Introduction

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In the 1920s, back when golfers drove square-dimpled balls off a sand mound tee, wearing jackets and ties and the newly fashionable plus-fours that made every man look as if he had been inflated above the knee, Pelham Grenville Wodehouse — P.G. to his friends, and he had many — gave voice to the peculiar anguish that has afflicted golfers since the game was first played on the windswept links of Scotland by men who had no idea what they were getting themselves into: “I wish to goodness I knew the man who invented this infernal game. I’d strangle him. But I suppose he’s been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his grave.”

In those days, The Oldest Member held court from his customary chair on the terrace overlooking the ninth green, where he could be found on any afternoon with a drink at his elbow and a story at the ready. The tales he told featured the trials and tribulations of various club members — each afflicted with his own peculiar deficiencies, but each sharing the one defect that united them all, which was their helpless, incurable, and completely voluntary addiction to the game of golf. These tales were chronicled in the nine-hole Wodehouse classic, Divots.

A century has passed, and the game remains as infernally addictive as ever, except that the members are now equipped with electric golf carts, custom-fitted carbon-fiber drivers, and moisture-wicking underwear — technological advances that have done nothing to improve human nature, which is, when you think about it, the equipment that really matters.

As it so happens, The Oldest Member’s descendants made their way to California, as descendants in America so often do, and his great-grandson now holds the chair at La Cucaracha Country Club, where the sun shines, the avocados grow, and the patio bar is always open.

La Cucaracha members retreat to this patio bar after golf to conduct autopsies of their most recent torments and triumphs, and in doing so are invariably waylaid by The Oldest Member, who is always there, who is always ready, and who will recount, in a fashion that discourages interruption, improbable but illuminating tales of the membership, past and present.

The following stories are mythology, not history, and therefore need not be accurate in order to be true. Accordingly, my lawyer reminds me to tell you that any similarity in these accounts to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. My lawyer is probably lying, but he bills by the hour and I have learned not to argue. Please enjoy this back-nine from The Oldest Member.