The Legend of Bagger Vance

I
N MAY OF
1931 an exhibition match was held over 36 holes between the two greatest golfers of their day, Walter Hagen and Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones, Jr. The match was the second and last between the two immortals (Hagen shelled Jones, 12 and 11 over 72 holes, at the first in Sarasota, Florida, in 1926). This second match was held at what was, at the time, the most costly and ambitious golf layout ever built in America, the Links at Krewe Island, Georgia.

Much has been written about the rather odd events of that long day. We have Grantland Rice’s dispatches to the
New York Tribune
, which were published at that time. The notes and diaries of O. B. Keeler devote several quite absorbing pages to the match. And of course the reports from the dozens of newspapers and sporting journals that covered the event.

One aspect of that day, however, has been largely overlooked, or rather treated as a footnote, an oddity or sideshow. I refer to the inclusion in the competition, at the insistence of the citizens of Savannah, of a local champion, who in fact held his own quite honorably with the two golfing titans.

I was fortunate enough to witness that match, aged ten, from the privileged and intimate vantage of assisting the local champion’s caddie. I was present for many of the events leading up to the day, for the match itself, as well as certain previously unrecorded adventures in its aftermath.

For many years, it has been my intention to commit my memory of these events to paper. However, a long and crowded career as a physician, husband and father of six has prevented me from finding the time I felt the effort deserved.

In candor, another factor has made me reluctant to make public these recollections. That is the rather fantastical aspect of a number of the events of that day. I was afraid that a true accounting would be misinterpreted or, worse, disbelieved. The facts, I feared, would either be discounted as the product of a ten-year-old’s overactive imagination or, when perceived as the recollections of a man past seventy, be dismissed as burnished and embellished reminiscences whose truth has been lost over time in the telling and retelling.

The fact is, I have never told this story. Portions I have recounted to my wife in private; fragments have been imparted on specific occasion to my children. But I have never retold the story, to others or even to myself, in its entirety.

Until recently, that is. Attempting to counsel a troubled young friend, for whom I felt the tale might have significance, I passed an entire night, till sunrise, recounting the story verbally. It made such a profound impression on my young friend that I decided at last to try my hand at putting it down in written form.

This volume is that attempt.

I have chosen, for reasons which will become apparent, to tell the tale much as I recounted it that night. It is a story of a type of golfer, and a type of golf, which I fear have long since vanished from the scene. But I intend this record not merely as an exercise in reminiscence or nostalgia. For the events of that day had profound and far-reaching consequences on me and on others who participated, particularly the local champion referred to above.

His name was Rannulph Junah, and Bagger Vance was his caddie.

—H
ARDISON
L. G
REAVES
, M.D.
Savannah, Georgia
March 1995

One

H
AVE YOU EVER
had blackjack tea, Michael?

The real stuff, I mean. One of my patients gave me these, cured sassafras root from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. Something mysterious and potent about it. Clears the head. You can stay up all night with your brain so lucid it almost feels transparent. Smell the earth in it? Something about tea from roots, as opposed to leaves. Something deeper, more connected to the source. I remember that rooty, woodsy smell from winter mornings as a boy. My mother said only a Yankee or a fool sweetened blackjack tea with sugar. It had to be molasses. And no milk. The farthest afield she’d stray was to serve it
au citron
, like the Creoles. But I’m wandering already, and you’ve barely even sat down.

How are you, young man? No doubt you’re expecting a lecture, but I promise that’s the last thing I intend. Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely. I can even under
stand and sympathize. Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in your bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like an exercise in expedience and venality. I understand that brand of despair better than I wish. But it’s a different decision you’ve made that troubles me more deeply.

I mean your choice to give up golf.

When I heard, Michael, I knew something was wrong. Seriously wrong. That’s why I’ve asked you here tonight.

Will you stay and listen to an old man?

You see, I know you better than you think. Not just from those forlorn “interviews” you endured once a year with the Scholarship Committee. In fact I made up my mind about you years earlier.

Do you remember when you used to caddie for me, in your “rabbit” days, when you were ten or eleven? You used to swing clubs on the tee like the other boys, but there was something that struck me particularly about you. You had an instinct. You saw through to the soul of the game.

Frank the caddiemaster told me once how, at ten years old, you asked to be sent out only with the best players, just so you could watch and learn. Frank showed me the list you gave him. Do you remember? The list of your approved players. I was flattered to find my own name on it.

I used to watch you sometimes when you weren’t looking. What struck me particularly was your interest in the grip. You knew, like every real expert, that a true player can be recognized
by his grip alone. The way a man sets his hands on a club will inform you infallibly as to how deeply he’s thought about the game, how profoundly he’s entered into its mysteries.

The grip, a remarkable fellow named Bagger Vance once told me, when I was about the same age you were then, is man’s connection to the world outside himself. The hands, he said, are where the subjective meets the objective. Where we “in here” meet the world “out there.” True intelligence, Vance declared, does not reside in the brain, but in the hands.

You had a wonderful grip. Even as a little boy, when your hands were barely big enough to wrap around a shaft. I suppose to me you represented golfing purity. Youth. Instinct. The untutored, pure love of the game.

No one who loved the game like you, no one who can play like you, should be allowed to quit. That’s a law, you know? And if it isn’t, it should be.

I know your disease, son. Thank God it’s mental, but then, in the final analysis, aren’t all our diseases mental?

The ancient Hermetists had a principle, the First Principle they called it, that the universe itself was mental. They taught that All That Was existed purely as a thought in the Mind of God, or the All as they called it. Even we human beings with all our complexities had no substantial existence as matter, but were merely thoughts in the mind of our Creator, much like Micawber arising with his fellows from the mind of Dickens.

The Hermetists claimed you could change the universe, or your own at any rate, by transmuting it mentally.

Alchemy. Lead into gold. All in the mind.

Am I rambling on? Yes, I see your eye wandering. To what? Oh yes…

Go ahead. Take it down, it won’t break.

It’s not the original, you know. That, the holder is obliged to return to the Georgia G.A. after his year. This is a half-size replica that Jeannie had made up for me. It has a certain grace, I think. Lord knows it’s the only thing I’ve ever won.

GEORGIA STATE GOLF ASSOCIATION
AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP
1946

WINNER
DR. HARDISON GREAVES

I’ll confess a secret to you, Michael. Might as well, since before this night is over I will have bared to you the innermost holdings of my soul.

There were nights, after Jeannie died, when I would creep into this room, alone, in those black hours beyond the stroke of two, and steal a glance at that one word.

Winner.

Does that sound superficial? Perhaps it was a rather slender straw to grasp at. And yet there is something profound and mysterious about the vastness of the gulf between “winner” and “runner-up.” Even one time, just once at any level, to
prevail
. To be, for one fragile moment, the best. It’s not to be scoffed at,
Michael. It helped me to do it, and it helped me to witness it, one day long ago in 1931.

Yes, I know your illness, son. I’m going to try to cure it this evening with a story. Will you stay and listen?

It may take all night. I’ll stay up if you will.

Good. Are you comfortable? That tea should be just about ready now….

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