Behind me I could hear the excited low tone of the radio announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve just heard one of the strangest challenges in tournament golf! Harry Crebson, the big blonde ex-G. I. who has been burning up the course has just told that grand old man of the game, Jimmy Ratchelder that he was going to—”
I moved away. Crebson had just placed himself in a spot where he would be either a hero or a bum. The odds were against him. Mo man can predict his own score. Jimmy looked at him with open mouth. Crebson grinned and walked away.
Suddenly I realized that he had promised a three on the par five ninth. Five hundred and eighty-nine yards. Crebson teed up, waggled the club head, grinned at Jimmy and said, “Watch this three, friend!”
Once again the drive was tremendous. I estimated it at three hundred and fifteen yards. Maybe three twenty. On his second shot, with roughly two hundred and seventy yards to go, Crebson raised a towering spoon shot that dropped dead on the green. Jimmy was just over the green with his third shot, a number six iron sunk his shorter putt and took a five.
Crebson said, “Say! You better watch those extra strokes. With the 33 I’m going to get on the second nine, you can’t afford any. Right now you need a 3 to tie the match.”
While the tense gallery watched, Crebson linked four birdies and two pars on the first six holes of the second nine. Jimmy, pushing a little, managed to get four pars and two birdies. That left Crebson four strokes up for the round and three strokes up for the match. Three holes to go.
On the sixteenth tee Crebson stretched and yawned. “Well, Jimmy I can relax from here on in. I need three pars to get my 33 for a total 67. You need three birdies to tie. Two birdies and a par to lose.”
The sixteenth is a dogleg with a shallow bend just halfway down the fairway. Crebson drove over the brush and the yell from the gallery told us that the ball was on. Jimmy addressed the ball and began to tremble. He glanced at Crebson and then at the fairway and back at the ball.
His drive hit the ground thirty yards from the tee, bounded high in the air and came to rest about a hundred and forty yards out.
“I think you looked up,” Crebson said.
With the match obviously lost, Jimmy settled down, took a par on the hole and birdied the last two.
I was weak from the strain. Crebson looked completely unruffled. I watched Lovelord and Tommy come in. Tommy seemed to be completely loosened up. I guess that once the money was out of his grasp, he had forgotten the tightness.
The cup and the cash was waiting just off the eighteenth green. The cameras popped as Crebson accepted, after waiting around long enough to make certain he couldn’t be caught by any of the boys plugging their way home with miracle scores for the last round.
After Lovelord holed out I walked over to him and said, “Third money?”
He chewed the edge of his mustache. “Fourth,” he said disconsolately.
“How come?”
“Tommy, blast him! Sank four approaches. Home with a bloody 66 for a 281 against my 282.”
And that was it. Crebson took the big money and Ratchelder took second. Tommy was in for the $500 and Lovelord took fourth.
Third money in a tournament like Southland meant that my hundred bucks was a good investment. Our spread would say that three out of the four big money winners in the Southland had used Miramar equipment. Tommy would make some extra dough out of his third place win.
I was particularly intrigued by the way he had come in so completely relaxed. When the prizes were given out, I edged closer.
Jimmy Ratchelder had gotten over the effects of the ride that Crebson had given him. He was his suave pink self again.
When Tommy got his prize, Ratchelder came over. He didn’t shake hands in the customary way. He merely said, “I trust you’ll be in our other tournaments, Mr. Sukiaki. I hope to have the pleasure of playing with you again.”
The crowd knew what was up. Everybody seemed to hold their breath. Crebson, hemmed in by celebrity hunters, elbowed out of the pack and drifted closer, a worried look on his face.
He didn’t have to look worried. Tommy glanced toward him and smiled. It was a smile that said Tommy had caught on to what Crebson had done for him.
He switched the smile to Jimmy Ratchelder. The smile turned into a wide grin. In a high voice, almost a falsetto, he said, “Name not Sukiaki. Name isss Suragachi. Hope to play again with honorable Ratcheldersan. Hear you make miserable shot on sixteenth hole. Hisssssss. So sorry!”
Jimmy, his pink turning to a deep red, went blundering off into the crowd.
I knew right then that neither Crebson nor I had to worry any further about Tommy Suragachi.
Sometimes a tournament will do that for a man.
