april-2012

nab a tiny pencil at Retreat.
On the fi rst hole, a par-fi ve
with a football fi eld fairway, I shot
a nine. On the second, a sandcovered
par-four, I shot an eight.
Things were starting poorly. But
on the next four holes I improved
with two pars, a bogey and a double
bogey. It felt good. My drives
weren’t straight, but they were getting
distance. I found a few trees,
but got lucky bounces back onto
the fairway. For the fi rst time, I
was grinning more than cursing.
Most importantly—Mark
introduced me to the mulligan.
If I badly topped a shot, he’d toss
me another ball and suggest I try
again. If that one was just as bad,
we’d choose the best of the two.
At one point I noticed the
threesome playing ahead of me.
They were all young guys dressed
like old guys—that’s just how
golfers dress—launching balls
from the pro tees. On the 11th
hole, one yelled over to me, “You
can play through if you catch
up.” And I know why he did. It
seemed like I just might. After all,
there were three of them and one
of me. But each time I started to
“I approached the tee, saw
water 30 feet ahead of me
and knew it might get ugly.”
APRIL 2012 49
get close, I’d hook a ball into the
longleaf pines lining the course,
and Mark and I would spend fi ve
minutes searching among the
fallen pine needles for my lost
comrade. It was for the better.
The last thing I needed was to
play my fi nal holes of the day in
front of a bunch of prodigies.
By the time I got to the 18th I
was spent. I approached the tee,
saw water 30 feet ahead of me
and knew it might get ugly. My
fi rst drive missed the water but
landed in the yard of one of the
private houses beside the course.
“You can’t end on that,” Mark
said, tossing me another ball. I
promptly deposited it into the
water. “One more,” Mark said. I
teed it up, took a breath, thought
about ten diff erent things I
needed to do to hit the ball
decently, and whacked it. Plop,
right into the drink. Even for me,
four shots is too many.
The next
morning I awoke knowing I was
two-thirds through with this
adventure. My fi nal 18 holes were
at Plantation, a course just inland
from Seaside that couldn’t be
more diff erent. Where Seaside
is all marsh and ocean breeze,
Plantation is ancient live oaks
with twisting branches and tricky
creeks. And then there were the
bunkers. “We’ve got 72 bunkers
here and 111 of them are on Plantation,”
one Sea Island employee
told me before I teed off .
He wasn’t joking. Weather I
was squaring up under a canopy
of trees or, rare as it was, on the
fairway, there was always sand
GO MAGAZINE
to contend with. More than the
bunkers next to the green though,
it was the Sahara-like fairway sand
pits that destroyed me. Moving
the ball 20 feet in a single stroke
does not do much to engender
confi dence.
My spirits were brightened a
bit once we hit the back nine and
the sea came back into view. My
game didn’t improve, but there
was something about looking off
into the deep blue calmness of
the sound that helped assuage the
desire to bend a golf club over my
head. Needless to say, my score
on Plantation was worse than my
score on Retreat. For the sake of
my pride and that of my future
children, let’s leave it at that.
After Plantation the last thing
left on my schedule was that massage.
I was desperate to have the
kinks pounded out of my back and
the sharp pain in my calves rubbed
away. Once I got on the massage
table though, something horrible
happened—I started thinking
about golf.
I couldn’t let go of how poorly
I’d done. If every shot was horrible,
I would have been able to
live with that. It would just mean
I wasn’t meant to play golf. Neither
was Charles Barkley—there’s
no shame in that. But every shot
wasn’t horrible. Some were downright
decent and all I could think
about was eliminating the terrible
shots and making them all
decent. As the massage therapist
was practicing her dark arts on my
neck and shoulders, all I wanted to
do was stand up and practice my
swing. I wanted one more shot.
Here I was, in what was supposed
to be the most relaxing part of this
grand experiment, and all I could
think about was playing more
golf. In that moment, I realized
why people both love and hate the
game. And on that massage table,
reliving the last 54 holes, I realized
my aches and pains came with a
price—I was hooked on golf.