PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — I’m out here for the Walker Cup, at Cypress Point, a good course and a beautiful one, but let’s not go crazy here. There are other good and beautiful courses in the vicinity. Pebble Beach. The two courses at the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. The back nine — the oceanfront nine — at the Pacific Grove muni. PG has the scruffiness that I think of as a core value of golf-course maintenance. There are folks at Augusta National who would disagree. I have a course-superintendent friend who understands the importance of scruffiness but also the importance of keeping your job: “Try selling brown a membership,” he says. In the United States? You can’t sell brown. Our golf year begins with Augusta, wall-to-wall carpeted in green. Everybody has a color TV these days.
I showed up in the Pacific Grove pro shop at 6 p.m. and was on the 10th tee, with a rental set in a comically stiff cart bag on my shoulder, about 10 minutes later. Sunset was 7:30ish. The fella behind the counter asked me if I would need golf balls. I did. I bought a sleeve of Srixons, the cheapest ball he had. I played the nine holes in 90 minutes and did not lose a ball. Nobody was behind me. Instead of waiting on tees, I chipped and pitched and putted until the coast was clear.
Ninety minutes of golfing nirvana. No idle chatter. Some blind shots. Bouncy fairways. Brackish air. No headcovers. (Left them in the shop.) In this setting, your life gets all commingled: your childhood, your college years, finding your way in the world afterward, marriage and child-rearing and golf when you can; whatever you call this next stage. I’m 65. My friend Sam Reeves, a youthful 91-year-old, likes to say if you don’t know if you’re middle-aged or old, you’re old. He also says golf is connectional.
My mind drifted, while on the Pacific Grove back nine: I’m at Bellport on Long Island, where I took up the game; many great games and times at National Golf Links, farther east in Suffolk County; golf at Elie and the Old Course and Machrihanish and other courses in Scotland; the embarrassment of riches that is golf in greater Philadelphia, where Christine and I raised our kids, all through my 30s, 40, 50s and 60s. Their personality traits and golf swings of hundreds of golfers have been deposited in my head over the years. Right now, I’m thinking of a man named Tommy Blue, my age exactly, 65. He’s a retired roofer in Machrihanish, in Scotland, and once worked on Paul McCartney’s roof and once played the bass drum on a McCartney recording. Had one memorable game with him. We zipped around. We both had the metabolism for fast golf.
A friend, Sharon Harrington, died last month. She was 65. I’ve logged a lot of rounds with her husband, Stevey Hags, a former Yale hockey player and a Hoganophile. Sharon raised two remarkable daughters and a son, totally engaged by her family life. She was also a golfer, a bridge player, a gardener, sharp as a tack and fit as could be. She went into a hospital for a kidney stone, complications developed, and she died on Aug. 22. Who would have guessed that she would not see Aug. 23? Not her husband, not their three children, not anybody. Hundreds of people came to her backyard memorial service. Sharon connected all of us and golf connected many of us. Golf is connectional.
I travel a lot in summer, as many of us do, and I find golf games here and there, as many of us do. In one round this summer, I played with a retired man a few years older than I. He played from the forward tees and had a beautiful no-glove grip and made a good turn through the ball. His good shots were good and if he duffed a series of shots he picked up, appropriately. He was walking, as I was, and his pace was fine.
“What was your handicap at its lowest,” I asked the fella.
He pointed to a divot hole on the fairway beneath us and said, “About like that.”
He wasn’t being humorous. I realized then he didn’t really grasp the question. Everyday conversation, the ordinary processing of words and information we often take for granted, had been robbed from him. He was holding on to golf as long as he could. It was moving, painful and inspiring.
I do things too fast. I’m a slow, careful reader and a slow, careful runner but for the most part I am ba-pa, ba-pa, ba-pa, on to the next thing. The other day, I went into a diner and told the young server as he sat me, “Don’t need a menu, just two eggs over medium with wholewheat toast, please.” The food arrived quickly and this young man said, “No rush, enjoy your meal.”
OMG. He nailed the whole thing. No rush. Enjoy your meal. What’s the rush?
This Walker Cup is funny. It has a funny pace. The 20 players and the two captains have been here all week, playing nine holes here, nine holes there. Long meals. Long ping-pong sessions. A slow, lovely week, and then comes the competition itself: Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon; Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon. Bam, bam, bam, bam. It’ll go too fast but the kids, win or lose, will have enduring memories.
They might actually remember the days leading up to the competition as well as anything. Ian Poulter talking to the GB&I team. George W. Bush at the opening ceremonies. The evening chocolates in the player’s rooms at Spanish Bay each night, right there on the pillow. I mean, that is living large. You’re a college kid (most of them) and you’re representing your country in a team competition and you’re staying in a super deluxe room (at Spanish Bay), and every night, during turndown service, they give you a free piece of chocolate!
I’m not offering this as a pro tip but it does work for me: you take the chocolate out of its wrapper, put it on your tongue and leave it there until it melts. Your teeth shouldn’t touch it at all and the chocolate, the smell and the taste and the texture, is everywhere.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
