The Golden Balls

The young man in the bright green polo shirt — collar standing at attention in the style favored by his generation, as though the shirt were attempting to salute — had just missed a two-foot putt to halve his match, and he was not taking it well.

“That,” he muttered, “is why God invented the gimme.”

The Oldest Member, sitting in his customary chair on the patio bar with a gin and tonic and the contented comportment of a nonagenarian who has long since ceased to play the game but has not yet ceased to enjoy the suffering of those who invite it, stirred at the word. His eyes, which had been half closed against the afternoon sun, opened with the alertness of a dachshund catching the scent of a dropped slice of Jarlsberg.

“The gimme,” he said, with an emphasis that caused the young man to realize, too late, that he had wandered into range. “You speak of gimmes. Sit down, my boy. Let me tell you about a man who believed in the gimme with all his heart and soul, and what came of it.”

The young man opened his mouth to protest, but The Oldest Member had already reached out and latched onto his arm with a grip that belied his years, and his manner made clear that protest would be not only futile but irrelevant.

There are in this world (said The Oldest Member), tournaments designed to celebrate the best in a golfer. The Masters at Augusta. The Open at St. Andrews. These are events that summon forth the noblest qualities of the human spirit — courage, grace, the ability to hit a three-wood stinger into a crosswind with twelve million people watching on television. The Golden Balls is not one of these tournaments.

The Golden Balls is a three-day stroke play event contested annually among the members of Burning Wood Country Club, La Cucaracha, and The Valet Club, one round at each, and it operates on a principle that would have been obvious to the Marquis de Sade. Every shot must be struck until the ball is holed. There are no gimmes, no matter how short the putt. You cannot abandon the hole because your handicap does not permit posting a higher number. Every stroke, from the topped drive to the six-inch putt that somehow catches a spike mark and lips out to perch directly behind the cup, is recorded with the pitiless accuracy of a court reporter. The tournament does, in theory, produce a winner — the player with the lowest net score — but nobody cares about this person and nobody ever remembers his name. The true focus of the Golden Balls is the loser. The man who finishes last. Quitting mid-tournament is technically permitted, but the penalty is severe: the quitter pays the bar tab for the entire post-tournament celebration, which, given the tournament participants’ capacity for celebratory drinking, is a sum that has been known to exceed the cost of a modest automobile.

As a matter of record, the winner that year was Don Pengerson, who carried a seven handicap and finished at four under par. Of course he did. Pengerson wins every competition in which money is at stake, in the same way that the sun rises in the east and water flows downhill — it is just one of the organizing principles of the universe. His nearest competitor was John McClag, who carried an honest six and finished at eight over par, and who was heard to express his feelings about the margin in language that drew a shocked but admiring glance from the bartender. But nobody was talking about Pengerson or McClag that evening at the patio bar. They were talking about Jabba.

That unfortunate soul — the man who finishes last — is required to display the tournament trophy in a prominent place in his place of work for the ensuing twelve months. I should describe this trophy. It is a large carbon steel plaque upon which are mounted two golf balls, painted gold, with a broken putter positioned between them in such an arrangement that, once perceived, cannot be unperceived. The sculptor — and I use the term with the most generous possible interpretation — was Buster Cauldwell, who crafted the original after what I understand was a long evening with a bottle of Maker’s Mark and an acetylene torch. It has been the centerpiece of the tournament for over twenty years, and no man who has ever been forced to display it in his office, where clients and colleagues and his own mother might see it, has ever fully recovered.

The pressure, you will understand, is immense. Good golfers suffer but mildly under pressure. Bad golfers, shall we say, do not. And the pressure to not finish last in the Golden Balls is of a description and intensity that reduces bad golfers to a state of gibbering incapacity that must be seen to be believed.

The betting at the pre-tournament stag dinner is fierce — far fiercer on the question of who will finish last than on who will finish first — the open bar and captive audience producing a volume of action that would not have been out of place on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

It was on the third and final day of the tournament, played that year at The Valet Club, that the events I am about to describe took place. The worst scores go out last, and the gallery swells with the happy anticipation of witnessing another man’s destruction.

The first two rounds, at Burning Wood and La Cucaracha respectively, had done their usual work of separating the competent from the doomed, and as the field sorted itself for the final eighteen holes, three men found themselves bringing up the rear in various states of desperation. They were Mason “MJ” Jay — like Magic Johnson but with infinitely less talent — Andy “Buddha” Budd, and Joe Tutt, known to all as Jabba.

I should introduce these gentlemen properly, for their characters are essential to the spectacle that followed.

Mason was the Chief Financial Officer of East Valley Bank, working alongside Don Pengerson, and was known throughout the club as “The Clam.” This was not a reference to any maritime aspect but to his habit, when distressed by his golf game, of falling into a silence so profound and so total that one began to check for vital signs. Under normal conditions Mason was a perfectly competent golfer and an agreeable companion. But pure stroke play — every shot counting, no mulligans, no gimmes, no merciful picking up of one’s ball and stuffing it into one’s pocket — rendered in him a condition indistinguishable from a panic attack. His hands would shake. His breathing would become irregular. His eyes would acquire the panicked, staring nature of a suburbanite who has just opened his front door to find a bear on the welcome mat. And he would not speak. Not a word. Not a syllable. He would simply snap shut, like his namesake, and remain shut until either the round ended or his nervous system gave out, whichever came first.

Andy Budd — Buddha — was a different animal entirely. The nickname had nothing to do with his physique and everything to do with his disposition, for Buddha moved through life with the serene, unflappable calm of a yogi who has achieved enlightenment, or who has honestly stopped caring, which may be the same thing. He had played professional baseball, where he had been known as a power and spray hitter, a man who could drive the ball to all fields with the sort of force that made parking attendants nervous. He had brought this same philosophy to golf, where it manifested as the ability to hit a golf ball an immense distance in absolutely any direction. His drives were events. They were extravaganzas. They were, on occasion, first responder emergencies. A Budd tee shot might travel two hundred and eighty yards dead center, or it might travel two hundred and eighty yards sideways, across the highway and into the parking lot of a neighboring retirement community, or, on one memorable occasion I am told, through the open window of a member’s Mercedes on the road beyond the course. He possessed, in the parlance of the game, no finesse at all. His putting was modeled after his primary athletic skill, swinging a wooden bat at a ball traveling over ninety miles an hour, but had never quite adjusted to the idea that a golf ball, sitting motionless on a green, did not require the same level of violent commitment. To his credit, Buddha accepted all of this with the equanimity that had earned him his name. He did not rage. He did not curse. He merely took in the results of his efforts with a mild, philosophical interest, as one might observe a weather pattern, and moved on to the next disaster.

And then there was Jabba.

Joe Tutt was a successful restaurant owner and a member of La Cucaracha. He was a man of enormous girth who moved through the world on two titanium knees, having arrived at his present physical condition through a program of dedicated eating and a principled refusal to exercise in any form. His sole concession to bodily maintenance was an hour each morning in the sauna, where he sat like a great, perspiring sumo wrestler between bouts, radiating steam and zero self-reflection. Jabba was a man who expected the world to accommodate him, and when it did not — when an asparagus order was late, when the cart girl informed him that they were out of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, when any person within earshot could, in his estimation, remedy the situation if only they would try harder — he roared. It was not a subtle roar. It was the full-throated bellow of a water buffalo who had built a successful restaurant on the principle that if you yelled loudly enough and long enough, people caved in and gave you what you wanted. This approach, it must be said, had served him well in business and poorly in golf, where the ball is famously indifferent to being yelled at.

The Golden Balls was a torture custom-fitted for Jabba, because the Golden Balls did not allow gimmes. This was a colossal problem, because Jabba’s entire short game was built upon the gimme. He owned a putter of unusual design, fitted with a grip so abbreviated that when he placed the putter head in the cup to measure “inside the leather” — the traditional standard for a conceded putt — the leather began at two and a half feet from the hole. By this generous metric, Jabba had not actually holed a putt shorter than thirty inches over the last decade. The Golden Balls required him to hole every one of them, and this was a prospect that filled him with the same enthusiasm a turkey feels in late November.

Why, then, did Jabba play? He played because John McClag told him he wouldn’t. It was McClag who, at the patio bar one evening in a moment of inspired malice, stated loudly and within Jabba’s hearing that the Golden Balls was “not really a tournament for a man who can’t putt inside two feet.” This remark landed on Jabba’s pride with the force of a sledgehammer on a walnut. He signed up on the spot, and had regretted it every moment since, but to withdraw now would be to concede that McClag had been right, and this was a concession that Jabba would sooner have died than make.

These, then, were our three protagonists as they stood on the sixteenth tee at The Valet Club on that brilliant Sunday afternoon, separated by a handful of strokes at the absolute bottom of the leader board, each man desperately determined not to be the one who would spend the next twelve months explaining to visitors why there was a plaque of questionable taste hanging in his office.

The sixteenth at The Valet Club is a long and difficult par four, lined on both sides by cypress trees that stand like disapproving sentinels, funneling the fairway into a corridor that seems to narrow the longer you look at it. But the hole’s true malice resides to the left of the green, where the ground slopes downward into a stand of eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus trees are, as any Californian will tell you, extraordinarily untidy organisms. They shed bark and leaves with a frequency and enthusiasm that demonstrates a deep indifference to the golfer who must find his ball within the debris basin, let alone hit it. To play a ball from this eucalyptus graveyard is to enter into a contract with chaos itself. The wise golfer, possessing any modicum of instinct for self-preservation, keeps his approach well to the right.

It was into this grove that Mason deposited his second shot.

His caddie — my grandson Bobby, who had not yet learned that there are situations in life from which the only rational response is to walk away — advised calling an unplayable lie. This was sound advice. Under the rules of golf, Mason could have taken a one-stroke penalty, returned to the fairway, and played his fourth shot from a position that offered some reasonable hope of reaching the green before nightfall. Mason, however, was in the grip of the debilitating madness that afflicts golfers who believe they can save a stroke by attempting the impossible. He studied the ball, which was nestled low in a tangle of papery bark and exposed roots. He selected a lob wedge. He swung.

The clubhead caught a root, twisted violently in his hands, and the ball moved perhaps four inches downward, diving deeper into the bark like a chipmunk eluding a Jack Russell terrier. Mason grasped his left hand in pain, his face contorting into a Halloween mask that in any other man would have produced language audible in the next county, but The Clam snapped shut.

What followed, over the next several minutes, was an exhibition of such sustained futility that those of us watching from the gallery found ourselves gripped by a horrified fascination, the way one cannot look away from a man trying to parallel park in a space that is clearly too small. Mason swung and the ball moved a foot. He swung again and the ball moved six inches sideways. He swung and the ball disappeared beneath a slab of bark, requiring him to remove the debris before he could swing again, at which point the ball moved backward. He swung and caught nothing but bark. He swung and the ball popped up two feet in the air and landed exactly where it had been. Through all of this, Mason did not speak. Not one word. His face had achieved a complexion somewhere between eggplant and a heart attack, and his eyes had the panicky look of a spelunker who has lost his flashlight, but his lips remained sealed with the hermetic finality of a submarine hatch. Fifteen swings it took him to extract that ball from the eucalyptus grove, and by the time he finally chipped onto the green and two-putted for a twenty, Mason had ascended to the summit of the leaderboard, which is to say to the very bottom of it. He led Budd by one and Jabba by three.

The seventeenth at The Valet Club is a shortish par four that looks, from the tee, to be designed to offer a troubled man a moment’s respite. This is a lie. Drive it left and you find bunkers; farther left and cypress trees block any approach to the green. Drive it right and you are in a vast expanse of deep rough, never mowed and treeless, impossibly far from the green.

Budd stood on the tee, with the look of calm certainty borne of long experience, that the ball was headed somewhere interesting. He was not wrong. His drive — struck with the full, uninhibited violence of a star athlete who had once hit thirty-seven home runs in a single major league season — departed the clubface at an angle that bore no discernible relationship to the intended target and soared over the cypress trees to the left on a trajectory that carried it at least two hundred and seventy-five yards on the fly. There was a distant, percussive sound, his ball striking the roof of a property in which a certain presidential candidate’s mistress was enjoying what she had been assured was complete seclusion. The Secret Service detail was briefly alarmed.

Buddha reloaded. His second drive, struck with identical ferocity and even less accuracy, sailed over the trees on an even more ambitious leftward trajectory.

There was a distant crash, followed by the wail of a car alarm. Martin Hill, who was Budd’s insurer and standing in the gallery, closed his eyes. Buddha watched it go with a mild, unsurprised gaze. He had seen this errant variety of shot before and knew he would see it again.

His third drive went dead right, into the unmowed wilderness. He slashed out, hacked his way to the green with the unperturbed patience of a landscaper mowing a half-acre lawn, and three-putted for a twelve. This was, by Buddha’s reckoning, an acceptable outcome under the circumstances.

Jabba, meanwhile, was conducting his own small melodrama. His approach shot, struck fat, advanced only thirty yards — a distance that, given the club he was holding, represented roughly half of his intentions. He stared at his divot with the incredulity of a restaurateur who has been escorted to a table next to the kitchen at his own establishment. His next shot, a wedge played with the compensatory aggression of the deeply aggrieved, was skulled with such force that it shot over the green, sailed over the out-of-bounds markers, and came to rest in Buster Cauldwell’s avocado orchard, where it was retrieved the next day by Butch, Buster’s big black Labrador, who fetched so many errant golf balls from the orchard that Buster filled his entire practice shag bag with them. By the time Jabba holed out for an eight, his complexion resembled a sunset during fire season, and the sounds emerging from him were of a character that permitted Mason to recover the faintest flicker of color in his ashen cheeks.

The standings, as the three men trudged to the eighteenth tee some five and a half hours after they had begun — for bad golfers under pressure play not only badly but slowly — were as follows: Budd led — which is to say, held last place — by two strokes over Jabba. Mason, who had recovered from his eucalyptus catastrophe with a workmanlike double bogey on the seventeenth, having taken two swings to extract himself from a fairway bunker but otherwise playing with the mechanical resolve of a sleepwalker whose body has stopped consulting its brain, was five strokes off the lead. The Clam was going to survive and he knew it, though he still had not spoken.

The eighteenth at The Valet Club is a longish, uphill par four that concludes with one of the most dramatic greens in the valley — a three-tiered affair, sloped so severely from back to front that a ball landing on the upper tier and not coming to rest will roll off the front with the gleeful exuberance of a child on a water slide. To the left lies the driving range, a detail of some tactical significance, since a tee shot pulled left will come to rest among several hundred range balls, producing a situation not unlike trying to find a specific identifiable grain of sand on a beach. A natural amphitheater behind the green provides ample room for a gallery, and on this Sunday afternoon the gallery was substantial, for word had traveled, as it always does, that the Golden Balls was approaching its climax.

Mason played first, and here The Clam demonstrated the solid conservatism that had served him well in thirty years of corporate finance. He selected a seven-iron off the tee. A seven-iron. On a hole that called for a driver. The gallery murmured in confusion, but those of us who understood the mathematics recognized the play: four safe shots to the green, three putts for a seven, and home free. Mason executed this plan with the tight, repetitive efficiency of an autoworker screwing bolts on an assembly line, each shot traveling a modest, controlled distance, each landing in the short grass, and when he three-putted from forty feet for his seven, he permitted himself a deep sigh and a single, almost imperceptible nod — the only visible emotion he had displayed in five and a half hours.

Budd’s drive left the clubface with its usual violence and soared over the trees to the right, landing in the sixteenth fairway, where it very nearly struck a woman from the ladies’ nine-hole league, who expressed her feelings on the matter in terms that John McClag, watching from the gallery, later described with professional admiration. Buddha’s journey back to the eighteenth green was circuitous but, by his standards, efficient. He reached the green in five, the last of these being a bladed approach traveling at a velocity utterly inappropriate for a shot intended to land on a sloped green but which, through an intervention of providence that defied all known laws of physics, struck the flagstick dead center and dropped straight down, coming to rest eight inches from the cup.

The gallery gasped. Buddha stared at the ball with the amused expression of someone who has just found a hundred-dollar bill in a coat he hasn’t worn since last winter. He holed this one, though not without a brief detour toward the left lip that stopped the hearts of several spectators who had money on the outcome. A six for Buddha.

All eyes turned to Jabba.

Jabba had poked his drive a safe one hundred and eighty-two yards into the left rough — safe, I say, because he had kept it far enough right to avoid the driving range — and had played three more competent shots to reach the green, where his ball sat two feet from the hole. He stood over it with the look of a patient who has been told the surgery is routine: all he needed was to three-putt from two feet, and the Golden Balls trophy would pass to Budd. A three-putt from two feet. Even by Jabba’s standards, this should have been well within his capabilities.

What happened next occurred in the space of perhaps two minutes, but I can see it still, frozen in my memory with the clarity of a photograph. Jabba looked at the ball. He looked at the hole. Two feet. He knew what was required. He walked up to his ball with what passed, for Jabba, as composure.

“No gimmes, Jabba!”

The voice belonged to Don Pengerson, who was standing at the front of the gallery with his arms folded and a grin on his face that could only be described as satanic. Pengerson had bet on Jabba to finish last, and the sight of his investment standing two feet from salvation was producing in him the opposite of pleasure. Jabba flinched as if he had been struck. He lurched backward from the ball with the desperate, flailing retreat of an unlucky soul who has reached into the cupboard for the artificial sweetener and found a scorpion. He very nearly fell. The gallery roared with laughter, and for a moment Jabba stood with his putter dangling from one hand and his free hand pressed to his chest, with the stricken look of a widow who has just been informed that her social security check has bounced, while Pengerson, the instigator, stood with his arms folded, grinning with open malevolent delight.

Jabba composed himself. He lined up the putt. Two feet. Downhill. Straight. The eighteenth green at The Valet Club is a slick surface, treacherous from any distance greater than a foot, but from two feet, the ball has only to be touched on line and it will find the hole. “It’s only a three-putt needed,” Jabba told himself. “No need to stress.” This was, of course, a lie of such magnitude that even the man telling it did not believe it, but it is what the human mind produces in moments of imminent calamity.

His putt was hit a bit too hard and off line. It caught the upper lip of the cup, spun to the right, and spat out to six feet.

Budd, who had been watching from the fringe with a deepening frown, felt the frown dissolve. A smile crept across his face. Was there hope? McClag, who had bet on Budd and had a moment ago been leaning back in quiet satisfaction, sat forward and made a choking sound as if he had accidentally swallowed the olive in his vodka martini.

Pengerson began to laugh — softly at first, the low, appreciative chuckle of an investor watching a stock he shorted begin its descent.

From six feet, the mathematics had changed considerably. Jabba now needed to two-putt from six feet to avoid winning the Golden Balls, and a three-putt would tie. But Jabba was not most golfers, and the green was very fast, and his hands were shaking like a man who has been asked to sign his name and has forgotten the concept of a pen. His second putt pulled up eight inches short of the cup.

Budd stopped smiling. Eight inches. Surely even Jabba could not —

Jabba’s third putt never touched the ball. The putter head jammed into the green a full inch behind the ball. Nobody among the two hundred people now ringing the green could hear the soft thud of the stub. But they all saw it. The ball did not move. Jabba had whiffed from eight inches.

Pengerson cackled with the unrestrained delight of a hedge fund director whose every prediction has been vindicated, a sound so perfectly suited to the moment that several spectators around him had to turn away to keep from losing their composure entirely.

The gallery had gone silent except for Pengerson, who was beyond all hope of containment. Jabba stood over the ball, frozen, staring down at the small, white, demon that had personally betrayed him. Then he stepped back. He walked away. He walked a full circle around the green, breathing hard like a winded rhinoceros, while the gallery retreated like the Red Sea before Moses, if Moses had been a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound restaurateur with two titanium knees and a putting disability.

Jabba returned to his ball. He stood over it. Eight inches for the tie. All he had to do now was hole the fourth, from eight inches, and the Golden Balls would be shared — an outcome that, while not glorious, was at least survivable.

Jabba looked at the ball. He looked at the hole. He looked at the ball again. He drew the putter back with a tentative and unsteady motion, no longer trusting any part of his body to do what it was told, and stabbed at the ball. It was a solid putt. It was also dead straight. It was also hit with a good four times the force required, the accumulated terror of the previous three strokes having converted itself into a spasm of overcompensation. The ball shot forward, hit the back of the cup with a pop only Jabba heard, leapt straight up in the air, and came to rest one inch behind the hole.

That was the putt he had needed. That was the tie. And it was sitting one inch behind the hole.

For a moment, nobody moved. Then Jabba bent down, picked up his ball, and walked off the green. There was nothing left to play for. Five putts from two feet would be a loss, and five putts from two feet it would inevitably be, and Jabba saw no reason to go through the formality of proving it in front of two hundred witnesses. He just collected his ball and walked off the green in the direction of the bar.

Pengerson fell over.

This is not a figure of speech. Don Pengerson, overcome by a seizure of hilarity so violent that it exceeded the structural capacity of his legs, toppled sideways into Chip Wetherbee. They both went down in a heap into the greenside bunker, from which position Pengerson continued to laugh with such force that Wetherbee, attempting to haul him upright, began laughing himself. The two of them lay tangled in the sand like men who have given up all pretense of decorum and intend to remain there until the laughing stops, which it showed no sign of doing.

Budd stood on the fringe and shook his head slowly, with the quiet gratitude of a condemned man who has received a last-minute pardon.

The trophy presentation took place on the patio at The Valet Club fifteen minutes later, just enough time for Buster to etch Jabba’s name on the back of the trophy beneath that of the previous year’s winner, Andy Budd, and Jabba accepted the Golden Balls with the stony, silent dispassion of a prisoner receiving a lengthy prison sentence. He held the plaque at arm’s length, gazed upon its contents, and said nothing. Those who were present told me afterward that this was the most calm and unemotional thing they had ever seen Jabba do.

What none of us knew, as we watched Jabba carry the trophy to his Escalade and drive away into the Southern California dusk, was that we were seeing him for the last time. Within seventy-two hours, “Jabba the Tutt” had sold his membership at La Cucaracha, liquidated his restaurant holdings at a loss, withdrawn his retirement and brokerage accounts — every cent, in a single enormous transaction that reportedly caused a young clerk at East Valley Bank to telephone Pengerson at home to ask if this was, in fact, permitted — and absconded to Samoa.

Samoa, for those unfamiliar with the finer points of international law, has no extradition treaty with the United States.

He also took the trophy, though this was not intentional. The trophy had been hanging in his restaurant, and when Jabba instructed his staff to pack everything and ship it to will-call in Samoa, they did exactly that — everything, including the Golden Balls, which nobody had thought to exempt. Buster Cauldwell, upon learning of this outrage, retired to his ranch with another bottle of Maker’s Mark and his acetylene torch and constructed a replacement. The new trophy is, by general consensus, even more offensive than the original. Buster had retrieved Machiette’s putter from the eucalyptus tree using his extendable avocado picker, and had substituted its mallet head for the original blade, a modification that the tournament participants agreed made the trophy more disturbing in ways they preferred not to articulate.

I am told that Jabba is happy in Samoa. He has opened a restaurant and his knees remain functional. The original Golden Balls trophy, I understand, hangs above the bar, where it is the subject of much curiosity among the locals and of the occasional, carefully edited explanation from its owner. The rules require twelve months of prominent display, and Jabba, whatever his other failings, has always obeyed club rules.

The young man was quiet for a moment.

“Did Jabba ever come back?”

“No,” said The Oldest Member. “But he sends a Christmas card every year, featuring a photograph of his restaurant. He called it Casa del Rey.”

The young man smiled. “King Tutt.”

The Oldest Member raised his glass. “He always did think highly of himself.”