The Greatest Player Who Never Lived by J. Michael Veron

Author:J. Michael Veron [Veron, J. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-43421-0
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2000-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

18

BY NOW, THERE were only three weeks or so left in my summer internship. I began to grow concerned about whether I would eventually find the answers to my growing list of questions about Beau Stedman. As I surveyed my cell, I still had a number of boxes to inventory.

The going had gotten slow in the last week or so. I had gotten bogged down in several boxes containing business files. There was nothing in them about Stedman, and it took me a while to get them all indexed and entered in the inventory.

I was just about to take my first break of the day one morning when I suddenly came upon a couple of files that put me back on the scent. Like the earlier files that pertained to Stedman, these were poorly organized, as if Jones himself rather than a secretary had maintained them. Various papers were simply thrown together rather than organized in sections or in chronological order as the law firm files typically were put together.

Among the papers were notes in a handwriting I recognized to be Jones’s. They were the most curious entries I had yet to find in this entire improbable saga.

On one aging sheet of paper torn from a legal pad were the following notes:

Beau at the Invitational

1935 (1st rd) 71

(2nd rd) 68

1936 (3rd rd) 70

1938 (2nd rd) 66

1939 (1st rd) 69

(2nd rd) 73

1940 (2nd rd) 67

(4th rd) 69

1941 (3rd rd) 71

1946 (1st rd) 70

1947 (3rd rd) 71

1949 (2nd rd) 68

1950 (1st rd) 71

1951 (3rd rd) 64

I could not believe what I was reading. Had Stedman played in The Masters? If so, how did he pull it off? And why were the scores only for one or two rounds?

I averaged all of his scores. It came to 69.14.

It was a staggering number. I doubted that anyone in the history of the tournament had done as well. Still, it appeared that numerous scores were missing. Maybe Jones was recording only Stedman’s good rounds.

I was having difficulty making sense of this new discovery. At lunch, I ran over to the downtown branch of the public library. I was becoming a familiar figure there, as it had a well-stocked section on golf, especially about Jones, Augusta National, and The Masters. I found one that gave a year-by-year history of the tournament, including the scores of every competitor.

I checked for Stedman’s name even though I really didn’t expect to find it. It wasn’t there. I then looked for some of the names he had used in the past. They weren’t there, either.

Maybe he used a new name, I thought. I had brought the file with me, and I opened it to the page with Jones’s notes on Stedman’s “Invitational” scores. Although many of the names of the competitors were unfamiliar to me, I couldn’t find a match for the scores that Jones had recorded.

I then decided that Stedman must not have competed in The Masters after all. Maybe Jones’s notes were a reference to some other invitational tournament.

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