The Downhill Lie Read online

  Nonetheless, it’s a mystery why anyone would want a house with a fairway running past the backyard. If you can afford prime golf-course frontage, you can afford to live on a lake, a river or a mountainside—settings with tranquil, natural vistas, where squadrons of riding mowers don’t show up at dawn.

  A woman who married an heir to a newspaper fortune once went out of her way to tell me that she and her hubby divided their leisure time among five homes, all located on championship golf courses. I restrained myself from suggesting that she needed a brain scan.

  Evidently, some folks’ idea of easy living is to slurp martinis on their porch deck while brightly garbed strangers in cleats stomp through the shrubbery in search of lost balls.

  Years ago I wrote a newspaper story about a retiree who, though not a golfer, had purchased a small condominium at a club in Pompano Beach. The fellow soon got fed up with duffers breaking his windows or topping tee shots into his flower beds, so he launched a one-man insurgency. Every time a golf ball landed in his yard, he’d scuttle out the back door and snatch it.

  One morning he was intercepted by an uncommonly fleet-footed player, and there ensued an ugly confrontation involving swordplay with a driver. Lawsuits were filed, and shortly thereafter the ball stealer was informed that the condo association had initiated eviction proceedings. The man defiantly presented himself as a crusader for the civil rights of non-golfers and, when I interviewed him, proudly displayed his stash of purloined golf balls, which filled a hallway closet. I don’t recall how the case was settled, but I’ve always wondered what led the old guy to imagine that he could live on a golf course and not have to contend with golfers.

  As the commercials on the Golf Channel make evident, beer drinking and prostate problems are core components of the male golfing experience. Recently, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a family with a fairway view from their windows installed video cameras because so many golfers were stopping to urinate on their property. More than forty offenders were recorded hosing down the trees and flowers, and in some cases ignoring posted signs that implored them to hold their bladders. Because the club was public, the pissers were not expelled or even admonished by name. However, after the videotapes aired on television, the Oak Ridge city manager hastily announced a campaign to install extra portable toilets on the course.

  That no homesites were being hawked at the Quail Valley Golf Club was a major lure. It meant there were no human neighbors to offend when nature called and, more importantly, no chance that I’d ever have to hit a 6-iron from the patio of a surly stranger.

  Better yet, actual wild quails nested on the land at Quail Valley! Such truth-in-advertising is rare—and highly discouraged—in the Florida real-estate racket. The tradition among developers here is to name their projects after wild creatures that they’ve exterminated or chased away, typically fox, bear, falcon, hawk, otter or panther. Not far from where I grew up was a course called Eagle Trace, upon which no trace of an eagle could be found. This was entirely expected.

  The few hardy critters that have adapted to human encroachment are considered too prosaic to be exploited for sales-marketing purposes. The last time I checked, there were no luxury golf developments called Possum Ditch or Rat’s Landing.

  Before applying to Quail Valley, the only sporting clubs I’d ever joined were notable for their genial lack of exclusivity; if your check cleared, you were welcomed with open arms. Quail was different. Not only was the check much larger, references were required.

  My wife wasn’t worried, but I figured we had no chance if anyone on the membership committee was familiar with my writing. With their acid humor and derailed characters, the novels could hardly be described as mainstream establishment literature. Worse, for twenty years I’d been writing a newspaper column that at one time or another had infuriated just about every big shot in the state, regardless of race, creed or political alignment.

  Lately I’d been raging, as had many columnists, about the bloody fiasco in Iraq. Polls showed that most Americans had come around to the same point of view—that the war was a colossal fuck-up—but little Indian River County still stood largely behind the president. Almost everywhere else in the nation, disgruntled Republicans armed with razor blades were slinking out in the dead of night to scrape off their Bush-Cheney bumper stickers.

  Not in Vero Beach; not yet, anyway.

  As we waited for our membership interview, I feared a prickly cross-examination….

  Didn’t you once write that the vice president’s pacemaker should be attached to a polygraph machine? And did you not also malign our commander in chief for “grinning like a Muppet” during a press conference about Iraq, and for conducting the war in a “delusional fog”?

  But the meeting at Quail Valley turned out to be laid-back and totally painless. There was no steely-eyed screening committee; only affable Kevin Given, the chief operating officer, and he was gracious enough not to mention the columns or the books. It was more of a social chat than an interrogation—how long have you lived in the Indian River area? What do you think of the schools? Do any of your kids play golf or tennis?

  Wisely I let my wife do most of the talking, leading Kevin to conclude that her charms vastly outweighed any of my as-yet-unrevealed personality disorders.

  A few weeks later, the acceptance letter arrived; we were officially country clubbers. Now I had to go out and play that nut-cruncher of a golf course.

  Day 117

  My first lesson with Steve Archer, the director of golf at Quail Valley. He’s mild and good-natured, as patient as a bomb defuser. Afterwards he fills out a note card for me to keep in my bag:

  “Posture—less knee flex…Spine should tilt 90 degrees to golf club.

  “Wider stance. Inside heels, shoulder-width apart…

  “Arms + body work at same pace—time out right hand, club head and right side.”

  That’s a lot to think about before hitting a golf ball, but I’ve got thirty years of rust to shake off. My goal is to play two or three times a week until I break 88, or rip a tendon trying.

  Day 119

  Freakishly, I manage to birdie that savage par-5 at Sandridge upon which I took a 9 two weeks ago. However, I quickly piss away the found strokes (and more), finishing the nine at 13 dismal strokes over par.

  When I was young, I would have stalked off the course boiling mad after blowing so many opportunities. Today I merely trudge, which I choose to view as a sign of maturity, not fatigue.

  Day 120

  My first round at Quail Valley—and also my first time playing with a caddy, which has me nervous. I’m prepared to overtip shamelessly if I offend him with my cussing, or my game.

  His name is Delroy Smith and he’s from Kingston, Jamaica, where he played cricket and soccer. He is a calming presence and, more importantly, a diplomat. Having looped on some of the toughest courses in the Northeast, Delroy is familiar with American profanity in all its gerundives, and nothing I say draws a flinch.

  For the first fifteen holes I avoid embarrassing myself. Then, on the 16th—a long par-3—I banana-slice a 4-iron into a water hazard on the adjoining hole. Next shot overflies the green into a different lake, and so begins the skid. I finish with a 97.

  On an upbeat note, the new irons felt good. I also sank a fair number of putts in the four-to-six-foot range.

  Delroy thinks I should be teeing off from the blue tees, not the shorter whites. When I mention this to Leibo, he suggests that Delroy might be having some giggles at my expense.

  Day 126

  I shoot 51 on the front side, which is the same score that Jack Nicklaus shot on the first nine holes he ever played. He was, however, only ten years old at the time.

  Day 152

  Big decision: Following Delroy’s advice, I’m now hitting from the blues. The additional 365 yards translates into an extra two or three lost balls per round.

  Today’s outing is exceptionally nightmarish. To torment myself I keep a splash count: On the fr
ont nine: five drives in the water. That’s a .555 slugging average.

  At No. 10, my tee shot skips into a trap, then bounces into the lake. On the very same hole, I scorch a pitching wedge over the green and into a creek full of mutant, moss-eating carp. Prudently, I quit keeping score.

  Tomorrow I have another lesson. I’m bringing a straight razor.

  Turtle Golf

  According to the posted handicap ratings, the hardest hole at Quail Valley is No. 4, a seemingly straightaway par-4 that measures a modest 387 yards downhill from the blue tees.

  A deceivingly bucolic-looking creek borders the right side of the fairway. The waterway is populated by hefty turtles, mostly yellowbelly sliders, that enjoy crawling up on the bank to sun themselves; during the winter months, it’s not uncommon to count six or seven of them basking together. From a distance they look like a garden of mossy old Army helmets.

  Because I customarily slice my drive into their creek, the turtles and I keep an uneasy relationship. Despite having poor eyesight, they seem to sense whenever I step to the tee box, and they move into defensive positions as quickly as turtles are able to move.

  Their reaction likely stems from an incident one bright and breezy afternoon when I skied a shot directly into a pod of the snoozing sliders. As soon as I made contact, I knew where the ball was heading. Having owned turtles as pets, I realized it was pointless to yell “Fore!” or any other warning. They simply don’t listen to humans.

  So I stood there squinting into the glare, trying to track my doomed drive as it rainbowed toward the shoreline where the sliders slept. When the ball landed, it made a loud tonk! and bounced as if striking macadam; simultaneously a lone turtle went airborne, a sight not often observed in nature.

  Fortunately, the reptile’s armored shell did its job; the poor fellow was dazed but unhurt. He righted himself and briskly followed his companions as they trundled en masse off the bank, into the creek. The splashes looked from a distance like small explosives.

  Not a single turtle could be seen when I arrived to search for my ball; all of them had remained submerged, holding their breath. Who knows how long they stayed down.

  The sliders share the waters of the golf course with hundreds of tilapia, perch and exotic carp, which were imported to gobble the hydrilla and keep the shorelines tidy. Some of the fish have grown quite large, up to 15 pounds, and breed with exuberance.

  During spawning season, the carp and tilapia use their fins to fan small craters in the sandy shallows where they deposit their eggs. Fiercely protective, they react aggressively when an errant golf ball lands in their nesting beds, as too many of mine have done. I’m not sure exactly how the fish remove the balls—perhaps they nose them off the ledges into the depths, or slap them away with their tails—but remove them they do. On several occasions I’ve had a shot trickle into a liquid hazard, yet when I reached the spot there was only a lone carp to behold, defiantly hovering on her nest.

  Having found water on sixteen of the eighteen holes at Quail Valley, I’ve devoted considerable thought to both the price and quality of the golf balls that I use.

  Choosing a brand wasn’t easy. Except for their general roundness, the balls on the market today are radically different from the balata ones I played as a kid. The newer models soar higher and roll longer—which in my case ensures that a really bad drive goes deeper than ever into the woods (or farther than ever from shore), and is therefore less likely to be recovered. Hitting the ball longer gets expensive when you haven’t learned how to hit it straight.

  No less a slugger than Jack Nicklaus advocates reducing the distance of new golf balls by at least 10 percent. He believes that the extended yardage has altered traditional strategies of the sport, and diminished the specialized skill requirements for both amateurs and professionals.

  The first time I smacked a drive 275 yards was a tonic for my fifty-three-year-old ego, since I’d never hit one more than 225 when I was a teenager. It’s a cheap thrill that dissipates the moment you see a lumpy, hungover, chain-smoking geezer waddle to the tee and—between coughs—clobber one 300-plus.

  More than a billion golf balls are manufactured annually, and most end up lost. Each type is engineered for certain performance qualities, though the specifications are impressive only if you believe they make a difference. You can choose low-compression balls or high-compression balls; dual-core balls or single-core balls; balls that are meant to bite on a dime, or balls that are meant to run like a scalded gerbil.

  One brand comes with a seamless cover and a “speed elasticity core.” Another has hexagonal dimples, supposedly to reduce air drag. The type that Tiger Woods hits is made of four pieces and wrapped with three covers, the innermost of which minimizes the spin when smashed with a driver.

  One ball company actually boasts of having the “thinnest urethane-elastomer cover”—a desirable feature for a condom, perhaps, but of dubious benefit in a plugged lie in a greenside bunker.

  I’d always thought that a good golfer could play well with any unscuffed ball, no matter what logo was on the box. Likewise, a lousy golfer would never find salvation simply by switching brands; the physics of a slice were inconquerable, whether the victim was a Noodle or a Nike.

  So when I launched my comeback, I stocked up on mid-priced balls from companies I remembered from the olden days. Later, several excellent players, including a couple of pros, told me that selecting the right ball really is important, even for a high handicapper. They said that the stuff you read in golf-ball advertisements isn’t just techno-crap meant to impress naive duffers; it’s valuable, stroke-saving data. No two brands are alike, they said.

  It was a fantastic excuse for me to start purchasing the most expensive golf balls on the market, Titleist Pro V1s, which are endorsed by many top touring pros. They get their balls for free, of course, while the rest of us pay about $48 per dozen, including tax.

  Here’s what I knew about the 2006 edition Pro V1, based on the helpful product information supplied by the manufacturer. It had:

  A large, high-velocity 1.530-inch core.

  A redesigned Ionomer casing.

  Soft compression “for outstanding feel.”

  “Drop-and-stop” greenside control (the term “drop-and-stop” being proudly trademarked).

  “Penetrating trajectory”—always a selling point for men of my age.

  Last but not least, it had 392 dimples arranged in an “icosahedral design.”

  Although empirical evidence abounds that the number of dimples on a golf ball is meaningless, manufacturers proudly advertise it anyway. One might assume that they’re charging customers more per dimple, just as computer companies charge for extra megabytes, but that’s not true. For $20 a dozen, a golfer may choose from balls featuring 300 dimples, 333 dimples or 432 dimples, respectively. They all promise greater length, better spin control and a softer feel around the greens.

  “To produce optimum lift and increased carry for added distance,” an outfit named Dimplit sells a ball stamped with 1,070 dimples. That’s almost three times as many as a Titleist has, but be assured that the Dimplit doesn’t travel three times as far.

  Another heavily promoted factor in the aerodynamics of a ball’s flight is how its dimples are configured. I’d never encountered the term “icosahedral” until I saw it in the Titleist promotional material. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, it means “of or having the form of an icosahedron.”

  An icosahedron is “a polyhedron having twenty faces,” and there’s the hitch: A golf ball that’s truly spherical cannot be truly icosahedral, because plane faces are flat.

  Among the shapes that may be icosahedral are pyramids, decagonal dipyramids, elongated triangular gyrobicupolas, metabiaugmented dodecahedrons, nonagonal antiprisms…but not spheres. Spheres, like balls, are always round.

  For the sake of argument, let’s say that my golf ball is merely roundish, and that the face of each dimple is a tiny plane. For 392 of th
em to be set in an “icosahedral design” would be a difficult feat, because 392 isn’t evenly divisible by the number twenty, and (as we now know) every icosahedron has twenty faces.

  The makers of Titleists probably have a slick defense for their esoteric geometric claims, but it doesn’t matter. Most amateur players don’t give a hoot how the dimples are designed. If a ball flies straight and rolls true, who cares if it’s got one enormous dimple or ten thousand microscopic ones? I’ll keep buying the damn thing because, like all golfers, I desperately need to believe.

  The 392-dimple ball that I adopted during relapse seemed like a good one, and I’m not getting paid a dime to say that. The folks at Titleist aren’t stupid—an endorsement by a hack with my scurrilous credentials wouldn’t boost sales even slightly. It might, in fact, produce the opposite effect.

  In any event, there’s nothing as sickening in golf as the splash of a $4 ball in a ten-foot-deep lake. That’s why I reverted to my high-school custom of deploying “water balls” on high-risk tee shots.

  A water ball is any ball that you don’t mind losing—preferably one for which you did not pay. Some golfers swipe balls from the practice range for use on water holes, but that’s tacky. Besides, range balls take such a daily drubbing that they often lose their juice, and can be undependable on long carries.

  The ideal water ball is an inexpensive yet unmarred specimen that you stumble upon while searching the rough for one of your own. These little gems go into a special zippered pocket of my golf bag, along with some lower-priced balls that I purchase at a discount sports store.

  The theory behind using water balls is to provide the shaky player with a perverse sort of immunity. It’s a known golfing fact that the odds of dunking a ball decline in direct proportion to its retail value.

  This makes perfect sense, given the warped and jangled psyche of the average golfer. I tend to take a smoother, more relaxed swing at a found ball because, what the hell, it’s a freebie. More often than not, I’ll clear the hazard with yardage to spare.