The Legend of Bagger Vance (2 page)

I
T SEEMS ODD NOW
, but in the Twenties, business people and even a good number of families took their meals—not just lunch, but dinner and breakfast as well—at cafeterias.

Particularly in the South, these teeming emporia were the absolute rage. There were Burr’s and Dawson’s in Virginia and the Carolinas, Whistling Pig in Alabama and Mississippi, Roberdaux’s, Tyrell House, and The Griddle. But the biggest and best of all was a chain called Invergordon’s. There were five in Birmingham alone. Jackson had three or four, Nashville and Memphis the same. Richmond had ten.

Invergordon’s were not the depressing impersonal factories that the word
cafeteria
evokes today. Each had a manager, usually a clean-scrubbed bachelor or widower, who lived on the premises in an immaculate suite upstairs. These mandarins prowled the tables dispensing goodwill and tending instantly to their custom
ers’ whims. One of them, a fellow named Adoor Moot, became Mayor of Charleston. That was how popular he was.

All the chains had hostesses, not just one at the door to seat the arriving guests, but a regular fleet of belles to serve the endless iced teas, Coca-Colas and coffees without which no Southerner could navigate from one end of a meal to the other. Invergordon Girls were the elite. They wouldn’t deign even to speak to Burr’s girls or Dawson’s, so total was their disdain for these competing plebeian establishments. Invergordon Girls dressed in Scottish tartans and brought drinks, flatware and condiments with a smile and special twirl that they learned at the Invergordon finishing schools. Young boys would just gawk with their jaws slack, and girls couldn’t wait to grow up and twirl at some newer and even more glamorous Invergordon’s.

There was a Mr. Invergordon of course. A Scotsman from Sutherland, in the North Country by Dornoch Firth. A golfer.

Mr. Invergordon had money, buckets of it from his cafeterias and in the Twenties bales more from Wall Street. He wanted to build a golf course. Not just any golf course, but the grandest, most spectacular championship venue these shores had ever seen.

Remember, this was ten years before Augusta National. Other than Pinehurst, which was all but inaccessible geographically, the South lacked a true world-class layout. Invergordon set out to remedy that.

He owned twenty-five hundred acres of prime duneland off Wassaw Sound, east of Savannah, Linksland. There was a true
sand beach on the south and east, and tidal flats on the mainland side that could be spanned by causeway. Drainage was excellent; there were snowy egrets, kites and petrels soaring in off the Atlantic. The breeze was fresh enough off the Point to keep the mosquitoes on their best behavior, not to mention give a round a smack of seaside interest.

Invergordon decided to build his links there.

He paid Alister Mackenzie $50,000 to design the course and oversee construction. I can’t tell you what a fortune that was in those days. I don’t believe Mackenzie earned half that for Augusta National and Cypress Point put together.

But Invergordon didn’t stop at a championship layout. He brought in Charles Roy Whitney from Philadelphia to build a 500-room hotel, complete with physical culture pavilion, natatorium, an enclosed botanical garden, and artificial hot springs fired by underground steam furnaces.

He named it Krewe Island after his birthplace in Scotland.

For sheer scope and grandeur I would rank Krewe Island with the Hearst Ranch in California and the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville—and Krewe Island was, or would be upon completion, open to the public.

I know you’re ahead of me, Michael. You’ve read of the Great Atlantic Storm of 1938. It was a hurricane, before they gave names to hurricanes. It blew for 54 straight hours with winds that hit 190 miles per hour. When it was over, Invergordon’s dream was reduced to matchsticks.

The very land itself had been annihilated. The six outward holes that ran south along the Point were literally washed into
the sea. There was nothing left. The last four, the home holes, with the exception of eighteen, were likewise obliterated. Everything was underwater and stayed that way for days. Salt water. When the sea finally withdrew, the South’s most famous golf links was nothing but a salt marsh choked with debris.

Curious, and much remarked upon ever since, was the fact that the eighteenth hole was spared. It was actually playable the day after the storm. The green had drained, bunkers were dry, even the fairway had not a pinch of salt on it.

But I’ve gotten ahead of my story. For by the time this catastrophe struck, Invergordon himself was dead, and had been for almost nine years. Blew his brains out with a British Enfield .303 in his office on the top floor of the Cotton Mart in New Orleans.

Crash of ’29.

The Depression hit the South hard, and hit Invergordon’s empire harder. Who could afford to eat out? Cafeterias withered where they stood. Invergordon’s four sons didn’t have the brains among them to make one decent businessman. It fell to Invergordon’s socialite daughter, Adele, to salvage the family’s fortunes.

Adele clung to Krewe Island, which at that point was still a year short of completion, perhaps believing as many did in the Crash’s immediate aftermath that the dark times would soon pass, the economy right itself and money flow freely again. Or maybe just because she knew it was her father’s jewel, the one creation that might outlive and even memorialize them all.

I remember, even as a boy, the desperation that suffused the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Krewe Island at last was christened.
She was grand, magnificent, spectacular. Not a single guest had slept a night on her virginal linen sheets, nor a golfer sunk his spikes into her immaculate bermuda fairways. And now it looked as if none ever would. The class of newly rich, the citizen millionaires, had been utterly wiped out by the Crash. All that remained of a possible Krewe Island clientele was the old rich and even they felt constrained, not so much by fear of the future as by an understandable reluctance to indulge themselves in luxury by the sea when so many of their countrymen were struggling so desperately just to survive.

Something had to be done.

Something to make Krewe Island transcend the current calamity. Something not just to lift it in the minds of the wealthy above the Greenbrier or the Homestead, but to make its extravagant existence palatable to the masses who would never be able to glimpse it, except in photos in the Society pages.

An event.

An occasion.

Something bold and dramatic, to capture the public imagination, lure the press, put Krewe Island before the eye of the world in a bright and even historic light. Money was no object, for if the Links and Hotel couldn’t leap instantly into the black, the whole colossal enterprise was doomed.

Adele’s brainstorm was this. A golf match. An exhibition for the unheard-of prize of $20,000. Between the two greatest golfers of the age, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.

Hagen the professional, if he won, would take the cash. If
Jones the amateur prevailed, the prize would be donated to the Atlanta Athletic Club.

The prospective contestants were approached and, for whatever reasons professional or personal, agreed.

A date was set.

And, true to Adele’s dream, the story caught fire. Perhaps it was just what the country needed as it writhed in the tentacles of depression. A show. A circus. Something bright and patrician, on a sunny greensward by the sea, where two gallant knights would joust for a king’s ransom.

Babe Ruth came down from New York by rail. Dempsey took an ocean view suite. Scott and Zelda flew to Savannah, motored daily to Krewe Island from her cousin’s cottage on Poinsettia Street. Even Al Capone, rumor had it, was on his way to swell the gallery.

Savannah was beside itself with anticipation. The city tumbled headlong into the grip of madness.

I
WAS PRESENT
for the next scene in this saga, but being ten years old and exhausted from a day of caddying, shagging and so forth was unfortunately sound asleep.

I must rely on the witness of my father, who had carried me along to the Hesperia Elementary School for the event. The Civic Auditorium would have been the appropriate venue for this colloquium, but that night was occupied by a Women’s Christian Temperance meeting. The town fathers gathered at the nearest reasonable alternative. This turned into something of a fiasco, as the only chairs available for Savannah’s loftiest personages were those designed for children aged eight and under. These were Lilliputian, to say the least. The dignitaries refused to sit upon them. They insisted on standing, which led, after five or six hours of heated, sweltering, smoke-choked debate, to a very real shortage of temper. But let me recall how my father told it:

It was Judge Neskaloosa River Anderson whose nose was out of joint from minute one. One of Invergordon’s ditcher operators had accidentally shot the Judge’s prize bitch, Jupiter. It wasn’t so much the dog’s death as the way Adele handled the apology; apparently she had no conception of how attached a Southerner could be to his best hunter. You could have shot the Judge’s firstborn and it wouldn’t have grieved him as much. Anyway, Old Neskaloosa took a stand opposing the golfing extravaganza, and his vote on the Council could put the bollocks to the whole damn shooting match.

The problem, as Judge Anderson saw it, was how much the city of Savannah was supposed to contribute to this exercise in private enterprise and greed. Our causeways would be used to transport spectators. Our streets would be employed for parking, our constabulary to maintain order, our homes to shelter the incoming hordes. Every office and business would be grievously inconvenienced for three days prior and God only knows how many days after. And the mess? Who would be responsible, who would clean it up, and most of all, who would pay for it? The judge felt that Adele Invergordon was taking advantage of Savannah’s good nature. “Our city is the doormat,” he declared, “upon which the heiress wipes her feet!”

At first no one took the old gentleman’s protestations too seriously. There was a great deal of shouting and declaiming to the effect that this golfing match was the eco
nomic boon the city was frantic for, that we desperately needed it in these dire times. Hotel rooms would fill, restaurants be packed, the average citizen could charge for parking, let rooms, perform services and in general line his needy pockets off the visiting Goths, who, thank the Lord, would in all probability be too-rich-for-their-own-good Yankees.

But Anderson would not be swayed. The hours crawled by and, as often happens when normally rational individuals are too long cooped in an oppressive environment, the seething throng began to transubstantiate into a mob. It started coming over to the Judge’s side.

If Adele Invergordon could offer $20,000 in prize money to two damn visiting golf players, by God she could come up with a matching sum for the civic coffers of Savannah, in whose bosom and by whose sufferance this self-aggrandizing stunt would take place!

A messenger was dispatched to Krewe Island and returned promptly with the heiress’s refusal. I recall vividly the phrases “adamantine in my resistance” and, more unfortunate, “blackmail.”

Shouting and countershouting resumed with a fury. Savannah’s pride had now been officially trodden upon. The Judge’s supporters swelled. The convocation divided into two equally rabid bands: those who saw the golf match, and the subsequent success of Krewe Island, as essential to Savannah’s economic survival, and those who declared that
survival be damned, we had endured defeat in war with less of a blow to our honor and manhood!

The atmosphere was explosive. No matter how fevered the indignation at Adele Invergordon’s affront to the city, all knew that the match must go on, Savannah was desperate for it economically. But how could it, now that our civic noses had been rubbed so ingloriously in the dirt? Cigar and cigarette smoke hung so thick you couldn’t see from one side of the room to the other. Meanwhile many of the elders had yielded to gravity’s demands and were perched absurdly on the kindergarten-sized chairs. The air was dense, humidity hovering just shy of out-and-out liquidity. Pools of perspiration pocked the hardwood floors, backs of shirts clung black with sweat. To this day I don’t know whose voice finally called out the solution. What I do recall is the zeal and enthusiasm with which it was met.

The rafters shuddered with cheers; the little basketball backboards, only six feet high, nearly came off with the stomping of feet and clapping of backs.

Savannah would nominate its own champion golfer!

A
third
contestant, a local hero, to duel the great Jones and Hagen!

This was when, Hardy [my dad told me], you came to and began blinkingly to demand to know what was going on. The town solons were congratulating themselves furiously on this brainstorm that would save Savannah’s name,
draw attention to her fine young manhood, and so on, when someone—I suspect it may even have been myself—rose to ask whom precisely we would nominate for this loftiest of golfing honors.

Instantly the hall fell silent. A name was shouted. Dougal McDermott. Cheers burst forth, till the obvious was recalled: that McDermott was the professional at Krewe Island, an imported Scot who had barely set foot in the town except for a stiff snort or to chase down the local trollops. No, McDermott would never do.

Neither would Frank Laren, the pro at our pathetic Southside Public Links. Or Andy Dillion, the city champ. Or Nicholas “Nitro” Vitale, the greengrocer. There was one fabulous golfer, Enderby “Cottonmouth” Conyngham, whom all agreed possessed gargantuan length, immaculate course management and a lockpicker’s touch around the greens. The only problem was Enderby was a Negro.

So desperate was the throng by this point that a debate of some ten minutes’ duration ensued, in which half a dozen of the city’s most fevered bigots, crackers and peckerwoods rallied to the black man’s cause, frantic for a champion with a chance to prevail.

Then came the breakthrough.

“What about Rannulph Junah?” a voice cried from the rear.

“He’s off to hell and gone, you damn fool! Tibet or Calcutta…”

“No, no—he’s back! Been back a month.”

Could this be true? Every heart leapt with hope. Rannulph Junah? Rannulph Junah!

Here at last was our man!

Scion of one of the South’s wealthiest and most venerated families, triple letterman at Columbia, law review graduate of Emory in Atlanta, handsome as a god, brilliant as Apollo, Junah possessed every virtue of shining Southern manhood.

And he could play. My God, he could play.

He was long. Titanic off the tee, with a rolling draw that he could turn on and off like a faucet. He could cut the ball as effortlessly as he hooked it. He was the only man I ever saw who could make a spoon back up on a green.

He had won the Georgia Amateur at eighteen, the Trans-Miss at nineteen, and had reached the finals of the North-South in ’27 despite a nearly ten-year hiatus from the game. The Walker Cup Committee had selected him as third alternate for the ’28 squad, and he had even practiced with the team for a week at the Chicago Golf Club before withdrawing for “personal reasons.”

Junah’s iron play was fearless. He hit the kind of low screaming bullets that started out jackrabbit-high and rose like eagles to peak, tower, float till they were nearly motionless and then drop feather-soft to the green, where they would alight, as Sam Snead later used to say, like a butterfly with sore feet.

And Junah could putt. Eschewing the charging, hell-for-leather style then in vogue, he utilized a touch like gossamer to ghost the ball with aching, tremulous slowness up to the very marges of the hole, at which exquisitely tender gait it would topple in from any corner of the quadrant, and never lip out for excess of speed.

Rannulph Junah, Rannulph Junah, Rannulph Junah! The galleries rung with the hero’s name. We must summon him, nay, collect him at once!

The crowd surged for the exits. But wait! The clock. It was nearly one in the morning! Manners precluded descending on the poor fellow at this hour, but, by God, the issue could not wait. A mad, sputtering paralysis gripped the posse. For an instant it seemed as if a mass nervous breakdown was immediately at hand. Then Willie “Argyle” Lofton, the town barber and sole Republican, spun straight toward you, Hardy….

“The boy! Send the boy!”

This motion was adopted by instant acclamation, as various members of the congregation shouted out its virtues. You, young Hardy, knew Junah; you had shagged for him, caddied for him; Junah was partial to you. Send the boy to be sure our man was awake, to prepare him for the coming delegation (which would follow within fifteen minutes), but on no account, under no circumstances, divulge the nature of our call.

“Will ye do it, Hardy?” the throng queried as one.

“Well, I…”

That was all you got out, son, before half a hundred fevered hands seized you and began tossing you skyward in triumph like Mercury himself.

“Fly then, lad, with winged sandals on your feet!”