PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — I’m out here for the Walker Cup, at Cypress Point, a good course and a beautiful one, but let’s not go crazy here. There are other good and beautiful courses in the vicinity. Pebble Beach. The two courses at the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. The back nine — the oceanfront nine — at the Pacific Grove muni. PG has the scruffiness that I think of as a core value of golf-course maintenance. There are folks at Augusta National who would disagree. I have a course-superintendent friend who understands the importance of scruffiness but also the importance of keeping your job: “Try selling brown to the membership,” he says. In the United States? You can’t sell brown. Our golf year begins with Augusta, wall-to-wall carpeted in green. Everybody has a color TV these days.
I showed up in the Pacific Grove pro shop at 6 p.m. and was on the 10th tee, with a rental set in a comically stiff cart bag on my shoulder, about 10 minutes later. Sunset was 7:30ish. The fella behind the counter asked me if I would need golf balls. I did. I bought a sleeve of Srixons, the cheapest ball he had. I played the nine holes in 90 minutes and did not lose a ball. Nobody was behind me. Instead of waiting on tees, I chipped and pitched and putted until the coast was clear.
Ninety minutes of golfing nirvana. No idle chatter. Some blind shots. Bouncy fairways. Brackish air. No headcovers. (Left them in the shop.) In this setting, your life gets all commingled: your childhood, your college years, finding your way in the world afterward, marriage and child-rearing and golf when you can; whatever you call this next stage. I’m 65. My friend Sam Reeves, a youthful 91-year-old, likes to say if you don’t know if you’re middle-aged or old, you’re old. He also says golf is connectional.
My mind drifted, while on the Pacific Grove back nine: I’m at Bellport on Long Island, where I took up the game; many great games and times at National Golf Links, farther east in Suffolk County; golf at Elie and the Old Course and Machrihanish and other courses in Scotland; the embarrassment of riches that is golf in greater Philadelphia, where Christine and I raised our kids, all through my 30s, 40, 50s and 60s. The personality traits and golf swings of hundreds of golfers have been deposited in my head over the years. Right now, I’m thinking of a man named Tommy Blue, my age exactly, 65. He’s a retired roofer in Machrihanish, in Scotland, and once worked on Paul McCartney’s roof and once played the bass drum on a McCartney recording. Had one memorable game with him. We zipped around. We both had the metabolism for fast golf.
A friend, Sharon Harrington, died last month. She was 65. I’ve logged a lot of rounds with her husband, Stevey Hags, a former Yale hockey player and a Hoganophile. Sharon raised two remarkable daughters and a son, totally engaged by her family life. She was also a golfer, a bridge player, a gardener, sharp as a tack and fit as could be. She went into a hospital for a kidney stone, complications developed, and she died on Aug. 22. Who would have guessed that she would not see Aug. 23? Not her husband, not their three children, not anybody. Hundreds of people came to her backyard memorial service. Sharon connected all of us and golf connected many of us. Golf is connectional.
