The Driving Range: The sounds are universally understood. The soft click of a seven-iron. The
metallic ping of a three-wood. The solid whack of an oversized driver. The
inaudible whoosh of a soft-sand wedge. A driving range? Looks like one:
Instructors teach, empty baskets litter the ground, golfers lean on clubs,
talking, watching, and admiring the shots of the guy on the adjacent tee.
Something though, is amiss; something quite different from your local torture
chamber. No mighty swings resulting in a four-foot ground ball. No ugly slices
careening over the 60-foot fence, into oncoming traffic. No wickedly snapping
duck hooks ripping into the parking lot. No embarrassing shanks threatening the
fellow three spaces down. No whoosh of air, followed by the sick thud of a club
grounding onto the hard earth.
Something is wrong with this picture. Drivers pounding balls into outer
space… the long, sweet arc of a perfectly stuck long iron… the impossibly
high parabola of a pitching wedge… each ball lofts, sails, or explodes into
the crystal clear sky of a perfect October day. Though each soaring white orb
is a once-in-a-lifetime shot for me, many of the assembled golfers are not
pleased, as they strive for perfection in a game where, cruelly, there is none.
These are not meat salesmen gathering for an annual golf outing, but a
smattering of the pros assembled for the Texas Open at La Cantera Golf Course,
on the cactus-strewn plain north of San Antonio.
Just one of the guys: Frankly, I’m terrified as I amble down the
fairway, hiding between the standard bearer and walking scorer, following
respectfully behind each group like the courteous entourage behind the king’s
carriage. I don’t want a caddie to yell at me again. I’m mortified, beyond
mortified really, that Mark Calcavecchia, Corey Pavin, or UT’s Justin Leonard
will demand I be removed (because I’m bad luck or maybe I twitched in some
indiscernible way) from this off-limits view of professional golf. Leonard’s
caddie has already reprimanded me for “moving” while Justin was over the ball.
A few holes later he shouts from 75 yards away, I’d damn well better “move when
he waves at me.” Though I’m too nervous to write a word, I pretend to be
writing all the time. I shackle myself to these officials, hoping nobody will
expose me for an imposter.
This isn’t really golf, certainly not a form I recognize anyway. Examples
materialize immediately. Pavin — the weak hitter of this group — whacks his
first tee-shot a little left, 265 yards on the 635-yard first hole. The ball
sits on a patch of rock-hard dirt and stone. I ponder this familiar lie (for
me), wondering what I’d do. As Pavin rapidly approached with a three-wood in
hand, I knew I’d take my putter and give the ball a backwards poke, hoping to
get back to the fairway. Pavin quickly sets up and calmly clubs the ball 225
yards, into the middle of the fairway, maybe 60 yards from the green. Just a
week before, I was lying nine at this exact same spot. Ho-hum. Another day at
the office.
All three players are lying two, no more than 75 yards from the impossibly
placed pin. Within seconds — plop, plop, plop — all three balls are docilely
sitting in a tidy circle surrounding the conquered pin. The farthest ball from
the hole? Maybe five feet.
Human after all: La Cantera is a big, long course. In an apparent
contradiction, it smiles more upon a “short,” accurate player like Pavin, over
big hitters. Like helicopter shots of placid rice paddies in Southeast Asia,
the big, open fairways are deceiving, filled with hidden treachery. Get just
one foot off the fairway and the golf ball will sink into a long, thick tangle
of Bermuda rough. It has the texture of a Brillo pad. Hitting an aggressive
shot from this nest is impossible, even for these guys.
La Cantera is not John Daly’s kind of course, yet as he approaches the 18th,
he’s three under, tied for third. The 18th (his group teed off from #10) is a
difficult 426-yard par 4. Daly did what only he can do. He almost drove the
green and he would have if he’d hit the ball straight. He didn’t. The ball
hooks left, coming to rest on a sandy road behind a temporary green building,
the bleachers and the gallery, maybe 70 yards left of the green. He lofts his
second shot, from a beach-like lie, into the middle of the greenside gallery.
The ball immediately disappears into the impenetrable rough. He chunks his
third shot about three feet, still in the rough. He finally struggles to the
green, where his playing partners had been waiting for about 20 minutes. He
three-putts for a seven. He just lost three strokes. Not a happy camper, he
tees off on #1, slicing a prodigious drive deep into the cedar forest. Somehow,
he gets a club on the ball, it comes squirting weakly out of the woods,
bouncing happily down the cart path, hops the curve, coming to rest directly
behind a large oak tree. Once again, Big John is buried in the deep rough.
I recognize the look in the beleaguered Daly’s eyes. It says, “Shit, do we
really have eight more holes to play?”
This article appears in October 18 • 1996 and October 18 • 1996 (Cover).