Fast Greens by Turk Pipkin

Author:Turk Pipkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466872202
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

21

When the money’s on the line, golf becomes like poker: you can play to win or you can play to not lose. Or, if you don’t have any real idea what the difference is, you can do what most golfers and poker players do: play to lose. They don’t know that’s what they’re doing, but the loss is just as inevitable as if they had drawn four cards to a deuce kicker or used a putter off the tee.

Shortly after buying that first five-iron at Santa Fe Park, I learned that golf is much harder than it looks. So after a lot of frustration and a good deal of pleading, Jewel finally enrolled me in a junior golf class.

I was by far the youngest student in the class. The course covered everything from driving to irons, chipping to putting, and even included a little lecture about common courtesy. It was complete in every way except one: the coach hardly touched on the rules. Oh sure, they told us about a number of penalties: stroke and distance for out of bounds, two strokes for hitting the pin when putting, and a whole variety of strokes for encountering water, lateral or otherwise. All examples of how the rules worked against us, but nothing about how the rules might work for us. They told us what to do if you lost a ball, but they never told us anything about what to do if you found a ball, but couldn’t figure out how to hit it. And on the very first hole of the class graduation tournament, that was exactly what my drive rolled into: an unplayable lie.

It was Bermuda grass, about eighteen inches deep. For most kids the ball would have been lost, but I knew it was in there. My eyes did not deceive. And when I found it nestled at the bottom of that jungle, I knew right away that I could never hit it out. But I’d never heard of an unplayable lie, that I could just take a one-stroke penalty and drop the ball out within two club lengths. I pulled out a seven-iron—having already graduated to a larger mismatched set of clubs—and I began to whale away.

Two, three, four; hit it some more. Five and six; change sticks. Seven, eight, nine; let out a little whine. Ten, eleven; bad-mouth heaven.

By fifteen the ball still hadn’t moved, but I was digging a nice tunnel toward it. How high can an eight-year-old count anyway?

I got the ball out of that patch of grass on the twenty-second stroke. Then a kid who was a couple of years older than me came over laughing and told me I could have dropped it out with one penalty stroke. I stood on my tiptoes and punched him in the nose.

My final score was one hundred and thirty-eight, for which they gave me a trophy in the shape of a boxer for fighting the course (not to mention the other golfers). Just like Sandy’s consolation trophy when Beast was disqualified for gambling, I refused to accept it.

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