That Was Business. This Is Golf.
13
The man at the patio bar, his blazer draped over the back of his chair, was complaining about his business partner. He had been complaining for some time, and with the practiced fluency of a chronic complainer who has rehearsed this tired grievance in front of several audiences.
“The thing is,” he said, “we were friends. You don’t do business with friends. I know that now. Everyone knows that. But you don’t actually know it until it happens to you.”
The Oldest Member, who had been listening from his customary chair with the knowing ease of a pianist who recognizes a concerto and has memorized all the movements, set down his gin and tonic.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “you are not the first man to discover that friendship and business are neighbors who share a wall — perfectly compatible until one of them starts renovating. I know two men who survived the renovation. It was not painless, but the building is still standing.”
The man stopped complaining. There was something in The Oldest Member’s affect that suggested a story was coming.
“Let me tell you,” said The Oldest Member, settling into his chair with the ease of an indulgent grandparent who has told this story before and intends to tell it well, “about Hugh Cavanaugh and Chip Wetherbee.”
Hugh Cavanaugh (said The Oldest Member) was a real estate developer who had started as a teenager, apprenticing as an electrician on job sites around Buellton, and had worked his way up through the trades with the relentless, grinding pursuit of a man who intended to own the buildings he was wiring. He had been developing for thirty years, and his success was evident throughout the area in the form of condominium complexes, shopping centers, and mixed-use developments that bore names like “San Marcos Estates” and “the Presidio Preserve” and that featured the ubiquitous red tile roofs and white stucco walls referred to by non-fans as “Taco Bell architecture.”
Cavanaugh was a large, confident, perpetually tanned man who played golf the way he developed real estate: aggressively, with total commitment, and with the unshakable belief that whatever he was doing was going to work out. He carried an eleven handicap, which was honest, and he bet on every round, which was habitual. He always took the contrarian view in any proposition, which was constitutional. If everyone at the patio bar said the market was going up, Cavanaugh said it was going down. He was right more often than he was wrong, but he conveyed his predictions with such conviction that people remembered the hits and forgot the misses, which is, when you think about it, the entire secret of real estate development as well.
Cavanaugh’s regular foursome at La Cucaracha consisted of himself, Chip Wetherbee, The Admiral, and Lester Spivey. They played every Saturday morning, and they played a better ball competition in which the teams rotated weekly, so that each man was, over the course of a month, partnered with every other man. This arrangement was designed to ensure fairness. What it actually ensured was that whoever was partnered with Spivey usually lost.
I have spoken of Spivey earlier. It is enough to say here that he was a cosmetic dentist — a profession built on the vanity of others — and that he carried a vanity handicap of his own, which made him, in any competition involving handicap strokes, a liability of the first order. The man who drew Spivey as a partner for the week knew, before the first tee shot was struck, that he was likely to lose, and the only question was how much.
When the teams rotated and Spivey was paired with someone else, the other two won. When Spivey was your partner, you almost certainly lost. The rare exception — once or twice a year, like a lunar eclipse — was celebrated with such astonishment that it only confirmed how reliable the losing was. Over the course of a year, the mathematics were punishing. Cavanaugh and Wetherbee, who were both competent golfers with honest handicaps, won more Saturdays than they lost. The Admiral, whose game was steady if unspectacular, broke roughly even but remained in the green. Spivey lost almost every week, regardless of his partner, and his partners lost with him, which meant that every man in the foursome carried the Spivey tax — a cost that showed up on the books as predictably as a utility bill.
The Admiral bore these losses with the tight-lipped stoicism of a man who had once commanded a vessel of the United States Navy and who was not about to be undone by a civilian in ill-fitting trousers. Wetherbee bore them with the easy good humor of a gentleman who was married to a woman twenty-five years his junior who played better golf than he did and who had taught him, by example, that there were worse things in life than losing a Nassau. Cavanaugh bore them with the loud, profane impatience of a day trader who expects his investments to perform and who does not enjoy the weeks when they don’t.
Now, I must tell you about Cavanaugh and Wetherbee, because their relationship is the story.
They were friends. They had been friends for twenty years. They played golf together, they dined together, their wives were friends, and they conducted business together, which is where the trouble began. Cavanaugh had developed a luxury condominium project — forty-two units on the East Mesa overlooking the harbor — and had hired Wetherbee, who was in the real estate business on the sales side, to sell the units. The arrangement was informal, as arrangements between friends sometimes are, which is to say it was governed by a twenty-year-old contract that had never been updated, which is to say it was a foundation poured on sand.
Wetherbee sold thirty-six of the forty-two units in the first year, which by any reasonable standard was an excellent performance. Cavanaugh did not consider it excellent. Cavanaugh considered it a failure, because Cavanaugh had projected selling all forty-two in the first year, and Cavanaugh’s projections were, to Cavanaugh, not projections but prophecies. Six unsold units sat on his books, accumulating carrying costs, and each one was, to Cavanaugh, a personal rebuke — not to the housing market, not to the economy, not to rising interest rates, but to Chip Wetherbee, who had failed to perform.
Cavanaugh sued him. He sued his friend, his golf partner, his Saturday morning companion of twenty years, for failure to perform under their outdated contract. His own attorney, upon reviewing the document, admonished him that it was barely enforceable and that filing the lawsuit was, in his professional opinion, inadvisable. Cavanaugh filed it anyway. He sued him for the carrying costs on the six unsold units, for lost profits, for damages, and for an amount that, when Wetherbee’s attorney read it aloud on Monday, caused Wetherbee to sit very still for a long moment and then ask, with the apprehension of a husband asking his wife how much she spent on that new necklace, whether the figure included a decimal point.
On Tuesday, his telephone rang. It was Cavanaugh.
“Chip,” said Cavanaugh, in a brusque, unemotional tone, as if placing a lunch order, “are we on for Saturday?”
There was a pause. It was the pause of an Amazon driver who has just been bitten by a beagle that is now asking for a cookie.
“You just sued me,” said Wetherbee.
“That was business,” said Cavanaugh. “This is golf.”
He said it with the absolute conviction that sees no trace of contradiction, because to Hugh Cavanaugh there was none. Business was one compartment. Golf was another. The fact that the same human beings occupied both compartments was, to him, an administrative detail of no great significance. You could sue a man on Monday and play a five-dollar Nassau with him on Saturday, and neither activity had any bearing on the other, in the same way that a man can adore his wife and spend every Saturday morning avoiding her without experiencing a crisis of conscience.
Wetherbee did not play that Saturday. He did not play for three Saturdays. His slot in the foursome was filled, temporarily, by Big Tully Olmstead. But Olmstead was a placeholder. The foursome, without Wetherbee, was not the foursome, and everyone knew it, including Cavanaugh, who telephoned Wetherbee every Tuesday without fail.
“Chip. Saturday. Are we on?”
“You are suing me for two million dollars, Hugh.”
“That was business. This is golf.”
It became a refrain. It became a mantra. It became, at the patio bar, a catchphrase that members deployed whenever two things that should not coexist were forced to coexist. When Pengerson collected his winnings from a man he had just denied a construction loan, someone murmured, “That was business. This is golf.” When Romanesco played a friendly round with an attorney he was opposing in court, someone murmured it. When The Admiral’s son-in-law applied for membership and The Admiral voted against him, someone murmured it with shocked reverence.
Wetherbee came back. Of course he came back. He came back because twenty years of Saturday morning golf is a force more powerful than a lawsuit, and because his wife, who was far wiser, told him that refusing to play golf with a man who was suing you gave the man the satisfaction of knowing he had gotten to you, and that the only proper response was to play, to win, and to take his money.
Wetherbee returned to the foursome. He played. He won. He took Cavanaugh’s money on the days they were on opposite teams, and he and Cavanaugh continued to take money from Spivey on the days they were partners, and neither man mentioned the lawsuit on the golf course, not once, not ever. It existed in the other compartment, and the other compartment was sealed.
The lawsuit ground on. Depositions were taken. Motions were filed. Discovery was exchanged. The attorneys demanded additional retainers with the quiet, inexorable inevitability of compound interest. And every Saturday, without exception, the four men — Cavanaugh, Wetherbee, The Admiral, and Spivey — teed off at eight-fifteen, played their better ball, squared their bets at the patio bar, and went home. It was the second most remarkable display of compartmentalization I have ever witnessed, and I say this as a man who has witnessed all four of Buster Cauldwell’s marriages.
The lawsuit settled, as lawsuits generally do once the legal fees have begun to rival the amount in dispute, for an amount significantly less than was sought and significantly more than Wetherbee thought was fair, which is the definition of a settlement. The mutual release paperwork was signed. Attorneys were paid. Life resumed. The following Saturday, Cavanaugh and Wetherbee were drawn as partners, and they won two of three parts of the Nassau plus a press, and Wetherbee was seen to buy Cavanaugh a beer at the patio bar afterward with no visible trace of irony.
“That,” said The Admiral, observing this from behind his gin and tonic, “is the strangest thing I have ever seen. And I served in the Navy.”
The story might have ended there, in rough equilibrium, had it not been for Spivey.
Spivey had spent the year losing — when partnered with Cavanaugh, who cursed him; when partnered with Wetherbee, who forgave him; and when partnered with The Admiral, who said nothing. The vanity handicap, that monument to Spivey’s self-delusion, ensured that his team received fewer strokes than it deserved, and the result was a year’s worth of Saturday mornings in which Spivey’s money surely and steadily drained away.
The following January, every other member of the foursome received a Form 1099 from Lester Spivey.
A 1099, for those fortunate enough to have never received one unexpectedly, is the document by which a payor reports to the Internal Revenue Service that money has been paid to a recipient, and that the recipient had better report it as income or face the consequences. The amounts were accurate. The documentation was meticulous. Every Nassau, every press, every side bet, precisely recorded over a year of Saturdays, had been tallied with the vindictive diligence of an HOA board member who has been sharpening his pencil for twelve months, and the totals were, for each recipient, large enough to attract the attention of any tax preparer with a pulse.
Cavanaugh opened his envelope, read the 1099, and laughed. He laughed for a long time. Then he picked up the telephone and called Wetherbee.
“Did you get one?”
“I got one.”
“The son of a bitch 1099’d us.”
“He did.”
“You have to admire it,” said Cavanaugh, and he meant it, because Cavanaugh was the one man at La Cucaracha who truly understood the principle at work. Business was business. Golf was golf. And taxes were taxes. Spivey had done nothing more than extend the logic to its natural conclusion, and Cavanaugh, the man who had invented the principle, could not in good conscience object to its application.
The Admiral did not laugh. He called Tony Romanesco.
Romanesco examined the 1099s with the professional interest of a jeweler appraising a stone he did not expect to find genuine.
“They’re legitimate,” he said.
“They can’t be legitimate,” said The Admiral.
“They are one hundred percent legitimate. He lost the money. He paid you the money. He is reporting that he paid you the money. The IRS is going to want to know why you didn’t report it.”
“It’s a golf bet.”
“It’s income,” said Romanesco, cheerfully. “But don’t worry. I’ll make it go away.”
Romanesco made it go away. How he made it go away I am not at liberty to say, because Romanesco asked me not to, and one does not refuse a request from a man who can tell you, with a smile, exactly how he would make your life very difficult if you did. But I can tell you that it involved several letters, at least one telephone call to the IRS that Romanesco later described as “entertaining,” and a bill that he did not send, because Romanesco understood, as he always did, that some services are best rendered as favors, to be collected upon at a later date.
The board, upon learning of the 1099 incident, moved to suspend Spivey. Spivey, through his attorney — in an encore performance — informed the board that filing an accurate 1099 was not only his right but his legal obligation, and that any adverse action taken against him for fulfilling that obligation would constitute retaliation of a form that his attorney was fully prepared to litigate. The board, recognizing in this threat the same whistleblower logic that had thwarted them before, retreated to the boardroom and — as expected — did nothing.
Spivey returned to the foursome the following Saturday, took his place as The Admiral’s partner, and lost the entire three-part Nassau and all the presses.
Cavanaugh, collecting his winnings at the patio bar, raised his glass.
“That was business,” he said, grinning at Spivey. “This is golf.”
Spivey, for once, said nothing. But he was already recording figures in his little black notepad.
The Oldest Member took a sip of his gin and tonic and returned his gaze to the man at the bar.
“The lesson,” he said, “is that there are those in this world who can separate the personal from the professional with the unsettling ease of a CEO who can fire his executive assistant and ask her to validate his parking on the way out. And there are those who cannot. The trick is knowing which kind you are, and which kind the other person is.”
The man considered this. “Which one are you?” he asked.
The Oldest Member smiled. “I am the one who watches and remembers. It is a far more comfortable chair.”