one who wins the most holes of the eighteen available wins the game.

  In stroke play, if you really screw up a hole, let’s say four over par, you may never make up that deficit, and you have to play the rest of the game with that depressing thought stuck in your mind. Arnold Palmer himself once took a twelve during the U.S. Open at Rancho Park in Los Angeles (there’s a marble memorial on what is now the eighteenth hole to commemorate the event, describing in detail how he got each stroke). But in match play, even if you hit twenty over par, all you lose is that one hole. Then it’s history, and you start afresh on the next tee, down only one more instead of eighteen more, as you would have been in stroke play.

  And in this format, what your opponent does, and where the match stands, has a huge impact on what you do on every hole. It doesn’t matter if you take an eight on a par-four so long as your opponent takes at least that many himself or you already have a sufficient lead to absorb a lost hole. And once somebody’s lead is larger than the number of holes remaining, the match is over. If you’re up three and there are only two holes left to play, you can’t lose, so the game ends and you win, “three and two.”

  It’s the most thrilling format imaginable. The reason it’s not used in regular tour events is that it would take too many rounds to determine a winner, and nine or ten days of golf is just too much.

  But the Ryder Cup has only twelve players on a side. Not only that, there’s no individual winner, just the team. Twenty-eight matches are played in all, each one worth one point. Ties are worth a half point. The team that wins at least 14½ points takes the cup home. If the whole tournament is all square at 14–14, the team already in possession of the cup from the contest two years prior gets to take it back home.

  Damned exciting stuff.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Being captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team is a once-in-a-lifetime honor, at least for an American (the Europeans tend to keep theirs on), but there is nothing honorary about the position. The captain sets all the pairings for the two-man matches, determines the order of play, is the only person allowed to coach team members once play has begun and has the absolute authority to make last-minute changes in who plays in what matches—or who plays at all.

  And he’s got one other little chore: The team consists of the top ten point-winners on the tour, points being awarded according to how they placed in events. The last two picks are solely at the captain’s discretion. There is no decision more subject to criticism and second-guessing, which has little to do with whom he ends up choosing or why. It could be the winner of the Masters, an up-and-coming sensation, whatever. As soon as his decision is announced, a million self-anointed experts are sure to demand his banishment to the fires of hell for his bone-headed misjudgment.

  Imagine what happened to me when, in addition to the no-brainer choice of Mack Merriwell, I picked Eddie Caminetti.

  I first heard about Eddie during a corporate outing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, some three months before the Ryder. An “outing” for a professional golfer means an excruciating day dragging three amateurs around a golf course for upward of five hours while trying to remember that they hadn’t paid four thousand dollars each for His Eminence to act surly. The reward at the end of the day is another three hours or so of pumping the hands of half-soused, florid-faced, potbellied corporate types at the behest of the sponsor who set the outing up. I perhaps ought to mention that the other reward, at least for someone like me, is about fifty thousand dollars, which is not bad for one day’s work, of which my caddie doesn’t get his usual tour-event cut.

  On this particular Sunday, the private course was filled with the usual onlookers gawking at our foursome, especially at me, the superstar who had deigned to honor their club with the graciousness of his presence. You might think such adulation is ego-sa
tisfying, but it’s really 100-percent pain in the ass, especially with no television cameras around. Answering the same old questions from this local Gang of Three as I get from reporters for network television is not only tedious but harmful: It’s difficult to keep the sound-bites fresh after you’ve mumbled them a thousand times to people who don’t count. If I had a buck for every joker that day who asked me whom I was going to pick as the final member of the Ryder Cup team, I could retire from the tour. Okay, I could retire anyway, but you know what I mean.

  ’Long about the twelfth hole, I noticed a funny thing. A lot of the people I thought were staring at me were actually turned away looking at something else, something on an adjoining hole. Even more amazingly, once in a while one or two of the amateurs in my group would kind of saunter off to take a look themselves. Now, what could be of more interest to a weekend duffer than playing a round with the Player of the Year?

  My curiosity soon turned to annoyance. Sure, I hated outings and didn’t need the attention from fawning locals carrying 25-handicaps, but I didn’t expect to be snubbed, either. Finally, after I crushed an absolutely massive drive on fourteen and turned to savor the astonishment from the rest of the foursome, I found all three of them staring intently at the approach to the seventeenth green about fifty yards to the right of our tee box.

  “Somebody want to tell me what—” I began with some irritation, but, surprisingly, astoundingly, Larry “The Hardware Maven” Dugelman held up a hand in my direction without even looking at me. I clamped my jaw shut before anybody could catch wind of my shock, not a likely occurrence since no one was looking at me anyway, and turned to see just what was so damned compelling over there.

  The seventeenth is a par-four so long that it misses being a par-five by about three inches. Fifty yards in front of the green and off to the right is a sand trap, the back of which is a sheer wall nearly six feet high, shielding the green from whatever happens to be inside the bunker, which at the moment appeared to be an entirely nondescript man of average height, build and coloring and wearing clothes so ordinary that, to this day, I can’t remember a single distinguishing characteristic of any of it.

  Standing with him just outside the trap were two players decked out in considerably more dapper finery. At the moment my eye happened upon them, the two men were laughing and shaking their heads as they walked back up the fairway away from the bunker, where I spotted two golf balls lying about seventy and eighty yards from the slightly elevated green. I assumed they were both lying two, while the man in the bunker lay the same but at a considerable disadvantage.

  “Lotta dough just went down on that little sucker,” said the auto dealer whose name I couldn’t remember, pointing to the bunker where I now saw another golf ball nestled at the base of that man-high cliff. Was it possible that this clown actually made a bet that he would win this hole? And even if he did, why would my three playing partners give a tinker’s cuss in the middle of playing a round with—did I already mention it?—the Player of the Year?

  I decided to watch with them, an easy choice since none of them was paying any attention to me anyhow. The guy farthest out on the fairway took a pitching wedge and lobbed his ball softly onto the green, maybe twenty feet from the pin. Not a bad shot at all for an amateur. The other guy tried a sand wedge but bladed it, sending the ball up over the green in a shallow ascent that put it in the rough more than fifteen yards back of the dance floor.

  The guy in the bunker watched all of this without any outward sign that it affected him either way, then stepped toward his cart and reached into his bag for what should have been some kind of wedge. But it was over four feet long with a bright orange shaft as big around as a radiator hose. It also seemed to have telescoping sections …

  “The hell’s he doing with a ball retriever?” I asked, mystified. Surely he wasn’t going to declare the ball unplayable and take a drop, costing himself a stroke? And even if that was his plan, why use a retriever instead of just hopping back in and picking up the ball by hand?

  I grew even more puzzled when he did step into the trap and walk up to his ball, still carrying the retriever. As he surveyed the sand wall looming above him, I said to no one in particular, “Somebody want to clue me in?”

  The auto dealer smiled, but still without looking away from the scene. “S′gonna play it,” he said.

  “What’s the retriever for?”

  The Hardware Maven turned to me, finally, a wide grin on his doughy face. “′At’s what he’s gonna play it with.”

  At that point I lost all interest. Who was kidding who here? “C’mon, guys,” I said in my most commanding, no-nonsense tone. “Let’s finish up here.”

  “Why don’t you come on over here and watch this,” said Vinny Zworsa in his most commanding, no-nonsense voice. So I did.

  The guy in the sand finished his examination of the bunker and stepped away from the ball, then twisted the flat part of the retriever head, jamming it firmly into the handle. He tilted the stick down and let the head slowly fall until it was in position behind the ball, being careful not to let it touch the sand, which would have incurred a penalty. When the whole configuration was stabilized, he took one more look at the wall, then locked his eyes onto the ball and stood as still as death for about five seconds.

  Slowly, he took the club back, picking up speed as the metal head came into the air above his right shoulder. When he had it pointed straight up, he brought it back down so fast it became a blur. I couldn’t help noticing that the only thing the guy was moving of his body were parts between his neck and his waist: Head and legs were so motionless they looked as though they’d been painted onto the landscape.

  I couldn’t see a single grain of sand come up from the trap as the retriever head slipped under the ball with the same kind of soft pinging sound a tennis ball might make if it were dropped onto a china plate. The ball flew almost straight up, seeming to follow the contours of the sand wall before it rose above the lip, and continued rising high into the late-afternoon sky. I couldn’t actually see any horizontal travel, but by the time it finally ran out of upward trajectory and began dropping back to earth, it was hanging right above the green.

  The dapper gentlemen on the fairway must have seen it, too, because I heard something roughly along the lines of “Holy Mother of God!” issue forth from one of them. As I followed the ball down, my eye caught the man in the bunker walking back toward his cart, not even bothering to watch his ball, said ball at the moment plopping onto the green, bouncing a few inches into the air and coming to rest on the same spot it had hit on its first touchdown, which was less than four feet from the hole.

  My playing partners loudly exhaled breaths I hadn’t realized were held, and then I did the same as they all turned wordlessly to watch my reaction.

  “Lucky break,” I said lamely.

  “Yeah.” The Hardware Maven snorted. “Was lucky the time he did it to me, too.”

  “Same here,” the auto dealer threw in as Zworsa nodded.

  He’d done this before? “Couple dozen times I know of,” Zworsa said, as though reading my mind.

  “Name’s Eddie,” The Maven said. “Eddie Caminetti.”

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t so special anymore. “Where’s he play?”

  “Embassy. Over to Hallandale.”

  “Maybe I’ll play him a little later.”

  “If you bet him,” the dealer said.

  “I don’t bet amateurs,” I answered huffily.

  “Then you ain’t playin’ him,” The Maven said as he walked back to the tee box and gestured for me to tee up.

  “What’re you, kiddin’ me?” I told you, I’m the Player of the Year, f’Chrissakes!

  “Man don’t give a shit who you are,” Zworsa said. “Only cares do you got money to play with.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this and decided to forget about it. On the next hole, as I stood over my ball ready to hit a seven-iron to the 190-yard, par-three green, I hear
d a sound like a brick hitting a concrete sidewalk from ten stories up and turned in annoyance, just in time to see a golf ball rocketing away from the eighteenth tee, this Caminetti character standing there still poised at the end of his follow-through. The ball was arcing heavenward, and I lost sight of it just as it finally looked about ready to start back down.

  “Stick don’t look right,” I said, expecting a typical half-moon driver clubhead to be dangling beneath Caminetti’s right shoulder.

  “Was a putter,” the auto dealer said, indicating impatiently that it would be all right with him if I decided to hit right about now.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After the boozy reception enabling about a hundred swaying business types to claim from now on that we were great friends, I made my standard little speech and then answered the standard questions, in addition to one that came from somebody’s wife who clearly wasn’t pleased at spending Sunday mornings with just the kids.

  “Mr. Bellamy, can you explain how such a silly game can be so addicting?” A scattering of nodding heads told me she’d struck a sympathetic chord, but I also was pleased to note that the majority of the women in the room looked at her with real surprise, as though the answer should have been self-evident.

  But it isn’t, not to those who don’t play. Trying to describe to a non-golfer what it feels like to hit a perfect shot is like trying to describe sex to a eunuch. There’s no common comparative basis in the language other than to reference the act itself, so you find yourself locked into non-illuminating recursions, like Hitting a three-iron 230 yards straight up the fairway is just like, uh … hitting a three-iron 230 yards straight up the fairway. Attempting to communicate to a cynic why you love the game so much is a fruitless effort doomed to failure, so there’s no sense even trying. It’ll only invite ridicule, especially if you head off into one of those sappy, religion-aping paeans so prized by professional golf writers who have run out of more comprehensible things to say.