A Country Mile To Par

CHAPTER 1

Before the speckles of memory, before the heartbreak, he was no more than a kid I knew.

            He filled out a space in my classroom, shrouded by inconspicuousness, and along with the rest of his classmates, he took in my lessons without fanfare or note. He left when the bell rang; I left when he did, the both of us leaving shared time as a courteous but insignificant memory not worth the keeping.

            But without warning or intent, in less than four months, he would move me to journeys – one of recollection and resurrection, and one life-altering walk towards the final hole of the United States Amateur Golf Championship.

            Yet mine is a life whose moments are lived from a distance, hidden obscurely in the shadows of solitude, and such is a moment that began my walk with Dexter McCandless. It happened, as have all the defining events in the last twenty years of my living, unintentionally, in the seed of a second it took a golf ball to take its remarkable flight after the most precious and perfect swing of a golf club I have ever taken.

            There’s no way for me to say it better: I pured that shot as if I swung perfection itself, unencumbered by any blemish to my desire or intent. An early May Saturday in Southern Indiana, late in the afternoon near the end of the school year, found me alone on the nearly empty public course as the sun crept almost down far enough to end my round in darkness. I can’t say there was anything particularly noteworthy about the eighteen holes of atrocity I was playing; it was late spring, long before I would settle into a regular schedule of playing and practicing in the summer, and so by the time I came to seventeen, I had seen far too many acres of the course and chalked up a score of well over 100 before I even stepped up to the tee.

The seventeenth at Helfrich Hills Golf Course isn’t really a monster hole. The tee crests a hill descending into deep valley, leveling out some fifty feet or so beneath the tee box before rising back up to a hilltop green some 360 yards away from the tee. It’s one of those holes that always seems to play tougher than it looks, which, for a golfer like me, probably describes most holes I play. Still, a lot of credible players leave the seventeenth wondering how they just racked up the double bogey the seventeenth put on their scorecard, or how the hole went so wrong after a tee shot in the dead center of the lush fairway in the middle of the valley. That’s golf, I suppose, but it’s really golf on the seventeenth.

I hit the driver off the tee reasonably well, but I lunged at it just enough to put a slice on it, pushing the ball into the left rough in the valley. I had about 135 yards left, going almost straight uphill to a flag nearly hidden deep in the back of the green.

            That’s when it happened.

            I took out an eight iron, and after an impatient and apathetic practice swing, I set up and let it fly. It was late in the day, and with a round like the one I was suffering, it just didn’t seem to be worth the effort to pick out a target, concentrate, and do the things you know you’re supposed to do to play well. I just looked up at the top of the hill, quickly found the motionless yellow flag and swung the club virtually mindlessly. The ball just exploded, almost as if I had rocketed it into an endless blue sky and the waiting hands of God Himself.

“Well, damn,” I said out loud to myself in shock. The ball started just left of the pin, and then, uncharacteristically for me and my left-handed swing, drew a little to the right, bounced once on the green and disappeared from my sight. By the time I put the eight iron back in my bag, I thought the ball might be resting within ten feet or so of the hole, and I contented myself with the thought of two putting for a par, a rare triumph in any rounds I played before the close of a school year.

            When I’d lumbered up the top of the hill to the green and started an excited search for the ball, it was gone. It just wasn’t there. In a moment like this, a golfer like me feels pretty damn pretentious going right up to the hole to check it. It’s a little like going into the high school dance and immediately asking the best looking girl for her phone number. Makes you look arrogant. But always, the better part of hope outdoes the better part of reason, so after a short look around the back of the green, I walked over to the hole.

            Sure as hell. My Calloway ball was resting in the bottom of the cup, completing its mystical 135 yard journey after a mindless eight iron and a blast of fate.

Eagle.