Par for the Course Read online

  Steam filled my shirt. I couldn’t take any more. “But you just don’t know—”

  Lin raised both hands to halt me in midsentence. “Are there any women members at the Yeah-man’s Hall Golf Club, Mr. Hackett?”

  I squirmed in my seat. “Um, I’m not . . . Yeah, I think so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Okay, yes, I’ve definitely seen some women playing at the club.”

  Tenacity was not just her middle name; it must have been emblazoned on her family coat of arms. “And how many of those women have you played golf with in the past year?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “I don’t think I’ve actually played with any. But I did give free lessons to a woman at my practice range last month. She was poor. A single mom.”

  Sarcasm must have been emblazoned just below tenacity. “You don’t say . . .”

  I noted her pale left hand and compared it to her tan right one. This woman was a golfer, and she wore a glove when she played. My competitive instinct kicked in again and together with the emotion of the moment caused me to blurt, “Yeah, and one more thing: If you’d care to meet me at a course and play an 18-hole round, I’ll make you a bet.”

  “A bet? At golf?” Amusement had returned, at least in her tone of voice.

  I felt the burden of defending all males on planet Earth. “Yep, at golf. You can play from the red tees, and I’ll spot you ten strokes for the eighteen holes. If I win, I get half of the teaching time for this class of yours, meaning that I share the stage with you and get to promote the male perspective on all this relational stuff.”

  A buzz filled the room—a decidedly feminine buzz.

  “And if I win,” Lin said with confidence, “you complete the eight-week course as the sole male in the room, and you get no stage time at all, and you have to sit right here in the front row.” She pointed to her first-row friends.

  Again sixty heads turned toward me, few of them smiling. One older lady seated in front of me whispered, “Do it, sonny. Take the bet!”

  Somewhere above row four, my gaze and Lin’s met in fiery battle.

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Deal,” she replied. “Thursday at two?”

  “At Yeamans Hall Club?”

  She nodded. “I’ll bring my own caddy.”

  For the last fifteen minutes of class Lin continued to extol the virtues of Eve and mock the actions of Adam. When finally she dismissed us, none of the others made an attempt to speak to me. To be fair, I didn’t seek them out either. I wasn’t scared of being offended again, or ignored, or even disrespected. No, what consumed me as I walked out of the Hyatt that night was why Lin Givens sounded so confident in making a golf bet with a professional instructor.

  2

  LESSON FOR TODAY

  The grip is all that attaches you to the golf club. The proper grip utilizes the fingers of the hands more than the palms. With a proper grip of the club (or proper grip of any subject matter), one can spare oneself much embarrassment, such as outright whiffs and ill-timed wagers.

  At seven in the morning—my usual start time—I arrived at Hack’s and saw my golf range absent of a single ball. In the dew covering all that Bermuda, tire tracks curved, crisscrossed, and backtracked. No worries, however. These tracks were not from a thief’s car but from my own golf cart.

  Cack Pruitt, my sixty-year-old greenkeeper, had arrived early and gathered the balls with what he called his range-picker. The range-picker was a kind of rolling retrieval system hitched to the back of a golf cart. I owned two carts—this plain one and one Cack had customized.

  This morning Cack toiled on his knees, applying grease to an axle. An oily red rag protruded from the back pocket of his jeans and a dirty ball cap had collapsed on his head.

  “Mornin’, Cack,” I shouted from the back door of the pro shop.

  “Just greasin’ your range cart, Mister Pro,” he said without looking up. “If I don’t do it, it’ll never get done.”

  Cack routinely solved the world’s problems, usually while sipping a Mountain Dew in the shade of his dilapidated umbrella table. He’d brought the umbrella table down from Myrtle Beach after I hired him, telling me his wife had given him the thing for an anniversary present some twenty years earlier. The umbrella table was faded blue on one side and dirty white on the other. It sat teetering on the far right side of the range, surrounded by three plastic chairs. He called this area the Groundskeeper’s Café. Though Cack would let anyone sit and listen, he took no reservations. Whoever sat there got to listen to Cack’s version of what was wrong with planet Earth and its billions of inhabitants.

  The previous week he’d waxed on about the Middle East to my customers—if we don’t protect the oil, somebody else will steal it; we should give polygraph tests twice a day to each member of Congress; TV networks hire too many good-looking anchorwomen, which distracts him from the actual news. Followed by the state of golf in general—too many scientists and metallurgists involved, inventing clubs that knock the ball ten miles, and this has made the game too easy.

  Cack didn’t play golf himself, but he’d get almost teary-eyed telling you how he missed the days of persimmon club heads, custom sanded and polished by expert craftsmen.

  Weekday mornings were slow at Hack’s—we were hoping to get some elementary school field trips booked in the near future—and this allowed ample time for small talk with my coworker. After opening the pro shop and checking my lesson schedule, I wandered out behind the hitting mats and down to where Cack had taken up residence in his three-seat café. I carried a cold Mountain Dew, which I handed him without greeting.

  “Tuesdays are your night for runnin’ the picker-upper,” he said in an accusative tone. Seated in his plastic chair, he opened the canned drink and faced the rising sun, which reflected white and bronze in his chin stubble.

  I sat across the rickety table from him and stretched my legs. “I know. I’ll run the picker tonight. Last night I had, um, a class.”

  Cack sipped his Dew, wiped his mouth with his forearm. “You taking another business class? I thought you were done with that.”

  “I am. This was . . . a different kind of class.”

  I hoped he’d let the subject pass, but Cack was about as likely to let a subject pass as he was to turn down a free Mountain Dew.

  “Then what, boss man, are you doing in a class if you’ve already finished your business degree?”

  I plucked a broken tee from the ground and used its tip to clean my thumbnail. “Nothin’ much. Just a little course on relationships.”

  “Aw, don’t go telling me you went to that thing at the Hyatt, what Mrs. Glen told me about. Something about understanding why men and women can’t communicate. That’s the one, ain’t it?”

  I nodded. “That’s the one, Caskster. Only it’s a slam against men, taught by a man-hater. I was the only male in the room.”

  My guess was next Cack would ask me how many females were in the room.

  He thumped a fingernail against the can once, then again. “How many women?”

  “About sixty.”

  “So you left, right? Couldn’t stand up to the man-hater?”

  “Um, no. Actually I made an attempt to defend the entire male gender.”

  He was grinning now, and the gold in his left molar shown brightly in the sunlight. “And she put you in your place?”

  “She tried. Actually she blames Adam for all the problems women have in the world.”

  Cack took another swig of Dew. He looked confused. “Adam? He that guy running for state senator? Lives in Beaufort?”

  “No, Cack. I meant the original Adam . . . the fruit thing, with Eve.”

  He tilted his drink can high and gulped the balance. Then he dropped the can on the ground and stomped it flat with his work shoe. “Let me get this straight. You stayed for a class that was all women, which is taught by a man-hater, and she blames Adam for thousands of years of women’s problems?”

 
“I did, it is, and she does.”

  He winced and tugged his cap low on his head. “You’re gonna make me ask why you stayed, aren’t ya?”

  “Actually I was hoping we could change the subject to why the crabgrass is creeping into the Bermuda on our range.”

  Cack slowly shook his head. “I’ll take care of the grass. You just tell me why you stayed for that class if it was taught by a man-hater.”

  I rocked back on the legs of my chair, debating between a lie and some altered version of the truth. “I might not have a choice. You see, Cack, I sorta got mad, and when I get mad I tend to get—”

  “Very competitive. I know ’bout that.”

  “Yeah, so I sorta made a bet with the lady.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “What kind of bet?”

  “A golf bet, of course.”

  “You WHAT?!” He nearly jumped out of his chair. Instead he leaned across the table and tried scolding me with just his stare. When that didn’t work well enough, he resorted to verbiage. “You made a golf bet with a feminist? Son, she’s gonna have all her buddies out there lining the fairways! They’ll taunt you while you try to putt. They’ll call you a male bigot in the middle of your backswing. You’re gonna shoot a one hundred, Chris. You’ll be lucky to break one hundred. Heck, you might shoot a two hundred.”

  I took the double scolding about as well as I could, given the circumstances. He was right—I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

  After he’d berated me a third time, I rose from my chair and looked down at him. “I only have one question for you, Cackster.”

  “Name it.”

  “Will you be my caddy?”

  The sound of pea gravel crunching under customers’ golf shoes meant business was good. And now, after six years of ownership, I could sometimes even tell by the sound whether the cruncher was male or female.

  The males showed up first. That afternoon I gave lessons to four guys from the Charleston shipyards. Big, burly guys in jeans and T-shirts, arms the size of cypress trunks. They were raw beginners. Enthusiastic, raw beginners. All they wanted to do was hit balls with a driver and hit them as far as possible. They’d whiff one, shank one, top one, then hit one clear over the fence at the end of my driving range. The sign at the base read 315 yards, a colossal poke by any standards.

  When they were done—“I should enter long-drive contests!” was the biggest guy’s boast—they each gave me forty bucks in cash and left laughing, bragging to one another about the length of their shots but agreeing that the sport of golf was way too expensive.

  At five-thirty a very different kind of new student showed up: Female. Thirtyish. Slender. Auburn streaks in shoulder-length brown hair. No ring. Big smile.

  “You’re Chris?” she asked, striding past hitting mats four and five, a teal-colored golf bag slung over her shoulder.

  I was setting out buckets of balls for Happy Hour and thinking about tomorrow’s bet with Lin Givens. To receive a warm greeting was both welcome and stunning. Kneeling on the mat with a hundred golf balls, I fumbled for words.

  “I’m, um, yes, I’m Chris. And you must be Molly, my five-thirty lesson?”

  She set her golf bag down a few feet behind the hitting mat.

  “I am.” And before I could say anything else, she pulled a club from her bag, slipped a golf glove on to her left hand, and stepped up on the hitting mat. “Okay, Mister Chris, where do we start?”

  Just what I craved from students. Enthusiasm.

  The lesson went fine—she quickly grasped the concept of the correct grip and was learning the swing plane—until she requested something that few students ever request. She asked to see me hit a few.

  “I’m very visual,” Molly said between practice swings. “If I see the swing of someone who’s good, I’ll learn faster.”

  I borrowed her 7-iron, stepped on to the hitting mat, and took two practice swings. Then I aimed at the 150-yard marker and hit a ball that landed just feet from the marker’s base.

  A simple “nice shot” was the response one might expect. What I got was silence.

  Molly sat on the grass directly behind me, looking down the line of my aim, her eyes scrunched as if not quite understanding what she’d just witnessed.

  “One more,” she said. “Swing just like that one more time.”

  I rolled another ball onto the mat with the club head. I hit this one much like the first and watched it land some five yards right of the marker.

  “Just one more,” Molly said. “I almost have it.”

  I tried not to laugh when I said, “A beginner who can grasp all the nuances of the swing from watching three shots from her instructor is a rare bird indeed.”

  “Tweet tweet,” she said, focusing in as I prepared to hit another ball.

  Her manner impressed me as a combination of comic banter and girlish curiosity. Just as attractive was how studious she became while watching me swing. She remained directly behind me, some five feet away, staring intently down the line to the target.

  I hit the third ball, watched it land just left of the marker, and turned to gauge her reaction.

  Big smile. “I got it now. Can I try?”

  In hindsight, what I should have done was simply hand her the 7-iron, trade places with her, and encourage her as I did all my new students. But I was thinking about the bet tomorrow with Lin Givens, who seemed to be everything that this Molly was not.

  She was harsh; Molly was curious.

  She ignored me; Molly grinned often.

  She despised men; Molly, from what I could tell, knew the art of subtle flirting.

  “Do ya mind,” I asked, still on the mat, “if I hit a couple more? I have a match tomorrow and could use the practice. I won’t charge these minutes to your lesson.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “A match?! Really? You compete against other men pros for trophies and things?”

  Her interest and enthusiasm flattered me to the eighteenth degree.

  “Well, sometimes,” I blushed. Somewhere between those two words humility strained to break forth. “But tomorrow’s bet is with a woman. We met yesterday and had a discussion that culminated in a wager.”

  Her smile and curiosity wilted like unwatered zoysia.

  “You gamble against women students? For money?” She reached out and took her 7-iron from my hands, as if reconsidering her lesson. “What kind of a teacher are you?”

  I shouldn’t have snickered, but the sound from my mouth as I looked over her shoulder and noted the dozens of people arriving for Happy Hour was close to a snicker. “I don’t think you understand. The woman I have a bet with is a radical, a true man-hater.”

  Molly shook her head and set her 7-iron back into her golf bag. “You just met the woman yesterday, and you’ve already branded her sexist and you’re betting money with her? How can you bet money with beginning students or label people that fast?”

  I saw the confusion and did my best to explain. “Well . . . it’s not really like that. There was this class, and she offended me, offended me greatly, and . . .”

  Her three steps away told me she was not buying this. I was so bad at this kind of thing.

  She backed farther away, hoisting her bag over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Chris, but gambling just repels me. I watched it ruin the life of someone close to me. And anyway, I think I’ve learned enough swing tips for today. I’ll leave my check on your counter.” Then she turned and strode toward my pro shop.

  For a moment I chastised myself for even bringing up the subject. “Wait, Molly, you don’t understand. I never gamble with . . .” But she was already through the exit.

  “Students,” I said to nothing but air.

  Before I could even process disappointment, Cack rang the Happy Hour bell, and I hurried to the pro shop to greet golf-happy Charlestonians.

  By 6:15, thirty of the thirty-six range mats were occupied, as well as the majority of the Bermuda grass hitting area to the right side. I made my way slowly down t
he range, offering free swing tips, saying hello to longtime customers. Happy Hour lured all kinds—men and women in corporate casual, kids in shorts, teenagers in who knows what fashion, all swatting ball after ball and counting down the minutes to 6:44 p.m.

  At 6:44 each Wednesday, a heightened sense of excitement came over my Learning Center. At 6:44 I ducked inside my pro shop, grabbed a bullhorn from behind the counter, and came back out with the thing pressed firmly to my lips.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, kids and hackers,” I announced, “please stop hitting for a moment and turn your attention to the maintenance shed. It’s time to play Whack the Cack!”

  Claps and whistles filled the range. Heads turned to face the maintenance shed. And out from the shed came Cack, driving his custom, metal-caged golf cart and waving from behind half-inch wire mesh. The cage was shaped like a top hat, which gave the cart a kind of Mad Hatter appearance. A clown face painted on the front of the cart, a red bull’s eye on each side and a third one on the back, added to the unconventional look.

  Cack drove up to the mats, greeted a group of teenagers, and waved me over. Through the metal door of his cart I handed him the bullhorn. Without a word he took off for the 100-yard marker. Customers cheered and pulled from their bags 5-irons, drivers, 3-woods, whatever club that gave the most confidence.

  Cack drove out to the middle of the range and wheeled the cart around to face the hitting mats. From inside his caged cart he raised the bullhorn and shouted in his best low country drawl, “All right, you bunch of hackers, hit me and you win a free bucket of balls.”

  He took off on the cart, doing long figure eights across the Bermuda. Though he’d never admitted it to me, he’d tweaked the engine as well; his cart was extraordinarily fast.

  White pellets flew through the air, most very wide of the moving target. Balls rolled on the ground. Balls skidded at odd angles. Others launched straight up, like a pop fly.

  Cack zigged and zagged across the range, weaving the cart and shouting, “You folks shoot like Union soldiers drunk on moonshine!”

  This was the South, and that sort of comment riled Southerners. In fact, some got in such a hurry to swing that they missed the ball completely, or hit the mat first and sent the ball dribbling only a few feet.