Bruce took one golf lesson at the local country club and rushed home to teach us what he knew: line your toes up in the direction you want to shoot, do not step as you swing like you do in baseball, grip the club with the right-hand pinky laced under the left-hand index finger, keep your eye on the ball. Do not under any circumstances raise your head or you will miss the ball completely or top it so it goes skidding into the grass only about ten yards away.
The grass on the Wisconsin golf courses in 1988 was invariably as thick and dewy as roadhouse snatch. It was tangly wet mangly centipede bluegrass that wanted to gorge and swallow your balls.
This first hole, Bruce said, this is a par four, it is 286 yards to the hole. He said, The goal is to get this little white ball into the hole by hitting it a maximum of four times. Each time you touch the ball with a club it is considered one stroke. If you finish a par four with three strokes it is called a birdie. If you finish it with five strokes it is called a bogey. That’s bad but things could be worse, he said. Six strokes is a double bogey, and so on.
He said, They have par threes, par fours, and par fives. Par on a par three is three strokes. Par on a par five is five strokes. You get the picture. The goal is to finish with the lowest number of strokes, unlike in baseball, where you want as high a score as possible.
I wondered about the possibility of par twos, or par tens, but was informed that such holes did not exist. It was like learning the rules of cribbage, where you fuss about fifteens: in a game in which everything is about making card combos that add up to just fifteen, the number fifteen becomes the entire focus of those hours bent over the board. And what if the inventor of cribbage had arbitrarily chosen the number fourteen instead? But that would be a parallel universe.
Bruce said, It is a gentleman’s game, comes from Scotland.
He said, Golfers don’t spit, or run, or shout, and they wear their Sunday best on the links, and tidy little cleats. He told us about the traditional Scottish golfer’s garb with high socks, golf knickers or in some cases a kilt, and sweater vests.
A kilt is a plaid skirt for a man, he said, like in Braveheart.
We ourselves played wearing the clothes we owned: tennis shoes, white socks, cargo shorts, and t-shirts that said Wisconsin Badgers or Go Pack Go. Bruce bought a set of men’s clubs, a set of women’s clubs, and four kids clubs with a kid-sized bag: a 3 wood, a 3 iron, a 9 iron, and a putter.
He said, These four clubs are all you need to take all the different shots necessary in golf. He assured me that I could use the women’s clubs from my mom’s bag if I needed something else, like a 5 iron or a wedge, by choking up on the handle. To choke up on the handle is like in baseball, where you grip it closer to the end to improve control, but in my case it proved difficult to avoid getting smacked in the nards by the handle when I swung choked up.
Bruce said, You need a minimum of three clubs and a bag to be allowed on the course.
He said with a grimace, And I got you four clubs.
It was me and my mom standing on the driving range with a bucket of balls, trying to take our first swings. I was seven, she was thirty-six. Holy moley! I am now myself forty-two, and last week she ran a half marathon. After a couple of years my mom gave up golf, never having had much fun out there. It is truly the most frustrating, most technically difficult, and yet the most exhilarating sport in the world. Later as an adult when Bruce and I introduced beer and cigars and Polack jokes to the links, it became a transcendent activity.
Bruce said, This is your tee. You use the tee to get the ball off the turf on the tee box, where you tee off or hit your first shot of the hole, so you can really crank it out there. He said, You take the ball and put it on the tee in your hand. Then you use the weight of the ball to stick the ball into the turf.
Bruce said, I like to keep the ball right above the grass, so I can use the tee surface to measure my stroke.
So I did the same for many, many years.
My mom teed up her first ball and it fell off when she took her hand away. She had put it in the ground very carefully, as one would tuck in an Indian in the cupboard baby, but her hand was sticky with perspiration and she had got it in at a slight angle, so the ball rolled off immediately.
That is considered one stroke, said Bruce. On the PGA tour they are very strict. He said, Use the weight of the ball to stick the tee in.
While we struggled to make contact with our teed-up balls, Bruce was taking his own practice shots, some of them zooming 150 yards airborne into the landing area, a huge mown field with black numbers on white wooden signs pounded into the ground at intervals: 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350 yards. A man in tidy white pants, a polo shirt tucked into a belt, and immaculate cleats was hitting a bucket of balls down the row of tee boxes, as far away from us as possible. He was cranking his balls past the 250 sign every time, hitting his driver. Once he must have looked up because he topped his shot and it skidded into the thick grass about fifteen yards in front of him. He was angry at himself and shook his head, saying Billy boy, Billy boy, Billy boy. Then he teed up another ball and cranked it out to about 275.
Bruce said, There are two kinds of clubs, the woods and the irons. The woods are for hitting for distance and the irons are for finesse shots. Finesse, my dad’s single favorite word. He would say, You have to finesse it, or That was a nice finesse shot, or Just a little bit more finesse on that and it stays on the green.
He said, In the past the woods were made with literal wood and the irons from metal, but now a lot of the woods are just fiberglass. Apparently they go farther that way, with these new clubs.
Bruce also had worked in an apple orchard during the formative years of his life, where he held the single-day record for bushels of apples picked. The man was an all-state baseball catcher, student body council president, and a monkey in an apple tree. One time he said, They never used to wax these prairie spies (Bruce’s favorite apple), but now they have to because of the tourists.
The 1 wood is also called the driver, Bruce explained. He said, You hit it off the tee and drive the ball for distance. The pros can hit upward of 300 yards, but I can only hit it about 180 so far. The 3 wood and 5 wood, he said, are for hitting off the fairway, like your second shot. He said, Should you be so lucky as to hit the fairway.
He said, A typical golf hole has a fairway, which is the short-cut grass lane down the middle. You are supposed to hit the ball into the fairway off the tee box. To the sides are cuts of longer and longer grass, called the roughs. They are thick and harder to get out of than a [my mother objected at this point to the metaphor]. Bruce said, Then there are sand traps or bunkers positioned strategically to make your life hell, he said, and the green, which is the small short-mown table surface where the hole is located.
I also noticed there were a lot of trees in the way of where you would want to hit a ball toward the cup. The cup was an insert of pvc pipe used to form the hole. If you ever got the ball into the hole it would make a satisfying knocking sound against the plastic interior. You could hear it rolling around in there, unless the cup was full of rainwater.
Sometimes the cup had critters in it in rural Wisconsin in the 1980s, spiders and bugs, and once a live ground squirrel. He was seriously pissed off at us and chased us for three holes, chittering like a monkey.
Bruce said, Some of the greens are just like tables, your ball will bounce up there, and then it will roll straight off the other side because it is so smooth, the grass is so short, it is like slate, just when you think you’ve hit a great shot.
I thought about how unfair, how impossibly difficult this life was. A mosquito bit the back of my neck. Another one buzzed into an open nostril. Hundreds of others nipped at my calves above my dorky socks.
Mom said, Can you hit irons off the fairway or just woods?
You can hit anything you want at any time, I think, replied Bruce in his tall white tube socks and dad shorts, except just putters on the green. But for distance the woods are recommended from the fairway, if you want to make par.
Bruce said, Making par is the whole point, nothing else matters. If you end up with eighteen bogeys then you are eighteen strokes over par. If you end up with all pars except three birdies you are three under par. Par for a typical course is 72 strokes. One round of golf is 18 holes, but you can play just 9, though the pros always play 18. If you want to win, he said, you need to shoot in the mid-60s.
We practiced carrying, setting down, and picking up our golf bags. They were heavy and unmanageable. The straps bit into your shoulder and rubbed off the skin and there were metal clasps that scratched at the openings of your t-shirt, like you were in the Boer War or a trench in Belgium, and everything weighed exactly twice what it should have.
The bags also contained pockets for tees, spare balls, and mosquito repellent. Every time we went outside in Wisconsin in 1988 we stunk like we had been rolled in jet fuel, and yet the mosquitoes kept coming.
June is humid and full of thunderstorms. This is when the bad tornadoes usually hit. If you go golfing at 6 in the morning your shoes are going to weigh ten pounds by the time you reach the fifth tee box from all the dew you’ve sopped up. It is downright cold when you start but by the time you have walked four holes the sun is up and lurking behind the haze. You are streaming with sweat. The repellent gets into your eyes and stings. Your tube socks and the inside of your arms are covered with sticky blades of grass from the mown lawns. You have lost three balls. The man on the mower stops and watches as you lift your head and your ball goes skidding ten yards to your left, and dribbles into a water hazard. You have now lost four balls.
After a morning on the links you hate grass so much, and yet love it, it is grass in your nostrils, it is a grass that is now part of you.
A blue heron struts through the water hazard. Stupid geese waddle across the fairway. A doe and fawn nibble in a clearing on hole fourteen, then dash into the corn that edges the woods.
The woods where Bruce’s drive goes CRACK against the trunk of a dowdy oak, smacking full face into it, then ricocheting into the corn behind those deer. Now Bruce is busy as a squirrel in another stretch of woods, hunting for golf balls. He used to buy sleeves of golf balls when he was a virgin golfer with fantasies of being part of a club of mutually respected adult golfers, a boys-only club of course, but no longer. Now he is a lone wolf, hunting balls behind signs that say PRIVAT PROPERT and reporting his own score.
You yourself are seven years old so technically are just the caddy for Bruce. He waits until you are out of sight of the clubhouse on the third hole and lets you hit your 9 iron, which he has concealed in his bag, from 50 yards out, and then putt.
Bruce says, I don’t want to have to pay a whole green fee for you. They don’t have kids rates, and you just end up throwing a tantrum anyway.
I once had to climb a tree on the twelfth hole at the public course in Evansville because I had flung my 5 iron into the top branches in a Shakespearian fury. Once I took a putter and swung it so hard into the surface of the green that it took up a yard of sod. You are not supposed to do things like that. You will get banned for life and have to bear the opprobrium of the entire local golfing community, which consists even of plumbers and pastors, if Bruce doesn’t cover up for you, for your embarrassing antics.
Bruce was very patient with me out there, out there in the shit, in the jungles of southern Wisconsin, on the links of glory.
Bruce explained the etiquette of the fairway and putting green. He said, The person farthest from the hole hits first. If two balls are equidistant from the hole (equidistant – his other favorite word) but one ball is in the rough, that player is out. The player who is out hits first. He said, While you wait for another player to hit it is considered polite to stand out of their line of sight. Preferably behind them. You can’t talk during their backswing, or take practice swings with your own club, or pop bubbles Gee. Don’t do it.
Bruce said, If you take a divot when you swing, you have to replace it. A divot is a chunk of sod. If you land a high shot onto the green it will often leave a ball mark, and you have to be very careful to repair it. He said, It is not enough to just tamp it down with your [tidy spike]. You have to take a tee and very gently lift the dirt from the bottom of the mark, until it is slightly higher than the putting surface, and then gently tamp it down.
He said, No not like that, Jesus Col. Here let me do it.
Bruce had a white deerskin golf glove and $3 sleeves of Titleist and Top Flite golf balls, and tiny tidy bags of tees. Later he would start buying the tees by the thousands in Sam’s Club. The balls came in sleeves of 3 that he bought in the pro shop, or at sports equipment retailers in the strip malls in Madison. I guess now they cost $15 or more, but Bruce was making forty grand a year in 1988, had a mortgage and two cars, small business, and considered himself upper middle class.
Not talking during someone’s backswing is something that is much more difficult than you would think. Especially as tyro golfers in those heady early days, when the links seemed like a kind of open cathedral, would any wayward remark at the wrong moment seem like sacrilege.
Bruce would say, Geeze Col, how many times do I have to tell you, do not talk during my backswing. I am taking a mulligan.
A mulligan is a retry from the same spot after you have fucked up a shot. The serious amateur golfers in Wisconsin commonly allow 1 mulligan per 18 holes, and only from the tee box, which will cost you 1 stroke plus the new stroke, but the last time I played with Bruce he would take a mulligan for every single shot he screwed up and not count the strokes. It was like he played two or three rounds at the same time, pockets always stuffed with spare balls.
Bruce tried hard to hit the links when no one else was around. Why did he do this? Because he was sociopathically impatient and liked to go as fast as possible, was sneaking his kid on with him without paying, and had to cheat constantly to keep his score under 100.
This meant we would go out at 6 am or even earlier, often playing a round before the clubhouse was even open, and going back to pay on our way out at 7:30 or 8. Bruce got away with many things per day every day for his entire life, any one of which would cause rows of church ladies to faint away in the pew.
That meant that we played on courses that were cow pastures, played early in the season with patches of snow still on the ground, on substitute greens that were just patches of grass set up in the fairways to protect the real greens still soft from winter runoff from being trampled. It meant we played late in the season, with the leaves off the trees in November and wind too cold for rational thought, for feeling of your own hands. And all those early years we carried our clubs, although later Bruce bought himself a little golf tricycle and pulled his along behind him. I remember losing him in the fog one early morning and locating him by the wheel tracks in the dewy grass. He had darted into a woodline to take a piss, and stayed to hunt golf balls.
Often you would leave a club near a green on one of the holes you had really stunk up, or maybe you had drained a 30-foot putt and were exultant, so you forgot your wedge where you had grabbed your putter, letting it fall into the fringe grass, only missing it on the 13th next time you rolled into a bunker.
In the 90s the drink girl would cut across four holes in her golf cart looking for the culprit, and if you were with buddies you would never hear the end of it. Everything is about etiquette in golf, and I had zero etiquette.
If you dribbled your tee shot into the shaggy grasses this side of the women’s tees, you had to play the rest of the hole with your cock hanging out of your zipper.
And the ball is your soul, it is your persona, even more than your car. The ball goes up, and your life is wrapped up in that stupid little ball, and where it goes you go, and it defines who you are. Are you a failure in this life, or a success, or are you a punk? Is your ball white, neon yellow or pink? Let’s not sugarcoat this: are you a fag? What luxury company has branded its name on the dimples of your ball, like MOM or LUCINDA on a bicep? Is your ball scuffed, scratched, blooded green with grass burns, or baptized in clay, mud, or sand? Tidy white? Do you keep it clean for whatever reason, to disguise your recent past? Do you hit it straight? Do you bounce it down the straight and narrow, right down the fairway?
What will Pastor Earl say when he sees your ball?
The drink girl is a four-sport varsity high school athlete who drives the links summers with a frosty cooler serving drinks out of the clubhouse to the geezers and craftily perving middle-aged small-town dentists and plumbers, some in tidy cleats. She is hot and friendly as fuck and flirts for tips. But where are you supposed to put your drink while you line up your putt? Which is how eventually we just started renting golf carts ourselves. They carry your clubs, have soft seats and cup holders and even space for a cooler if you want to stock up on beverages at the turn (the turn is the midway point of a round, between holes 9 and 10), and some of the ungovernored carts can catch major air on those western Wisconsin rises.
Cart golf is in fact the only way to go.
When you first start out it is difficult to hit the ball. It is difficult just to make contact, you need thousands of reps to start making the ball zoom. Then where does it zoom, not forward in glorious arcs, but into the ground in front of you, careening to your right off the tip of the club or slicing maniacally to your left, all of this more or less along the ground, into tufts of grass thicker than dockwhore muff. That is no good, because you need to go hundreds of yards, not dozens, and the only way to do that efficiently is to get the son of a bitch airborne.
Do not despair, this is only rocket science! Try try again. First your tee shots improve: you start lifting the ball off the tee with a driver or 1 wood, or 5 iron. It goes about 126 yards, then 150, then 175, which is when Bruce starts to look worried. Then you will probably experience success lifting the ball with a 9 iron or more acutely angled wedge close to the green. And finally you will figure out how to lift the ball out of the rough with low irons, first the 6 and 7 and finally the 3 and 4.
You young punks can drive the ball 350 yards, but your short game is shit, you take 2 strokes to get it on the green and then putt like a fucking NASCAR driver, some geezer will say, and that is usually true, that the strength of the fogies out there is not their 150 yard drives, or getting into short range on a par 5 by slapping consecutive 136-yard shots with a 5 iron, but at close range, where they know how to drop a ball within a bushel barrel of the pin, then slam it home.
They literally can not drive legally in the state or recognize their own friends until spoken to, but they can slam a ball into a pvc pipe from 8 feet away time after time after time.
The pin is what they call the pole that holds the flag that marks the hole, explained Bruce. He said, If you hit the pin with a putted ball it is a penalty of one stroke, which is why you need someone to tend the pin while you putt. The person would stand to one side of the pin with the loosened shaft in hand, so that the putter could use the pin to sight their shot. As soon as the ball was struck, the tender would remove the pin, step daintily from the hole, set the base of the pin on the green, and let the flag flop over. In western Wisconsin at a place like Deer Valley or Deer Run you could hear the wind whipping the flag like a Ste. Marie call girl while you stood there as Bruce lined up his putt, then drained it.
Bruce said, You have to line up your putt. What I do is I crouch down and fix in my mind the line I want to hit the ball along, and what speed I want the ball to be going when it hits a particular spot along the curve, like that leaf there.
Bruce said, There is not supposed to be any leaf on the putting surface, but if you go out there to get it, which you can do, do not step on the putting line. That is one of the absolutely worst things you could do.
Bruce said, If you hit the pin with a struck ball, a wood or iron, there is no penalty, but if you hit it with a putted ball it is a penalty of one stroke.
Bruce said, A lot of things can go wrong with a golf swing. You call pull it, hook it, slice it, or push it. I myself have a nasty slice because of a loop in my swing, and he demonstrated what he meant by swinging at the ball in question. We were teeing off at the par four first hole at a golf course in Oregon, Wisconsin. To our left was a pond, to our right was a stand of trees beyond which shimmered the next fairway, like heaven through a tunnel, and in the middle was our current fairway. Some 400 yards away stood the tiny green, marked by a miniature flag. Ping! The little son of a bitch took flight, starting out straight down the fairway, but almost immediately spun away to the right, describing an arc through the clump of trees, and into the neighboring fairway, where it came to rest in front of two geezers who raised their fists and shouted.
Bruce said, Fore!
He said, You say fore when you hit a shot that might roll into another golfer, or accidentally hit into golfers in front of you. He said, It sounds like four but the word is fore, as in, before you.
The geezers got into their golf carts, zoomed into our fairway and shouted, Next time we are going to step on your ball, asshole! as they passed us humping our clubs toward the next shot, and eternity.
Man, aside from probably ruining your day, golf can also be straight up dangerous, was the thought that crossed my mind.
Bruce said, The ball does that because of the excessive spin put on it by the loop in the swing. As its forward momentum decreases, the spin takes over and makes it act like a helicopter.
He said, You can fix all of these problems by swinging more slowly, but that is not what the pros do.
For some years Bruce carried an extendable steel golf ball scoop for retrieving splashers, balls smacked into water traps. The thing fit in his golf bag, collapsing down from eighteen feet to the size of a putter, and it was a sight to see Bruce in action with it, if your human eye was fast enough to catch him dart from the fairway towards the water at an oblique angle. Like everything else Bruce ever did, the decision to retrieve balls from the lagoon was made at the last second. There he was, in among the bullrushes, the only thing visible the whites of his tall socks. Then there would be a loud splash, as the lady golfers zoomed past, chasing their seventh stroke, and shrieked something obscene at the man emerging from the pond in his shorts, wet to the thighs. He would look and them and say, What? Never one to seek conflict, my dad, though he never once hesitated to take the right of way at a multiple-stop intersection.
Bruce said, Slow down your backswing and you’ll straighten out that shot. He said, Oops now you’ve got a hook. Sometimes when you start hooking it is really hard to stop. A hook is when the ball is hit so hard from anger that its lateral spin takes over about a hundred yards out and it makes a tight hook-shaped curl right to left, and ends up landing in somebody’s backyard or pool.
There are these geezers and their wives who buy the houses that line the edges of the golf courses in Wisconsin. They keep a golf cart under the massive back deck and pay for the privilege of getting onto the links whenever they damn well feel like it. They are retirees living the dream. Their windows are made of special reinforced glass and there is a five-year waiting list to get your papers in on a fifth fairway mansion.
I straightened out my hook with one session at the driving range but straightened it out too far: for the next ten years I would tee off with a grievous left-to-right slice.
Bruce is actually left-handed, but they do not make many left-handed golf clubs and what he found in the Play It Again Sports in Madison, Wisconsin in 1988 was for right-handers, so he played right-handed. He also did this with baseball and written assignments all through grade school, and made it more than work.
I have always had performance anxiety, in fact total loss of muscular and cerebral control when attention is focused on me by a crowd. I know what the molecule under the microscope feels, it is opprobrium, it is hate, it is disgust, it is horror. This has led to many embarrassing failures over the course of my life, with the exception of one fall morning on the Yahara back nine when I was thirteen and Bruce, fidgety and disapproving of the slow play of a foursome of elderly lady golfers in front of us, finally asked them on the twelfth tee in a sardonic voice, to make things worse, if we could please play through. Playing through is when a group of slower players lets a faster group behind them go ahead by teeing off in front of them. This gaggle of wisecracking diddies must have had their coffees Irish that morning, because they instantly gathered round the tee box, shrieking and hiccupping with spite, reminding us of the rule about playing with our johnsons out if we couldn’t reach the ladies tees, making fun of our tall socks and tennis shoes, asking us when the track meet began, as we got out our balls and drivers. The twelfth tee was a par four with a skinny fairway that required you to land your drive at least 175 yards out between a stretch of tall pine trees and underbrush on the left and an honest to Jesus pond on the right. From the pond came the sounds of ducks quacking and splashing. Bruce said, Bet there are a ton of splashers in that baby, don’t hit it into the pond, Gee. From the left, out of the trees, came the sound of nothing at all, like creaking in dark space. I strode to the center of the box while the chatter of the ladies never quite subsided, stuck my ball in the ground on its tee, addressed the mother fucker for one split second, and jacked my drive 250 yards straight down the middle of the fairway. I believe one of the ladies fainted away. The other three were too astonished to say a word, and Bruce and I strode calmly on out of there after he popped his five iron onto the fairway at exactly 176 yards. Later, out of hearing of the klatch, Bruce said, Well done on that tee shot.
