Corona Golf
18
The young man huffed into the patio bar in an thoroughly agitated state. The cart girl, he reported, had run out of both Moosehead beer and peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and he had been forced to play the back nine with neither. He said this with the wounded disbelief of a vacationer who has been promised the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai and received something akin to the Tumbleweed Golf Resort in Barstow.
“You don’t know how good you have it,” said The Oldest Member, setting down his gin and tonic. “There was a time, not so long ago, when there was no cart girl and no patio bar. And grown men played golf anyway, which tells you everything you need to know about the disease.”
The young man shrugged. He knew what Covid was, of course, but he was new to La Cucaracha and new to the game, and he had not experienced what it had done to golf.
“Let me tell you,” said The Oldest Member, “what it was like to play golf during a pandemic. And about Buster Cauldwell, who saw a business opportunity where the rest of us saw only despair.”
Golf (said The Oldest Member) was declared a “non-essential” business by the authorities, a classification that was received at La Cucaracha with the stunned disbelief of an astronaut being told that oxygen was optional. Non-essential. Golf. The course closed that very day. The membership greeted this news with the outrage of those who had organized their entire lives around a tee time, and who now found themselves standing in their living rooms at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, fully dressed, with nowhere to go. It was, by any reasonable measure, the darkest period in the history of La Cucaracha Country Club, and I include the year the main dining room caught fire when Jabba demanded a special order of a twenty-four-ounce rib-eye flambé (tableside) and the year Belmira rammed The Admiral’s BMW with a Range Rover in the parking lot.
The course eventually reopened — after weeks of lobbying by the membership, several letters to the Board of Supervisors, and one impassioned telephone call to the governor from The Admiral, a substantial political donor, that, I am told, was conducted with the bearing of a man who had once commanded a vessel under fire and had not adjusted it for civilian use. But it reopened under conditions that the membership deemed only loosely connected to the game they had been playing six weeks earlier.
Ball washers were removed. Bunker rakes were removed. The flagsticks were locked in place and surrounded by foam inserts set so shallow that a ball entering the hole at anything greater than a dying pace might skitter completely through the cup. The practice putting green was closed. The driving range was closed. Social distancing, they called it. The phrase infected the club vocabulary like a virus of its own and attached itself to everything. No golf carts. No bathroom doors. No congregating at the first tee. No patio bar.
No patio bar. I will let that sink in.
The effect of these restrictions was positively Darwinian. You carried your bag, or you didn’t play. The octogenarians vanished overnight, along with those who, while not technically octogenarians, had achieved a similar condition through decades of committed inactivity. The younger members, freed from the gravitational drag of the elderly and the infirm, tore around the course in three hours flat, playing at a pace that would have been considered unseemly in any other era but that, in the Covid era, felt like liberation.
McClag lasted almost eight holes. He had been walking with a determined, red-faced stride, refusing to admit that his body had opinions about the arrangement, and he made it through seven holes by sheer force of profanity. On the eighth, his ball found the barranca to the right of the fairway, and McClag, who had never in his life left a ball unplayed when a dollar was riding on it, descended into the brush to retrieve it. He emerged four minutes later, visibly gray, his lungs complaining bitterly at their newly discovered workload, and announced, in language that I will not reproduce, that he was done. His playing partners helped him to the clubhouse, where he sat in a chair for twenty minutes and drank water, which may have been the first water McClag had consumed voluntarily in a decade.
Big Tully Olmstead fared worse. Tully, who carried two hundred and seventy pounds on a frame that had not been designed for that purpose and who had not walked more than forty consecutive yards since his last cardiac stress test, attempted the approach to the second green — an uphill climb of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards that, to a man of Tully’s dimensions, might as well have been the north face of Everest. He made it to the front right bunker. He did not make it out. An ambulance was summoned onto the course, and the paramedics found Tully lying in the sand with his eyes closed and his sand wedge across his chest, looking like a pharaoh who had been buried with his favorite club. They carried him out on a stretcher, because nobody — not the paramedics, not his playing partners, not anyone within visual range — wanted to try to carry Big Tully Olmstead. Martin Hill, who had issued Tully’s life insurance policy and who was walking the adjacent first fairway at the time, saw the ambulance arrive and was later described by his playing partners as having gone a shade of white not typically found in nature. It was the last time Tully attempted to walk a golf course, and it was, by most accounts, the last time he attempted to travel anywhere that did not have valet parking.
The foam inserts in the cups resulted in chaos of a different paradigm. Balls bounced out with a regularity that turned every putt into a philosophical crisis. Was the ball holed or wasn’t it? The rules committee issued a directive stating that a ball that remained in the cup was holed, and a ball that struck the foam and exited the cup was not, which satisfied nobody. It enraged Pengerson, who had struck a towering tee shot on the seventh hole from a hundred and sixty yards that “smokestacked” straight down into the cup, slamming into the foam surrounding the flagstick, and launching sideways with the velocity of a spooked cat and disappearing into the barranca to the right. A hole in one. Except that it wasn’t. Pengerson, who already had four holes in one to his name, was not a man who needed a fifth, but the denial of it offended him on a level that had nothing to do with the record and everything to do with principle. His name does not appear a fifth time on the hole-in-one plaque in the clubhouse, and he has not forgiven the foam.
Without rakes, the bunkers became landscapes of churned, footprinted sand that bore less resemblance to a golf hazard than to a beach at the end of a holiday weekend. The rules committee, in a rare display of common sense, declared all bunkers ground under repair, permitting a free drop outside the bunker. This was intended as a mercy. For most golfers, it was. For Spivey, it was a strategic goldmine.
La Cucaracha’s local rule required that the drop be no closer to the hole but within six feet of the bunker. Spivey, whose approach to the rules of golf had always been that of a chiseler looking for loopholes in a contract, realized that dropping farther from the hole but with a clear line to the flagstick was worth far more than dropping closer with the bunker still between him and the green. He began calculating his approaches with the bunker drops in mind, choosing shots likely to land his ball in the most advantageous bunker, from which he would take his free drop onto a perfect lie with a clear path to the flagstick. His scores improved, as did his vanity handicap. When told of Spivey’s subterfuge at the patio bar, Sasso noted that he hadn’t known anyone to exploit a crisis this effectively since Spivey 1099’d his own foursome. “Bunkers,” Buster said, “who would have thought bunkers could be fun?” Sasso looked sideways at Buster and winked.
And then there was the bar.
The clubhouse bar was closed. The patio bar was closed. The men’s grill was closed. The snack bar at the turn was closed. Even the cart girl — who provided beer, Fireball shooters, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches to golfers in extremis — was out of a job. The Ladies Bridge Club could no longer play bridge, their card room having been shut down as surely as the bar. La Cucaracha Country Club had become, in the language of the pandemic, a “dry campus.” The phrase was spoken at La Cucaracha with the same horror one might reserve for the announcement that the club had been struck by a meteorite. The membership stared at one another with the hollow, uncomprehending eyes of those who have been informed that the laws of physics have been revised and that gravity no longer applies.
Buster Cauldwell looked at this situation and was horrified. Not because the carts were banned, or the bunkers were a mess, or the foam inserts were making a mockery of the game. Buster could handle all of that. What Buster could not handle was the idea that grown men were playing golf without access to a cold beer. Buster had more money than he knew what to do with. He did not need the income. What he needed was to right a wrong.
On a Wednesday afternoon in late May, Buster drove his truck — the F-250, the one that smelled of manure and diesel — onto the sixteenth fairway, with Butch riding shotgun. Chip Wetherbee, Hugh Cavanaugh, Mason, and Buddha Budd were playing, and Buster had decided they “needed beer.” He parked in the rough, lowered the tailgate, and brought forth a battered Igloo cooler containing two six-packs of Corona. The foursome fell upon it with the gratitude of men who have been crossing a desert and have found an oasis. Word traveled. The following Saturday, Buster was back, with four six-packs, and a Mason jar for donations. The donations, he said, would go to the caddies.
Outside caddies had recently been permitted by the club — La Cucaracha having finally recognized that if the membership could not ride in carts, someone would have to carry their bags, and that the membership itself was not going to do it.
The caddie operation featured men wearing name tags and golf attire that was technically within the dress code but that tested its boundaries in ways the committee had not anticipated. The favorite three were Dawg, Raider Ray, and Mandissimo.
Dawg was the best of them. His name was not Dawg. Nobody knew what his name was. It said “Dawg” on his name tag, and that was the end of the inquiry. He had been the top caddie at the Pebble Beach Resorts for decades before retiring to Santa Barbara, which explained why he was quiet, efficient, knew the yardages by heart, and had the uncanny ability to read a green from forty yards away with an accuracy that made the members suspicious and the other caddies envious. He also, it emerged, had a side gig.
The Admiral was the first to discover it. He reached into his bag on the first tee to get some tees and found three beers that he had not placed there. He looked at Dawg.
“That’s Dawg food,” said Dawg.
The Admiral examined the beers. They were cold. They were Coronas. They had come, The Admiral understood, from Buster’s truck, and they had been placed in his bag by Dawg, who had worked out an arrangement with Buster that involved the caddies serving as a mobile distribution network, delivering beer directly into the bags of members who had not ordered it but who, upon discovering it, were unlikely to complain. It was, in its way, a masterpiece of entrepreneurial initiative. Buster supplied the product. Dawg distributed it. The member discovered it at the moment of maximum thirst and minimum resistance. The donation was, of course, expected.
The Admiral paid for the beers. Everyone paid for the beers. Nobody complained. The system worked.
Raider Ray was the second caddie — at least that was what his name tag said — and he had come to caddying from his custom paint auto body shop, which the pandemic had temporarily closed. He was a Raiders fan of the fervent, irrevocable, tattooed variety — the tattoos being on his hands and neck, which are the locations reserved for men who wish to communicate their affiliations to the world without the inconvenience of conversation. He wore a ponytail, which enhanced the look. He wore only the black and silver — a color combination that evoked the sartorial choices of a gloriously fashion-challenged celebrity at an awards show.
Mandissimo was the third. His given name was Mando, but his personality was so large, so uncontainable, that the membership had inflated it to the superlative, and his name tag read “Mandissimo.” He was moonlighting from his remote-work bank job, which he performed in the mornings from his kitchen table before reporting to the pro shop at noon, where the caddies gathered between loops. He was a Miami Dolphins fan, and he wore the team colors — aqua and orange — with an island swagger that was better suited to a Bahamas boat captain than to a California loan officer.
He and Raider Ray conducted a running argument, sustained over the entire duration of the pandemic and never once resolved, about whose team was worse and whose fashion sense was more regrettable. Raider Ray told Mandissimo that he looked like he had been mugged by Jimmy Buffett’s parrot. Mandissimo replied that with all those tattoos and that ponytail, Ray would know — he probably stole it.
Buster’s operation expanded. The truck appeared every Wednesday and Saturday, Butch in the passenger seat with his head out the window and his tongue in the breeze. The tailgate came down. The coolers came out. Butch made the rounds, greeting golfers with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a Labrador Retriever who has never met a stranger. The Coronas — and Buster, who was not without a sense of humor, served only Coronas, because serving a beer named after the virus that had caused all the trouble pleased him — flowed through the caddie network and into the bags of the membership with the quiet efficiency of a well-run supply chain.
The beers were not only for sale. They were also caddie fuel. Dawg, Raider Ray, and Mandissimo drank a substantial portion of their commissions, a practice that Buster not only tolerated but encouraged, on the theory that a well-hydrated caddie was a happy caddie and a happy caddie was a caddie who would continue to distribute product. Donations accumulated. Buster did not keep a cut. He did not need a cut. The man had more money than he could spend. He was doing this for the principle of the thing, and the principle was that no golfer should have to play eighteen holes without a beer.
McClag was Buster’s best customer. McClag, who had recovered from his eighth-hole collapse and returned to walking the course with the sullen, wheezing determination of a patient who has been told by his doctor that exercise will extend his life and who is not fully sure this is a good thing, bought beer from Buster’s truck every time he played. He stored the bottles in the side pocket of his golf bag, which was a system that worked perfectly until the day it did not.
It was on the fourteenth hole, a dog-leg par four, that McClag snap-hooked his driver so violently to the left that the ball never had a chance. It crossed the fairway, crossed the cart path, crossed the rough, and plunged into the Laguna Verde with the decisive finality of an Olympic diver. McClag stared at the water. He stared at the driver. And then, with the full, explosive savagery of one who has reached the end of his patience with this accursed club and with the universe that gave birth to it, he hurled the driver at his bag.
The sound was distinctive. It was not the sound of a driver striking a golf bag. It was the sound of a driver striking three glass bottles of Corona at high velocity, which is a different sound entirely — a sound that begins with impact and ends with the fizzing, foaming, dripping aftermath announcing that McClag had just destroyed his own refreshments. Machiette had destroyed his mobile phone in exactly this fashion, hurling a sand wedge at his bag and obliterating the phone in the side pocket, so the physics were well established. Beer soaked through the bag, through the scorecard, and through McClag’s wallet, which was in the side pocket and which emerged, some minutes later, looking like it had been through a car wash. The bills inside were wet. The credit cards were sticky. He extracted the photograph of his wife, which he carried for reasons that nobody at the club had ever understood given the frequency with which he complained about her, and dried it carefully on his shirt.
McClag’s language during this episode was heard, according to one report, as far away as Cucaracha Plaza. Wetherbee’s wife, who was playing the eighth that afternoon, heard it and told Chip afterward that she didn’t know who the man was, but that she hoped he was receiving professional help. Raider Ray, who was caddying for McClag’s group that afternoon and who had witnessed the explosion at close range, told Mandissimo afterward that the Dolphins would be better appreciated as fish tacos at a Tampa seafood restaurant. Mandissimo told Ray that the Raiders were like homeless people, moving from city to city until they outwore their welcome, and that Las Vegas was only the latest shelter. Ray told Mandissimo that the reboot of Miami Vice had been canceled so there was no need to audition. Neither man could explain how the conversation had arrived at this point from the subject of broken beer bottles, but neither man felt the need to.
The operation ran for three months. It ran beautifully. It ran with the smooth, invisible logic of a free market in which the product is cold, the demand is bottomless, and the middlemen wear NFL fan gear. And then the ABC showed up.
Alcohol Beverage Control. It had been called, we later learned, by the Ladies Bridge Club. The bridge club could no longer play bridge — the pandemic had shut down their card room as surely as it had shut down the bar — and they were offended, deeply and profoundly offended, that the golfers still got to have fun. If they could not play, nobody should drink. A man in a dress shirt and khaki trousers, carrying a clipboard, appeared on the twelfth fairway one Wednesday afternoon, examined Buster’s truck, examined Buster’s cooler, examined the donation jar, and informed Buster that he was operating an unlicensed alcohol distribution business, in violation of seven sections of the California Business and Professions Code, and that this would need to stop.
Buster glanced down at the man with an unbothered calm of one who had been in disagreements with the powers that be before and emerged intact, if not victorious. He had survived a difference of opinion with the Disciplinary Council at Dartmouth. He had survived four marriages. He had survived an ex-wife who tried to ram his golf cart with a Range Rover. A man from the ABC with a clipboard was not going to ruin his Wednesday.
“Sir,” said the man from the ABC, “you cannot sell alcohol without a license.”
“I’m not selling alcohol,” said Buster. “I’m accepting donations for the caddie benevolent fund.”
Buster reached into the glove compartment of the F-250 and produced a piece of paper. It was typewritten, on ranch stationery, which told you everything you needed to know about how long Buster had been expecting this conversation. “The Norwood Cauldwell III Caddie Benevolent Fund,” it read, was a charitable organization dedicated to the welfare of golf caddies in the greater Santa Barbara area. Dawg was listed as treasurer. Raider Ray was listed as sergeant-at-arms. Mandissimo was listed as secretary, a title he had not been informed of and which he learned about three hours later, at which point he asked why he had not been consulted and pointed out that at least the bank had offered him a salary.
“I’m afraid that’s not a recognized exemption, Mr. Cauldwell,” he said.
“It’s been working for three months,” said Buster. He paused, and then added, with the calm, conversational tone of a legislator making a point of order, that the man from the ABC was occupying a patch of ground that was designated for private non-profit purposes, and that his presence was no longer required.
The operation was shut down. Buster received a warning. The warning was added to a collection of warnings, citations, and letters of admonishment that Buster kept in a drawer in his ranch office, alongside the note from the Ladies Bridge Club that read “This is not a barnyard.” Buster greeted the warning with the same mild, philosophical interest he reserved for the weather: things that happened, that could not be controlled, and that did not, in the final analysis, matter.
In time, the restrictions eased, and The Admiral’s letters to the governor — written on personal stationery, in the Annapolis hand, with the unwavering conviction that golf was essential to the functioning of civilized society — had the desired effect.
When the carts came back, the caddies were no longer needed. Raider Ray returned to his paint shop. Mandissimo went back to full-time banking. On their last day, Mandissimo told Ray that the Raiders‘ last championship was so long ago that the players were now eligible for Medicare. Ray admitted that this was technically accurate, but then noted that the Dolphins’ last championship was so long ago that the players were now eligible for burial. Mandissimo admitted that this too was technically accurate, and opened another beer.
Dawg returned to his true vocation, which was organizing money games at the local public golf course, where the stakes were higher and handicaps were ignored as irrelevant. Raider Ray and Mandissimo went back to playing in those money games, where their insults continued, their fashion war endured, and their respective teams continued to disappoint them in ways that neither could have anticipated but both, in their hearts, had always expected.
The foam came out of the cups. The flagsticks were removable again. The rakes came back. The carts came back. The bar reopened, and the membership returned to it with the reverent, almost tearful gratitude of those who have been to the desert and have found water. The octogenarians reappeared, and the pace of play slowed to its typical four hours and twenty minutes, and the younger members, who had briefly tasted the paradise of three-hour rounds, mourned what they had lost and were ignored.
Life, in short, returned to normal. And normal, at La Cucaracha, was a thing to be treasured, because normal meant you could play golf, and you could have a beer afterward, and you could sit at the patio bar and complain about the pace of play. Which is, when you think about it, what a country club is for.
“So you see,” he said, “a cold beer on the golf course is not a birthright. It is a privilege. There was a time, not so long ago, when there was no cart girl, no beer of any kind, and grown men played eighteen holes sustained by nothing but profanity and the contents of Buster Cauldwell’s cooler. Before you complain about the drink cart’s provisions, my boy, be grateful there is a drink cart at all.”
The young man looked at his drink — a Moosehead, cold, served to him at a patio bar with no social distancing and a bartender who knew his name — and took a long, appreciative sip.
“Who was Dawg?” he asked.
The Oldest Member smiled. “Nobody knows his real name. That’s the beauty of it. He appeared at La Cucaracha when he was needed, and when the carts came back he went back to running money games at Santa Barbara Muni. You can find him there any Saturday, if you don’t mind losing.”
“And Buster?”
“Buster is still here. He parks his truck in the same spot every morning, in front of the main entrance, where the Ladies Bridge Club would prefer he did not. Some things, my boy, not even a pandemic can change.”