Miracle at Augusta (9 page)

THE BELL IS STILL
ringing when Jerzy bursts through a door in the back of the science center and walks with badly concealed haste toward the yellow and black buses lined up on the far side of the parking lot. Although scores of students pour from a dozen buildings, he is as impossible to miss as a giant turtle without a shell. In a sea of affluent preppies, his Eastern European hand-me-downs seem particularly off-kilter, and while Jerzy is certainly uncool, he is also flaunting it. Economic hardship may explain the baggy wool pants and too-small blazer, but not the smiley face T-shirt or Where's Waldo hat. Despite the obvious drawbacks, he can't resist drawing attention to his geeky self. As his own mom points out, he's a wiseass.

If Jerzy hoped to reach the safety of the bus before the Shiny Black Parkas could get a bead on him, it's too late. They're already lying in wait between him and the bus door, and from the front seat of Simon's old pickup, I get my first good look at the brains of the outfit. He's of medium height and wiry, pale and blond, his long bangs cut straight across his forehead. Instead of any outward sign of malevolence, there's something unformed and missing in his features, like the overly symmetrical oval of a child's drawing.

As he waits for Jerzy to get within arm's length, he slips a hand out of his pocket and forms a fist, and as I hop from my truck, I catch myself doing the same.
Be careful. You get in a third fight in a high school parking lot with a bunch of teenagers, Sarah won't be asking any
more questions. She'll just put you on meds.

“Hey, Jerzy,” asks the leader softly. “Where you headed?”

As at the bus stop, Jerzy's only resistance is willful denial. He plods ahead as if he doesn't see or hear a thing.

“Over here, you fat fuck.”

“Dipshit, he's talking to you.”

By now, I'm directly behind the three, and when Buster Blond pulls back his arm, I step in front of him.

“Excuse me, fellas. Don't mean to interrupt, but I need a word with my friend.”

For a couple of seconds, the leader stares at me nonplussed, not sure how to react to me or what to do with his fist. When he puts it back in his pocket and steps aside, I guide Jerzy past them to the front seat of Simon's pickup.

“YOU'RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY
I'm here,” I say.

“Kind of.”

“I came to see if you'd like to hit some golf balls.”

“Wow,” says Jerzy, still digesting his reprieve as his classmates hover nearby. “I guess you really do have a lot of time on your hands.”

“As a matter of fact.”

“I could probably clear my calendar for the afternoon.”

Big Oaks is cold and bleak as Siberia. In every respect, it's the same dreary interior I had to reimagine as Augusta National just to get myself to show up every day, but based on Jerzy's expression you'd think it actually was Augusta. “This place rules,” he says, and his eyes delight in every sorry detail, from the ripped Srixon banner advertising a ball they stopped making two years ago, to the corny clock with golf clubs for arms, to the shuddering ball machine.

Once we pick up the clubs and get settled in my stall, I do a quick inventory of what I have to work with. Jerzy, who is at least 6′3″ and 220 pounds, is a seventeen-year-old man cub. He has big hands, big feet, and a big head, and the kind of natural size and heft that often translates well to golf. (See: Jack Nicklaus, Craig Stadler, Colin Montgomery, and my old nemesis Stump Peters.) Size gives you ballast that roots you to the ground and, once you learn to shift your weight at the right time, natural power.

I pull the 7-iron from my bag and mold his hands around it until they've glommed into something cohesive. “You want to hold the club very gently,” I say. “Whatever you think the pressure should be, it's half that. Okay, now take your hands off and place them back on.…All right, now try it again.…One more time.…That's excellent. Where you've got them now looks really good.”

“Thanks, Mr. McKinley. I need to get a grip.”

“You and me both…and it's Travis.”

I align his feet, tilt him forward into the proper posture, then share a fundamental concept of a good swing, which is to barely swing at all and instead twist your torso back and forth, with your arms going along for the ride. To provide a sense of how it feels when the chest initiates the move, I have him cross his arms and I place my hands on his shoulder, but before I can turn him halfway back, he winces in pain, and when he covers it with a quick smile, I know it's from all the punches he's been taking every morning and afternoon.

“A quarter swing is all we want today. For our purposes, it's better. On the way back, just enough of a turn to get your weight on the inside of your right foot. Then plant the left and turn around it.”

I have him rehearse the move several times before I pluck a yellow ball from the basket and place it on the thin mat. Jerzy's first swing is a whiff. So are the second, and the third; and the fourth catches so little of the ball, it doesn't roll off the mat.

The next hour is a blur of shank hooks and shank slices. He hits behind the ball, on top of it, and beside it, and yet, within two thirds of a bucket, I know he has the makings of a golfer. Not because he's flashed an inkling of athletic talent or shown evidence of having absorbed a single thing I've said, but because he is a glutton for punishment. An hour of nonstop frustration and repeated failure rolls off his thick shoulders like rain. Undaunted, he tries as hard on his eighty-eighth swing as his fifty-third and his eleventh. Not only that, he is having fun.

“Keep your grip pressure constant throughout the whole swing,” I say, and nudge another Big Oaks rock between his feet. “And try not to get so geeked at the ball. Don't react to it at all. Pretend it isn't there.”

“What ball?” he asks.

For the hundredth time, Jerzy pivots and unleashes his abbreviated swing, and for whatever reason (Yahweh, Vishnu, Jesus, grip pressure), the sound of club striking ball is entirely crisper, deeper, and sweeter—and the velocity with which it flies off the face is deliriously disproportionate to the effort put into it. When it drops out of the air and stops rolling, it's traveled more than two football fields.

“Piece of cake,” says Jerzy.

JERZY SMILES LIKE THE
Pope the whole drive home. That's the effect hitting it on the sweet spot has on one's sense of well-being. It smooths out the edges, even the jagged ones. It's like Zen meditation, only better because it isn't bullshit. Although I couldn't be happier for him and even take some credit for his beatific glow, my own state of mind is precarious. I've been uptight since we stashed the clubs at the front desk and headed for Simon's truck, and as I dodge the potholes on Route 38 my unease blooms into something closer to panic.

It started when I placed my hands on Jerzy's shoulders and saw the toll of those punches, and his flinch recalled Rodica's half-smile when I asked about spending time with her son. I realized that the reason she didn't want to tell Jerzy was not to preserve the surprise. It was to protect him from the likelihood that it wouldn't happen at all, that I would have a change of heart or “something would come up” and my impulse to help her kid would evaporate as mysteriously as it arrived.

Rodica's pessimistic scenario didn't pan out. I did show up. Not only that, I snatched him out from under the nose of that little vacant-eyed assassin and introduced him to the wonder that is Big Oaks. But what now?

As I turn onto the street that dead-ends at Roxbury Farms, I think about the bruises on Jerzy's arms and wonder how much of a commitment I'm prepared to make for a goofy teenager who shoveled my driveway and was nice to Noah and whose sardonic wit reminds me of my grandfather. Maybe Rodica knows me better than I know myself, and I'm not cut out to be a do-gooder. If her assessment is accurate and I bail after two or three or four sessions, will that be worse than doing nothing?

And then for some inexplicable reason (Yahweh, Vishnu, Jesus, grip pressure), the anxious voices shut up long enough for me to think, Who knows? And besides that—fuck it.

“So, Jerzy, I've been thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

“How about we do this every Tuesday afternoon?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. You'll help me get through my draconian suspension, and I'll teach you a little about golf.”

I'm not sure which one of us is more surprised. Or pleased.

WHEN I PICK UP
Jerzy the following Tuesday, I can tell from his eyes it's been a rough week. I don't know how rough until we get to our stall and Jerzy takes two easy swings with the 7-iron, stops, and looks down at his feet.

“Jerzy, what's the matter?”

“My arms, my shoulders, my ribs. I can't do it.”

To be here at Big Oaks and unable to hit a shot is devastating to him, and I don't know what to say. I'm still struggling to come up with plan B when Jerzy hands me the club. “Since I'm so useless, why don't you hit a few? Maybe I can learn by watching.”

After a few practice swings, I scoop a ball from the plastic basket with the blade and bounce it into my palm. “You're in for a treat, my friend. Bear in mind that what you're about to see is on a whole different level from just hitting balls.”

“I'll try.”

“When I have to describe to the layman what it is that I do, I often fall back on the language of art. To put it simply, I use my clubs to paint pictures.”

“Let me see if I grasp the analogy,” says Jerzy. “The irons, woods, and putter are brushes. The ball is the paint, this stall the easel or studio, and the golf course, or in this case Big Oaks, is your canvas.”

“Very good.”

“And you're Picasso.”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“Paint away, Pablo.”

My first two swings are Jerzyesque. I don't whiff—I'm a former U.S. Senior Open champion, for Christ's sake—but like him, I get too amped, hold the club too tight, and the result is two ground balls.

“Maybe you need to loosen up. Or is this your blue period?”

“That's an excellent suggestion. Thank you.”

I bend at the waist, windmill my arms, and swivel my hips. “A routine I picked up from my amigo Miguel Ángel Jiménez,” I say. Despite the elaborate stretching and Castilian lisping, my third shot rolls harmlessly off-line. On my fourth, I finally make a good pass at it. It produces a hard hook that never gets five feet off the ground and misses my target by inches.

“I get it,” says Jerzy, almost smiling, “you're trying to hit the guy in that lunar vehicle picking up balls.”

“It's not easy being a role model,” I concede. “There's a lot of pressure and responsibility. And, in case you haven't noticed, that thing is moving.”

Which is why I consider my next salvo—a vicious slice that bores in on the buggy like a heat-seeking missile before scoring a direct hit on the front door—one of the two or three best shots in my career, and as the driver slams on the brakes, I improvise an understated victory dance, which goes on for minutes and owes heavy debts to the WWF and
Soul Train.

“Good thing you stretched,” says Jerzy.

The guy behind the wheel, who is being bombarded while picking up balls at minimum wage, is less enthused. “McKinley, you do that again,” he shouts, “I'm going to come up there and kick your ass.”

THE CAGED BUGGY, WHICH
had drawn perilously close, makes a U-turn and goes back to collecting Big Oaks range rocks.

“Jerzy, I'm sorry you couldn't swing the club today, but we're going to make a golfer out of you, I promise.”

“Turn me into a Cheez Doodle for all I care. As long it's something other than Jerzy Solarski—dipshit, fat fuck, pizza face, loser, and one other thing, what is it? Oh, yeah, Polack.”

“When I'm through with you, you'll be Jerzy Solarski—dipshit, fat fuck, pizza face, loser, Polack, golfer. How does that sound?”

“Better.”

And that should have been enough for me. Thankfully, it's been a while since Elizabeth and Simon passed through the pricklier stages of adolescence, yet not so long that I've forgotten that conversation with a teen is a minefield. If you are able to extract a glimmer of a smile from a seventeen-year-old, you've done a full day's work. Time to go home, crack a beer, and put your feet up, but I'm so relieved about having salvaged the afternoon, I prattle on like a twit.

“I hope you realize that not a single thing those morons are calling you is accurate. You're a big dude, but you're hardly fat. You're no bigger than Jack Nicklaus was at your age, and he's only the best golfer of all time. You're not a loser, your skin issues are minor and temporary, and you're not a dipshit, whatever that is, and the last I checked, you can't be a Polack, if you're not from Poland. Although I suppose they could make an exception.”

“How did you know I'm not Polish?”

“Your mom told me that she and your sister and you came here from Rumania.”

“When did you talk to her?”

“A few days ago. I couldn't show up at school and pick you up without running it by her.”

“Why didn't she tell me? Was this some plan she dreamed up to boost my self-esteem?”

“The reason she didn't tell you was because she was afraid I wouldn't follow through and then you'd be disappointed. Your mom had zero to do with this. Believe me, she has enough on her plate.”

“What is that supposed to mean? What do you know about her plate?”

“Not much.”

“Exactly,” he says, and lumbers off in the direction of the bathroom. While he's gone I work my way through the bucket with the 7-iron and berate myself for having learned so little in half a century. After ten minutes, he still hasn't returned, and after fifteen, I realize he's not going to. I reach the parking lot in time to see him step onto an eastbound bus.