I went to bed at nine-thirty and I think it was a quarter of three when I got to sleep.
Ruff and I were the third flight out. I looked at the big board and saw that Rick Lorry and Bobby Broom were already posted for the first two holes, Bobby with a three and a four and Rick with a pair of treys. My name was in the sixth slot, Thomas Firth, and I could imagine the spaces being filled with sevens and eights.
Ruff slammed one out there for a good two-seventy, maybe more. He smiled and stepped back. I addressed the ball. It was the size of an aspirin tablet and the handle of the driver felt as though it had been greased. The crowd was five deep around the tee watching everybody hammer it away, waiting to follow their favorites. They had sighed nicely at Billy Ruff’s drive. I couldn’t keep them waiting forever. I had to do it. The backswing creaked and I felt that I’d swayed back off the stance and I’d come down on it with a hack that would smother the ball. In tournaments you just don’t hit any grass-cutters off the tee.
It was like swinging a strand of wet spaghetti at the ball. To my intense surprise the click was crisp and the ball drew a white line out across the green to the fairway. In my anxiety I had hit close to the outer limits of control. A hundred yards out it started to climb. It climbed and soared and dropped with a little tail on it, bouncing and running, coming at last to rest a good ten yards beyond the gleaming dot of Billy’s drive. The gallery applauded. I guess they thought I meant to do that.
About forty or fifty people followed us out, better than half of them moving ahead to the green. Billy took a clean full swing with a seven iron, getting a lot of loft. It dropped to the right of the pin, bouncing once straight up and coming down to rest at the place where it had first hit.
I had hoped to be out of the daze, but once again the ball shrank away to almost nothing and the club felt too loose and limber in my hands. I swung and found myself looking up, like any dub. The club edge apparently bit into the ball right at the middle. It rolled, and rolled, and rolled. It rolled up a little isthmus of grass between two bottomless traps, rolled across the green, and came to rest on the far edge, a bit closer to the pin than Billy’s was.
Half the gallery, who knew the game, roared with laughter. The other half applauded, wondering what those jerks were laughing at. I surprised a grin on Billy’s face.
“That ought to break up the buck fever,” he said.
“A little child shall lead them,” I said. “Next time I’ll bounce off a horseshoe in the rough.”
My confidence was back and suddenly it was a game, a good game played out under the clean sun, with the smell of moist grass, the click of club-face on ball, the white perfect parabola of a pitch to the green. My putt went down for the bird and Billy, after long consideration of the roll, dropped his.
At the end of eight I had a stroke on him. He got a bird on the ninth to my par and half the morning was over with a pair of thirty-fours posted.
I guess playing him even on the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth did too much for my head size. The fourteenth is a long dogleg to the left and you have to get out there a good two fifty before you can make the turn with the green in view. A shorter ball, played to the right of the fairway, will put you far enough from the tall pines so that you can take a chance on cutting the corner. My drive was short and Billy was out there where he could see the green. I sat right in the middle of the fairway and the choice was up to me. I could play a long low iron and try to put enough tail on it to catch the roll and go around the corner down toward the green, or I could slam one over the trees.
My caddy, who had been glowing with pleasure at the way I was doing, had the iron half out of the bag.
“Four wood,” I said.
He turned and looked at the trees and then at me. He handed me the four wood without much enthusiasm. I tried so hard for loft, playing it well off my left foot, that I went under it a shade too far. I was higher than the trees, all right, but I wasn’t long enough, not by fifty yards.
We found it, still in bounds, in the bottom of a ravine, on a sand bank, with just the top showing over the slow-moving water. I walked up to the top of a knoll, looked at the green, with Billy’s ball sitting almost insolently four feet from the pin for a certain birdie, and trudged back down to my ball. The safe play was to belt it out onto the fairway for a safe pitch to the green and a certain five. So I tried to slam it over the knoll onto the green. The water and sand smothered it. It bounced on the top of the knoll and rolled down, still in the rough. The ball came out cleaner than I expected and I overshot the green, chipped back up for the fifth and took two putts for a fancy seven to Billy’s three.
“Rough,” he said.
“My fault.”
He took the four-stroke lead and built it into a six, coming home for the morning with a nice 69 to my one-over-par 75. Every time I thought of that fourteenth I wished I was standing in front of myself so I could kick myself in the stomach.
It seemed to me that I would be out of it entirely, because the odds were in favor of at least three of the men tailing me to come in with a low enough total to put me back in the final two, the two who would be all through.
I hung around, hoping against hope, watching the scores go up on the board. When Wilmer Fraiden’s six on the eighteenth went up to give him a 78 for the round and a total of 220 as against my 216, I had a flutter of hope. If anybody else was going out, it had to be me or a pro named Forrester who had gone into the morning round with a total of 143 and who wasn’t being any ball of fire. As the scores came in and were posted I was getting dizzy from the mental arithmetic. With two holes to go he needed a pair of fours to tie me at 216. The first four went up. Now if a three went up on the board, I was all done. I could see the eighteenth green, ringed around with spectators. The boy with the chalk reached up to the board as the crowd broke up. He wrote a nice round fat five and I was in the afternoon round by one stroke.
I took a look at the other scores. Bobby Broom had taken a 71 for 201 and Steve Corning had banged out a 65 to tie him. Rick Lorry, with his 69, was in second place with a 202. Sixty-six Clyde was in third with a 204, two strokes behind Rick, with Billy Ruff breathing down his neck with a 205. The man who had gone into the morning with the highest gross, 144, a man named Branders from Tennessee, had put together threes and a few fours for a whistling 63 to make him fifth with a 207. Lambertson, the pro who had gone in with 142, one stroke over me, shot a 66 for a 208 to place sixth. And there I was with my 216, eight strokes behind him, in the seventh slot. With the tie for first, that made up the eight for the afternoon round.
To keep the gallery split, it was the custom for the two men in the lead to head up different foursomes. Before lunch the officials called the eight of us into one of the club rooms, wrote six names on slips of paper and put them in a hat for Bobby Broom and Steve Corning to draw alternately.