By the way, was Kennedy crazy, or brave, or trapped when he challenged the Russkies on the Cuban missile thing? That week, they made us go to chapel six or seven times, and then they put the firing pins into our drill rifles. We were schoolboys, but the way they saw it, we would put on our combat fatigues, slither down the hillsides to the river and do battle with the Red Army, all 300 of us. But what of Frankie Accardo (and probably some others), who wasn't thinking about mushroom clouds or fighting the Russians? Accardo had a firing pin in his rifle now, and his only purpose in life was to shoot Brother Boyle, who had mocked him mercilessly in Latin class. This was 1962.
It's only natural that these questions, each with its own weight, crowd together. In the nagging search for hidden meanings, the mind connects one thing and another in strange ways. Why didn't you spend your life with A.? Were the braciole and the veal scallopini on your grandparents' fragrant Sunday table as transcendent as they seem now, or is that a trick of memory? And when you flew off Route 28 that time in a dizzy swirl of pavement and moonlight and Johnny Walker Red, why did the little convertible flip miraculously back onto its wheels? So that K., her heart like a flower, could become a painter of renown?
And tell me now, what does it mean to score a hole in one at age fourteen and never experience such bolt-from-the-blue perfection again? In anything?
As any golfer or ex-golfer can tell you, this is no small question, no inconsiderable mystery. The old Scottish game has tormented its adherents, and given them momentary pleasure, for centuries. It's a cruel and beautiful game, a thing of such richly tangled emotions that it can become inseparable from life's big issues--even among those who refuse now to play it.
I am one of those, a fallen-away golfer. I have reasons.
From the time I was six years old and began taking lessons from a famous pro in south Florida until the age of eighteen, I played golf like a kid possessed--nine frenzied holes wedged between caddie assignments, eighteen after school, thousands of chip shots on the big front lawn, hundreds of cracked and smiling balls struck joyously into the woods. There were tournaments at age ten, another battery of lessons at twelve, and my first full-sized, pro-shop-measured, grown-up set of clubs--Kroydons, ten irons, four persimmon woods--at thirteen.
This was a major event in life, a rite of passage no less momentous than confirmation by the local bishop or kissing Barbara Smith in the popcorn-strewn last row of the Galli-Curci Theater during the second reel of, if I'm not mistaken, South Pacific. By thirteen I played as well as my patient father, better than my brother and most of my friends. I had also copped one of the most obnoxious attitudes in the history of adolescence. Demanding of myself and fellow players, cocky and petulant, I was a smug little jerk when I was shooting par and sheer brooding hell when things weren't going so well. If my dad had confiscated my clubs and thrown them in the river, no one would have blamed him--least of all the people whose golfing afternoons I regularly ruined.
But aside from giving me The Gaze every now and then...a withering gaze refined by the Italians over many centuries...or gently rocking one palm in the other in an expression of suppressed menace that only now do I fully grasp...aside from that, my father indulged my fits and tantrums with stoic resolve. He understood how hard the game was, and he understood the stupidities of boys born to relative privilege in America.
This was the kid--good Christ, it was me--who on a dewy morning in July 1959 stood in the tee box of the par-three fourth hole at our local course in upstate New York and grabbed a five iron out of his bag. He set a Spalding Dot down on the grass and promptly struck the thing on a perfect arc over the blue pond, between the bunkers, onto the green and into the cup, 162 yards away, on one gentle hop.
