The Aloha Press
11
Two men were settling a wager at the patio bar, and the transaction was not going smoothly. The loser, an excitable individual who was taking this loss with the composure of a hotel patron who has been charged for use of the minibar he did not open, was maintaining that a bet made under the influence of three Old Fashioneds was not, in any meaningful legal or moral sense, a bet at all. The winner was maintaining that it was.
“The thing I’ll never understand,” said the loser, reaching for his wallet with the reluctance of a porter ordered to cross a river teeming with piranhas, “is why I offered a press. I was two up. Two up! What breed of idiot presses when he’s two up?”
The Oldest Member, who had been observing this scene from his customary chair with the quiet pleasure of a spectator who has ringside seats, set down his glass.
“You are not,” he said, “the first man to ask himself that question. Come. Sit. I will tell you the story of John McClag, who was two up with three to play and made the mistake of accepting an Aloha press from Don Pengerson.”
The man, who had been on the point of leaving, found that he had somehow sat down again. There was something about The Oldest Member’s manner — an established, immovable assurance of a man whose drink is full and whose story is ready — that made departure feel not so much rude as physically impossible.
If you wished to understand the essential tragedy of John McClag (said The Oldest Member), you needed only to watch the man place a bet. It was not that McClag was unlucky in the conventional sense — lightning had never struck him, nor had he been sued more than the usual number of times — but he possessed some deep, almost molecular inability to recognize the moment when fate was sliding the banana peel beneath his shoe. That he had built a thriving obstetric practice in the valley was, I have always felt, one of the miracles of the age, for here was a man who could guide a newborn safely into the world with the hands of an angel, yet could not so much as flip a coin without backing the wrong side of it.
McClag was also, I should mention, a man of the most remarkably vivid vocabulary. I have traveled widely and have heard stevedores on the docks of San Francisco express displeasure with their working conditions. I have listened to drill sergeants at Fort Ord address recruits who had failed to meet expectations. I once stood within earshot of a cattle rancher near Paso Robles who had slipped on a fresh cowpie. None of these gentlemen, gifted though they were, could have held a candle to John McClag on the subject of a missed four-foot putt. His profanity was not the crude, workmanlike cursing of an ordinary man. It was art. It had structure and momentum. It built like a symphony, starting in the lower registers and climbing through movements of increasing complexity until it reached crescendos that sent herons flapping from the trees along Las Piñatas Drive and caused the Ladies Bridge Club inside the clubhouse to set down their Chardonnay and squirm uneasily in their seats.
The Saturday of the match in question was one of those golden Southern California afternoons that exist primarily to lure men into a false sense that the universe is kindly disposed toward them. McClag — pink, round, perspiring lightly in his lavender polo like a ham left on a radiator — stood on the sixteenth tee two up on Don Pengerson with three holes to play. In the balance was a high-stakes Nassau — stakes that, had either man’s wife been informed of them, would have resulted in domestic consequences more devastating than anything the golf course could inflict. It was at this point that he committed what I have always referred to as “the fatal McClag error,” which is to say he opened his mouth.
“Donny, Donny, Donny,” he said, mopping his neck with a towel that bore the crest of The Valet Club, “I want you to know there are no hard feelings. This amount of money between friends — it’s nothing. I’m thinking a week at Pebble Beach. MaryAnn’s never been.” He patted his belly with the contentment of a vacationer who has just mentally packed his suitcase. “Or maybe I’ll finally put in that backyard putting green I’ve been— ”
“Tell you what,” said Pengerson, in that easy, sunlit demeanor of his that I have always compared to the image of a rattlesnake putting on a Hawaiian shirt. Pengerson was the type of man who could foreclose on your mortgage and leave you feeling oddly grateful for the conversation. As president of East Valley Bank, he had cultivated an aura of breezy geniality that concealed a competitive drive of the sort that would have impressed Genghis Khan. “Let’s make it interesting. Aloha press — double or nothing on the entire match.”
Now, a wiser man — which is to say, very nearly any man — would have looked into those twinkling blue eyes and seen the trap. But McClag was two up. McClag had been striping the ball all day. McClag could already taste the celebratory Corona he intended to consume at the patio bar while describing his victory to everyone within range.
“You’re on,” said McClag.
What followed was the most surgical three holes of golf ever witnessed at La Cucaracha, beginning with the sixteenth, the second-hardest hole on the course — a long, grueling, uphill par four that punishes ambition and rewards nothing. Both drives found the fairway. Pengerson, who dismissed the slope for his approach as a minor administrative matter, threaded a long iron up the hill to eighteen feet. McClag, who had been chattering happily about his anticipated Pebble Beach vacation through most of his ride up the fairway alongside Pengerson, who was walking and paying no attention, tugged his approach into the rough left of the green and chipped on to ten feet. Pengerson situated himself over his eighteen-footer and sank it with the perfunctory dispatch of a conductor punching a ticket. McClag, who now needed to hole a ten-footer merely to lose by one instead of two, saw no reason to extend the agony and two-putted for bogey. An oath of the category that would have stripped the varnish from a church pew escaped his lips and drifted across the adjacent fourth fairway. The lead was one, and a faint shadow of unease had crossed McClag’s pink and amiable face, like a cloud passing over a cold February moon.
The seventeenth at La Cucaracha is a longish par three, the sort of hole that looks deceptively simple until one considers the deep bunker lurking to the right, and its companion, a sprawling sandy wasteland that guards the left side and wraps around behind the green, ensuring that any shot struck with even a whisper of doubt is punished in the style it deserves. Pengerson’s tee shot described a high, gentle cut against the California sky and took its position twelve feet below the hole. McClag, whose hands had begun to exhibit a faint tremor, pushed his iron into the right bunker, and from his lips there issued a string of remarks so incandescent, so richly and imaginatively sulfurous, that a woman walking her French Bulldog along Arroyo Drive quickened her pace and covered the animal’s ears. But it is one of the maddening contradictions of John McClag — and here I must lean forward in my chair for emphasis — that the man was frequently capable of the most exquisite golf. He stepped into that bunker with the determination of a bandit who has one bullet left and intends to make it count, opened the face of his sand wedge, and played a shot of such delicacy, such feathery precision, that the ball floated out of the sand like a dandelion seed on a summer breeze, landed with a whisper, and trickled to a halt six inches from the cup. It was the species of shot that allowed McClag to forgive the man who invented the game.
McClag was reaching for his putter when Pengerson waved a magnanimous hand. “Pick it up, Johnny,” he said, with the easy generosity of a gambler holding all the cards. “Even you couldn’t miss that.” The remark hit hard. McClag’s face, which had been glowing with the triumph of his sand save, went rigid. He scooped up his ball in silence.
Pengerson gazed at his twelve-foot birdie putt with the smug calm of an attorney reviewing his own contract, which he has every intention of enforcing. He settled over the ball. He drew the putter back. The ball rolled across the green with a steady, unhurried conviction, as if it had been given its marching orders and saw no reason to deviate from them, and dropped into the center of the cup with a pop that, to McClag’s ears, carried all the warmth of a cell door closing.
All square.
McClag’s complexion, which had briefly rallied to something approaching its customary pink during that brilliant bunker shot, now progressed to a shade I can only describe as boiled lobster. He said nothing as they walked to the eighteenth tee. Rather, he glowered — a deep, smoldering, full-body rage that radiated outward like heat from a stove. A squirrel in a nearby oak watched him approach and moved to a higher branch.
By the time the two combatants reached the eighteenth tee, word of the high-stakes wager had traveled through the club with the speed that only the promise of another man’s humiliation can provide, and a small gallery had assembled around the green. The eighteenth at La Cucaracha is a narrow par four that bends around a stand of ancient oaks, trees that have been smothering both tee shots and hope since the Eisenhower administration. The approach is uphill to a green that slopes so severely that a ball placed on its upper tier will, if given the slightest encouragement, run off the front of the green like a man late for his flight.
Both drives found ideal positioning, long to the left half of the fairway. McClag, who had summoned from somewhere within his pudgy frame a final reserve of competitive intensity — a desperate rally I have often compared to a cornered badger — struck his approach first. The ball drew in from the right, landed sharply on the green, took one obedient hop, and came to rest two feet from the pin. The gallery roared. There were whoops. There were hollers. Chip Wetherbee was shaking his head and grinning from ear to ear. McClag’s chest inflated to dimensions I would not have previously thought possible. The lobster faded from his cheeks, replaced by something approaching his customary pink. He turned to Pengerson with the expression of a defendant who has just watched the plaintiff’s expert witness contradict himself on the stand.
Pengerson surveyed the situation from one hundred and sixty yards with the air of an oenophile considering whether to pair a Belle Glos or EnRoute pinot with his pork chop. He selected his club — an eight-iron, I believe — waggled once, and swung.
The ball rose against the late afternoon sky, cleared the hill, and vanished from the view of both players. From the fairway, one hundred and sixty yards away and below the crest of that long uphill approach, neither man could see the green. But they could hear the gallery. And what they heard told the story.
It began as a murmur — the low, appreciative hum of people watching a well-struck ball land on a difficult green. Then the murmur grew, taking on a quality of heightened attention, the sound of a gallery collectively holding its breath as they watched something roll toward a destination that seemed increasingly, impossibly, inevitable. I have always said you could chart the ball’s progress across that treacherous green purely by gallery volume — the murmur swelling steadily, acquiring an edge of disbelief as the ball tracked the cup from six feet, then five, then four — and then, the ball found the bottom of the hole.
The entire hillside exploded. This was not a polite golf clap. It was a roar, the full-throated detonation of people who have just seen something they will be describing, with diminishing credibility, for the rest of their lives.
McClag did not need to see. He knew. He stood next to his cart, leaning on his putter, and I tell you that the knowledge arriving on that round, pink face was like watching a man open a letter from the IRS that did not contain the expected refund, but rather an audit notice.
What followed was the most magnificent display of uninterrupted obscenities I have encountered in a lifetime of close observation. McClag did not “curse” in any ordinary sense. He erupted. He detonated. He went off like a munitions depot struck by lightning. The initial explosion — a single, percussive syllable of such force that it scattered seven inquisitive crows from the oaks — was only the overture. What followed was a virtuoso performance, a towering, baroque edifice of obscenity that encompassed Pengerson, the eighteenth hole, the known universe, and what McClag proposed to do to all three. It climbed octave by octave, building through passages of such creative depravity that two members in the gallery stood rooted in open-mouthed admiration and an elderly woman on Via Posita Drive telephoned the clubhouse to inquire whether someone was being murdered. He cursed standing still and he cursed driving up the hill and he was still cursing, in a lower but no less comprehensive register, as he crested the rise and saw nothing on the green but his own ball, sitting two feet from the pin with nowhere left to go, which inspired a brief but passionate coda on the subject of providence and its sadistic turns.
Pengerson, who had remained at his station in the fairway during this performance, permitted himself a small, private smile — the smile, I have always said, of a stockbroker whose investments have performed exactly as projected. He replaced his divot with the toe of his shoe, slid his eight-iron back into his bag, and began the long walk up the hill, hands in his pockets, acknowledging the gallery with a modest tip of his visor as he strode onto the green, the gallery’s roar having already told him everything he needed to know.
McClag, breathing heavily from the general exertion of processing cosmic injustice, stared into the cup for a long moment, as if hoping the ball might somehow not be there. Then he bent down, plucked his own ball from its position two feet from the hole — two feet that would now haunt him for the rest of his natural life — and, with a motion that began somewhere around his ankles and gathered force through every outraged inch of his body, hurled it over the cart barn. It sailed high and white against the afternoon sky, clearing the roof by a comfortable margin, and was last seen bouncing down Arroyo Drive in the direction of Cucaracha Plaza. Pengerson slung a companionable arm around McClag’s damp, heaving shoulders.
“Johnny,” he said, with a warmth that could have melted butter, “let me buy you a drink.”