Miracle at Augusta (7 page)

BY SUNDAY MORNING, THE
rain has cleared. It feels more like early September than late February, and that first-day-of-school edge in the air does nothing to ease my tension. Earl's feeling it, too. On the range early, just after dawn, he hits a couple of balls off-center.

For those who didn't complete yesterday's round, there's a shotgun start at 8:16 a.m., and shortly before that our threesome is ferried out to the dew-covered 12th green, where the previous afternoon, Earl marked his ball in the rain. The 460-yard 12th is a brute of a par 4, and reaching the green in regulation was no mean feat. Still, there's a lot of work to be done. If you placed the ball by hand, you couldn't come up with a longer or more difficult putt on this green.

Earl's marker sits on the right edge, and the hole is cut on the far left. In between is a seventy-five-foot travelogue that features two knolls and a steep drop. The first half of the putt is uphill and slow and the second half is the opposite, with a dozen feet of break from right to left. After a couple of minutes to digest it, Earl shakes his head and says, “It's like putting over a camel…that's drinking water.”

While Earl walks the width of the green and surveys the putt from both sides, I refer to my notes from last night's cram session at the caddy shack. Before Owl focused on the pin placements for the third round, he spent a good ten minutes breaking down this first crucial, tone-setting putt, and since I could tell him where Earl had marked his ball, he could be extremely specific. He even made a little sketch:

“The first key,” I say, “is hitting it firm enough to get it to the top of the second knoll.” I make a point of avoiding the word
hump.
“The second is getting it right enough to account for the break. Because of the rain, the first half of the putt is even slower than it seems. You need to hit it twenty percent harder than it looks. The second half of the putt will be hardly affected by the rain. The back half of the green always drains a lot better than the front.”

I walk to the apex of the putt and point to a spot on the right side of the second knoll. “This is our target. If you can get the ball to die here, the slope will do the rest.”

For a second Earl appraises me as coolly as the putt. Although he doesn't say a word, I know what he's thinking:
When the fuck did you become an authority on the drainage of the 12th green at Shoal Creek?

On the practice green, I had Earl hit a dozen putts of similar length, but there was no way to prepare him for these contours or the pressure of having to deal with them on his first stroke of the day, and when he replaces the marker with the ball and squats behind it, I can see he's still struggling to believe in both himself and me.

“Earl, I did my homework. The line is perfect. You got to trust it.” Earl makes three long practice strokes, takes one last peek at his distant target, and gives it a roll. The hit is solid and the ball easily crests the first knoll, slows as it climbs the second, and settles at the top, exactly what I asked for, except that the ball has come to a complete halt. For the next couple of seconds it doesn't budge. It just sits there like Louie refusing to take a walk, and it's not clear if it's going to stay put or roll back to Earl's feet. Instead, it makes a quarter turn forward and then, after a second pause, another, until once again it is on its merry way.

When it stops for the third time, it's three inches from the hole.

“Hell of a putt, Earl.”

“No, Travis, it was a hell of a read.”

Compared to that, the next six holes are a piece of cake. Earl pars them all, and his 71 keeps him perched at the top of the leaderboard, two up on the only other golfers who managed to shoot par in the second round. Hale Irwin and Gil Morgan, who else?

“LET'S GO, EARL.”

“Come on, baby.”

“Time to go to work, big fellah.”

Earl attracts some of the most boisterous galleries out here, particularly since he laced up his Reeboks and went back to Vietnam. Nevertheless, this crowd is louder, warmer, looser, and funkier than any that we've experienced so far.

“We at Shoal Creek or Soul Creek?” asks Earl with a smile.

“Come on, Travis,” says a mellifluous southern voice I recognize as Owl's. “You got to bring it, too.”

Hearing my name called out elicits a quizzical look from Earl. “Travis, you got family down here?”

“Not that I know of.”

This is Earl's first time going off in the final group on Sunday, let alone with Morgan and Irwin, and the southern hospitality is just what he needs. He comes out of the gate striping the ball with his characteristic precision and gets right back on the par train he's been riding since dawn. Unfortunately, conditions have been steadily improving since then, and by the time we approach the green of the par-five 3rd, a chilly, blustery morning has blossomed into a gorgeous Alabama afternoon without a trace of wind. The perfect weather and receptive greens are not a propitious combination, at least not for Earl, because it means that par isn't going to get it done after all, and as if to emphasize the point, Irwin rolls in a twenty-six-footer for birdie and Morgan rolls his twenty-two-footer on top of it, cutting Earl's precious lead to one.

If Earl's going to get his name engraved in silver, he's going to have to go low too, and as I learned from Earl in Sarasota and Louie in Winnetka, it's not easy teaching a middle-aged dog new tricks. On 5, Earl has an eminently makeable eighteen-footer of his own for birdie, and after referring to my crib sheet, I pass on this wisdom from Owl: two inches right and firm. Earl starts it on line but comes up half a foot short, as usual, and on the next four holes he leaves three more birdie putts in the jaws. When we walk off 9, Earl's lead is gone with the wind (and the cold and the rain) and the Birmingham chapter of Earl's Platoon is as frustrated as his caddy.

Not that Earl lets it affect his ball-striking. He opens the back nine with two more solidly struck shots to give himself yet another legitimate birdie chance. This one is from nineteen feet, not that it really matters, and as Earl looks it over, I return to Owl's notes and diagrams, sickened at the thought of all this proprietary reconnaissance coming to naught.

“Looks like an inch and a half off the right to me,” says Earl. “What do you think?”

“I know exactly what it is. But why bother reading 'em if you're not going to get the ball to the goddamned hole?”

Amazed, Earl stares at me hard, and I meet him halfway. “Right edge,” I say, and slap the Bridgestone in his palm.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “One forty-five-second fight and you're a certified motherfucker.” Then he bangs the nineteen-footer into the back of the cup.

“You're welcome,” I say.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE
rarest of phenomena—an Earl Fielder birdie binge.

Earl follows up his birdie on 10 with three more on 11, 12, and 14. With that last ten-footer, he snatches back the lead at five under, one better than Morgan and two up on Irwin, and the ruckus raised by Earl's Platoon echoes off Double Oak Mountain.

Now it's just a matter of coaxing Earl back to the sprawling antebellum clubhouse, and using my proprietary database of local knowledge, I walk him through three stress-free two-putts. On 15, I get him to play a twenty-two-footer like it's thirty. On 16, I add two inches of break, and on 17, I pass along Owl's instruction to ignore what he sees and hit it straight.

As a result, Earl steps up to the 18th hole with both his lead and his nerves intact, and as he has all day, he pipes another drive straight up Broadway. I walk off the yardage to the nearest sprinkler head and do the math, then do it two more times just to be sure. As I told Owl, math was never my strong point. Three times I get the same numbers—158 yards to the middle, 143 to the hole, but with water in front, I'm only thinking about that second number, the one to the center of the green.

The prospect of delivering Earl his first PGA win has me approximately as worked up as watching Elizabeth be born, and I pull the index card from my back pocket one last time, not for the distances Earl hits all his clubs, which I've long since memorized, as much as for the tactile comfort of its softened edges. In the last two weeks that card has been in and out of that pocket and the rain so many times, it's as faint and frayed as the Shroud of Turin, but the barely legible numbers confirm what I already know—that 158 is a garden-variety 7-iron. If there's half as much adrenaline coursing through Earl as me, 7 is a little too much club and will put him in the back half of the green, but with water in front, there's no way I'm pulling less.

“It's a generic driving range seven,” I say. “You're going to be a little pumped, but back of the green is just fine.”

“I agree,” says Earl. “Got to be the seven. I don't want to be anywhere near that water.”

I pull the club and Earl goes through his brisk routine of two practice swings and a waggle. As he slides the club behind the ball, the wind, which has been nowhere to be seen or felt for two hours, picks up, and with it, just as suddenly, comes a light shower. As Earl steps away from the shot, I open the umbrella, hand it to Earl, and toss up a tuft of grass, which blows straight back into my face. After a couple of minutes of discreet stalling, I toss another pinch in the air and it comes back with interest.

“With the rain and wind I'm thinking six.”

“I'm with you,” says Earl. “It's got to be the six.”

I put back the seven and, still holding the umbrella over his head—now the rain is coming down even harder—I hand him the 6.

“Nice and smooth. Nothing fancy.”

After two practice swings and a waggle, Earl turns on the ball and hits it just as pure and solid as he does on the range 365 days a year, except in leap year, when's its 366, and it's all over the flag…until it splashes in the back of the pond.

With a horrible sinking feeling, I drop my eyes to Earl's bag and confirm what I already know. The 6-iron hasn't moved. It's still there. In the wind and the rain and the adrenaline, and whatever other excuses I'll come up with over the next three or four decades, I handed him the 9 instead of the 6.

After a drop, a pitch, and two putts, Earl finishes with a double bogey and adds one more top five to a resume already bursting with them.

FOR THE SECOND TIME
in a month, Earl feels obliged to take me out and get me hammered. To dilute the misery, he invites Stump to join us, and Stump, a frequent visitor to Birmingham, insists he knows just the spot. Its official name is the Plaza, but to regulars it's the Upside Down because the sign above the door is flipped over, and as we duck beneath it and descend the stairs, I tell myself it's got to be a coincidence and not a twisted reference to the upside-down 6 that I handed Earl on 18.

To be fair, Stump might just as likely have chosen the Plaza because he likes it. As we discovered in Honolulu, the three of us share a weakness for dives, and the Upside Down is certainly a fine example, right up there—or down there—with the Ding Dong, and after grabbing our three-dollar shots and two-dollar beers, we settle into a cozy corner in the blue glow of the jukebox. Beyond the pool tables and the pinball machines is a redbrick wall festooned with graffiti, including the terse posting
GET OVER IT.

Easier said than done.

To my relief, Earl is taking my screw-up better than me. In fact, he seems unfazed, and after my second shot, I can't resist the urge to verify that. “Earl, you're really not mad at me?”

“Travis, why the hell would I be mad? You busted your ass for me for two weeks, and did a hell of a job.”

“With one little…I guess not so little…exception,” interjects Stump.

“When you called, I thought I was doing you a favor,” says Earl. “I was wrong. You lit a fire under my ass. I had four birdies on the back nine! At Shoal Creek! On a Sunday! When was the last time you saw me do that? Never. I don't go that low at my muni back home. I couldn't have done that without you.”

“Or Owl,” I say.

“Yeah, let's not forget Owl all of a sudden,” says Stump, hoisting his mug.

“When you told me to get the fucking ball to the hole on twelve, that was beautiful. Exactly what I needed to hear. And the best part about eighteen is there's no scar tissue…because I can blame it entirely on you.”

“Wonderful.”

“It really is,” says Earl.

“You know what we need?” says Stump, digging a couple of quarters out of his pocket. “Music.” He walks to the jukebox, and before he gets back, the unmistakable sound of Hendrix's guitar pours out.

“I wouldn't have thought a redneck like you had any use for Jimi,” says Earl.

“There's a lot about me you don't know, son.”

“I guess so.”

“For example, you probably didn't know I can sing. You're looking at the five-time karaoke champion at the Frog Tavern in Macon, Georgia.”

And he can. When Hendrix starts to sing, Stump, clenching his Pabst like a mike, is right there with him, shamelessly adding extra syllables to one-vowel words, like
sun
and
shine,
in the time-honored rock star tradition.

“Stump, you motherfucking bucket of shit,” I say.