Unplayable Lie

Acknowledgments

The Middle

Prologue

Murder is, by definition,

a life-changing event. But what the fuck? I didn’t get murdered and I didn’t murder anyone. All I did was see a frigging United States senator, who was the leading candidate to win the next presidential election, kill some other politico type on a golf course and my life got trashed. That just doesn’t seem fair to me. It’s kind of bullshit, in fact. I mean, I know the dead guy didn’t deserve to be murdered—nobody does. But jeez—all I was doing was playing golf.

One day, a little over twenty years ago, I was playing my Monday practice round at Congressional Country Club. It was a practice round for the U.S. Open and it was my first year on the tour. I had the world by the cajones. I had it all. I mean, all.

Moments before the one dickhead shot the other dickhead, I would never have dreamed that I had just played the last thirteen holes as a PGA Tour professional that I would ever play. I would never have dreamed that there, on the pastoral grounds of one of the most famous golf courses in the world, my life as I knew it would collapse faster than it took Doug Sanders to three-jack the eighteenth hole at the 1970 British Open and lose by one stroke.

One’s life can end or change in a single, innocuous moment, without warning. One or two seconds out of billions of seconds. The terrifying part is knowing that there will always be more life-changing moments ahead, right up until the last second of life. Now that’s something to look forward to.

One of the many girlfriends that have passed through my strange life told me that I have too many demons. She said that I wasn’t smart enough to try to ponder the secrets of life and death, and she was probably right. I’m certainly not a deep thinker or anything—but when life gets to be as weird as mine, it does make you think. How can you help it? How many people witness a frigging murder while they are playing golf?

If I had been playing slower things might have turned out differently. But the sky was threatening and I wanted to finish the round. My caddie and best friend, Daniel Dude Demeter, had told me to slow down just a few minutes before, on the eleventh hole. He claimed that if I played too fast, I wouldn’t retain anything about the course.

Actually, his exact words were, You ain’t gonna remember shit about this track if you keep playing like you gots to get in and collect on a bet. Dude was a college graduate, but he liked to get all ghetto-like when he talked trash.

I didn’t care—I always loved playing fast, especially when I was playing well and that day I was in one of those zones where I could do nothing wrong. I was six under par, striking the ball as purely as I was capable. So I used the weather as an excuse to shrug off Dude’s usual good advice and having been the stubborn asshole that I was, I actually picked up my pace. I birdied the par-three twelfth hole with a twenty-footer. Dude and I didn’t even talk afterward. We just moved on.

The thirteenth hole on the Blue Course at Congressional was a seriously tough 461-yard par four. The fairway fell off steeply to the right of the landing area. There was deep rough and out-of-bounds left. I pulled out my TaylorMade metal wood and hit my drive exactly how I visualized it—a high fade that landed soft in perfect position on the fairway. I took off after my ball at a virtual run. I was, in the jargon of the day, totally stoked. I couldn’t wait for the tournament to start on Thursday. I just had a feeling. Yeah, right, some feeling.

I didn’t even wait for Dude to check the yardage when we got to my ball. I could see the shot. I could feel the distance. It looked to be two hundred yards to an elevated green, which was protected by four bunkers. The ball was slightly below my feet and I would need a little extra club. I pulled my three-iron and slowed down enough to go through my usual-but-simple pre-shot routine: I step back and visualize the shot, seeing the trajectory. I watch what the ball does when it lands. Then I step up to the ball, taking a kind of half-practice swing, check my aim, and let it rip.

I landed the ball within three feet of where I was aiming. The ball released and took the slope toward the pin, stiff as a wedding dick. Another easy birdie. I smiled at Dude and said nothing, because nothing needed to be said. Then the sky seemed to turn just a notch darker. Ominous. Looking back on it now, it sure as shit was ominous.

I headed for the fourteenth tee box. This time, I hit a sweet little draw, letting my hands release a little faster. I didn’t really need to draw the ball on this hole, as the landing area was generous. I just did it because I could—and when I’m in that zone, I love to make it work for me. I relish the feeling of complete control over that shitty little white ball that almost never does exactly what it is told.

Again, I took off at a fast pace. Dude chugged along behind me with the bag over his right shoulder. I could hear my irons clanging against each other and the squeak of his tennis shoes on the grass. His breathing was labored as he struggled to keep up with me. The sky was now almost black and it made the trees and fairways look greener. Everything was intense. Selfishly intense, if you know what I mean. It was my game, my sky, and my colors. It was all about me.

I knew some professional golfers who would not want to shoot a career round in a practice round just before a big tournament. We all know how tough it is to shoot two great rounds in a row, and we are almost all very superstitious. You know, some guys won’t use a ball with a number on it that’s higher than three. Others have to mark their ball with the same coin every time.

But I didn’t care. I loved golf because it was always me against me. I know it might sound silly and you may not believe me, but the fact that I played well enough to win trophies and money was all just a bonus for me. I loved the personal challenge of the game. It was only me, not me against the course. I knew that I could birdie every hole, at any given time, and on any well-designed golf course. I knew that I could eagle two or more par fives on most PGA tournament golf courses. The course was just there to keep me honest—to penalize me for not putting the ball exactly where I knew I had to put it. The course was simply a road map to tell me where my next shot had to land. If the ball didn’t land there and instead went into a hazard or the rough, that was not the course getting the better of me. That was me failing to perform.

Nor was the weather an excuse for me. The weather would either keep me from playing that day or not. Once I was playing, it was my job to hit the correct shots for the wind, the rain, or the muddy lie. It was always only about me and what I could do. There is no other sport in the world that comes close to golf for being the perfect game of self against self. Maybe it’s because there simply is no perfect game in golf. If I could birdie every hole, why wouldn’t I be able to throw in some eagles, too? And how many would it take to make a perfect round in golf?

I felt an almost-perfect round in me that day. I wanted to go as low as I could, not caring that it might jinx me for the tournament. I wanted everything I could get out of that round.

If only I had slowed down, especially once I saw the players ahead. They didn’t seem to be moving and I assumed they would let me play through. I charged ahead and was on top of the world. I could do no wrong.

If only.

I never finished that hole—and I, Edward Bennett, never played another round of golf as a tour professional.

I’ll start at the beginning . . .

The Beginning

Chapter 1

My first impressions of

golf were not good. My father played on his two days off per week, much to the chagrin of my mother. Dad was a supermarket assistant manager. He never became the store manager, but it certainly wasn’t due to lack of seniority—he had worked at Market World for twenty-seven years, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, eight to twelve hours per day until he dropped dead on his way to his car after shooting a ninety-three and having three beers. My mother was always talking about how the company was trying to kill him. How they didn’t appreciate him. How he needed to assert himself more.

Twenty-seven fucking years and he never even became a store manager. Mom was right.

But all poor Dad ever did was get out of the house as soon as he could on Saturday and Sunday mornings and hit the municipal course for thirty-six holes and some brewskis with his cronies. It wasn’t much of a life.

Sometimes I would get so mad at him. We would have plans to go out to dinner, maybe that restaurant in Hollywood where the train went around and brought you your food. I loved that place and would really look forward to going out on those nights.

But Dad didn’t come.

Mom would start swearing under her breath, pouring herself a highball. Soon the swearing was out loud. I had a hell of a vocabulary by the time I was ten.

Sometimes Mom would pull me to the car and we would go to the golf course, looking for Dad. Even at seven years old, I knew that Dad would be humiliated by his wife coming for him at the course. Most of the time, I figured he deserved it. But I hated it when she would send me off to find him. I learned to first look at the eighteenth green to see if he was just finishing his round. Then I would look down the eighteenth fairway. It would be late, so the shadows of the large oaks would be long, and the grass would be dark, not inviting like grass usually is. I could always tell Dad from the way he walked—a little crooked, cocked to the left, carrying his bag.

Finally, and most embarrassing for all of us, I would look in the bar. If that was where he was, I wouldn’t need to say anything. He would see me, look away quickly, then acknowledge me with a little nod. He would come, but dinner would then be a silent and painful affair that even the stupid little train carrying wing dings could not overcome.

When I turned ten, Dad began to take me to the course with him. I think he thought that Mom would be less pissed off if she didn’t have to be saddled with me all day. I was pretty big for my age and I was able to carry his bag with no problem. I began to caddie for Dad. I felt pretty cool carrying the bag, but what I really wanted were some golf shoes. I loved the clickety-clack of the spikes on the pavement, kind of muffled and rough in the parking lot, then clean and crisp on the cement by the clubhouse. Real shoes, nicer than anything Dad wore to work, but with spikes and a cool flap over the shoelaces.

Dad, I would say at least once a round, it’s kind of slippery out here. I really think I could do a better job for you with some golf shoes.

We’ll see, was all he would say.

As a caddie, I learned about the game of golf. Dad was a high handicapper. Breaking ninety was always a cause for celebration. But Dad played by the rules. He was scrupulous about that.

Eddie, how a man plays the game of golf is a window into how that man will live his life. If he is willing to cheat himself and his pals on a golf course, he’ll cheat on just about anything in the rest of his life. Where another eighteen-handicapper might bump his ball out of the divot he was in, Dad would play the ball where it lay, usually skulling it or hitting it fat.

I would hear variations of those golf is like life comments a lot over the rest of my life, but most of the time, I would hear them from big-bellied, fat-assed, cigar-chomping CEO types who apparently thought that not counting all of one’s strokes wasn’t really cheating.

Caddying for my father changed my entire perception of him, which admittedly wasn’t as good as it should have been. I mean, I loved him and everything, but I learned to respect him—and eventually, I began to understand him. I wish Mom could have seen Dad on the golf course. I know she thought he was a wimp at work and felt that he let us down by not making something more of himself. But I saw a man who really did believe in himself. I saw a man who was comfortable with his limitations and persevered at one of the hardest games ever invented, despite his limited talent for the game. I saw a man who played by the rules and refused to bend them.

It’s funny how different we can truly be compared to what other people think of us, even loved ones. Dad was seen as a failure, by his own wife. How shitty was that?

I was still too young to truly understand what went on in the corporate world where Dad was competing for promotions. But I intuitively understood that his unbending devotion to rules and form was probably more of a hindrance than a help in the business world. Or maybe I didn’t intuitively understand anything of the sort, since I’m not exactly an intuitive kind of guy. In hindsight, I could be giving myself more credit than I deserve.

Golf made me love my dad more than I ever had before. Unfortunately, it did nothing to help the relationship between him and my mom. On nights after a golf game, I would go to bed after dinner, and like clockwork, they would start arguing. Or rather Mom was arguing. Dad never really raised his voice to my mother. Like the rest of the rules in his life, he did not think it was the way a husband should talk to his wife. So he allowed her to yell at him. Between her outbursts, I could hear his quiet voice trying to answer her with reason and rationality. But the world had cheated my mom by cheating my dad—and in her view, that was that.

I felt so alone lying there, hearing them argue. I wanted to run to them and shake them. I wanted to tell Dad that Mom has a point—that he had been cheated and their lives should have been better. I wanted to tell Mom that Dad was a wonderful and kind person who was respected by his friends. I wanted to tell both of them that they really loved each other and they should shut the fuck up and stop fighting.

But of course, I didn’t say any of those things. Hell, I was only ten. I would put the pillow over my ears and eventually fall asleep.

Chapter 2

My dad’s name was

James Bennett. His friends at the golf course called him Jimbie. His coworkers called him Jim. My mother called him James (among other things).

He died so long ago that it’s hard for me to describe now what he looked like without looking at a photograph. I remember that he was tall and dark-haired, with big, strong hands and arms, making his putter look like a toy when he held it. After choking on a three-foot putt, his friends would go after him with a vengeance that only men playing with other men could understand.

Nice putt, Alice.

Hey Jimbie, does your wife play golf, too?

Jimbie, does your boy here know you’re a homo?

Gee, Jimbie, how’d that stay out of the hole?

My dad would smile at the good-natured insults and make another lunge at the ball with his heavy hands. It was my first experience with the camaraderie of men and the peculiar sexist, racist, and homophobic themes inherent in American sports humor.

Even though I at first thought these insults were original and hilarious, I eventually learned that not only were they tired old jokes, but that they would be repeated over and over by the same foursomes for years. And each time, the recipient of the insult would smile or laugh like an eight-year-old hearing a fart joke and would hurl another old insult back. I loved every minute of it.

I began playing golf at eleven, just a few months before the new year and my twelfth birthday. Jack Nicklaus was to become the leading money winner on the PGA Tour that year, winning over $290,000. Tom Watson won the British Open, his first major victory. Lee Elder was the first black to play in the Masters. The Vietnam War was finally over, Nixon was gone, and Gerald Ford was either falling down or hitting spectators with his errant golf shots.

I had caddied for Dad for two years and so I knew the game pretty well by the time I actually decided to see if I could hit the ball. Even though I practically lived at the golf course on weekends for all that time, I never did anything more than putting on the practice green while waiting for Dad to have his beers.

One day, I asked Dad if I could hit some balls at the range while I waited for him. It was in the fall and the lights of the range were just coming on.

I was wondering when you would ask me, he said. Go mess around with my nine-iron and maybe next week, I’ll ask Arturo to check your grip and swing for you.

Arturo was Arturo Vasquez, the head pro at our municipal course in Encino, California. Arturo was also one of Dad’s friends and a regular playing partner. My dad was the only one I knew who called him Arturo. Everyone else called him Artie.

It was said that he was from Honduras and had actually won some tournaments in Europe. But while he was in Portugal for a tournament, he had supposedly gotten into a fight over a woman at a nightclub in Lisbon, breaking his left hand. He was never able to seriously compete on a pro tour again. Most of the private country clubs didn’t particularly want a Latino head pro, so he somehow ended up in a suburb of Los Angeles at a municipal course playing for two’s with high handicappers and giving lessons for fifteen bucks a pop.

It is a cruel and fickle fucking game.

I must have hit two hundred balls off that worn-out green mat the first night at the range. I topped and skulled and whiffed and shanked. But every once in a while, I would get one in the air and I knew I was hooked. By the two-hundredth ball, I was hitting clean shots more often than not. I modeled my swing on Arturo’s swing—even then, I knew better than to model it on my dad’s.

At some point, I felt like I was being watched. I turned around and saw Dad and Arturo standing behind me. Dad had a smile on his face and Arturo was inscrutable.

Looks pretty damn good, Eddie, said my dad. Whattaya think, Arturo?

Eddie, why don’t you come by tomorrow after school? Arturo asked. We can adjust a couple of things for you.

My heart leapt. I was going to get golf lessons! I turned to Dad with what must have been a pleading look on my face. Please say yes, oh please say yes, I thought desperately.

Dad gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

I broke into a huge grin. Oh yes, sir, Mr. Vasquez, I replied. I’ll have to do my homework first, but I can be here by five. Is that all right?

Arturo nodded. See you then, Eddie. He turned and headed back into the pro shop.

Dad took the nine-iron out of my hand and put his arm around my shoulder as we walked back to the car. Dad didn’t hug me a whole lot, so his arm around me felt good. I could sense that he was proud of me and I wanted that moment to go on, forever and ever. To this day, I can still hear the clickety-clack of his shoes on the pavement and feel his strong arm around my shoulder.

Like the stupid little shit that I was, I asked, Dad, now that I’m gonna be a golfer, do you think I can get some shoes with spikes?

He didn’t answer, but I could sense his smile.

Chapter 3

When I went to

bed that night, I could hear Mom and Dad going at it again, Mom in her loud and argumentative tone and Dad in a soft voice I couldn’t understand. Once in a while, I would hear my name and knew they were arguing about me. Was my mother worried about losing me to golf like she claimed to have lost Dad? Would she try to stop me from learning the game? I closed my eyes and thought of the balls flying off the face of the nine-iron. I saw only the good hits. I worried myself to sleep.

When I went to breakfast the next morning, Dad had his face buried in the Los Angeles Times. Mom had on her lavender terrycloth robe and was making me bacon and eggs. Now when I picture Mom and Dad together, it is often during mornings like these in the kitchen, with the maroon-and-white patterned rectangles in the linoleum floor, the off-white walls, the ugly olive-green appliances, the window overlooking our back yard with one big oak tree and, of course, the smell of bacon frying. All the fighting from the night before would be over and the three of us would be together as a family. Not necessarily talking, but just being comfortable together, knowing that despite everything, we loved each other very much. I kissed Mom on the cheek and sat down.

Hey, Mom, did Dad tell you Mr. Vasquez offered to give me some golf lessons? I wasn’t good at being subtle.

She turned from the stove and looked at me, almost sizing me up. She must have known that I could hear them arguing at night. I was beginning to squirm under her gaze when her face suddenly softened and a wisp of a smile appeared on her lips.

Just make sure you get all of your homework done before you go. And I don’t want you riding your bike home—there’s too much traffic at that time of night. Dad will come and get you when you’re done. And with that, she turned back to the stove.

I looked over at Dad, who had lowered the paper just enough to watch the action. He looked at me and winked.

Hot diggity dog, I thought.

~~~

School that day seemed interminable. Our little ranch-style house in the poorest part of Encino was a mile from my school and two miles from the golf course. I think I might have even forgotten to doodle the name of the girl I liked, Theresa Manning, in my notebook that day. I could think of nothing but golf. When I told my best bud, Dude Demeter, what I was going to do after school, he was jealous as hell. He made a strong argument to go with me and get lessons, too, but I told him that this was a private lesson from the head pro himself. I was kind of an asshole about it and Dude moped around, barely talking to me the rest of the day. I didn’t care. Nothing could have ruined that day for me.

I rushed home from school and didn’t even take time to have my usual Oreos and milk before starting my homework. I was fidgety and anxious and I had to read the same paragraph in my history book three times before I understood it enough to do the assignment. I must have asked my mom what time it was four times every fifteen minutes. She would smile and run her hand through my hair, telling me it was five minutes later than the last time I asked.

Finally I was done and I biked to the course, getting there about twenty minutes early. I could see Arturo on the range, giving a lesson to a fat guy in very pink pants. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had no clubs. I had no shoes. I didn’t even have a putter and ball to play with while I waited. So I decided to go into the pro shop and browse through the new clubs, shoes, and other neat golf stuff. Maybe even pick out what I would want to buy someday when I could.

Hey, Ed. How ya doin’? asked Billy G. from behind the counter (I never did learn his last name).

Billy was the only one who called me Ed. I think he believed that I would think he was cool by making me sound grown-up. But I had already noticed that around the golf course, grown-up names weren’t what was cool. My dad was Jimbie. His friend Paul was Paulie. Except to my dad, Arturo was Artie. Hell, the famous Arnold Palmer was Arnie. There was Bobby Jones and Jimmy Demaret and, of course, Johnny Miller.

Hey, Billy G. I pretended to be interested in the price of some new Ping clubs.

What you up to? Clearly Billy G. didn’t have anything to do.

I’m just waiting for Ar . . . for Mr. Vasquez. He’s going to give me a lesson.

Oh shit! I mean, oh yeah, I forgot about that. Sorry, Ed, I was supposed to give you these and tell you to help yourself to some balls and start warming up. Billy handed me two irons, a nine and a seven. Then he put two buckets of balls on the beat-up counter. Sorry, man.

No problem, Billy. I took the offered clubs and tried to pick up the buckets of balls like I knew what I was doing. But of course, I spilled about ten balls which Billy helped scoop up and then I banged the clubs against the glass entry doors of the shop on the way out. I made my way to an empty spot and poured the balls into the container next to the mat.

I didn’t exactly take over where I had left off the night before, but there weren’t quite as many tops, shanks, and whiffs before I was once again getting the ball in the air with some degree of regularity.

A voice interrupted my thoughts, causing me to shank the ball I had been about to hit. It was Arturo, who had silently come up behind me.

Rule one of practice, he said, is to slow down. Flailing at one ball after another isn’t going to teach you anything. You need to think about what you are doing and what you just did. Why did that ball go to the right? Why did you top it? Only by thinking about the swing and understanding what causes the ball to travel the way it does will you begin to truly learn and understand the golf swing.

I nodded as if I understood what the hell he was talking about. I mean, then, all I really understood was that you swing the club and you hit the ball, hopefully in the right direction.

And with that, we began what would be a long and fulfilling relationship for both of us. I don’t know what was ever said between Dad and Arturo, but he never charged my dad a dime for my lessons and allowed me to hit as many balls as I wanted. I later learned from Arturo that he had seen something in my swing that first night at the range and had decided then and there to see if there was more potential. The more he taught and observed me, the more he knew with absolute certainty that I was a natural. If I had the heart and mind to train and compete, he thought that I could become a great golfer.

Of course, he didn’t tell me any of this until much later. In those early months, we worked on things one step at a time. I began seeing him three or four afternoons a week. One week, we would talk about my grip and that would be all he’d allow me to think about. Another week, we would focus on my hand position at the top of the backswing.

One thing at a time, he would tell me, so that my head was not clogged up with swing thoughts and I could instill that one lesson in my muscle memory.

Some evenings, we would hit no more than ten or twenty balls. We would stand in his teaching cubicle and talk about why the ball went right, left, high, or low. He would take the club from my hands and gently push me out of the way, hitting a high, soft fade, exactly as he described it.

I was only eleven, just a kid. And sometimes I would act like a kid, pestering him with questions.

When can I go play?

When can I have my own set of clubs?

Wouldn’t I have better traction with golf shoes?

"If you can do anything you want with the golf ball, why aren’t you still on tour?

I asked that last question one July night, that first summer of my lessons. The night was warm and windless and the evening shadows were long. It seemed so quiet after I blurted out the question that I could hear nothing but the whack of other golfers’ balls and the cicadas buzzing loudly in the weeds on the other side of the driving range net.

Arturo looked at me for a long time. He wasn’t angry. It was a reasonable question, after all. Especially by an eleven-year-old.

I’ll make you a deal, Eddie. When you win your first tournament, I will sit down with you and if you are still interested, tell you the story of my life. Then you’ll understand who I am and why I am here. He smiled at me, I think to take the edge off the strain of the moment.

You got a deal, Mr. Vasquez. I paused. Does that mean I actually get to play the game someday?

With that, Arturo laughed. A true, deep, hearty laugh that made me laugh, too.

Chapter 4

My birthday was in

January and I was turning twelve. I remember praying that I would get a set of clubs for my birthday. Mom and Dad played it coy. Mom would ask me what I wanted, pretending that she didn’t hear me say I wanted my own set of clubs the last time she asked. I was using whatever clubs Arturo had lying around the shop, usually unclaimed ones that had been left on the course.

Maybe I should call Dude’s mom and have her ask him what you might like. That way, it would be more of a surprise.

"But Mom, I whined, I really, really need golf clubs."

Oh golf, golf, golf. That’s all I ever hear around this house. But there was good humor in her statement. A change had come over her in the last month or so. She had gradually become more supportive of my golf and volunteered to drive me to the course. She began to ask questions about how the lessons were going.

I think that Mom began to see a difference in me in those early months of my golf lessons. And why wouldn’t I be changed? Except at school, my life was spent with grown men who were treating me more and more like an equal. The on-course sarcasm and insults became more frequent as the golfers got used to my presence and I had developed an easy relationship with Arturo. Once in a while, I would even make a comment about one of the guys’ shots and the others would crack up. I was maturing in subtle ways. I didn’t think I was any different, but a mother sees all.

Slowly and quietly, I began helping out around the pro shop and driving range. I might ask Billy G. if he wanted me to sweep up for him and he was always too happy to oblige. I began picking up the ball baskets from the range and stacking them in the shop where Billy would load them to sell. Eventually, other patrons who had seen me doing errands began to assume that I worked for the club and would ask me to do something. I never corrected them. If I was capable of doing what they asked, I simply did it. It was a silent understanding that I had created with Arturo, an unspoken show of appreciation.

~~~

On my birthday, I had a lesson scheduled with Arturo. When I got home from school, Dad was already home. Although he had put in an eight-hour day, it was unusual for him to be home so soon. He worked ten- or twelve-hour days more often than not. He needed the overtime and the company was happy to pay assistant manager rates for an employee who knew more about the store’s operation than any manager the store had had for the past ten years.

Both Mom and Dad offered to drive me to the course. They said they were going to drop me off and go run some errands while I had my lesson. Then we would all go out to my birthday dinner.

How about that place with the train? Dad asked. We haven’t been there in a long time.

Aw, Dad, that place is for kids. Let’s go to Hamburger Hamlet on Sepulveda.

My parents smiled at each other. I know it probably sounds silly to most of you, but seeing my parents smile at each other was one of the nicest things I remember about them. It was too rare for that kind of moment to go unnoticed and I felt a deep stirring of happiness. We were still a family that loved each other.

Whatever you want, Eddie, said my dad.

We got to the course, but instead of