'The Royal & Ancient Golf Curse' - Part 13. Swerves & Curves

By: Richard Voorhees


[Editor's Note: In the 12th episode, our friends warded off a scorching heat wave in style, with gin and tonics on the terrace of a private golf club. This is the 13th in our friends' series of misadventures, suffered under the spell of the Royal and Ancient Golf Curse.]

With putters and fresh gin and tonics in hand, we approach the sixth hole, which consists solely of a sprawling green. To say it undulates is a laughable understatement. The cart nymph shows us from where we'll be putting. It's not a tee box but more a spot on the edge of the green where we're to place our ball. It's a par-2. We have to try to two-putt from about 100 feet above the hole, over the most topsy-turvy green I've ever seen. No one remembers who has the honors.

A waiter in tuxedo approaches Beer Boy with a piece of paper on a small black tray.

"Excuse me, Mr. Beer."

"What? What?"

"Do you want to close out your tab, sir?"

"My tab?"

"For the rounds you stood to celebrate that brilliant ace."

"Omigod. When is this going to end?"

From the terrace, some sustained muffled applause ripples our way. The guests we saw earlier are now seated on the terrace, looking on. They smile toward Beer Boy and raise their dozens of drinks in gratitude and congratulations.

"I explicitly instructed you to close the tab at $200."

"Oh, dear me. I misread your note. I thought you drew the line at the more usual limit - $20,000. See for yourself. Here's your note right here."

Beer Boy looks long and hard at the instructions he wrote earlier and it does look a lot as if he'd written $20,000.

"That's absurd."

"I could try to reverse the charges."

"Absolutely. Please."

"On the other hand, what's been drunk can't exactly be poured back in the bottles? Can't use it to top off our liquor cabinet, can we?"

"No."

"What's been decanted can't be canted. It can't, can it?"

"But."

"That was an actual hole-in-one you had, wasn't it? You have hole-in-one insurance, don't you? One should carry hole-in-one insurance, surely you're aware."

At this, poor Beer Boy's face falls even farther.

"I let mine lapse."

"Oh, what a shame."

"And… and… okay, okay, I admit it… it was a mulligan."

"What?"

"I took a mulligan. She let me. I made my hole-in-one after being given a mulligan."

"I see. That's entirely different. I'll be right back." The waiter strides off and we all look at Beer Boy with a new appreciation.

Wild Turkey pulls his hand out of his pocket and there's Beer Boy's golf ball, covered in asterisks.

"Beer. I found your ball."

"Great," he says, crestfallen.

"It looks cool covered in asterisks. And stamped 'mulligan.' "

"Lemme see that thing."

In no time, the waiter comes strolling back, presumably after his conference with the club's manager.

"Management's decided it's only going to charge you $200."

"Thank you! Where do I sign?"

"Right here. In blood."

"What?!"

"Just a little joke. Good luck on the rest of your round."

"And mulligan or no mulligan, Beer Boy, that was a helluva shot," says Wild Turkey.

"Yeah," he admits, "It was pretty cool."

The waitresses are a little tipsy. They're half-dancing around the green at this point. One of them rushes up to us laughing.

"Who's putting first? I want to help you put it in the hole!"

"I'll go first," says Beer Boy, who's reached a new level of not giving a rip.

"What shall I do?" she asks.

"Just go about ten feet past the hole and lie down on the green and look along the ground this way. Then tell me what you see."

"Okay!"

She sashays down the hill and then kneels behind the hole for a few seconds. She hops back up and with a dramatic sweep of her arm, waves first left, then right, then left, and then right.

"It goes exactly like that," she says, laughing.

"Well, alrighty, then I'm going to go like this," says the Beer dude, and he gives his asterisked golf ball a solid whack and sure enough it goes left and right and left and right and then it swerves by the hole on the high side and trickles a good twenty feet past.

"Nice line," says Single Malt. "Too much oomph. All right, fellers, if no one objects, I'll go ahead."

"My turn to help," the second waitress says. "Want me to go look for you?"

"Nah. Let's walk down to the hole. We'll see if we can feel the slope through our feet. Better keep a little to one side, though. Don't want to step on my line."

As they start off, we hear his helpmate singing: "Lines, lines, lines!"

So Single Malt and his terribly cute caddie walk toward the hole. They look as if they're pretending they're sneaking away together, the way they're pussyfooting along. As our friend walks off the distance, his graceful assistant starts goofing around. First she veers to the right, then she veers back to the left and bumps into Single Malt, laughing, then she weaves off to the right again, and then she pretends to careen back into him, giving him a playful shove this time when she collides with him.

She knocks him off his path and he laughs. Up till then he was being very serious trying to figure out the putt. But she also sloshed his G-and-T and it splashed on his white linen trousers. If you didn't know him, you might think he'd had an accident. This cracks his concentration more than a little.

As he's looking down, he realizes he's standing right on his own putting line. Unhappy at this turn of events, he picks up the offending shoe and steps to the side. He's made a perfect shoe print that's running diagonally across his line. Seeing that her partner is looking a bit thrown off his game, the young woman tries to help. She comes up to Single Malt and puts her hands on his chest, smiling reassuringly into his face. Then she takes his drink and puts it down and she takes him in her arms. Our friend's spirits improve appreciably. After a while, she lets him go, hands him his drink, and they walk jauntily back to where his ball awaits. There's a spring in the old boy's step.

"Hold this for me?" he asks his able caddie, handing his drink to her. With exaggerated aplomb, he takes up his putter. She stands aside, a drink held aloft in each hand. She's a regular Statue of Liberty, holding not one but two beacons.

"All right, dudes," he says, rubbing his hands together. "I'm letting it fly. Quadruple-breaker, here we come."

Single Malt raps his putt and sure enough it breaks once, twice, thrice, and then as it's picking up speed heading down the last hill, looking as if it's going too fast to take that final break, that it's going to roar on by the hole on the high side, it catches the right edge of that fresh shoeprint of his, takes a little hop sharply to the left, and thus redirected begins bearing down on the hole.

We start shouting encouragement. The din from us (and the guests on the terrace) gets louder and louder and reaches a deafening pitch when his ball, having achieved terminal ramming speed, bangs into the back of the cup, pops straight up in the air, and falls in!

Like a pack of banshees, we whoop it up, laughing and howling, except for Single Malt himself. He's a jumble of nearly suppressed emotions. Pleased, humbled, surprised, embarrassed, all at the same time, and thankful that the golf gods thought to deal him such a beautiful wild card just when he needed it. His excited caddie (after setting down their drinks) runs up to him with a great show, almost dancing in place, and throws her arms wide to give him another huge hug.

"I'm going to school on that one," says Wild Turkey.

"Me, too," I say, practicing my gallows humor.

We don't manage to learn from his putt. You can't go to school on such a bomb. That shot was a miracle. The best you can do is enjoy seeing it happen, in all its improbability. Beer Boy misses his 20-footer back up the hill and Turkey and I four-putt. But who cares? We had the thrill of seeing a most outlandish footprint putt.

And whatever he might say to the contrary in the future, it's plain to everyone who just witnessed his putt on Hole No. 6 - Single Malt loves this game.

When not writing about golf, Richard Voorhees is a novelist, filmmaker and lexicographer. His novel, "Shooting Genji," and his dictionary of occupations, "The World's Oldest Professions," are available on Amazon.com and at his website, www.rgvoorhees.com.