Mulligan: On being a hack golfer

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Author: Matt Condon

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On being

a hack golfer

M AT T C O N D O N

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For Kate and for Finnigan, in anticipation of our first game as father and son, with all my love

First published in 2007 Copyright © Matt Condon 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Condon, Matthew (Matthew Steven), 1962- . Mulligan : on being a hack golfer. ISBN 978 1 74114 793 3. 1. Golf - Tournaments - Queensland - Humor. 2. Golfers Humor. 3. Golf - Humor. I. Title. 796.352620207 Illustrations by Andy Joyner Set in 11/14 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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mulligan (n. golf) a shot replayed without penalty, permitted only in unofficial games Macquarie Dictionary

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1. The Tears of Maroochy

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n my younger and more vulnerable years, I thought we would play golf together even when we were old men. Until that early spring at Coolum when it all fell apart. At the start of that final round at the resplendent Hyatt Regency course, fashioned by that terrible poet but wonderful golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Junior, we were, unwittingly, three Gatsbys standing at the first tee. We couldn’t know that by the 18th hole, our regular golfing days as a trio of hacks would be over. Like a sudden and inexplicable death in the family all of it—the years of pleasure, agony and intimacy—would be snatched away from us. A favourite uncle, swept off by the grippe. We did not know, as Nick Carraway had known of Gatsby, that ‘it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night’.* * First, a footnote on the footnotes. They are the ‘mulligans’ of literature, the opportunity for a free swing, so they shall be employed forthwith. Second, having read The Great Gatsby two dozen times, it has only occurred to me now that by citing those rolling ‘dark fields of the republic’, Carraway may have been referring to a golf course. 1

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By the time Farquharson (or Fark) had pulled up his mismatched socks on the tee at the first hole, not far from the resort course’s glorious Gone with the Wind-style carriageway dappled with coins of shade, teed up his sparkling new K-Mart Slazenger B51 ball,* blown his cheeks in and out a few times to our chagrin, saluted the brow to check the distance of the foursome ahead of us and duly shanked into the figs not seventy metres down the left of the fairway, he was already being borne inexorably into the past.† Likewise The Dog, aka Big Dog, aka El Tee Bee Dee Eee (or LTBDE—Let the Big Dog Eat), all six foot three of him, shirt collar turned up, shorts creaseless, each club in his bag happily wearing its own individual woollen hat, except for that of his Bertha (or namesake Dog, as he called it) which, that morning, he unleashed on the opening fairway with his usual gusto. The Dog had argued that it was right and proper on this, the final golfing day of our Bloke’s Week, for us to tee off from the championship black markers. This had been greeted by the usual guffaws, pffshaws and objections, to which we received the expected response from an educated man of fine taste, quick wit and courteous disposition, ‘You’re both soft cocks.’ * It is exciting—well, sort of—to witness what Farquharson pulls out of his ball bag. He is, by definition, a ‘scrounger’, perhaps a by-product of his Scottish genes. He will happily delay play to wade into an artificial lake in search of a ball. Thus, his ball bag is a lucky dip of other hacks’ discards, complete with company logos and personal flourishes. He once pulled out a 1940s Dunlop Federal, studied it with the care of a jeweller, breathed good luck on it and teed away. . † Carraway’s love interest in The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker, is a professional golfer. In the film starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, Baker, played by the wonderful Lois Chiles, dislodges a ball half-buried in a sand trap. ‘At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken.’ Jordan Baker, although sartorially more elegant, and a woman, has much in common with Farquharson. 2

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THE TEARS OF MAROOCHY

The untrained ear, though, heard, ‘Your socks.’ This was The Dog’s way. He murdered language by simply exhausting it with his unceasing velocity. Just as he of the Wi-Fi generation murdered electronic equipment, car tyres, speedboat motors and go-kart chassis. The Dog was permanent motion, and all of us hung off the tail of his giddy comet. (Often, in the wake of The Dog, Farquharson would be heard to utter, ‘My giddy aunt!’, thus underlining his generation.) That early morning at the Hyatt, with the sun a beautiful pale saffron, and the deliciously drunken swathes of cart tyres cutting through the fresh dew ahead of us, we ordered Farquharson to take the honour of the opening tee-off. After all, he had won our interminable Trivial Pursuit tournament concluded just the evening before at our rented apartment in Cotton Tree. With a group of elderly gentlemen waiting behind us, and the course marshal sitting in his little Gilligan’s Island hut abutting the tee, it was Farquharson’s greatest nightmare, thus the shank.* The Dog’s Precept, however, launched from the tee as a high-velocity bullet would spin in slow motion out of the muzzle of a Glock, à la Martin Scorcese, sailing over the little pond with its nasty but aesthetically pleasing thicket of reeds and down the centre of the fairway. The Dog issued his traditional first-hole mantra, made famous at the US Masters by Freddy Couples. ‘Oh yeahhhhh, baby,’ he crooned, lovingly caressing the phrase and giving it a coital musicality that did not belong on a golf course. There was not a word from the posse of respectable elderly gents waiting patiently in their carts, this Mount Rushmore of a foursome, yet I thought I * It was, I knew, The Dog’s revenge. Fark had somehow overtaken us in that deciding game, steadily filling his plastic orange pie with pieces, sweating profusely, strangely silent. He had taken the game with a question on Pyrex crockery. It had infuriated The Dog, and exasperated me, that Fark could know about the history of Pyrex. 3

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detected a weary disdain for The Dog’s ebullience, an involuntary wiggle of some thicket-style eyebrows. The strictures of the gentleman’s game held fast, at this point at least. I, too, had no inkling that something between the three of us was coming to an end. I took the tattered grip of my three iron (having been frightened off drivers more than two years earlier, and still unable to return to them, as a jilted lover may never be able to go back to the restaurants, bars and park benches—the plain geography—of his shattered romance), and teed off happily. I thankfully cleared the reeds, and my shot withered safely to the right of the fairway, a ball that lazily made its way through the diamond dew without spectacle or shame. It was the sort of unremarkable ball that reminded me of the response people often gave, when confronted by the inexplicable and murderous acts of a neighbour, ‘He was very quiet. He never bothered anybody. He kept to himself.’ ‘That’ll do, Mattyyyy,’ said The Dog, which was his Elephant Stamp to me, meant without condescension, an affirmation that I was, at least, free of trouble. For this, in front of the Mount Rushmore Gang and the course marshal, I was both balmed and grateful. At the start of a round, and in front of other silent men waiting at a tee, I always came away from that first stroke with a minor case of the shakes.* To get it over with, and to enter the great heaving, breathing monster of the course, was always a relief.

* Perhaps my jitters were the result of teeing off in front of the course marshal. I have had a terror of uniformed men of responsibility, charged with giving orders, keeping the peace and, quite possibly, depriving one of liberty, since my Great Shoplifting Incident when I was nine years old. I had pocketed a Freddo Frog at the urging of my friend Timothy Fletton, been caught and threatened with the full force of the law. I have trembled before authority figures ever since. I have also never been partial to Freddo Frogs. 4

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It was a glorious Friday. We had decided unanimously to take on the Hyatt without carts, to stretch out like good, oldfashioned, honest golfers, to feel the sun on our brows. Farquharson was his jaunty, diminutive self, pulling his buggy and raggedy golf bag up the manicured first fairway. He was as he always was, at the beginning of a round. He fizzed like a child-shaken soft drink bottle with the notion that this would be his day, the day of a personal best, and even an opening shank could not dampen his ebullient spirit. I liked that about Farquharson; with each round, he was a born-again golfer, fresh from the egg. The Dog, too, was as always, striding ahead to his beautifully positioned Precept, as if Farquharson and I did not exist. As if we were there, simply, to witness his golfing prowess, and to verify remarkable shot play that would become a personal narrative, later. (‘Tell him, Farquharson. You saw that second to the green on the par five, didn’t you? Tell him.’) We were The Dog’s Boswells. But this day at Coolum, in the Maroochy Shire, on the course which Mr Jones had described as ‘not designed to punish champions, just to find out who they are’, it may have served us well to brush up on the history of the imposing Mount Coolum, at the base of which nestled Mr Jones’ deceptively welcoming fairways and greens. Maroochy was a beautiful young Aboriginal woman who was stolen from her fiancé Coolum by his rival, Ninderry. Coolum showed great courage and rescued his bride-to-be, but was pursued by Ninderry who decapitated him with a boomerang. Coolum’s head rolled into the sea, and became Mudjimba Island. His torso is Mount Coolum. Poor Maroochy retreated inland and cried so much her tears became the Maroochy River. 5

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So there was blood in the soil and great sorrow beneath Mr Jones’ architecture. There was nowhere we might seek refuge, not even in Mr Jones’ spectacularly puerile epic ballads. (My particular favourite is this stanza from his 146-line poem ‘Thanksgiving’: ‘Our mother sang us so deep / We loved each other to sleep / U la u la la / Oh oh oh ah ahaaa.’) On that first fairway, our tee shots established the pattern of the round, just as in life we contain our patterns of DNA. The Dog opened beautifully, his game yet to be infected with the yips, thoughts of greatness or the notion that he could hit the longest drive in recorded history. This would come later. If the Coolum course was designed to derail anybody by tickling the champion out of him, it was The Dog. The champion in The Dog was always almost there, like the tingling you feel before a sneeze. And as with the tingle, his greatness could be sensed, through the noise and splutter, but never given shape. Farquharson was already on his way to his traditional selfcombustion on or around the 11th hole. He had not had time, thus far, to initiate his innumerable mulligans,* the mulligans we never saw. We always gave him at least two, but knew there were many of what we liked to call Farquharson’s ‘mulligans that dare not speak their name’, namely, the invisible strokes he masterfully embedded in his round. He was a Mulligan Magician. I was rusty, but agreeably so, and without the length of the woods of which I had grown fearful always on the catch-up. For a while, during my divorce from the woods, The Dog’s running * Our poet, Jones Jr, was once quoted in an interview as saying: ‘Both Bush (George W.) and his father like to play a fast round. Clinton likes his mulligans.’ It makes sense that Clinton would like ‘his mulligans’, just as he has liked cigars and women, for he is a man who loves life, and as the three of us often said—there’s life, and then there’s golf. 6

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joke was that I could complete any round with only a three iron and a putter. He was right, of course, but you never let The Dog know he was right. Letting The Dog know he was right released something within him, a flood of self-satisfaction. (Funnily, that moment had a sound to me—the popping of a boy’s swollen finger from a dyke.) But on that day, a second shot with my beloved three iron came off the blade with that rare and lovely deep reverberation that happens when the club kisses the ball’s sweet spot, and flew towards the green. ‘Shottttttt, Matty,’ said The Dog, which was as good as a handshake from the Pope, and The Dog proceeded to lob his ball on the green with grace and ease. ‘Shotttttt, Dog.’ Farquharson was still foraging like a bush turkey. ‘Fark, fark, fark,’ said he, scratching at the foot of a magnificent pale fig, its leaves waxy-green and as shiny as mirrors. His ball had landed between two exposed roots, as thick and smooth as a cyclist’s legs. At The Dog’s soundless suggestion, made only with his face and oh-so-familiar tics and gestures, I hurried over to monitor any possible infraction.* It was a terrible lie, between the cyclist’s legs, but Farquharson faced it bravely and, for a moment, with seeming success. He somehow lofted the ball out of the woody thighs and it was building height when, twenty metres down the fairway, it caught in the golden inflorescence of a palm tree. Nuts scattered, and the ball dropped dead beneath the damaged crown. I accompanied the already crestfallen Farquharson to his ball, resting among the red seeds, and studied the inflorescence—for a moment I saw it as the * When we played resort courses, The Dog and I kept an eye on Farquharson in those early holes like international observers at a potentially dubious foreign election. We eyed him casually and fairly for at least half the round to ensure at least some form of accuracy on the scorecard before we turned for home. 7

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broken crown of Farquharson, the Broken King of Amateur Golfdom. He faced up to the ball with a gritty grin. I crossed my fingers for him. He chipped it to the fringe of the green, and I patted our little king on the back. It was as it had always been, but not as it always would be. This would be our final round as golfing buddies of more than a decade’s standing. Within months I would have settled permanently in Queensland, Farquharson would have a new job and a new partner, and The Dog would be living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with his golf clubs one of the few artefacts from home in his luxurious apartment. Maroochy was weeping, but on that last day we simply did not hear her.

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2. A Giraffe in the Clubhouse

F

arquharson, as fussy as a hen,* had spent months organising our Sunshine Coast golfing week, right down to a detailed itinerary of resort courses, restaurants and a deep-sea fishing trip. On spec he had booked us a three-bedroom apartment in the Rive Royale at Cotton Tree. It was the knotted flaw in Nanna’s otherwise perfect cardigan. Farquharson had bombarded me with emails and Internet links to the luxuriant inner sanctums of the Rive Royale, drawing my attention in particular to the spa and sauna facilities where carefree young (or not so young) men of the world might entertain long-legged beauties, to the apartment bedrooms where all sorts of mischief might unfold, and even to the kitchen where he would be cooking for us (and any number of new female friends) his famous duck à l’orange. I had a sneaking suspicion that the duck à l’orange was somehow linked to the name Rive Royale. Sometimes, Farquharson’s dots were very easy to connect. * Picture here Mother Hen, replete with bonnet and little round spectacles, in the classic Foghorn Leghorn Loony Tunes series. 9

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There was no point in telling him that I was happily attached,* that I had a lifelong aversion to spas and the warm, soupy detritus of other human beings, and that I had not eaten an orange since my days in the Under-10 Ashgrove B’s Rugby team, sitting cross-legged, scarred-kneed and dirty-panted in a dustbowl paddock near some oil refinery tanks in greater Brisbane. He would not have listened anyway. Besides, I did not wish to get into a discussion about duck à l’orange with Farquharson. I had become entangled before in his wearying expositions on the history of food and his culinary mastery† of which, to date, there had been little tangible evidence apart from his hand-ground oily pestos and his penchant for sesame chicken wings. ‘You will note,’ Farquharson wrote, ‘that our building is opposite the fabled Waldorf.’ This was one of those jokes I decided not to try to untangle. I had no idea what he meant by his reference to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York until I arrived at the Rive Royale. Standing on the balcony, I had a resplendent view of a tacky, poo-brick block of units called, ho ho, the Wal-Dorf. What Farquharson’s meticulous research had failed to uncover about our apartment at the Rive Royale—and this despite having taken the full virtual tour on the Net—was, first of all, the inexplicable décor. When we opened the door to Number 19 on the third floor, all crude jokes and excitement at the thought of the golfing week ahead, we were greeted not with pale pastel paintings of sea horses and clown fish, * As was The Dog, albeit to several women at once, or so rumour had it, the source of the rumour being himself. . † Once, on a trip to southern Spain, Farquharson had ordered in his best Spanish a whole grilled fish. His Spanish proved unequal to the task. What arrived on a huge white plate was a squid sitting in a shimmering pool of its own dark ink, its eyes frozen in a look that can only be described as cantankerous. As were mine. 10

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A GIRAFFE IN THE CLUBHOUSE

seashell-encrusted ceramic lamps and seagrass mats, or wafting white nylon curtains, but by something more evocative of Carry On Up the Jungle. Here, in the old seaside village of Cotton Tree, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, we stepped into the interior décor equivalent of Dr Livingstone’s head. The Dog and I both stared at Farquharson. For a second, he became in our eyes a stereotypical native porter. Or perhaps a pygmy. ‘Mandingo!’ he shrieked, unabashed, striding past the imitation elephant-foot umbrella stand, the lubra-lipped, pointy-breasted wall sculpture, the zebra-striped welcome mat. Confused, I crept along the hallway with my luggage and clubs, wondering how we had found ourselves inside A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene, right there by the Pacific Ocean. I saw no yellow butterflies, but I was waiting for the tsetse flies to strike. Farquharson was whistling at the dark rear of the apartment, checking doors and taps and the lavatory flush. He would have hung up his clothes already and arranged his shoes neatly at the base of the wardrobe. Standing like a sentinel beside the sliding doors on to the veranda was a six-foot-tall wooden giraffe with geometric patterns and childishly drawn flowers burned into its wrinkled tan hide with what might have been a branding iron. Its large, bulging shell pasta eyes stared out at the street and, across the way, the Wal-Dorf. Someone had bestowed on it long black eyelashes which gave it a fey, genderless air. Somewhere beyond the palm fronds and a rhinoceros magazine rack (disembowelled and shovelled out from the top down, its guts now a clot of thumbed Australian Women’s Weekly and New Idea magazines) and the bongo-drum coffee table with a cigarette singe in its skin, I could hear Farquharson breaking into a refrain from Paul Simon’s African phase. He would have to be restrained immediately. I cheerfully 11

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imagined him strutting down the hall, stepping into a camouflaged trap and being slung skyward in a net made of handfashioned rope. Meanwhile, The Dog had gravitated to the ‘master bedroom’ with its en suite and wardrobe with mirrored doors, and before I could say ‘Tally Me Banana’ he had started unpacking his luggage on the expansive bed, and setting up his various mobile phone, iPod and camera chargers. By the time I’d put down my own bags Farquharson had squarely settled into the second-largest bedroom, unperturbed by the Carmen Miranda lampshade. Without a word being spoken, I had been relegated to the ‘children’s room’, with its two single beds overlooked by a spectacularly bad painting of a spectacularly weary water buffalo. It bore an uncanny resemblance to my great-aunt Pippa. I dumped my bags and retreated to the balcony with a warm beer we had brought and pondered this process of natural selection which, again, was as it had always been. The Dog planned to score, as he invariably did, or so he kept reminding us, and so required the largest playground. Farquharson, being between partners, took the next best thing, though anything upscale from the backseat of ‘Kevvie’, his old Kingswood, was a bonus. I was in a secure relationship, and thus the kiddies’ room and great-aunt Pippa. It was amazing, I thought, how quickly men work these things out, and without anything being said. It was the unwritten law of the jungle. In this instance, literally. While the boys settled in I pondered my vista of little Cotton Tree, right on the estuary of the Maroochy River. To the right, I could see the surf beyond a skirt of casuarina trees, and over the rooftop of the Wal-Dorf and other low apartment buildings I could just make out the caravan park with its splashes of orange and blue and green canvas between the gnarled trunks and heavy foliage of sporadic cotton trees. The caravan park 12

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sat at the mouth of the river, straddling estuary and ocean, and its gritty sand was constantly being nibbled at, sometimes bitten severely, by the Maroochy’s ever-shifting mouth. A little to the left was King Street, the 100-metre main drag of this one-time timber depot and fishing village. In the distance, across the estuary, were apartment buildings still under construction, dominated by cranes at the water’s edge. It was a snapshot of just about every small ocean-side village the length of the Australian east coast. The tourist dollar, boutiques, freshly ground coffee and box-like holiday units festooned with batik and cheap cane furniture straight off Asian container ships were moving in. Cotton Tree was no exception. I knew the Cotton Tree Caravan Park very well. For years it had been the site of consecutive Christmas holidays for my sister, her family and my parents. Living in Sydney, I would fly up to Maroochydore and spend a fortnight in a small, airless annexe off my folks’ caravan. We would ‘visit’ my sister’s site on the other side of the park, where her family spent a month in, comparatively, extreme luxury. My brother-in-law, a builder, applied his numerous skills to the construction not of a tent, but a seemingly unending Bedouin-style palace, with two bedrooms, a lounge room, a kitchen complete with sink and larder, and a dining room. It was there of an evening the family played canasta, and I drank bourbon in order to cope with playing canasta. I would have perhaps been more interested in the place if I had known some of its history, and the rich narrative of that ever-restless Maroochy River. The site of the van park on the estuary has always been a place of feasting, relaxation and celebration, first for the Gubbi Gubbi people many thousands of years prior to white settlement. Throughout the twentieth century it was the annual 13

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holiday destination for working-class locals and still it holds fast to its history as a playground, impervious to the modern world and crazed development whirling around it. In a delightful oral history held by the Maroochy Library, Emily Law (née Hamilton) recalled camping holidays at Cotton Tree as a child in the 1920s. ‘Oh, we’d go for a swim here and we’d go out to the surf and then we’d go back. We practically lived in our bathers,’ she said in 1985. And there was a boat used to go—Rolly Gill had a boat and he’d go from Cotton Tree up to the hotel. You’d hear them calling out, ‘Sixpence to the pub, this way for the pub, sixpence.’ Before we went, Mum would make our Christmas pudding, and she had a camp oven, and we’d have a chookie. Perhaps some ham, and [we’d] cook vegetables to go with them. Mrs Law remembered, too, the estuary flooding and sweeping through the camp sites. She said her younger brother Bill would beg their mother to pray for their safety, and she would reply, ‘I can’t, love, I’ve got to hold the tent on. You pray.’ Another former local, Rosemary Opala, developed a lifelong love of Cotton Tree—and the eponymous tree species—from her own childhood holidays there in the 1930s. She also remembers the ‘wild’ estuary and its constantly shifting mouth, a problem still vexing local authorities. It was a favourite, Cotton Tree, because it was sheltered, and on one side you had the river, and the other the ocean. I remember they had joy flights at the beach, one of those planes with the open cockpit. It was for the rich people— not us—and cost a fortune. About five pounds I think. One day I was swimming at the beach and ran out and 14

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nearly got run over by the plane. I got a good paddling for that, with my wooden sand shovel. Her most vivid memory, though, was of climbing the scratchy bark limbs of the ‘big old cotton tree’ by the water. Almost three-quarters of a century later, she says she can ‘still feel the branches beneath my little bare feet’. Rosemary’s tree is still there, by the river. I did not know then that in a few years time I’d be sitting on the balcony of an apartment looking over the van park’s eight acres along with a malformed giraffe, at the end of something. Despite the African effluvia, and the startled giraffe which couldn’t make up its mind whether it was starring in The Snows of Kilimanjaro with Gregory Peck and his gammy leg, or onstage at the old Les Girls in Sydney’s Kings Cross, Farquharson had, by chance, selected the perfect place for our farewell to—what? An era in our lives? Perhaps for Farquharson and me, both of similar age and in our early 40s, the end of youth? Maybe the end of a particular type of friendship? It was logical that friendship shifted too, like the elusive, unmappable place where the freshwater Maroochy River met the salted Pacific. Even now I cannot be sure where the end began. At the start of our week, everything was blooming in vivid, eye-catching yellows, like the morning’s new blooms on the cotton tree. But there, too, were yesterday’s orange-tan flowers crouched in the dark shadows. ‘Ayyyyyy-ooooo, eeee-aaaaaaayyyyy-oooooo, daylight come and I wannnna go hooooooome!’ bellowed Farquharson, already changed into one of his customary pyrotechnic shortsleeved shirts, khaki shorts that extended below his knees, and leather loafers. He held his arms wide, excited, an open stubby of beer at the end of one arm. 15

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He had switched on the ceiling fans, their blades shaped like banana tree leaves, and he started to dance. I suddenly smelled The Dog’s powerful aftershave issuing from the master bedroom, and thrown around the flat by the wobbly fan leaves. The week had officially begun.

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The Clubhouse Dialogues (I)

ME: I’ve been thinking about the word ‘hacker’, and it occurred to me that as members of the media, we are colloquially known as ‘hacks’. FARK: That’s true. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d been called a hack. DOG: I wish I had fifty cents for every time you’d been called a wanker. FARK: Since you’re the only one who calls me a wanker, you’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul. DOG: I have absolutely no idea what that means. FARK: Which is exactly why I said it. DOG: Which is exactly why you’re a wanker. ME: In golf, we are hacks. And in our profession, we are hacks. I can’t think of any other situation where that would occur. Where our jobs and our recreation are virtually one and the same. 17

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FARK: That’s a curious idea. DOG: I do believe you’re splitting hairs. FARK: From one who has so few hairs to split, that’s a big call. And why are you talking like a character in the Hound of the Baskervilles? DOG: In life, everyone can be a hack. ME: But the word has precise meaning for those of us in the media. Particularly newspaper journalists. Even those at the highest echelon of a newspaper—the pontificating columnists, the ‘colour’ writers, the sketch artists—can reasonably, indeed justifiably, be called hacks. As any golfer not of the professional ranks can be called a hack. But I can’t establish the link between the definition of ‘hack’ in relation to golf, which to my mind is associated with the sound of a club being used over and over in an attempt to strike the ball, thus the sound of hacking, and the definition in journalism, which pertains to the speed of production, yes, but does not carry the sound. It is the sound of ‘hack’ that is, perhaps, the only differentiating feature. FARK: Would you call the sound a hack? When the club goes through grass or undergrowth? I’d say ‘swoosh’ was more accurate. ME: Or ‘thresh’. FARK: The people I have known with a bad case of thresh. DOG: (Rolling his eyes.) I would disagree that you would call someone of a decent handicap a hack. How could you call a 10-handicapper a hack? FARK: What is the definitive line above and below which one becomes a hack? Nobody has ever set the line. 18

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THE CLUBHOUSE DIALOGUES (I)

DOG: It’s all relative. Someone on the professional tour might call anyone with a 10-handicap a hack. And those in the magic 10 and below zone would call anyone above 10 a hack. I hover around 11. I do not consider myself a hack. I am on the line. I walk the line. FARK: To a professional you are a bone fide hack. The hack’s hack. Anything above scratch, bada bing, bada boom— hacker. ME: Bada bing, bada boom? FARK: It’s from The Sopranos. Tony Soprano plays golf. A lot of the gangsters play golf. Golf is central to The Sopranos. They settle their beefs on the course. They decide who’s going to get whacked and who’s not going to get whacked. The golf course is the neutral field of diplomacy for gangsters. ME: Did you say ‘settle their beefs’? DOG: And you, my dear Farquharson, as a tabloid journalist and sub-editor, with an official handicap that hovers around 36 would have to be a hack’s hack’s hack. In short, a wanker. FARK: I would have to see official verification of your claim to be off 11. You have been ‘hovering around 11’ for several years now, and yet, your worship, I have not seen a scintilla of supporting evidence in relation to this claim. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting argument, Dog. There are many journalists of my acquaintance who would argue violently that they are not traditional media ‘hacks’. ME: But if those near the top of the profession can be categorised as a hack, then what, to them, is their professional level? PGA qualification? A novelist who writes for a newspaper? 19

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FARK: No, no, no. Novelists who write for newspapers are worse hacks than journalists who just hack away without a book behind them. All journalists know they can write books but they choose not to because that is the worst sin of a journalist, to show off with a novel. A novel is airy-fairy stuff and against the ethos of true journalism. Anyone can make things up in a book. ME: To be a journalist AND a novelist, then, is to be beyond a 36-handicap? FARK: Way beyond. It is off the scale. It’s so far out there you may as well be playing a different sport altogether. DOG: Graham Greene must have been a very, very bad golfer. ME: And George Orwell. FARK: And John Updike. Look at Updike. A terrible, terrible golfer. He is living proof of this theory. But what of novelists who have never been journalistic hacks? ME: Like . . . J.K. Rowling? DOG: I don’t think they play golf, the people in this category. I have never heard of J.K. Rowling playing golf. FARK: I’m surprised you know of J.K. Rowling. I was not aware she wrote children’s books about Formula One motor racing, go-kart racing, jet skis, blonde floozies and pornographic movies. DOG: Oh, ho bloody ho. FARK: I think we’re straying from the point here. ‘Hack’ can have many uses. You can hack your way through a forest. That makes you a hack. An old horse is a hack. DOG: How is your mother? 20

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THE CLUBHOUSE DIALOGUES (I)

FARK: You can hack up phlegm. DOG: Dot Hack 1 and 2 are video games. I know them well. FARK: There you go. You can be a computer hack. ME: You see? Journalists are not the only hacks. Just as oranges are not the only fruit. DOG: Serial killers. They can hack bodies into little pieces. Just as Farquharson can hack 18 holes into many, many little pieces. The Ted Bundy of golf. FARK: I am proud to be a hack. DOG: You owe yourself a dollar, you wanker. FARK: And you’re poorer by fifty cents. ME: I do believe this is the first time in the history of our game where Farquharson, in the vicinity of a golf course, has got his mathematics right.

21

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3. Origin of the Species

B

y the end of the first hole of that final round our trio had neatly settled itself into its familiar pattern—together, we were the Russian Babushka dolls of amateur golf. The Dog had comfortably slotted away a neat par with a simple 10-foot putt.* I put together a warmly pleasing one-over with a tricky gentle left-to-right twenty-footer. Farquharson, despite his early entanglements with the fig limbs and the palm tree crown, scratched out a respectable two-over six. Nothing had changed about the dynamic of our game. The Russian Dolls. Dog, par; me, one over; Farquharson, double bogey and beyond. The Dog rushed to the next tee before Fark had removed his ball from the hole and I noticed, with a certain degree of alarm, that my diminutive friend had taken off his glove to execute the putt. He had tucked it into his rear trouser pocket but four of the saggy glove fingers were dangling free. This did not augur well, I thought. Fark had put his cards on the table. He was taking this game very, very seriously.

* It is another aspect of the game’s arcane nature that while the length of a hole can be measured in metres in various parts of the world, a putt is always measured in feet. 22

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ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

Gone, too, was the bouncy bonhomie. ‘Nice recovery, old cock,’ said I, and he nodded earnestly, acknowledging the compliment, before returning the putter to his bag. We hauled our buggies together to the foot of a stone staircase that led up to the elevated second tee (blue marker; 316 m). The granite tee marker could be seen through the shadows and vines like some archaeological head out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Both of us could hear, out of sight, The Dog practising his drive. ‘Beautiful course, hmm?’ I said to Farquharson, but he was somewhere else, on another plane, conjuring a ‘zone’, a peaceful, perfect glade of concentration, in which he sat, like a tartan-trousered, Niblick-gloved Buddha, aligning his universe. From the tee, the shortish fairway revealed itself as one of those magnificent optical illusions that so many good golf courses can produce. We could see the fluttering flag atop the pin in the distance, but in between were three folds of grassy earth, each sloping in the opposite direction to its predecessor, and for a split second one felt a little disoriented, a tad drunk. The vista threw both balance and perspective out of whack. It was as bemusing as one of Mr Trent Jones’ poems. Farquharson stood directly behind The Dog just as he was about to swing. He scratched his chin. He was going to study The Dog’s reading of the hole and imitate it. Knowing what was about to happen, I put my hand over my eyes. To compound the impending disaster, I could sense beyond the trees the Mount Rushmores approaching their balls on the adjacent first fairway. ‘Don’t,’ The Dog hissed, his club face poised at the teed ball. Farquharson stopped scratching. ‘DON’T,’ snapped The Dog, and Farquharson skittered sideways. Once before, in a replica moment, they had almost come to blows. 23

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And just as The Dog unleashed The Dog, one of the Rushmores emitted a tremendous octogenarian hack that in turn sent an sulphur-crested cockatoo shrieking out of the crown of a neighbouring tree and in a wet, phlegmy, feathery and earpiercing moment, The Dog’s ball sailed off to the right and into a hidden water hazard. The Dog stood, frozen, the club held at an angle across his back where his swing had come to rest. I knew he was considering several options. He could beat up an old man nursing the tail end of an unseasonal spring cold. He could chase a cockatoo. Or he could quietly stoke a potbelly of rage against Farquharson for the rest of the game. Returning to his buggy, he chose to squat by the potbelly. To make matters worse, his elfin nemesis strode to the tee, orchestrated a single practice swing, and belted a clean, straight drive 220 metres down the very centre of the giddy, wobbly fairway. In the manner of television professionals, he picked his tee out of the earth before the ball had come to rest. It was kerosene to The Dog’s flame. Jittery with the interplay, I plonked the ball into the woods to the right, short of the water. I rushed to my battered and already weary old golf bag and buggy ensemble. I had long been an observer of my golfing buddies’ games, and always assumed they were locked in some strange, awkward and interminable competitive dance. They too watched my game, such as it was, from a three-dimensional perspective. Perhaps one or both of them, on occasion, were in competition with me. I was not interested in beating The Dog. It had never happened, and probably never would. Golf is a game with infinite levels of talent and ability. It is like the world’s most intricate mathematical equation, suffused with angles and measurements and speeds. The slightest flaw results in certain 24

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defeat. The most delicate of ingrained habits, as imperceptible as a blonde baby’s eyelash, can afflict a game for life. Each hack carries it—a virus, with varying debilitating symptoms. I have thought of this virus many, many times. The golf virus. It is usually passed down through the male line. It was thus with Farquharson, The Dog and myself. Each of us had been infected in our early teens, in three separate cities along the eastern seaboard, by significant men in our lives. Golf has about it an air of privilege. It was not thus with us, but three children from working-class families were granted a window to the game. Perhaps it represented a better future, an ideal to strive for, or a place, when reached, where we could rub shoulders with folk of a more superior cut of cloth. I don’t think so. I suspect we were being introduced to a parallel universe, one of camaraderie and nature, of pure and simple pleasure, an alternative to the more horrible world one was forced to live in. Perhaps we were being offered a balm for the rigours of life, one we could reach for, as adults, when things became too complicated. The older I get, the truer this seems.* The three of us shared other aspects of our golfing heritage— all of us had started early, experienced a long, golf-less void in the middle and returned to the game many years later with calcified skills. (With the exception, perhaps, of The Dog, whose vigorous attraction to go-karts and the opposite sex had kept him limber.) Golf is not a game you just pick up when you feel inclined. That great golf philosopher Wodehouse knew this too. In Brisbane in the 1960s and early 1970s, our family lived in a then newish suburb called, curiously, The Gap. It sounded geographically perilous, but was in fact so named because it was

* The great humorist and golf writer P.G. Wodehouse understood this. ‘Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.’ A Mixed Threesome (Herbert Jenkins, 1922). 25

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where two of the city’s low hills almost met. From a distance, these hills appeared folded over each other. On closer inspection, a little S-bend snuck between them, and thus The Gap. We lived off Payne Road. This seemed appropriate at the time, for a doctor lived at the top of it, and there was a golf course at the bottom. This was the Ashgrove Golf Club, a hilly, heavily treed and beautiful little course that spread across the foot of one of the aforementioned hills. Some of my earliest memories are of my father returning from the club on a Friday night, or after a round on Saturday, his neck pink after a sunny eighteen holes, and bringing back golf-related stories just as he brought back grass-stained golf balls and wooden tees in his royal blue imitation leather golf bag. Looking down the hill from our front veranda, you could see some of the early holes through the crowns of gum trees and stands of whiskery bamboo. I remember watching groups of players, small as coloured ants, inching over the manicured landscape, and always wondering—is that Dad? My father was a young man then, with a young family, and he was trying to make his way in the world as best he could with twin babies and a wife at home and a mortgage. The club, I see now, was an important part of that journey. He met other young men there, men who were, if you like, at the same train station at the same point in their lives. And for a few hours a week, while nappies flapped on Hills Hoists in backyards throughout the neighbouring hills, these men could escape to somewhere else. The countless golfing stories and anecdotes about human nature that my father brought home after a round were, in their way, as powerful as nursery rhymes. They have stayed with me all my life.* * Is it surprising that in innumerable golf books, stories relating to golfing anecdotes are invariably referred to as ‘tales’? 26

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What is it about golf that nurtures so many stories? It is a cradle of suburban myths and legends. To this day I can still picture the old man who dropped dead on the 17th, or was it the 18th, green at Ashgrove, or the car left by a member one Friday evening in the nearby car park without its handbrake on, which plunged into the course’s little creek, or the furious wife who, tired of the number of hours her husband clocked up at the club, set fire to his bag and clubs on their front lawn.* Perhaps it was the popularity and omnipresence of Americans Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in those heady years in the 1960s and early 1970s that lit the golf burner under so many amateurs around the world, but I like to think my father and his golfing buddies were inspired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd Jr, the first golfer on the moon. Watched live on television by countless millions around the world, Shepherd—a part of the Apollo 14 mission—snuck a six iron† into his cumbersome suit and produced it on 6 February 1971, getting off three shots and hitting himself into golfing immortality. It’s not difficult to imagine hacks across the planet watching Shepherd fire those shots and, like all true amateurs, thinking

* My father told me all these golfing nursery rhymes by the time I was 10. I was too young to understand the sexual undercurrents, the strange architecture of marriage and sport, but it was there. In golf, men come together, and when men come together, sex or a discussion of it is not far away. My father still chuckles at the memory of one Friday night at the club when an enraged young wife entered the clubhouse with a dining tray laden with a complete meal, including salt and pepper shakers and a vase with a single flower. Without a word to her inebriated husband she dumped his dinner in front of him, and left. . † Shepherd’s co-walker on the lunar surface that day was Edgar Mitchell. He recalled in an interview: ‘The Apollo 14 mission was underway when I first learned that Alan had brought the club head on board. He didn’t have a real golf club. What he did was take the club head and fit it on a piece of metal. I believe it was a tool having to do with the thermonuclear generator. An engineer helped him, I believe, build a little slot to hold the club head’. . 27

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‘I could have hit it better than that’. Mission Control certainly had mixed feelings about Shepherd’s golfing prowess. Hitting with one arm in the bulky suit, the first strike was a non-event. ‘He topped and buried it on the first swing,’ a NASA observer commented.* NASA declared the second shot, which travelled about a metre, a slice. The third ball went several hundred metres in every golfer’s dream—moon gravity.

Some golfers thrive on the presence of other players. Some are the opposite, imploding under the gaze of others. I fit into the latter group. I shiver at the sight of groups banked up at the first tee of a busy course. Be it in golf or other areas of life, as a male I don’t like being scrutinised by other males in matters of maleness. The Dog, on the other hand, loves it. The Dog feeds off it. He knows he is better than most hacks, and those he suspects he might not be better than have to prove it. If he were of the ocean, The Dog would be a Grey Nurse. Farquharson shares with me a rickety belief in his talent, and observers beyond our trio tend to white-ant that belief. We are brothers, Farquharson and I, in this respect. To extend the marine analogy, in the great ocean of hacks, Farquharson and I have adopted the philosophy of the Spotted Pipefish, preferring to blend unnoticed into the seagrass. Try as I might, I cannot find the source of these differences in our friendship or in our golfing pedigrees. The Dog first hit a ball with his beloved one-armed grandfather on the delightful and testing little course at North Ryde, Sydney. Having lost his limb in World War II his grandfather * The fact that Shepherd hit a second ball immediately also makes him the first, and thus far only, taker of a mulligan on the moon. 28

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did not play, but gently steered and coached the young Dog around North Ryde’s up-and-down fairways. ‘To say I was a natural would be a lie,’ The Dog recalls. ‘Come to think of it, to say ANYONE is a natural at golf would be a lie. Pop can’t actually play but he walked around the course with me, told me what to do and helped me with etiquette. I remember that I had to tee up on the fairways and some old bastard yelled at me hysterically when I took some MASSIVE divot out. Grandpa told him I was learning and to shut his mouth.’ Farquharson too was introduced to the game by his grandfather, but the experience was not as pleasant. They played with a raggedy collection of clubs on a second-rate course on the outskirts of Melbourne, and Grandpa Farquharson was more interested in the local mushrooms than the game. (Poor Farquharson’s clubs are still a mélange of hand-me-downs and adopted urchins, but he’s very fond of mushrooms.) He had an annoying habit of greeting his grandson in a boxer’s stance, and thumping his upper arms, a belligerence which extended to the golf course, where little Farquharson was constantly ridiculed and berated for bad shots. I don’t remember the first time I picked up a club, but I do recall being enrolled in lessons at the Ashgrove course. Now I only remember cold blue dawns and a line of future champions driving and whacking iron shots under the tutelage of an anonymous instructor. My lessons on those winter mornings came to nothing, but there was some evidence that I might at least be able to hit a decent ball if I stuck at it, and so began a lifelong tradition of inheriting my father’s old clubs whenever he moved on to a new set. Now, I would never consider buying a new set of golf clubs for myself, for using my father’s old clubs connects me to him 29

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in essential and poignant ways. I can pull a club from the bag and know that my father’s hands were responsible for the wear and tear on its rubber grip. I can study the little chips and scratches on the club heads and wonder what trouble he had found himself in, and how he had got out of it. Often, I find pencil nubs and forgotten tees in the bag, all of which are features on a small map of my father. Golf can be an emotional rollercoaster. Over the years our threesome, for all the countless belly laughs, backbiting and satirical ruminations of the day, had shared many moments of heart-wrenching honesty, sadness and poignancy about life and love and death. The game of golf is riddled with history and lore, as is life, and everyone who plays is somehow loosely connected to this great, sprawling tree that has its roots on the east coast of Scotland where it all began more than five centuries ago.* Yes, golf can make one sentimental, even romantic, but this was not the case on that second hole at the Hyatt, with The Dog about to pop a rivet, Farquharson nurturing a sudden smugness that, if allowed to grow, would destroy his round, and me quietly bringing up the rear, avoiding any form of conflict. How competitive men are and always have been, I thought, deeply and philosophically, the thought gone just as quickly as it had arrived, like a spring dandelion head, as I quietly toed my ball across the blood-red ‘out of bounds’ line splashed across the leaves and mulch,† and punched a low five iron for the green. Thank goodness I was not that sort of golfer.

* I would rather hit a Precept than a pebble, as they did in those early days. How quickly the virus of the game took hold, as evidenced by King James II banning golf (and football) in 1457 because the locals—on the eve of an English invasion—were spending too much time on the links and not enough in military training. † My first mulligan that dared not speak its name. 30

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4. An Aside on the Mysteries of the Mulligan

F

arquharson is a curious fellow with an insatiable appetite for knowledge of all things, from barbecue tongs to the creation of the universe. In fact, the two notions have coalesced at least once—why, argued Farquharson, wouldn’t the big bang look like an overcooked rissole? He has his best thoughts standing over and toying with a mound of sizzling onion rings.* Despite having taken too many mulligans to count in his golfing career, it was years into our golfing relationship before he stood, mid-fairway, his eyebrows raised, and out of the blue demanded, ‘Why is a mulligan called a mulligan anyway?’ * It is best not to argue with Farquharson about barbecues or anything barbecuerelated. There is something about the barbecue that rings a primeval gong within him, and no matter where he is, or in whose company, he will naturally gravitate towards a barbecue, 44-gallon drum or ashy pit. He can turn up at a party in the home of someone he doesn’t know, and end up manning an apron and cooking for a hundred people. He displays great panache before the barbecue, and once in control is as protective of his kebabs and rumps as is a lioness of her cubs. 31

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It was a good question, coming from Farquharson. It was like an amphetamine addict staring at a sprinkling of tablets in his palm and wondering what they were and how they got there. ‘Dog!’ I shouted ahead. ‘Where does “mulligan” come from?’ ‘Pelicans?’ ‘A MULLIGAN!’ ‘Who gives a shit,’ said The Dog. Such queries did not interest The Dog on the golf course. Outside of its ambit, he was a very inquisitive young man. But on the course he was all action.* A ‘mulligan’ is a second shot, taken to replace a wayward or woeful first. It is a liberty usually agreed upon among friends. A ‘mulligan’ has no place in the official rules of golf or in official competition. In the United States it is also known as a ‘do over’, but I do not like this description of a mulligan. It reminds me too much of The Dog’s many late-night conversations about female conquests. The Dog was entitled to his female conquests and there is nothing a man pretends to enjoy more than hearing of a friend’s female conquests. But, in the great planetary system of male and female relationships, when you are no longer in the galaxy of female conquests, actual female conquests orbiting another man, even a close friend, can become a tad repetitive, even dull. Terra firma ‘do overs’ become uninteresting when you’re in zero gravity.

* The Dog often makes me think of Hemingway and his famous quote, ‘Never mistake movement for action’. I think Hemingway would have liked The Dog. They were both men of action, although as far as I can tell Hemingway was not a golfer. He did come up with one golf quote, which, despite repeated readings, remains incomprehensible. ‘The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.’ Write about what you know, Hemingway said. I don’t think he knew golf. 32

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AN ASIDE ON THE MYSTERIES OF THE MULLIGAN

The mulligan has also been called a ‘breakfast ball’ or ‘Sunday ball’, presumedly in reference to the rustiness of amateur players in the early morning and on the first shot of the day, or perhaps the laid-back nature of Sunday as a day in the week. After all, a Sunday is understood to be a ‘Day of Rest’. It is the one day of the week on which we are expected to relax. Indeed, some religions demand that nothing of an exertive nature take place. Around the world, Saturday is usually the day for club competition among members. So for club members or competitive types, perhaps Sunday is technically a ‘lazy’ golf day, one on which mulligans can be taken willy-nilly, and with derring-do. To the hack, though, ANY day on which golf is played is exertive and exhaustive. There is no Sunday for the hack. On many occasions, we as a trio have referred to the mulligan as the ‘hangover freebie’, or the ‘Hello nurse! Ball’.* Often, Farquharson doesn’t call it anything, or ask for it; he simply strides briskly to his bag to retrieve another ball and hits away. He announces this mulligan, though, with a short, sharp, ‘Fark!’, as is his habit.† The Dog rarely requires a mulligan. In fact The Dog will frequently hit a perfect drive or pitch to a par three green, pull a ball from his pocket, and hit another, just to see if he can beat his own perfection. He has seen this on television somewhere. Or perhaps in the final

* We used ‘Hello nurse!’ simply to exclaim shock, surprise and embarrassment at such a bad shot. And again—surprise surprise—there are sexual undercurrents. Our saying’s exclamation component does, at least, have roots in the term’s original definition, as offered by Wikipedia: ‘Hello, nurse!’ was a popular catcall used during the heyday of vaudeville. One of many running gags used was the appearance of a voluptuous, suggestively dressed person wearing a nurse’s uniform. Upon her appearance, the main characters in the vaudeville sketch would call out, “Hello, NURSE!”’ † The Dog and I used secretly to refer to this as Farquharson’s ‘Crow Ball’. As we will see, secrets between playing partners is part and parcel of golf. In a foursome—two lots of two partners—this is clear by definition. In a threesome, the situation is infinitely more complicated. 33

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scenes of that Kevin Costner masterpiece, Tin Cup, where the hapless Ray blows his chance for immortality and victory in the US Open championship in his quest for personal perfection over mere fame and earthly riches. (I had never realised until now that Ray was a sort of golfing Buddhist, a state to which Farquharson also aspires.) In the end, of course, Ray gets to keep his honour and the girl. The girl bit would have appealed greatly to The Dog. This, then, despite its derivative qualities, is The Dog’s ‘non-mulligan mulligan’. In essence, the shot never existed. In many ways, the term ‘mulligan’ has similarly nonexistent roots. Nobody knows where the word, in the context of golf, actually originated. There are several theories. But they are mythical, or more akin to fairy tale, which seems entirely appropriate. Golf is a game of both mathematical precision and swirling legend. The High Court of world golf—the United States Golf Association (USGA)—suggests that the ‘story most widely accepted’ involves 1920s hotelier David Mulligan, part-owner and manager of New York’s Biltmore Hotel.* As the legend goes, he once hit a long but wayward drive, then teed up for an immediate ‘correction’ shot. His friends dubbed it a ‘mulligan’. Another story, again featuring David Mulligan, is that he once drove friends to one of his favoured clubs—the Club de Golf St Lambert, near Montreal. The road was so poorly maintained that he was ‘jumpy and shaking’ on the first tee† and was granted an extra shot, or ‘mulligan’. Believe it or not, there is a third myth attached to the increasingly annoying Mr Mulligan. Arriving late for a round * Spookily, F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his honeymoon night there on 3 April 1920, following his marriage to Zelda Sayre at the rectory of St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. If ever a marriage needed a mulligan, it was this one. † My own permanent affliction, precisely. 34

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AN ASIDE ON THE MYSTERIES OF THE MULLIGAN

of golf having slept in, a ‘frazzled’ Mulligan hit a poor first tee shot and was gifted a second. Frankly, all this sounds like a load of bunkum. It also sounds as if Mr Mulligan was a lousy golfer. To attract three separate myths regarding one of the lowest, most embarrassing and degrading terms in the history of the sport perhaps indicates he was a spectacularly lousy golfer. If any of the three hold a grain of truth. I doubt it. The tales of Mr Mulligan are too neat and convenient. My suspicion is the term came into irregular use, and then attached itself to his surname because they were one and the same and, conveniently, Irish. There is another theory which suggests the term came out of the abuse and jokes suffered by Irish Americans joining elite golf clubs in the early twentieth century, thus an Irish name came to symbolise bad play. There was, too, a John ‘Buddy’ Mulligan, who was renowned for re-hitting bad shots at Essex Falls County, New Jersey, although the fact that he was best known as ‘Buddy’ argues against him being the originator of the mulligan. Yet despite the term’s soupy origins, by 1949 it featured in P. Cummings’ Dictionary of Sports, which suggests that the word ‘mulligan’ had graduated from localised to wider use, from humorous regional slang into official terminology. How did this happen? What sent a regional golf joke about one man’s lack of skill rolling across Fitzgerald’s dark fields of the republic to every first tee from Rhode Island to Big Sur and into the printed pages of a sports dictionary? The Biltmore Hotel is no more. Nor are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mr David Mulligan or John ‘Buddy’ Mulligan of New Jersey. Yet ‘mulligan’ survives. A minor adjunct to our leisurely game. And in Farquharson’s case, his patron saint.

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5. Bags and Baggage

T

he night before that final round I had not seen the flaming palm tree just beyond our balcony at Chez Dr Livingstone as an omen. By the time we reached the quaint par three third tee at Coolum, however, it had become something of an apocalyptic vision of how our opening nine holes would unfold. After The Dog’s penalty shot from his unseemly water dunk on the prior hole, courtesy of The Parrot, The Cough and the Aggravating Farquharson, which resulted in a double bogey, and Farquharson’s miraculous par, courtesy of stiffing a seveniron approach to the green which never elevated itself higher than a centimetre above ground level and hopped and skipped its way to within two feet of the pin, a fiery and titanic battle royal loomed. I had carded a very creditable bogey, having nosed my ball back into play from deep inside the woods, then fired a blind boomer which produced a divot as big as a small Fijian island before slashing its way through fig tree leaves on its way to the lip of the green, but nobody acknowledged my prowess. The Dog and Farquharson had seriously locked 36

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horns, and had temporarily drifted into a matchplay frame of mind. Two, when I last counted, never went into three. So we came to the third hole all locked up at two-over apiece, I knew what The Dog was thinking. To be level with Farquharson was impossible, unimaginable. It was a nightmare. It was tantamount to breaking mirrors under a ladder, while carrying a black cat. This was a Hindenburg moment in golf. His fury had been replaced by unequivocal panic. It did not help that Farquharson was granted tee honours on the third hole. Farquharson had never, in living memory, been granted honours before today—a day that gifted him two. He stood on the tee, pinching some blades of grass and tossing them casually to test the direction of the breeze. It was too much for The Dog. And I saw now that this text had been prewritten, in the palm tree blaze the previous evening. We had planned to dine in nearby Mooloolaba, then savour some local pubs and bars. The Dog was behind closed doors, primping and pampering in preparation—a routine, we knew from experience, that could take several hours—so Farquharson and I had retired to the balcony, pulled up two chairs and a couple of beers and settled in to enjoy the dusk and the eerie volcanic plugs on the horizon. First, we smelled smoke. Then the head of the four-storey palm to the left of our balcony and its heavy, dry, whiskery undercarriage exploded into flame. Farquharson and I continued to sip our beers with idle amusement, and enjoyed the show. ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Yayus,’ said Farquharson. Very quickly a crowd gathered below. Passing cars slowed and passengers gawked. An elderly couple from the Wal-Dorf stood and watched, their hands held behind their backs. The 37

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flames intensified, and soon the palm’s large leaves were smouldering. Both of us could feel the heat against our faces. The giraffe stared out the window, unblinking. Farquharson slipped a foam jacket over his stubby, just in case. ‘Should we alert the authorities?’ I asked. Moments later we heard the wail of a fire engine in the distance. ‘Who’s smoking cigars?’ The Dog asked, arriving on the balcony in a rolling wave of spicy cologne. He stopped, the flames flickering in his eyes. ‘That’s one hell of a Cuban.’ The burning head of the tree, as spectacular as it was, provided less dramatic interest, however, than the manager of the Rive Royale, a tall, gangly gentleman in his fifties, of whom we had had several comic sightings yet no direct contact. We had only seen him in an old blue-striped shirt with a frayed collar, shorts pulled to an impossible height, long short socks and tennis shoes. He woke up the entire building each morning, as he cleaned the pool with peculiar passion. He did not exactly walk or run, but had a gait that fell somewhere in between, like the hop of an old grasshopper. He was a blur of perpetual motion, or at least bits of him were. You never saw him in toto, just a glimpse of a single shoe or a baggy shorts hem or his wild, combed-over grey hair flitting behind rubbish bins or into lifts or through the gaps in palm fronds. On the evening of the Great Fire, though, we saw too much of him. He hopped and flailed at the base of the tree, fired a water hose without sufficient pressure into the sky, neatly watering himself, flapped and fretted in and out of the gathering crowd. Sparks began to shower down on his immaculate little lawn. Farquharson puffed away on a cigarette. ‘Isn’t there a cocktail called the Flaming Palm Trees?’ ‘Never heard of it,’ said The Dog. ‘And I’ve savoured them all.’ 38

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‘With coconut or something? I’ve heard of it, too.’ ‘Listen to both of you. Like two old queens.’ ‘Not so old, are we darling?’ Farquharson leered at me. ‘It’s the Flaming Coconut Tree or something.’* The fire in our palm tree eventually burned itself out without the need for a fireman’s hose, and the crowds drifted off, leaving only the forlorn figure of the manager standing on his lawn, now singed and spotty as a leopard. He looked up at the smoking, charcoaled heart of his palm. It had been an omen, naturally. A portent. We were in for a combustible round at Coolum. It was The Dog, of course. When it came to golf he was a walking tinder-box. And there was no more effective match for his tinder than Farquharson. I had realised The Dog was serious about his golf when I learned, very early on, he was a bag-in-the-back-of-the-car man. No matter what vehicle The Dog was driving, his clubs were always with him. Bag-in-the-back-of-the-car men are in denial about their status in the golf pecking order. They are declaring, loudly, that they are most certainly not hacks, nor are they players off a scratch handicap. They fall somewhere in between, they are saying to you, and their immediate access to their bag lets you know they are on an upward trajectory. A golfer’s bag can say a lot about a person’s character. The Dog’s was the latest in golfing design and technology, meticulously maintained. It even had an odour of newness, if you cared to get that close to it, or were permitted to get that close. The Dog, too, always had new balls at his disposal, fresh from their little boxes, and purchased following a tip-off from his golfing contacts or the latest data from golf sites on the * We were both wrong. Our thoughts were circling an actual event—the worst nightclub fire in US history, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston on 28 November 1942. The death toll was 492. 39

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Internet. The Dog was similarly particular about his tees, gloves, divot forks, shoes, socks, hand towel, ball marker and pencils. The Dog was, and is, completely of the moment. He works in advertising. His grasp of the latest technological advances in any field, be it computers, mobile phones, or Formula One racing cars, is as encyclopaedic as it is frightening. The Dog always has the latest wire, aerial or ether connection radiating from his person, vehicle or home. As for me and Farquharson, our clubs were always somewhere in a garden shed, or under the house—depending on the house—or in the laundry with the mops and brooms. Our bags always needed a wipe before play. They carried the scars, splashes, knocks and scratches of the life that whirled around them. Within them were the perfectly preserved artefacts of the last game we had played, which could have been months before. Empty Gatorade bottles, old gloves, pencilled, undated score cards, empty triangular sandwich containers, perhaps a forgotten cigarette lighter, and balls that carried the grass stains of some distant fairway. Resting on buggies next to The Dog’s, our bags were like two dirty orphans being chaperoned by a very wealthy and beautifully dressed distant uncle. We could have propounded the adage that the bag doth not make the man, but frankly it was of no great import to either of us. It was, funnily, the same with our cars. While The Dog nipped around town in the latest Subaru, I enjoyed the creaky elegance of an old white Peugeot 504 complete with bung windows, rust spots and a nasty habit of occasionally smoking from the steering column. (Pffft. It was, after all, a French car. What did I expect?) I called it Percy. Similarly, Farquharson drove a vintage Holden—a 1978 Kingswood SL—Kevvie. A 40

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permanent resident on the cracked dash was a small wooden duck called Vivaldi, a gift to Farquharson as some sort of talisman, or feathered patron saint of travelling. For some reason, Kevvie was constantly being stolen and recovered. We theorised it was being used for assorted heists and other subterfuge activities. We were later proved correct. Kevvie was lifted and utilised, on one occasion, for transporting large blocks of stolen sandstone. When Kevvie was returned by police, it was littered throughout with stone crumbs which Farquharson was never able to get rid of.* Farquharson and I worked in the media. For some years we knew each other only as semi-familiar faces across the back rooms of assorted pubs and journalists’ bars in Sydney. When I went to live in London and write for the Sydney Sun-Herald, I was heading down an escalator into South Kensington station one morning just as Farquharson was heading up and out on the parallel escalator. We waved, shouted and somehow in that fleeting moment made arrangements to meet, and so it was in London that our friendship flourished. We had never played golf together. We had never discussed golf. I did not know if Farquharson played golf. Much later, when both of us were back in Sydney, it was The Dog who was our golf catalyst. I first met The Dog, through Farquharson, at our local watering hole—the ‘London Hotel’ in Balmain. We spent many, many pleasurable hours upstairs in the pool room there, hatching plans for books, films * There was, of course, the famous occasion when Kevvie was stolen from a hotel car park in Rozelle, Sydney, and was missing for close to three weeks. In the interim, a despondent Farquharson had been forced to take public transport to work, and hire cars for weekend trips out of the city. Kevvie turned up, of course, parked on the street behind a hotel in neighbouring Balmain. With the club lock securely fitted. Just where Farquharson had left it. 41

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and documentaries, discussing women, debating sports and the issues of the day, and playing fiercely competitive games of eight-ball. It was there I first met The Dog. I loathed him at first sight. I think he felt the same way about me. It can be this way among men, a bristling, a deep primal instinct, just as a dog’s hackles lift at a sound in the dark. Sometimes men hackle because they see something of themselves that they don’t like in that other person. I probably saw a bit of my inner dog in the actual Dog. Later that evening, under a streetlamp in Darling Street, The Dog and I threatened to knock each other’s head off and squared off like two fighting cocks rutting in sawdust. Then it was all over, and we became best mates. Perhaps Farquharson and I played golf together in those early years—I can’t remember now—but it was The Dog who brought us together as a golfing threesome. Although The Dog was ten years younger than me and Farquharson, in some ways he belonged more to our era. His taste in music, for example, was eerie for a young man. He was into Neil Young, Springsteen, early eighties’ punk and New Romantics, when his head should have been full of New York or LA rap and London trance. However we came together, we remained a distinct threesome, a trio of hacks, as opposed to the usual twosome or foursome. Our threesome kept things open for a foursome with a sort of permanent revolving door for the guests of our choice. If one of us fell ill, or suffered too mighty a hangover, then we still had a twosome, and when we all lived in Sydney we played together at least once a week, no matter what the weather. ‘Does it get any better than this?’ The Dog often asked, out on the links. 42

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I think about that phrase, so wistful now, and can honestly say—no, it doesn’t. At Coolum’s short and sweet third hole, Farquharson took an eternity over his tee honours, wiggling and waggling then standing back from his ball, as if his concentration had been broken by the shutter of a press photographer’s camera. ‘Oh for crying out loud,’ The Dog snorted from the wings. But a golf course is one of the few places on earth where the biblical proclamation of an ‘eye for an eye’ can be exacted with such swiftness. In addition, Farquharson had trouble with par threes. They appeared so easy. They presented themselves as the simplest mathematical equation on the course. Tee to green. One shot. A dawdle. You could actually construct, in your imagination, the start and finish of the hole—tee, and one or two putts. You could hold the hole in its entirety in your head. Not so Farquharson. He giddied at the possibilities, just as he giddied from any type of red wine.* A par three had the potential to swallow him whole. Which is exactly what happened. Coolum’s par-three third witnessed one of the great duffs of Farquharson’s golfing career. It wasn’t just the distance. (A mere eleven metres. The Dog, without saying a word, paced it out.) It was the sound of the duff. It was a loud, soggy ‘oofff’, like a wet, flat tennis ball hitting a wall. It was a big, sloppy, mucky handful of pure and untainted embarrassment. The ball gently skipped to its resting place like a very small Girl Guide skipping along and swinging a basket full of charity biscuits. I swear I saw Farquharson grow physically smaller in that moment. The Dog’s face bore a rich, deeply etched smile. It was the beginning of Farquharson’s decline and fall. We all knew it. * Or white, or rosé, or even a sticky. Particularly the sticky. 43

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After the ‘oofff’ it was so quiet we could hear the lava cooling over at Mount Coolum. Farquharson walked slowly to his ball, his club dragging, peering back at the tee as if the cause of the disaster rested there on the cut grass. He took a second shot quickly in the manner of people when they trip over in public and spring instantly erect, pretending the trip never happened. He duffed again, but not as badly, and the ball dribbled like a village idiot halfway down the fairway. The Dog and I both managed to hit the heart of the green. Farquharson waited disconsolately near his ratty bag. The Dog, his bag and buggy parked sideways in front of us and blocking the path, took his time reholstering his eight iron. He polished the head. He blew into its little cloth cap before securing it. He took a swig of Gatorade, tossed the empty bottle several metres, potting it in the waste bin without touching its sides, and strode down the hill. We waited momentarily, before moving off very slowly. Farquharson’s skinny, battered bag seemed so heavy with bits of broken dream that he may as well have been dragging a dead white elephant by the trunk.

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The Clubhouse Dialogues (II)

FARK: Let me get this clear, Dog. And please remember you are on your honour, Your Honour. DOG: Just get on with it. FARK: Let me take you back to the Easter just passed, where we all repaired to a rental property at Hawks Nest, north of Newcastle, for some rest and recreation. Do you recall a young blonde woman? The one we played pool with at the pub, and who was there at breakfast on that first morning, and who polished your golf shoes prior to that day’s round? DOG: I do remember an attractive young woman polishing my golf shoes, yes I do. FARK: For the record, was or was she not the same young woman who, the following evening, bought you drinks at the bar and joined us for dinner, namely a seafood platter, on that very same evening? DOG: That’s correct, yes. One and the same. 45

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FARK: This was not the same woman we know as your girlfriend, who, and please feel free to clarify this if I am in error, was at the aforementioned holiday house the night before our Easter sojourn ended and who, indeed, on that last morning, farewelled you with a loving kiss and embrace prior to you enjoying a round of golf before heading back to Sydney. DOG: That’s right. They are different women. FARK: So we have here two separate blondes . . . DOG: Why are you talking so stupidly? You sound like some dandy from The Persuaders. ME: You weren’t born when The Persuaders was on, Dog. Let’s at least clarify that. DOG: Well let me clarify this for both of you. Mind your own bloody beeswax. FARK: There’s an awful lot of clarifying going on and I still have no idea what you’re talking about. ME: Are you sure you were born in the 1970s, Dog? From your lexicon, you sound like someone’s Edwardian greataunt. DOG: I wouldn’t drive a lexicon if you gave me one. FARK: Is that supposed to be funny? DOG: It is fucking funny. ME: Why have I never got motoring humour? FARK: As I was saying, before I was interrupted, don’t you find it a bit odd that you would turn our golfing weekend away into a revolving door for your assorted dalliances? DOG: And don’t you find it a bit odd that I haven’t reached 46

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over and rearranged your sanctimonious, pontificating, holier-than-thou face? ME: It’s a terrific little course, is it not? The one at Hawks Nest? It’s a very pretty little course. FARK: You don’t think it a trifle off that you can wave off one, and then ten minutes later another is at the front gate with a bowl full of home-made lasagne? Covered in glad wrap, no less? DOG: Yes I do. I loathe lasagne. FARK: You’re like the delicatessen counter at Woolworths. Next! If I were a religious man I might be forced to seek alternative company. As a man of old-fashioned morals and a keen student of the unspoken, unwritten codes of man’s humanity to man, or in your case, to women, particularly those of the blonde persuasion, I find it moderately insulting and indeed somewhat out of step with the times to be seeing females obviously under the spell of your considerable sway demeaning themselves and their gender by polishing golf shoes and hand-delivering dishes for your thoughtless consumption. DOG: We won’t talk about that little spot of bother you found yourself in on a certain scuba diving weekend not that long ago, shall we? FARK: That’s diving. Not golf. With golf you learn to leave your wood in the bag. DOG: Is that supposed to be funny? The wood bit? ME: I thought it was funny. DOG: So one can get completely pissed on a diving weekend and try to chat up another bloke’s wife and then get 47

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knocked unconscious for his troubles because it’s diving, not golf? FARK: In all the years we have played we have never, and I repeat never, brought a girlfriend, lover, wife, concubine, brief acquaintance, even a sister, into the threesome. DOG: What you do with your sister is your own beeswax, to use your lexicon. ME: Goodness gracious. There’s that word again. FARK: You broke the unwritten rule. DOG: You ate the lasagne. ME: And it will go the way of all digested foodstuffs. Much like this conversation. FARK: That wasn’t funny. DOG: No it wasn’t. ME: Lighten up. It was the time of the Resurrection of Our Lord. We had a great time. We played some great pool at the pub. We played golf four days straight. We learned that cold next-day lasagne doesn’t hold a candle to cold pizza. FARK: He’s right. DOG: Yes he is. I apologise. There will be no more blondes. FARK: Thank you. DOG: But Tina, my secretary, may be dropping by to say g’day. She’s a brunette. FARK: Jesus. ME: Exactly.

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6. The Masters Breakfast Invitational Gets Out of Hand

W

hen we were all golfing buddies with no end in sight of either the golf or the buddiness, the frequency of our playing together increased exponentially with the depth of our friendship. In the early days, we hit a ball together maybe once every few months. We eventually graduated to a game per week before culminating in the ultimate in hack buddy-dom, the all-male golfing vacation. But at the start of our mateship we drank, played pool and caroused more than we indulged in golf. Golf is another level of bonhomie altogether. To play golf regularly with the same people is a statement about your friendship. It is the hidden door in the library of mateship. It is a very, very exclusive club, one for which you never apply for membership. It just happens. Once you’re in the club, I have noted, you protect it fiercely. Invited guests are chosen with the utmost care. And, like any exclusive club, the first-time invited guest is on probation for 49

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the full eighteen holes.* The invitee is fully aware of this. Men know when they’re on probation with other men, and golf is the toughest proving-ground of all. What bound the three of us even closer together, particularly at the start of that final year as inseparable hacks, was when the Masters Breakfast Invitational got out of hand. To explain what happened to the Masters Breakfast Invitational tournament is to go to the very heart of man’s childish nature. No man will broadcast it in public, but inside all of us resides a common yearning for certain things that belong, traditionally, to childhood. Or, more specifically, boyhood. As men, we never lose our desire for cubby houses (studies, sheds, studios, recreation rooms, bars), go-karts (skateboards, cars, jet skis or, in The Dog’s case, all of the above, including go-karts), opportunities to play with other boys (golf, billiards, bars, golf, League/Union/AFL matches—live or on TV—golf, bars) and the invention of our own clubs, tournaments and various competitive contests. It was the last that gave birth to the Masters Breakfast Invitational. For some years, our trio had convened at The Dog’s abode under the great span of the Gladesville Bridge in inner-western Sydney to watch the final round of the US Masters. This fell always in April, and always on a Monday. The Dog, forever hospitable, provided a barbecued breakfast of bacon, eggs and sausages. The Dog, too, loved to barbecue, and The Dog’s barbecue was probably the only one in Australia that was out-of-bounds to Farquharson. The Dog’s house and yard—which ran down to the shores of the Parramatta River—was much like a compound, if not literally, psychologically. It was ‘The Dog’s Place’. That was * Indeed, the 19th hole can also be a crucial make-or-break platform for the club aspirant. 50

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understood. The Dog did what The Dog did inside the boundaries of his own property. Nobody told The Dog what to do inside the compound. The barbecue was a part of that landscape and Farquharson knew to keep his distance. After breakfast, the final round and the presentation of the green jacket in Butler’s Cabin, we would head out to North Ryde Golf Course with a huge appetite for the fairways and greens and with the distant roar of the crowds in Augusta still with us, like the sound of the sea in a shell. It was during a walk down North Ryde’s very pretty par five 17th, that The Dog suggested the Invitational Breakfast. ‘You know,’ said The Dog, ‘we should have our own Masters.’ Farquharson was behind us, having a devil of a time extracting his ball from a blanket of thick clover. He had done his traditional collapse around the 13th and was now beyond counting his score. Perhaps the most disappointing moment in the hack’s game is when the scorecard is abandoned. That moment of surrender punctures a black hole in your round, into which disappears your enjoyment of the day prior to implosion, the day ahead and, quite possibly, the health of your game over future months. ‘That’s it!’ Farquharson had declared on the 16th. ‘I’ve had it. I’m done. Dusted. Finished. Over.’ This was followed by the inevitable slow-motion dropping of the club to turf, thrusting of hands into pockets, nonsensical little walkabout, retrieval of the club, transfer of blame for poor play to the equipment at hand, and a silly defeated grin on the next tee that said—I don’t care any more. Farquharson could achieve all this in a matter of seconds. After he had surrendered the game could not hurt him any more, so he took to the clover like one of Thomas Hardy’s fieldhands. He thrashed and threshed like a peasant full of cider. 51

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We ignored Farquharson in his ‘rural idiot’ moments. ‘What do you mean, “our own Masters”?’ I asked The Dog. ‘Our own Masters. An annual competition, after the final round of the real Masters. Eighteen holes. Handicaps apply. Entrance fee and prizes. Why not?’ ‘Why not? What’ll we call it?’ ‘The Big Dog Cup.’ ‘The Big Dog Cup?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, launching a practice swing for a short 45-metre chip to the shadow-dappled green. ‘Hitler had his own cup, did you know that?’ ‘No I didn’t.’ ‘He called it the Hitler Cup.’* ‘How very original. And definitive.’ ‘He was a shocking golfer, you know.’ ‘Why is that?’ I asked, knowing the answer. ‘He never got out of the bunker.’ I could hear a very weary drum roll and the clang of a cymbal somewhere high up in the gum trees. I suggested politely to The Dog that considering our tournament would involve inviting someone outside the group to join us for breakfast followed by 18 holes, after the final televised round of the actual US Masters, perhaps a more appropriate name would be the Masters Breakfast Invitational. The Dog took his time pondering this suggestion before * I had to check on this to see if The Dog was right. He was. I made a point of never again referring to the subject. As the story goes, Hitler commissioned the cup following American athlete Jesse Owens’ star turn at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Humiliated by his Aryans’ poor showing, the Führer set up an international amateur golf competition in Baden-Baden so the Third Reich could at least restore some national pride. Hitler did not account for the English pairing of Arnold Bentley and Tommy Thirsk who both hit final-round 65s to win the cup. Hitler had a tantrum, refused to present the cup and returned immediately to Berlin. The cup itself is an amberencrusted brass salver. 52

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agreeing, reluctantly, that it was the most logical, albeit predictable, name for our annual competition. Then I said, ‘The biggest question is—who do we invite to make up the foursome?’ ‘Hmmm,’ said The Dog. ‘That is difficult. Nobody Farquharson knows, of course.’ ‘Of course.’ Poor Farquharson. At some point The Dog had decided that he was not unlike the Pig Pen character in the Charlie Brown comic strip, and that he trailed a cloud of dust, flies and other unimaginable organisms behind him. I did not find Farquharson objectionable in this way. He always seemed, to me, well-appointed and clean behind the ears. But The Dog’s standards of hygiene came from a different textbook to our own. ‘What about Temple?’ I considered Temple. It made sense that The Dog would think first of Temple. I liked Temple, a close friend of The Dog’s and a complex character who sported on his forearm one of the most amazing tattoos I had ever seen—a brilliantly rendered portrait of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. Temple, too, was fantastically ordered and neat.* ‘Temple is a very good choice,’ I said. I was looking forward to seeing again the wild, swaying coat tails of Ned Kelly, and the stylish way the folk hero brandished a sawn-off shotgun. ‘But he may be busy,’ mulled The Dog. ‘He’s taken up triathlons in a big way. He’s in training.’ * I had always assumed that Temple’s name really was Temple, but it wasn’t. Apparently, following an extended drinking binge some years previously, Temple had declared that he would never drink again, and had proclaimed very loudly in a public bar that from that moment forward, he would ‘treat his body like a temple’. His actual name, it transpired, was John Lennon. 53

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It was why Temple was vaguely scary. He had frightening reserves of self-discipline. Whenever he played golf with us, I always kept him in the corner of my eye. Just in case he murdered someone, or self-combusted.* In the end, due to availability, we settled on inviting Big Dallas (we knew lots of ‘Big’ men) to the inaugural Masters Breakfast Invitational. Big Dallas, a press photographer, was the perfect choice. He hit a big ball and had a big sense of humour. Big Dallas, a regular Saturday golfer, non-hacker and hugehitter, took out the inaugural trophy over a miffed Dog. In the second year, Big Dallas asked four of his mates to compete. A handicap system was introduced. Farquharson again was presented with the Masters Breakfast Invitational Special NAGA† award. Big Dallas had arranged a tournament trophy that bore a passing resemblance to a pile of elephant dung with a toy five-iron sticking out of it. In the third year of the Invitational, there were 14 competitors, and the tournament found a permanent home at the picturesque The Coast Golf Club, of which Big Dallas was a new member. The course wound around Little Bay in Sydney, near Long Bay Jail and backed on to a psychiatric hospital.‡ It tickled me, the idea of playing a round of golf with the psychiatric hospital as gallery. I imagined the unfortunate inmates looking out at groups of men in funny clothes trying to hit a flyspeck with a silver stick, and wondering what * That Temple had formerly been a member of the SAS, and had snapped his back during a parachuting accident, gives you an idea of the sort of resilience we’re talking about here. † NAGA (pronounced Narr-garr)—Not A Golfer’s Arsehole. ‡ Big Dallas had told us, perhaps by way of getting our increasingly popular amateur tournament to take up permanent residence at his home links, that he had once seen on the back nine a nurse from the hospital sunbathing topless by one of the tees. It’s not every golf course that can boast a resident topless nurse. 54

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manner of insanity could possibly possess someone to do that. What didn’t tickle me was The Coast itself. It was as brutal and unforgiving as the sheer sandstone cliffs it sat upon. In the last year I played the Invitational, before heading north, there were more than 30 men vying for the bronzed dung and a faded green jacket purchased from a Salvation Army disposal store. We had created a monster, and it had lumbered off down the fairway, flailing its arms and trailing behind it amateur golfers and scorecards and bitten pencils and mulligans and dreams of a moth-eaten old sports coat the colour of pea soup. It can be a dangerous thing, stepping outside of your golf threesome. It can be dangerous, too, to give hacks a whiff of competition. Worst of all is to offer them a prize at the end. You would be amazed what a hack will do for three free balls in a cellophane packet. What happened to the Masters Breakfast Invitational contained a deeply embedded message to all of us as bona fide hacks. I have still to work it out. I had heard, via The Dog, that the most recent Invitational was rocked by scandal and accusations of cheating, and that the awarding of the dung trophy was suspended until the handicaps of the top three place-getters had been investigated. The other scandal was that Farquharson had not carried off the NAGA. That had been wrested away from him by Dunphy, one of Big Dallas’ colleagues, who, in a round littered with shots that instantly entered the golfing folklore of the Masters Invitational, had hit an unforgettable 14 on the last par three. The hole required players to hit over a small bay that seethed with ocean foam. To crown it all, Dunphy’s third shot hit a wet rock in the bay as the sea drew out and bounced back to the tee itself, landing only a few feet from Dunphy, who was still holding his club. 55

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Both Dunphy’s boomerang ball, and his being crowned tournament NAGA, had seriously hurt Farquharson, who was now jealous of the last placegetter. That’s how arse-up Farquharson’s game had become thanks to the Invitational, and that’s the peril of giving hacks their own competition.

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or the hack, there are certain golf courses where the CrackUp—that inevitable and disastrous loss of concentration that implodes a promising round—is permissible, indeed, almost expected.* The Hyatt Regency at Coolum is not one of them. At Coolum, the fairways and greens, the bunkers and traps, are so magnificently attired, so well-mannered and maintained, that if the course was a person, it would sport a tuxedo, know how to detect nutmeg deeply embedded in a fine wine and carry a cigar cutter worth more than Farquharson’s combined assets. It beseeches gentlemanly conduct. This is not a place for a Crack-Up, just as the red carpet at the Academy Awards is no place for a marital tiff, or a funeral for a giggling fit. * The public course at Hen and Chicken Bay in Sydney’s inner-west is the ideal course for a full-blown Crack-Up, as Farquharson has repeatedly proved. It is not the busiest course in town. Indeed, it is debatable whether it is an actual golf course. It has an inordinate number of par 3s that would not look out of place in someone’s suburban backyard. The sort of homemade hole favoured by those newly stricken by the golf bug, namely teenage boys and what was once known as ‘the aspiring lower middle class’. 57

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I had suspected Farquharson was in for one of the great Crack-Ups of his dusty career when he decided to take a shower at the Hyatt before the round. This was peculiar, even for Farquharson. ‘You’re what?’ The Dog asked. ‘I’m having a quick shower.’ We were due to tee off in 17 minutes. ‘He’s what?’ I asked, disbelieving what I’d heard. ‘He’s having a quick shower,’ said The Dog. There are two things at play here that go to the very heart of Farquharson. The first is that he believes in value for money. His rationale for life is that you get what you pay for—and a little more if you can. Farquharson is the sort of man who can always get a little more juice out of the lemon. He had executed a quick reconnaissance of the clubhouse on arrival and discovered the ‘complimentary’ showers, towels and soaps. It was logical to him to take a free shower if one was available, despite having showered only an hour earlier. It was, in effect, the first time I had ever encountered a ‘bathroom mulligan’. The second thing is that anyone who knows anything about Farquharson’s peculiar physiology in terms of his consumption of alcohol* would not object to him showering as often as possible, even during a round. But here, moments before a game of such importance, on a course you apologised to for inflicting a divot, it was too much. As we waited, The Dog said quietly, ‘What hole then?’ ‘For his Crack-Up?’ ‘Yes.’ * The odour of whatever Farquharson drinks, be it beer, spirits, or even cranberry juice, can be detected easing out of his pores within hours. People can become intoxicated standing too close to Farquharson after he’s had a big night. There is no need for Farquharson to ‘blow in the bag’ when the occasion demands. The bag gets the idea in his vicinity. 58

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‘Taking into account the pre-round shower?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Seven,’ I said, confidently. ‘Six. I’ve got fifty on it.’ ‘You’re on.’ When Farquharson finally emerged from the locker room, all buffed and shiny (and his pockets stuffed with packet soaps), I knew the golfing gods had something special in store for him. It would transpire that both The Dog and I were wrong about the timing of the Crack-Up. Though it would come earlier than expected, Farquharson would manage a recovery that defied science. But Farquharson’s shower, our bet and notions of the Crack-Up set me thinking about golf and psychology. It is a seriously under-studied field, though there is some headway being made. In January 2005, a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association included a session titled ‘Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Teaching, Learning and Playing Golf’. Participants included Harvard Medical School psychiatry instructor Howard Katz, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry from the Chicago Medical School Phil Lebovitz, and professional golf teacher and player Bob Farrell of the Tamarack Country Club, Connecticut. One of the many conclusions reached at the meeting was that golf was an attempt to master one’s environment, which was fundamental to building an ego, which, in turn, meant that to play golf was to put a large amount of personal self-respect on the line. Farquharson, The Dog and I were fully aware of the mental rigours of the game. We did not need sessions on a dimpled couch to make us aware of golf’s psychological demands. Or of the game’s infinite complexity. 59

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However, when our final year together was disrupted by personal circumstance, and our games suffered or, more correctly, when we lost control of our environments, perhaps we could have done with some advice from Messrs Katz, Lebovitz and Farrell.* I can appreciate the link between golf and psychoanalysis, but the aforementioned meeting, as reported by Psychiatric News (Online), has me sceptical. In particular, Lebovitz’s anecdotal evidence sounds a little too anecdotal for my liking, or like something Farquharson might cite. For example, once Lebovitz was accompanied on a round by a friend who was dying of cancer. ‘I played as though I were a rank beginner,’ Lebovitz lamented. ‘I had a slice like I hadn’t had for years. I chopped up the ground; I went into sand traps and couldn’t get out of them.’ According to the Psychiatric News, Lebovitz attributed his woeful performance to ‘sadness over his friend’s imminent demise, as well as to the round reminding him of his father. The last time Lebovitz and his father had golfed together, his father was dying from cancer’. Phew. It can be safely assumed that Lebovitz would never be invited by our trio to make up a foursome. Lebovitz doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs. Another reason to have something pressing to do if Lebovitz suggests joining you for a round is that he told Psychiatric News he had worked out the maths on the probability of a hole-in-one. Over the course of the year, there are about 81,000 tee shots on par 3s by PGA Tour professionals. In most years, * Farquharson has, on several occasions, suggested that every golf club should appoint a permanent ‘in-house’ psychoanalyst. This says more about Farquharson than the idea itself. 60

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about one of every 2,500 par-3 tee shots ends up in the hole. And these are the best golfers on the planet. For us amateurs, the chances are closer to one in 20,000 tee shots or greater. Chances of making a hole in one are only slightly better than winning a lottery prize.’* Thanks, Lebovitz. For an examination of the psychology of the game with heart, and devoid of twenty-first-century gobbledegook, ‘findings’ and statistical hogwash, you cannot go past one of the game’s earliest and enduring classics, The Mystery of Golf† by Arnold Haultain, first published in 1908. Haultain was, without doubt, a hack. His text reeks of it. Yet he casts a wonderfully naïve eye on the game and, more peculiarly, charts a map of the inside of an average golfer’s head. Not much has changed in a century. As he writes of the psychology of golf: Golf, indeed, is a fruitful field of psychological phenomena. For example, hypnotists of the most modern school aver, I believe, that there exist somewhere in the brain or mind of man five distinct layers of consciousness. For proofs of multiple consciousness the hypnotist should frequent the links. He will there often find one layer of consciousness roundly upbraiding another, * Based on Lebovitz’s mathematical model, The Dog, Farquharson and I, at one round a week, based on four par-3 holes, shoot about 208 par-3s a year. It would take us 196 years to shoot Lebovitz’s 20 000 tee shots, or 784 years to shoot the number of par-3s executed in your average annual PGA Tour. We are, naturally, suspicious of Lebovitz’s methodology. † A Canadian prose writer and poet, the full title of Haultain’s book is The Mystery of Golf: A Brief Account of the Game: Its Origin; Antiquity; & Rampancy; Its Uniqueness; Its Curiousness; & Its Difficulty; Its Anatomical, Philosophical, and Moral Properties; Together with Diverse Concepts on other Matters to it Pertaining. 61

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sometimes in the most violent language of abuse, for a foozled stroke; and so earnest sometimes is the vituperation poured by the unmerciful abuser upon the unfortunate foozler, that truly one is apt sometimes sincerely to commiserate the former, and to regard him as the victim of a multiple personality, and not at all blameable for his own poor play. I tried to discuss the foozler and Haultain’s multiplepersonality theories with The Dog but he waved it off. ‘Not interested, Matty,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ ‘Not interested in theories, Matty. Just the here and now. That’s all that matters.’ ‘You don’t think it’s interesting, the psychology of golf?’ He let out a low, gentle laugh, accompanied by a very slow shake of the head. It was an admonishment from handicapper to hack. ‘Ohh, Matty. You will learn that the one thing you never use, on a golf course, is the brain. The brain is the party crasher of golf. Not only that, when the brain crashes a golf party he’s the only one in fancy dress.’ I could tell The Dog had spent a lot of time thinking about the brain as party crasher. ‘But Haultain speaks to us across a century of golf.’ ‘Dead wood, Matty. Dead weight. It’s the natural enemy of the golfer.’ ‘History is the natural enemy of the golfer?’ ‘Corrrrr-ect. Great golfers are always looking ahead, Matty. To the next shot. I don’t see Tiger with dusty old books hanging out of his golf bag.’ ‘I have read he’s very well versed in golf literature. In the game’s history.’ 62

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‘I don’t care if he writes poetry or not. He’s Tiger. He can do anything he likes. And he’s not effeminate, if that’s what you’re getting at.’ ‘Who said Tiger Woods was effeminate?’ ‘You did, calling him a poet.’ But what The Dog had to say about golf, history and ‘looking ahead’ was very true about our threesome. The Dog belonged to that singular moment when the club face met the skin of the ball, and all that would follow. Farquharson and I sought solace and wisdom from all who had gone before us. So it came to pass that as a threesome we could discuss anything on the golf course, including the minutiae of the actual game at hand, shot for shot, except golf in its wider, grander scheme of things. Farquharson and I did, of course, out of The Dog’s earshot. Although even Farquharson only feigned interest, I could tell, when I started getting into the intricacies of the keynote addresses at Golf Science 2000, an interim conference of the World Scientific Congress of Golf held on the Gold Coast just prior to the Sydney Olympics. He also expressed no tangible enthusiasm for my desire to find out how golfing anecdotes across time stood up against contemporary empirical evidence into golfing performance. ‘Sorry?’ he often asked, scrunching up his face like a child finding the boiled lolly he expected to be sweet was sour on his tongue. So I had Haultain to myself, and the delights of the writings of evolutionist Charles Darwin’s grandson, Bernard, and the golfing prose poetry of Herbert Warren Wind. One day, at the 19th hole of North Ryde, as we sat on the balcony in the cool early evening and enjoyed a kookaburra chorus, I fished out my copy of John Updike’s excellent Golf 63

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Dreams* and forced a select passage upon my two companions. The Dog was rolling his eyes in despair, and Farquharson was only half-listening, as I emitted a small cough and started reading. Solitary golf is barren fun . . . My regular foursome faithfully votes upon, at the end of the round, ‘the Most Ignominious Shot’—the bunker blast that bounced backward, for instance, or the twelve-inch putt that lipped out—and the shot, recollected in beery tranquility, develops a charm that at the time passed quite unnoticed. The joys of retrospect [my emphasis here was specifically for The Dog and I stared at him to make my point], indeed, are as much a part of golf camaraderie that one sometimes seems to be playing in the future-perfect tense, with a ring of reminiscence even as the ball is struck. Golf is as much a game of the mind and soul as of the muscles and, without companionship, as pointless as a one-man philosophical symposium.

I sort of slammed the book down on the table for dramatic effect. The Dog finally broke our beery tranquility, saying, ‘Sounds very effeminate, Matty.’

* Golf Dreams by John Updike, published by Penguin Books (1996). 64

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he Dog seemed to cheer up enormously when the rump of Coolum’s corpse came into view at the fourth hole. A par on the third had put him back on track, and he had warmly congratulated me on my bogey. I was happy in Bogey-Land, without a hint of major blow-outs. Each one-over to me was as good as a par, sometimes better. I was extremely content being a resident of Bogey-Land, or a Bogan. The Dog’s lightness of step was, of course, caused by Farquharson’s misery. Our little friend had carded a stupendous seven on the par-three third, and it had blown away his optimism as quick and sure as the tornado that claimed Dorothy and Toto. Poof, and a pleasing front nine vanished. Walking to the fourth tee, I had one of those moments rarely granted to hacks on a five-star resort course. I had a chance to take in the flora, to smell the wattle and bottlebrush, to admire the strange rickety legs of the pandanus trees. It was this frame of mind, able to take in nature’s bounty, which was often denied the hack. This, I felt, was ironic. Golf was a game that existed in the beauty of the outdoors, fresh air, bird 65

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life. It was the only game in history that both embedded itself in and pitted itself against the natural world, however manicured and man-made that nature might be. Partners of hacks always wave them off secure in the knowledge that at least they’re doing something ‘outside’, much as children are always being encouraged to go play ‘outside’, as if life’s lessons and virtues and remedies are to be found ‘outside’, as opposed to the stuffy, introverted and indeed dangerous effects of being ‘inside’. Being ‘outside’ is good for us. But ninety-five per cent of the time, the golf hack is impervious to the beauty of his surrounds. The torture inflicted on us by the game’s difficulty, the frustration and the profound knowledge that, via golf, there is always a greater force bearing down on us and exposing our fallibility, indeed, mortality, precludes us from appreciating the very reason we’re there playing golf, ‘outside’.* Yet we must do it; we must play, just as we must breathe. As we teed up at the fourth Farquharson loitered around the rubbish bin near the path, a downcast Toto checking his tees, some as old as the timbers of the Mary Rose, while The Dog swished away with his wood and faced down what appeared to be a rudimentary par four. ‘Mayor’s office, Matty,’ he said to me, winking and clicking his tongue after a perfect drive. As he was meant to, Farquharson heard, and winced. It was a high-pitch dog whistle to the poor fellow’s ears. When The Dog found himself in the Mayor’s Office so early in a round, you knew he was in for something extraordinary. * It is why, as I’ve argued for years, watching televised golf is the only instance where the hack can truly absorb and understand how wonderful it is to be ‘outside’ playing the game. It is why, in the annual coverage of the US Masters, the producer, before cutting to an advertisement, puts on the screen lovely pictures of quivering magnolia flowers, or whispering pines. We have, therefore, to be ‘inside’ to enjoy the ‘outside’. This is a philosophical debate Farquharson has never been able to get his head around. 66

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He confidently shoved The Big Dog into his bag and studied Coolum’s distant volcanic hide, apparently trying to work out how he might scale it without ropes between the front and back nine. Farquharson had developed a small tic below his left nostril. As I teed up I noticed, in the distance, a passenger jet climbing into the sky out of Maroochydore Airport, and a tiny shudder went through me. Like much of the world’s population, since September 11 I had not been able to look at an airborne passenger jet the same way I once had. It was no longer simply a mode of transport. It had become something else. This in itself had amazed me. That a familiar object, seen so many times, could become something else, a changed thing. It was one of the many revelatory things to come out of September 11, albeit insignificant compared to the loss of life and the global political implications. Someone had decided to use commercial passenger aircraft in a way they had never been used. As a weapon. As a statement. A new definition had been drawn out of them. This, to a lover of words, was exasperating. I fluffed my half-hit, mistimed tee shot down the left of the fairway. Farquharson followed suit. As I walked towards the ball I thought of September 11 and of being, by chance, in the United States for that historic moment. I was in San Antonio, Texas, researching the ghostwritten autobiography—I was, of course, the ghost—of a famous Australian tennis legend. I had flown into San Antonio on the night of September 10, checked into my Spanishinfluenced motor inn, fallen into bed exhausted, woken at 8 am, made a cup of bad instant coffee and turned on the television to find the world was coming to an end. I didn’t leave my motel room that day, apart from scuttling out to a nearby Denny’s for food. I was transfixed by the television, and the awful opera of that infamous day. I am 67

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embarrassed now to remember that I had felt a little terrified as the drama unfolded, and had drawn the motel room curtains as protection. I was stuck in my Spanish motor inn for days until, thanks to a kind-hearted soul at the airport, which I visited daily, I slipped on to a flight to Chicago via Atlanta, and then another flight to London. I remember vividly when the plane landed briefly in Atlanta. As the wheels touched the tarmac the passengers broke into spontaneous applause. We had flown and not died. From Atlanta to Chicago, the man in the seat across from me quietly read his copy of the Koran for the duration of the flight. From Chicago to London we were served meals with plastic knives and forks. The world had already changed forever. Thus during what should have been a festive occasion on that bright spring morning on the Sunshine Coast, I trailed Farquharson and the long-striding Dog up the fourth fairway and was visited by thoughts of death. Death and golf are natural companions. Many men have died on golf courses, or after a round, whether through collision with a speeding ball, lightning strike or, most commonly, heart attack.* In its exhaustive 1997 study into people expiring due to their involvement in ‘outdoor activities’, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that out of 3239 deaths over a 35-year period, only five per cent were golfers. To put this into context, if half the American population visited ‘open fields, parks or playgrounds’ at least once a year, and found themselves ‘under trees’, then the likelihood of being struck and killed by lightning was one in 5.3 million. * Or embarrassment. Ask Farquharson about the notorious bunker incident at the 17th at North Ryde Golf Course. 68

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If the US Department of Labor is to be believed, the one golf-related occupation you don’t want is that of groundkeeper. In short, groundkeepers get a bum deal. According to the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1992 and 2002 exactly 1117 ‘groundkeepers and gardeners’ were killed at work. During those ten years, groundkeepers accounted for one in every 60 workplace deaths. One of the most common causes of death was ‘overturned vehicles’, specifically tractors and mowers. As for players, the American Equestrian Medical Association, in a study evaluating horse activities in relation to other sports, revealed that the sport that caused the most head injuries was golf, followed by horseback riding, water-skiing, skiing, tennis and bowling. Then there are heart attacks. Clay-faced crooner Bing Crosby is a case in point. On 14 October 1977, after a round at La Moraleja Golf Course outside Madrid, Spain, he dropped stone dead near the clubhouse. In fact, he literally fell at the feet of playing partner and golfing pro Valentin Barrios, and myth has it that his famous last words were, ‘That was a great game of golf, fellas.’* Why was I thinking of death on this sunlit day? Yes, it was our last round as mates, but I didn’t know this at the time. I think, however, I must have known that something was changing and this might explain my remarkably consistent * Sadly, as Barrios recalled, these were not his last words at all. Barrios said: ‘. . . he fell face down on the red-brick path, landing on my foot when he fell. We turned him over; he was very pale and had a large red bruise on his forehead from where he hit the ground. He died at my feet. I knew he was dead right away—died instantly’. And of the final words: ‘It’s been widely quoted that Bing’s last words were “That was a great game of golf, fellas” or something to that effect. Well he did say that in the golf cart heading up the hill, but afterwards, while we were walking towards the clubhouse entrance—just seconds before his collapse—he spoke his last real words to me. He turned and said, “Let’s go have a Coca-Cola.”’ Not something you’d chisel into a tombstone. 69

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play. I was, by and large, hitting the ball cleanly and steering clear of Coolum’s outrageously wild and dense foliage. I was finding the light stuff. In fact, at the fourth tee I had, for the first time in several years, taken the driver out of the bag. The driver. My nemesis. I had lost the fear of it. I had lost the fear of death, despite a glimpse of that passenger jet. I was not interested in my score. I had shunned competitiveness. I had ceased to count my own strokes.* I took that ratty driver and decided, without realising it, that I was there to enjoy the golf. The rest of the world could go to hell for the next four hours. Farquharson was suspicious. He insinuated I’d been taking private lessons during my absence from Sydney. He eyed me from his buggy, picking at the button on his glove. He stood directly behind me this time at the tee, looking for clues to my newfound driving. It was a fluff. But not a major fluff. It was a fluff with potential. Farquharson smelled a rat. I couldn’t tell him that I had simply renounced death, because I didn’t know it myself. When he failed to solve the puzzle he fell into a minor melancholia, and approaching the fourth green together, in the privacy of not an actual cart but a metaphorical one,† we entered one of those moments so common in golf partners— the deep personal conversation. We spoke about his poor dear * This is unusual, considering mathematics is the bedrock of the game of golf. Refusing to count is like deciding to play Mozart’s Requiem on a zither, or reading Joyce’s Ulysses upside down, and in a mirror. It is denying the art. † When we used actual carts, The Dog always drove alone, as only Formula One drivers, for example, drive alone. He pushed his cart to its limit, and our history of the game is festooned with his spectacular 180-degree (sometimes 360-degree) skid marks and tyre slashes, many of them ending within a whisker of catastrophe. Once, at The Coast in Sydney, our cart was left dangling backwards over the edge of a rather forbidding sandstone precipice, an achievement The Dog declared the highlight of a rather lacklustre round. 70

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father, Frank, an alcoholic pensioner, seeing out his years within sight of an oyster farm in northern NSW. Whenever Farquharson mentioned Frank I immediately thought of the little bivalves destined for the tables of Sydney’s finer restaurants, perhaps even for Farquharson himself, sitting at a table in Darlinghurst or Pott’s Point, his napkin tucked beneath his chin, all set to sup oysters cultivated a few hundred metres from his grey, ash-flecked old father. They rarely spoke, he and Frank, but letters bobbed up between them over the years, like messages in a bottle. ‘He’s trying to bring us together again, as a family,’ said Farquharson, scratching around for a tee. ‘Every few years, he writes, or rings my sister, and tries to make us feel guilty for his predicament.’ Frank’s ‘predicament’ is not an uncommon one—he chose the bottle over his wife and children, and then disappeared, propelled, perhaps, by the weight of life, or some inner hunger. And before long, three decades have passed, cigarettes have rotted his lungs, and booze his organs, and he’s tormented by another sort of hunger. The great hollow howling that is the fear of dying alone. ‘What does he expect you to do?’ I said. ‘Your clan is flung all over the country. What? You all pack up your lives and go and play Happy Families after all this time?’ It was my way, to be protective of Farquharson. There was something at his very centre—despite all the cockiness, the mistrust and the chaos—that was as fragile and still as a glassblown plumb bob, that you wanted to put your arms around and shield from the dangers of the outside world. Poor Farquharson. Frank had stepped out of his life when he was just a boy, and deny it though he did, his father had a permanent hook in Farquharson’s lip. Every now and then Frank tugged on the invisible line. 71

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‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’ ‘Maybe I should go and see him again.’ ‘What happened last time?’ ‘We got pissed at his local, then I went home.’ ‘Nothing resolved.’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Just you feeling more hurt and upset than ever.’ ‘Yeah.’ I had offered innumerable times to go with him to the town of the oyster farms as back-up, so he could finally confront his father with all the questions that had roiled within him for as long as he could remember. We’ll get it over and done with once and for all, I told him. He always said yes, with tears in his eyes, and it never happened. ‘It’s just fathers, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Yeah. It’s just fathers.’ I could not know then, that just eight weeks later I would conceive a child with my partner, and within a year hold my own son in my arms, the two of us staring at each other in confusion and amazement after the birth. Just before teeing off on the fifth, how expert I was on the relationships between fathers and sons. How knowing and decisive. ‘Fark!’ shouted The Dog from the back of the green, having already putted out, made a phone call on his mobile, and taken a leak in the bushes before we finished the hole. ‘What’d you have on the last hole?’ ‘Five,’ said Farquharson, doing up his glove. But we all knew he’d had six.

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ME: Tell me, Farquharson, what’s the worst thing about being a golf hack? FARK: The Christmas and birthday presents. ME: I don’t understand. FARK: As a child, I once showed a transient, fleeting even, interest in insects . . . DOG: You mean entomology. FARK: I mean why don’t you shut your friggin’ cakehole while I finish the story. DOG: Shut your cakehole. I haven’t heard that, I don’t think, since Grade One at the North Ryde Primary School. No, I lie. I think it was mentioned in one of those appalling Carry On films, those Ealing Studio things where pasty English men with big noses and tight, smelly tweed jackets are always talking about breasts and dicks and sexual positions with a wink and an elbow to the ribs. Shart yar flippin’ cakehowl, orright? Stuff like that. 73

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FARK: May I finish? ME: I love the Carry On films. Carry On Up the Khyber is a classic . . . DOG: Yes! Cakehole. Khyber. You see? ME: And I think Carry On at Your Convenience, set in a toiletmaking factory, is an entirely underrated addition to the canon. FARK: Am I invisible here? Do I exist? DOG: Let’s leave it at that. ME: Go ahead, Farquharson. You were talking about cakeholes. FARK: Actually, I was talking about insects. I showed interest in them, as a child, as many children do. Oh look, I hear from the family, little Fark is going to be a scientist. DOG: Entomologist. FARK: So what presents do I get for the next ten Christmases and birthdays? Bug catchers. Butterfly nets. The Complete Guide to Australian Insects. Magnifying glasses. Field binoculars. ME: It’s the same principle as when you’re in your teens, on the brink of adolescence. Teetering on the precipice of the cracking voice, with half-a-dozen whiskers on your chin. Suddenly everyone’s giving you deodorants and aftershaves. Particularly deodorants. DOG: Oh God, yes. Enough to open a stall. ME: Brut. I remember being awash in Brut. I positively reeked of Brut for most of my teen years. Brut was the soundtrack scent of my early manhood. Can a smell be a soundtrack? 74

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THE CLUBHOUSE DIALOGUES (III)

FARK: It could be an olfactory track. DOG: What a clever little cakehole you are. How witty. You are a regular Fark-wit. FARK: When you decide to take up golf, however, it’s the ‘gift idea’ that never ends. ME: So true. FARK: It is the hobby that has an inexhaustible array of gifts at its disposal. For the unimaginative, there is the golf shirt and accompanying towel. Some people, perhaps aunts and uncles, maybe grandparents, will give either the shirt or the towel. Siblings might give both, so as not to appear cheap. DOG: There is the golf-themed bottle of Scotch or Bourbon that comes with a free green divot, or a key-ring with a golf ball at the end of it. One of the greatest advertisements for drink-driving there is, the bourbon and the golf ball key-ring. ME: There are the Funny Golfer Bookends. Plaster, with the head of a golfer, wearing cap and a bushy black moustache and gripping a club at one end, and his plus-fours and legs and spiked shoes at the other. You can put in the middle all the books about golf that are to come your way in the next ten years of Christmases and birthdays. DOG: I’ve never had one of those. FARK: You’re almost ten years younger than us. Just wait. DOG: I have received Brut, though. ME: You’ve received Brut? FARK: Do they still make it? 75

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ME: Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there are huge, hangarsized storage warehouses full of leftover Brut cologne and deodorant and soap-on-a-rope from the 1970s and 1980s. FARK: Ageing like fine wine. DOG: Now that’s a good idea. Giving wine to golfers. ME: Hear, hear, young Dog. FARK: Oh deary me, how positively waif-like. There are countless alcohol-related golf gifts, of which I have several. ME: My favourite is the Golf Ball Martini Glass. It adds a unique type of sophistication to that classic drink. The ball sits steadfast in the centre of the stem, as if it was swallowed by an emu. I can’t imagine James Bond drinking a martini out of such a glass. In fact, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone drinking a martini from such a glass, gripping, as they must, the half-digested ball as they sip their sophisticated martini, in their best tuxedo. FARK: There are golf wine holders, golf corkscrews and wine bottle corks, golf wine racks. ME: Golf socks, with little crossed clubs stitched on to them, I’ve received several pairs of those. DOG: What about the rude tees, with little naked ladies holding up the ball cups? They’re quite interesting. FARK: They’re about as interesting as your endless tales about which woman is currently holding up your ball cups. DOG: I think that was a line out of one of those Carry On films. FARK: Yes, it’s one I think you’re very familiar with. Carry On Down to the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinic. DOG: Jealousy really is a curse. 76

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he fifth at Coolum extends away from the tee like a long, perfectly glazed green platter, with giant sprigs of parsley on either side and the meatloaf of Mount Coolum in the near distance.† It struck me, as I was still trying to squeeze thoughts of death from my game, that it was the perfect hole to analyse our individual styles and skills, or lack thereof, in this game we loved. Hackers are easy to study. They are self-contained bundles of tics, idiosyncrasies, flails, flubs and peculiar angles. They putter along the fairways like homemade cars, emitting odd noises and unexpected mushroom clouds of exhaust, with

* With a deep and respectful nod to journalist Phillip Knightley’s fine memoir, A Hack’s Progress, and to John Bunyan’s essential guide to the golfing life, The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which is to Come, and in particular the passages on being mired in golf’s Slough of Despond. For example: ‘This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond.’ † I was obviously feeling peckish, and desirous of the food and drinks cart, at this stage of the round. 77

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characteristics that we vaguely recognise as vehicular, yet not. The hack has windscreen wipers made out of wooden spoons, wheels fashioned from antiquated metal rubbish-bin lids and headlights fitted with toaster filaments. Pipes and aerials stick out of surprising places. Nonetheless, like the sleek, factory-made version, their imperative is the same—to move forward. It is different for professionals, or those of a sub-10 handicap. They have the same aerodynamic lines, the identical geometries of locomotion, give or take a novel variation, and a seemingly invariable consistency. The professional’s game is one in which a single fluff, an individual moment of error, can define a round, can attract all manner of debate and speculation. The tiniest of flaws can mar perfection, like an ill-shaped bubble in a Reidel champagne flute. It is the exact opposite for the hack. The single near-perfect shot illuminates and encapsulates a round and becomes its fondly remembered, even legendary, highlight, as buffed, polished and cherished a memory as a child’s first steps. One great shot can relegate many thousands of others to the dustbin of history. Golfers, more particularly hacks, have a habit of elevating the game to a metaphorical plane, of overlaying it with religious overtones, and imbuing it with philosophical characteristics. It’s not difficult to see how this can happen. It’s a game with a rich history, one played simultaneously against others and one’s self, thus reflecting, in a very generalistic sense, the human predicament in life and thus the universe. Some of the more enterprising among us have seized upon this tendency in the game’s devotees. The spiritual guru, Deepak Chopra, for example, despite being busy guiding the souls of millions around the globe and attempting to crack world peace, managed to find time to hook into the golf-is-ametaphor-for-life thing with his book, Golf for Enlightenment. 78

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It is, of course, a ‘fable’ about a hack, Adam Seaver, who meets a ‘mysterious golf pro’ called Wendy. Wendy takes Adam through the game of life, a process which spits him out the other end as a more rounded, deeper-thinking and more balanced individual, with an infinitely better handicap. Chopra advocates many things in his fable, including becoming one with the ball,* playing the occasional round without counting your score and taking the point of view of blind golfers. (He had seen a television documentary on visually impaired golfers and had realised the game was about ‘intuition and feeling’.) Despite Chopra’s success, it was another American writer, spiritualist Michael Murphy, who took the mystical side of golf to a groundbreaking level with his novel, Golf in the Kingdom, first published in 1972 and perhaps the biggest-selling golf novel of all time.† Murphy’s book also introduces a ‘mysterious’ golf pro, a mythical, mystical figure called Shivas Irons,‡ who imparts advice on the game proper, and the great game of life. Mr Irons, in turn, has his own mentor in the equally other-worldly Seamus MacDuff.✧ In Golf in the Kingdom’s sequel, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Murphy returns to Scotland to investigate sightings of Mr Irons and ends up playing a few holes on a course beside MacDuff’s mist-shrouded old house. I can’t resist sharing an extract with you.

* In an interview with Terri Wellington, Chopra said: ‘There’s a meditation technique that is taught by advanced yogis and includes three things: focused attention, stillness of mind and union with the object of your perception. So, when this combination exists, anything is possible’. † Proclaimed by John Updike, ‘A golf classic if any exists in our day.’ ‡ Which sounds, to me, like a cheap, tinny brand of Scotch. ✧ This is not a joke. 79

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I thought about Nadia’s ‘spirit-matter’. Was this the thing she’d tried to picture in her drawings the day before? She and I had talked about such a phenomenon reported in the sacred traditions. The Roman Catholics’ ‘glorified body’, the Sufis’ ‘man of light’, the Tibetan Buddhists’ ‘diamond body’, the Taoists’ ‘spirit child’, each in its own way represents a set of experiences that suggests we can radically alter our flesh, and prominent among these is the perception of particles, ‘sparks’, or scintillae that revitalize mind and body. Everything now seemed charged with the radiance that rose in my cells. The clouds, the grass, the rolling fields* were filled with the same aliveness. This effervescence, in which the whole world sat, was available to everyone. For a few moments I sat on the tee to enjoy it. One thing is certain. Most literature about playing golf on a higher plane seems to be immune from the editor’s pencil. Every hole provided opportunities for shots that were specially shaped, including fades and draws, slices and punch hooks, and airplane shots that fly low before rising to clear an obstacle. Practicing these hour by hour, my connection with the ball in flight grew steadier, closer, and stronger, stretching the mysterious envelope that passes beyond our flesh. My round with Shivas Irons† had shown me the power of this extrasomatic reach, and letters from readers had confirmed it. * Of the republic? Further proof of my theory F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing of the United States as one giant, dream-heavy golf course. † There is, believe it or not, a Shivas Irons Society, based in Carmel, California. Its mission statement is: ‘The Shivas Irons Society exists to explore golf’s beauty and mystery, and to provide opportunities for personal and social transformation.’ 80

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Michael Murphy would never have survived a round with our Dog, a mystical master of verbally auto-edited bluntness, who once told Farquharson, in his usual pithy manner: ‘You’re doing the impossible, you’re thinking too much. Just hit it.’ That day on the fifth at Coolum, I looked long and hard for any sign of an extrasomatic reach, firstly at Farquharson. There was plenty of MacDuff, but not a lot of Shivas. In the infinite variety of hack ‘styles’, Farquharson’s is one that is instantly reflected in his physiognomy. He is short, tight, compact, the rattle at the tail of the snake, the coiled spring inside the cap gun. He is ostensibly lean, almost wiry, despite a permanent midriff pot that gives him a passing resemblance to an anaconda that has just swallowed a piglet. The piglet is the direct result of consistent alcohol consumption, and it never increases or decreases in size. Farquharson is never fatty of jowl or puffy of face, despite the barrels of Chablis that have passed through his lips. In his early forties, his hair is still as black as a crow’s wing, and he has a capacity for enormous facial hair growth. Beneath an almost permanent tan, or high blood pressure that shows on him not as red or pink but the lustrous brown of polished oak, can be detected the blue-black shadow of whiskers. If you can imagine Jack Lemmon as one of Gary Cooper’s wine-swilling resistance fighters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, then you have Farquharson. It is the height–coiled spring ratio, however, that defines, indeed rules, Fark’s game. For starters, a normal set of men’s golf clubs always appear a fraction too big for him, so when he lines up with every club bar the putter (and perhaps the sand wedge), it looks as though the club is playing him, and vice versa. This, in turn, requires him to clasp well down the shaft, sometimes at the very border of grip and shaft, where the rubber hand grip gives way to metal. This leaves him with an enormous amount of superfluous club extending back from his 81

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wrists and aiming unnervingly at the piglet. It also leaves him very little room to manoeuvre. This isn’t Farquharson’s major problem, however, for among other things golf is a question of physics. One (mal)adjustment leads to another, and yet another, until the whole edifice is spectacularly out of whack. It is the ripple effect of construction—if the foundations of a house are even slightly out, the ramifications will be felt throughout the entire structure. Doors will jam. Cupboards will swing open of their own accord. Things won’t line up. Like all hacks, Farquharson has a detailed mental checklist of how good golfers play the game, and he tries manfully to follow that blueprint on the course. He stands with his feet apart the right distance. He bends his knees and tests them— bounce, bounce—like a freshly married couple testing a new mattress. He assumes the correct hand grip, and waggles the club head in front of the ball. He follows his mantra. Keep the head still. Keep eyes on ball. Turn hips. Follow through. Finish shot with right foot hinged and frozen on its toe. But despite all this, he has forgotten the first and most basic flaw in his plan. His hands are too low on the shaft. His stance is fine for a regular grip up the shaft, but not for his low grip. So his stance is wrong. With the wrong stance, and his hands too low on the club, he has no power. And the ripple spreads. Farquharson’s golfing edifice is how I imagine dynamiters approach the demolition of an old hotel or a power plant or a hospital. How they set the charges in sequence and in perfect relation to the doomed building’s original design, its stress zones, its vulnerable seams. The first detonation is set off, then another and another, until the building neatly folds in on itself, as if exhausted. This is precisely what happened to Farquharson’s game. The grip was the first point of detonation, and the rest collapsed in on him effortlessly. 82

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Farquharson had never worked this out. He cannot understand why he ends up hacking at the ball like a fieldhand attacking a sett of sugar cane with a machete. To avoid this, he tries to lift everything up and away from the obstruction of the earth, throwing his upper body skyward, and air swinging. His game is metronomic. It swings between gouge and air. All because—as The Dog says ruefully, with a shake of the head—he was ‘born a shortarse’. ‘For Christ’s sake, get your shafts cut back,’ implored The Dog in our early years. ‘Or try some ladies’ clubs.’ This deeply offended Farquharson. It was like asking him if he bought his clothes in the children’s department. It struck at the heart of his maleness. I noticed he grew his moustaches longer and larger during this period of our golfing history. Sometimes, of course, Farquharson hit a sweet drive. This was one of those great accidents of the physical world, where all the mistakes combined and inverted themselves quickly enough to become, through a mesh of impossible mathematical equations and variations of weight, air resistance and muscle coordination, a correct swing. It was simply a question of odds. Poker machine addicts know that, at some point in their lives, they will strike a jackpot. It simply comes down to statistics, to probability. Most of the time, however, he foraged like a bush turkey off the plate of the fairway, then had to find his way back to it via bad lies, thickets of weeds, water, swamp and trees. It was only on the green, once he got there, that he had the opportunity to approach the game as it was meant to be played. To the inherent sequence of drive, approach shot and putt. He was only invited into the game on the green. Because it often took Farquharson so long to get there, through all the slashing and hacking, through all the obstructions and impediments the world of nature threw at him, he 83

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overcompensated on the greens. He brought too much mojo to the putting surface. The mere fact of getting to a green left him fizzing with adrenalin. He also had to contend with his spectacular ability to misread putts. He undershot them and overshot them. He lined up at 45-degree angles to the hole. He pushed his ball towards imaginary second flags. Sometimes you would think he saw not one, but two or possibly three pins on a single green, and it was fascinating to watch him putting on this marvellous green in his head, and not the one that was there before his eyes. It was an extension of the troubles he had with par threes. These short holes could be gobbled up in a single mouthful, and Farquharson would have digested it mentally, walked off with a par and be striding towards the next hole before he’d even struck the ball at the tee. It was the same, but worse, on the greens. It was condensed, concentrated golf, sitting there in its kidney-shaped completeness. And for poor Farquharson it was, time and time again, golf’s cruellest illusion. He stared at the magician’s hands until his eyes smarted, but each time he was fooled. Farquharson could never resolve one of the greatest puzzles for the average hack: that not every ball had to be hit as hard as you could hit it. He saw the game simply, as children draw a house—leaning left or right, crooked four-pane windows, chimney stack, and puffs of homely smoke. From the tee you had to belt the skin off the ball. On the second shot you had to belt the skin off the ball, and hope for precision at the other end. And on the green you nudged the ball close to the hole, hoping the planets aligned to give you the correct speed, distance and direction.* If Farquharson’s game was a meal, it * Bunkers were a necessary but unwelcome evil, and to get out of them, you had to belt the skin off the ball. 84

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would be simple fare—pea and ham soup for entrée, roast beef, baked potatoes and a green (with gravy) for main, and sago pudding for dessert. The Dog, however, was modern Australian French–Japanese fusion. His flavours were both subtle and pinged on the tongue. He was a perfect, ten-point marbled Wagyu.* At 188 cm, he had an obvious height advantage. From the back, seeing them pulling their bags up a fairway, Farquharson could have been The Dog’s son. The Dog is not only big, but powerful, and a regulation driver looks smallish in his large hands. It is one of the reasons why he goes for oversized club heads on his drivers—they give him, at least, some sort of psychological balance in his Lilliputian world. So The Dog has no grip overhang, and no piglet to contend with. Interestingly, while The Dog is all power and mobility around the shoulders, he appears, to the naked eye, to sit heavily from the waist down. Though he bears no fat, he is not unlike one of those toy water-drinking birds from the 1960s, a thirsty woodpecker that, when placed on a glass, jar or jug, will swing and swing until its lower ball of ballast lifts up to the horizontal and its beak dips into the wet stuff. So The Dog is concrete and steel below the belt, and feather and fibreglass above. This, to another hack, appears to be a perfect combination for a consistent drive, as is borne out by The Dog’s ability to hit long and straight. This high-percentile consistency, indeed, provides The Dog with the platform, the concrete apron, for a decent score, hole after hole. The foundation of his house is straight and level. * Des Houghton reported in The Courier-Mail, on 20 May 2006, that Greg Norman has lent his name to the high-class meat—Greg Norman Signature Wagyu—in a multimillion dollar deal aimed at cracking the huge US beef market. The ‘highly prized wagyu marbled beef’ out of Dalby would sell for $US50 to $US150 a kilogram. 85

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The Dog’s big drive gives him one sort of psychological advantage over hacks like me and Farquharson. At the tee he is already liberating Paris while we are stuck in a muddy trench in Flanders. Low on ammunition. The drawback is that when a big hitter does strike a ball a tad askew off the tee, the results are sensational to watch—huge, soaring, wayward balls, a shrinking full stop in the sky, and the fall back to earth and a destination unknown. The Dog often simply abandoned a waywardly driven ball, took a penalty or mulligan and belted another. His ‘middle game’ too, when on song, was remarkably consistent. He hit his fair share of greens in regulation. His club choice was always reliable. If he missed, it wasn’t by much. On the green, too, The Dog was economical, and had enough ‘touch’, not to hole every 30-footer in front of him, but to try to stay out of trouble. He rarely three-putted. What separated The Dog from the great, hairy, dusty herd of hacks that daily graze the nation’s golf courses was his penchant for height. His arse, to put it colloquially, was not borne close to the ground, and with his balsa wood upper frame and riveted steel plinth, he could throw a ball to the heavens like no one I’ve ever seen. He had very impressive hang time. If he had a flaw though—and he obviously did, hovering as he did with his handicap in the early teens—it was exactly the thing that impelled his life beyond the golf course, his ace in the hole, and the source of his allure and the engine in his cruiser. It was speed. Speed took the pace off The Dog’s game. Speed was his true enemy. Speed of thought, speed between shots, speed even in repose. The Dog played golf like a chess player, always several moves ahead, and the shot at hand trailed in his wake. Take away his size and natural ability and he’d be at best a 36-handicapper. For The Dog was always somewhere else in the distance, ahead of his present. If ever he had played a round with Shivas Irons, the babbling golf guru would have been left 86

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behind, pontificating on how to squeeze the juice out of his extrasomatic reach, as the holy light gathered at dusk and The Dog was pulling out of the car park, his clubs rattling in the boot. The Dog’s mind was a flywheel. He burned rubber. He was a blur. And like most speedsters, he was prone to the speed wobbles. When the wobbles set in, the psychological crash was not far behind, and on many, many occasions The Dog went from a scintillating, sparkling round of timed perfection to a duffing, hooking, shanking, flubbing disaster in a nanosecond. In such moments he was like those cartoon clocks—when they break down they really break down, exploding in curly busted springs, flying cogs and limp hands. The Dog can regroup quite quickly, even over the course of a single hole. Or he can admit total defeat. When he throws his hands up in surrender, leaving behind the shattered windscreen of a golf cart or a putter curled around a tree trunk like a twist of lemon peel, or a series of neat and perfectly spaced fairway divots that resemble the gills of a shark, he adopts a smiling, ‘I don’t care what my score is’ face, and has a different game altogether. Waving the white flag, I have seen him hit chips, putts and bunker shots on a par with a professional. But speed is the black hole in his game, and it is always there, ahead of him, in any round. It sits quietly inside of him, like an addict’s desire, waiting to take over. And at the risk of sounding like Shivas Irons, here lieth one of the major differences between the golfing professional and the hack. We hacks cannot help but drag the vestiges, entrails, scraps and tidbits of our actual lives on to the golf course. We cannot divest life at the first tee then slip it back on, like a green jacket, especially a green jacket, at the end of a round. We are our games and our games are us, with all our attendant foibles and weaknesses. 87

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The better you avoid your own life when playing golf, the better you play. This was why I was totally unsurprised at the Australian Open of 2001, my first real professional tournament as spectator, that there was an eerie, almost funereal quietness. The players seemed almost hermetically sealed from the world, separated from us by some invisible membrane. But bring our lives on to the golf course we do, and whether by chance, or some hidden Shivas Ironian design, that final round at Coolum became a surprising confessional.

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10. The Not-So-Young Men and the Sea

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ince moving north I must have missed the moment when Farquharson became a Deep Sea Fisherman. As booking agent for our Bloke’s Week he had deemed it necessary that we take a break from the links in the middle of our tour and sample the joys of the open sea. There was, however, a spanner in the works. The principle that applies to myself and raffles, lottery tickets and poker machines is the same one at work whenever I go fishing. I win nothing, and catch nothing. Thus the prospect of spending several hours on a boat kilometres from land with The Dog, Farquharson and a fishing guide did not excite me. Indeed, there are very few people on earth who would relish being cooped up with Farquharson for several hours on a boat a few kilometres from land. Perhaps his mother. Maybe not even his mother. The Dog was up for it, of course, because it involved an outboard motor. This, it seemed, overrode the drawbacks of being out of any form of mobile phone range, and of the range of young women, unless, of course, our Captain was a woman. 89

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Accordingly, on the Wednesday morning we woke before dawn. It was nice to be up and about before the sun came up. We waved to the manager of the Rive Royale, who was out on the footpath with his leaf blower, leaf blowing in the dark. ‘Can someone explain to me the point of the leaf blower?’ asked Farquharson. ‘It is a contemporary, labour-saving device that quickly removes floral detritus and other unsavoury, and visually unseemly, vegetal matter from carriageways, porticos, driveways and other surfaces usually associated with human locomotion,’ The Dog said. ‘In short, it performs the same function as your sorry arse.’ ‘Very nice, Dog,’ I said, ‘particularly for 4.31 a.m.’ ‘I mean, you blow the leaves from one place to another, that’s it,’ Farquharson continued to himself. (Often, he was the only person who listened to anything he said.) ‘It makes no sense. It doesn’t pick them up, or stick them in a recycling bag, or bundle them into piles to be put back on to the garden as mulch. It is an entirely ridiculous object. And I know what you’re thinking.’ ‘Oh, no you don’t.’ ‘Apart from your todger, you’re thinking that I’m right.’ ‘Oh, no I’m not.’ ‘Are too.’ ‘I think you’ve both missed the point,’ I interjected. ‘Isn’t the burning question here why Basil Fawlty is leaf blowing in the pre-dawn in the spring? What, exactly, is there to blow at the height of a Queensland spring at the seaside?’ ‘Ask Farquharson,’ said The Dog. ‘He knows all about what to blow in the spring.’ ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ said Farquharson. ‘That is funny,’ said The Dog and I in unison, although I was starting to chafe at The Dog’s continual flow of sexual 90

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T H E N O T- S O - Y O U N G M E N A N D T H E S E A

innuendo. Even sexual puns can become dull and heavy, sitting in the stomach like undigested Yorkshire pudding, when enunciated too often. ‘I think Matty is right,’ said The Dog after some rumination. ‘If I were a psychologist, I would say our manager has a very, very unhappy marriage. I can appreciate the lure of gardening and general yard tidiness. It is akin to our desire to be out on the golf course. It is one of man’s natural desires. But to leaf blow in the pre-dawn is a condition, an illness. The poor fellow needs help.’ For a brief moment I sat at the wheel of my car and thought—what am I doing here, at this time in the morning, with these two people, talking about leaf blowers and how they relate to the human psyche? At least Farquharson hadn’t brought up his win at Trivial Pursuit the previous evening. ‘How about that win last night, boys?’ he piped up immediately. We ignored him. It made no difference. He answered himself, as he always did when he was ignored, except on the golf course. Farquharson was conspicuously quiet on a golf course, or quieter than normal, for on a golf course, no one can hear you scream. ‘It was a triumph, a magnificent victory,’ he mumbled. ‘A science pie at that. There is no limit, it seems, to the man’s capacity for trivia.’ It was perhaps the greatest truism we had ever heard him utter but we left it alone. We were met at the Mooloolaba Wharf by our Captain, a male in his early forties, and his deepsea fishing vessel, a 30-odd foot angling machine with twin outboards. The Dog was delirious at the sight of the gleaming Evinrudes. I was reminded, briefly, of the classic scene in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where R.P. McMurphy (Jack 91

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Nicholson) takes the residents of a mental asylum out to sea for a spot of fishing. I had a sudden but disturbing vision of myself as one of those magnificent fools, trying to put the dislodged eyes of the bait fish back in their sockets. Farquharson was little Martini, skittering around and around the poop deck. The Dog, of course, was entertaining a floozy below decks, in between pulling in monstrous Red Emperors. The Captain was an ordinary local, who still looked half asleep. We cruised past the canal-side mansions and out into open water. ‘Beautiful day,’ said Farquharson, sniffing the salted air in an exaggerated manner, his foot up on the ice box on the back deck. I sat quietly and watched the land receding. I could see the little Lego box of the Rive Royale in the distance, and wondered if the manager had finished his leaf blowing. I could not make the connection between fishing and golf. I knew there was a fleeting similarity in that both were pursuits that promised masculine relaxation and camaraderie, and a certain flexing of male competitiveness. Both were conducted in the outdoors. Both were sports that ‘real men’ were expected to be attracted to. And both fishing and golf provoked dialogue and literature on that metaphysical plane. But in the back of the boat, now skipping towards the horizon at high speed, an undefined malaise left me feeling as lost as I’d ever been, even with two old friends on board, and the promise of golf the next day and the day after, our final day, which we had reserved for the king of courses, the Hyatt Coolum. Not even the thought of my surprise for the boys—the inaugural Coolum Cup—cheered me in the thudding fishing boat. I had purchased this magnificent two-handled prize, plated in fake gold, especially for this trip. Around its heavy wooden base were several vacant shields which, over the years, would be engraved with the winner’s name out of the three of us. I 92

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took no account of Farquharson ever winning the cup—his full name would never fit on the little metal plaquettes—but I figured it was a safe bet. The cup remained hidden in my bag back at the Rive Royale, a grail that would be presented to the victor during breakfast on our last morning together. I had never been deep-sea fishing and when the boat finally cut its motors, with the shoreline a grubby smudge in the distance, I instantly felt the great roll and heave of the ocean beneath me. As a virgin deep-sea fisherman, I had been warned of this roll and been given by my mother over the telephone a long list of suggested pharmaceutical panaceas.* I trusted my steel trap stomach and avoided them, something I now see was all a part of the maleness of fishing. I did not want my two closed male companions to see me as the Woody Allen of the high seas. The Captain gave us a short tutorial on baiting the hooks although The Dog and Farquharson were making noises and faces as if this was an unnecessary distraction for beginners only. They baited away and had cast before I’d finished fumbling with my little dead fish and pieces thereof. It was still very early. The sun had yet to rise, although the sky was lightening in beautiful shades of purple and blue. I plopped my line not far off the back of the boat and waited. I had a distinct feeling both The Dog and Farquharson were silently and secretly watching each other’s lines for a twitch or a wiggle, and in that first hour all four of us on board were silent in the glow of dawn, bibbing and bobbing on the great groggy plate of the sea. On our way out the Captain had regaled us with tales of what fish were ‘on’ at the moment, and the monsters we could * My mother had a huge medical dictionary on the kitchen bench by the phone at all times. 93

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expect to haul on board. We would hardly have the time or the physical stamina, he promised, to bring over the bow the rich bounty that awaited us. Farquharson had already arranged for a restaurant in Maroochydore to cook our fresh catch that evening. He had had lengthy discussions with the chef. Indeed, in recounting their conversations he referred to his contact as ‘my chef’. I would have been annoyed at this pretentious quirk if Farquharson’s chef wasn’t a window of respite from Farquharson as chef, and his unending procession of grilled chicken wings, and his rhapsodising about his homemade pesto, ground in the marble mortar and pestle that he had purchased, or so he told us, from a mortar and pestle specialist on the outskirts of the township of Carrara in Italy’s Apuan Alps. Michelangelo’s David was carved from Carraran marble, and it was David that Farquharson said he thought about when he mulched his basil, pine nuts, olive oil and hand-grated parmesan. That’s Farquharson. ‘My chef is particularly good with sea perch,’ Farquharson said, although we were only half-listening. I had realised, some time ago, that Farquharson was the sort of man of a certain sort of age who lived one life in his head and another played out by his actual person. In our age of shameless acquisition, status and celebrity he was, in fact, the perfect man for his times. Maybe there was a little of Farquharson in all of us. It was one of the reasons, although perhaps I had not fully understood it at the time, that after almost two decades in Sydney I had fled back up north. The sheer weight of what the place had become had squeezed me out. Psychologically, I was progressing to a simpler existence, yet everything about my life in Sydney was becoming more complex and burdensome. One of the last straws was the matter of a new roof at my apartment building in Elizabeth Bay. Owner of one of two 94

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second-floor apartments in the block, one evening I was summonsed to the flat next door, home to two local entrepreneurs (they ran a trendy coffee shop in Potts Point), who had a faiblesse for early Barbra Streisand albums, and a small, wrinkled Schnauzer. Joint heads of the building’s body corporate, they had decided that we needed a new roof. They had selected a particularly attractive slate (could it possibly have come from Italy’s Apuan Alps?) and according to their mathematics, my portion of the bill would not exceed $40,000. If I’d had $40,000 I wouldn’t be living in Elizabeth Bay but in a villa in Italy’s Apuan Alps. I suggested we, the address collective, might like to go with something a little cheaper. Such as regulation roof tiles. This caused them, and their dog, Chewbacca, to screw up their faces as if they had all bitten simultaneously into a wild, unwashed quince. Physically and mentally labouring under a substantial mortgage, and with the new roof hanging over my head, I could see no way out of my predicament but to sell up and move on. Perhaps it was a rash decision, but at the time I could see no logical alternative. I was forced out of Sydney by pallets of imported slate.* Perched at the back of a 30-footer in the middle of nowhere, thinking these thoughts, I realised I had been at sea for just over an hour. I couldn’t imagine the thoughts of poor Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, drifting for 84 days. At least Barbra Streisand wasn’t recording albums during his time, and my reading of him suggests he was not a person who necessarily counted himself lucky to need other people. He was a man who dreamed of lions, not slate roofs. It was then we saw the whales. * Although constant, high-volume renditions of Hello Dolly—The Original Broadway Cast Recording, People, and Je m’appelle Barbra were also contributing factors. 95

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‘Whales,’ said our Captain, pointing. Both Farquharson and The Dog kept fishing. And there they were, a mother and calf, rising together several hundred metres from the boat. I lowered my rod and stood, awestruck. ‘On their way home,’ the Captain said. They were coming towards us. They surfaced simultaneously, the calf keeping close to its mother’s dorsal, mirroring her movements. The white water they generated was frosted pink in the dawn light. It was nothing the Captain hadn’t seen before, yet he too stood transfixed by the huge creatures. Even The Dog and Farquharson were now glancing over—in-between testing their lines for bites and letting line in and out. The whales were getting closer, shooting umbrella-shaped flumes of spray into the air. ‘That’s incredible,’ I said. Then they disappeared. ‘They’re coming under us,’ the Captain said. ‘Take a look.’ Seconds later the giant whale, big as a bus, and her baby, eased beneath the boat, huge ripply shadows in the deep jade water. A few minutes later the mother broke the surface hundreds of metres to the south, and performed a spectacular half-leap, followed and imitated by her infant, as silly as a sardine. The Captain went back to preparing some hooks and lines while I stood on the rolling deck and watched the whales until I could no longer see the feathery plumes of their breathing. ‘The marine biologist,’ Farquharson said, not looking up from the point where his line entered the ocean. ‘Yes!’ The Dog agreed. ‘The marine biologist!’ They were, of course, referring to the famous Seinfeld episode where George pretends to be an eminent marine biolo96

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gist, and whale specialist, in order to impress a woman. In the episode’s parallel story, Kramer decides to practise his drives by hitting a few golf balls into the ocean. George is ultimately called on to exercise his supposed skills when he encounters an actual beached whale while attempting to court the young woman. His ruse is uncovered. In a masterpiece of sitcom writing and storyline collision, George did manage to save the whale, and discover the source of its distress—a Teitlist golf ball was blocking the whale’s blowhole. I thought about those whales for the rest of that very long day. By mid-morning the sun was high and the surface of the sea was being strafed by strong on-shore winds. Our Captain pulled anchor and manoeuvred us around to several new locations to see if our luck would change. It didn’t. In the end, we seemed to be the only boat left on the ocean. ‘Yesterday we were hauling them in,’ the Captain said, and I did not disbelieve him. Word had gotten out down below, obviously, that Farquharson was out wetting a line. I had one bite that bent my rod into an impressive curve, but whatever was on the end of the line decided to move on before I could bring it on board. It was in perfect keeping with my history as a fisherman. There was a crestfallen air about our charter vessel and the Captain wisely suggested we call it a day. I was studying the curious rust-orange muck in the water. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Spore,’ the Captain said. ‘If you get in early, at spawning time, the fish will bite anything that moves. They can’t help themselves. They’re starving. They’re crazy.’ ‘Except today,’ said The Dog, packing up his rod. For The Dog, our day at sea had been like watching the most anticipated Formula One race of the year and seeing nobody take the chequered flag. It was like going to a brothel 97

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for a cup of tea. It had no real outcome for him. Failure was not an outcome. He decided to blame Farquharson. ‘The marine biologist!’ Farquharson said again, to no laughter. He even requested trailing a lure as we headed at high speed back to port—a final competitive gesture—but nothing took to the bauble of dancing orange plastic. ‘Nice to be outside anyway, hey Dog?’ I said as we approached the Bar. ‘I know a lot more about fish spore than I did at 4.30 this morning,’ he said, his gaze fixed on his mobile phone, waiting for the exact moment when it came into service, and brimmed with messages. Farquharson, meanwhile, was standing in the cockpit with the Captain, yacking about the fishing game, something about which all real men, no matter how tall they were, knew something. It endeared Farquharson to me, this fanfare to the common man he played time after time, particularly with taxi drivers, of whom he was quite fond and who were often the recipient of his broken Mandarin.* There was little conversation on the way back to the Rive Royale. We were tired, thirsty, sunburned and smelled of raw fish thanks to the grimacing bait. I could hear Santiago roaring with laughter. Since then, I have thought long and hard about the failed fishing expedition. Something happened between the three of us, out there on the water. Nothing obvious to the naked ear and eye. Just a little fracture in the skeleton of our friendship, as fine as a hairline crack in a quail bone. What was it? When we returned to the Rive Royale, The Dog had clicked over into someone else, someone a little differ* In an odd irony, he’d learned most of his Mandarin in the backs of taxis in Hong Kong, where he was once, albeit briefly, a resident. He was an infinite, spiralling conch shell, our Farquharson. 98

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ent. We still had two days to go and yet he was checking his watch regularly and sending copious SMS messages on his mobile. Farquharson too became just a little bit more serious. His attempts at humour had dulled and he had lost his gusto as a storyteller. He was like the tourist who had a lot left to see but couldn’t fit it in because the train was due at the station in an hour. He seemed to have caught this condition off The Dog. I think, now, that for a few hours our old dynamic as a trio was laid bare out there on the sea, that the sun burned off and bleached dry what our friendship actually consisted of—the race to make each other laugh, to joust with our wits, to denigrate each other with the efficiency of a samurai’s blade. And when that was gone, what was left? We knew each other’s stories back to front. We could recite for hours, if uninterrupted, each other’s life tales. It is one of the reasons, I thought, for the end of friendships, romances, marriages. As human beings, we simply run out of story. The Dog and Farquharson disappeared to their respective rooms. I went out on to the balcony, patting the giraffe’s rump on the way. I leant on the railing and looked out to the mountains. There was not a single leaf on the driveway.

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11. The Mathematics of a Threesome

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n those last few holes of the front nine at Coolum—a clutch of rudimentary par fours then a daunting, roundthreatening final hole heading into the clubhouse, a nightmare of water and pines with the safety of the rows of parked buggies and the promise of refreshments so tantalisingly close—the mathematics of our threesome revealed itself. In the end, golf is a game of mathematics. I am hopeless at anything to do with numbers, as is Farquharson. The Dog had once run his own business, and presumably balanced the books, so he was way ahead of both of us. But even a child could see that a threesome presents unique complications, above and beyond the regulation twosome or foursome. John Updike has pondered the same problem. He wrote of the foursome: Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives, and have stuck with them longer. The loyalty we feel towards our chronic consorts in golf acquires 100

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THE MATHEMATICS OF A THREESOME

naturally the mystical and eternal overtones that the wedding ceremony hopefully, and often vainly, invokes. What is the secret? Structure, I would answer: the golf foursome is constructed with clear and limited purposes denied the nebulously grand and insatiable goals of the marriage twosome.* Updike suggests that in golf, as in marriage, ‘we march more or less in the same direction’, searching for each other’s lost balls and commenting on our respective defective swings. Yet there the similarity ends. . . . unlike marriage,† golf is war from the start: it is out of its regulated contention, its mathematical bloodshed, that the fever of golf camaraderie blossoms and, from week to week, flourishes. We slay or are slain, eat or are eaten: golf camaraderie is founded on the solid and ancient ground of animal enmity, pleasantly disguised in checked slacks and small courtesies. How true this is in the case of our threesome, and how eerily literal—Farquharson often wears checked slacks, and considers himself a small courtesy. Still, Updike’s ‘structure’ does not account for the odd and prickly threesome, sitting scratchily between the tight, neat twosome, and the powerful synergy of the foursome. This was the dynamic that flashed itself suddenly and rudely at me on that final handful of front-nine holes at Coolum with the late morning sun high and hot, and the course’s shadows pinching themselves in, all dark and hard-edged. * Golf Dreams, by John Updike. † This, I think, is the only debatable area in Updike’s thesis. 101

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Farquharson had steadied his ship, and on the pleasant and comparatively unexacting seventh he carded a sloppy but creditable bogey. I followed suit. The Dog executed an extremely efficient par, knocking a starchy 10-footer to the back of the cup to emphasise the point. He had entered his Determined But Silent Phase. I knew this phase very well. He intended not just the defeat of Farquharson, but a wholesale sacking, a cruel slaughter. It all started an hour before, when Farquharson had ticked him off at the tee and been the initial cause of The Dog’s drive sailing into the pond. The Dog operated to a code similar to that of The Sopranos. An underling could not strike a ‘made’ man. To do so was asking for trouble. In The Dog’s mind, he was ‘made’. Farquharson was nothing but a bit player, a fringe dweller, a bottom feeder. Farquharson was the kid who hijacked trucks and stole a few dozen cheap suits. (And sometimes wore them.) The Dog intended, over the next dozen holes, to put a gun to the back of Farquharson’s head. Thus the Silent Phase, building to the boom of a bullet breaking the speed of sound. Farquharson knew all this. It was so rare for The Dog to be quiet, for there to be even the slightest modicum of silence or stillness about his person that, like Toto, Farquharson could sense the coming tornado. The question was—would our diminutive friend stand his ground, with sheets of sparrows wheeling crazily in the sky, or rush into the house and hide under the couch? Despite appearances, Farquharson is no fool, and walking to the eighth hole, with The Dog striding far ahead, he decided to reveal some of his own battle plan. I knew what was happening. It was the inevitable flaw in the threesome. In the looming psychological war between Farquharson and The Dog, I was the neutral arbiter of insanity. I was No-Man’sLand between the trenches, Switzerland in a chaotic Europe. 102

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‘He’s playing quite well,’ Farquharson almost whispered to me, ‘under the circumstances.’ Here it came. I was about to hear the ‘circumstances’. Farquharson was going to let me in on a few little secrets about The Dog, like one friend sitting another down and telling them their spouse is having an affair. I was caught in a good oldfashioned triangle, or what Updike called the ‘inexhaustible competitive charm’ of golf. But Updike had experience of foursomes, not threesomes. But no amount of ‘circumstances’ could influence the end result. So why had I become the cat’s scratch pole? To tip the balance of the threesome. At the end, bloodied and beaten he might be, but Farquharson would at least have someone to apply a cool compress to his battered forehead. Maybe he hoped that throwing disparaging thoughts about The Dog into the ether would redress his fortunes and steel him for the back nine, when The Dog’s onslaught would be in full swing. In golf, anything is worth a try. Indeed, as Updike so rightly identified, the ‘inexhaustible competitive charm of golf’ for the hack ‘lies in its handicap strokes, whereby all players are theoretically equalized and an underdog can become, with a small shift of fortunes, a top dog’.* ‘Circumstances?’ I said, following my script. ‘You know,’ said Farquharson, sniffing. ‘The creditors coming after him. The wolves at his door.’ ‘Ah, the wolves.’ ‘Must be terrible pressure on him, the poor fellow. He’s holding up very well, I think, under the circumstances. Then there is, of course, the problem with the girl that lives downstairs.’ I was beginning to tune out with talk of the wolves, but pricked my ears at ‘the girl that lives downstairs’. I had been * This, I knew only too well, very much depended on the dog. 103

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to The Dog’s house on many occasions. It was a rambling, spacious affair with a small granny flat on a second level out the back, connected to the main house by an internal ladderstyle staircase that would have been popular on a nineteenthcentury clipper ship. In the long, narrow backyard was The Shed, a former refreshment stall for the tennis court that once graced the yard, but which had long since vanished, buried beneath a strip of lawn. The Dog had done a little work on The Shed, polishing the floorboards and installing lights, a fold-out bed, a refrigerator and a television set, so it acted as an additional guest house. It still had its heavy wooden front flap on hinges that was kept open with a roof hook. I had stayed in The Shed many times, and on lazy summer afternoons it was possible to imagine young men and women in whites leaning into the frame for a glass of chilled punch with a sprig of mint. I knew The Dog lived upstairs in the house with his partner, Genevieve, and that several additional tenants had come and gone. But I did not know the ‘girl that lives downstairs’. ‘The girl that lives downstairs?’ ‘Poppy.’ ‘That’s her name? Or her demeanour?’ ‘She’s a medical student,’ said Farquharson, issuing a little snort. ‘She has a full-sized skeleton down there.’ ‘Really?’ ‘I’ve seen it, through the windows. Not a pleasant sight late at night, after a few bevvies, let me tell you.’ ‘How interesting.’ ‘She and The Dog? Let’s just say they’re on friendly terms.’ He glanced at me with his finest Artful Dodger smirk. He had a delicious, stolen gold fobwatch of salacious gossip in his pocket and he flashed it to me ever so discreetly before tucking it away. 104

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It would not, as I well knew, be the only thing he had to ‘just say’ about the matter. Up ahead, The Dog was languorously practising his drive on the tee. For some reason I suddenly saw him as a skeleton holding his Big Dog. Farquharson cleaned his ball in the ball-washing apparatus, the little hand crank causing at first a whir and then a growl. He glanced smugly towards The Dog. ‘Let’s just say that in the study of medicine, a live human body is invariably preferable to a plastic skeleton, hmm?’ He snickered. I hoped there were no more medical analogies to come, but it was Farquharson’s habit to wring the neck of a gag. He was the sort of person who sat in the periphery of firelight, or at the end of a table, listened to an expertly told tale, or an elaborate and beautifully timed joke, then before everyone had stopped laughing, would jump in with his own comparatively dull anecdote. ‘That’s right, because when I was trekking through Nepal’ . . . etc. etc. He was, effectively, the equivalent of a narrative puncture. He could deflate an atmosphere quicker than a heart attack at a retirement farewell. ‘All that flesh, all those moveable parts to study,’ he said. ‘Alright already, I get the point.’ ‘She is no longer in residence now, of course, young Poppy,’ he added, checking his gleaming ball, ‘after they were caught— how should I put it—doing some heavy duty research together . . .’ ‘In flagrante.’ ‘In her room, actually, beside the skeleton.’ The Dog was just about to strike his ball when he stopped and looked up at us. ‘Pardon?’ ‘Didn’t say a thing,’ said Farquharson. I shrugged my shoulders. 105

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The Dog launched his Precept way up the rising fairway and smacked his lips, well satisfied. I did not like the look of this hole. It appeared innocent enough, and for some reason I am happier, as a hack, to be hitting a drive uphill rather than downhill. It feels, although there is no logical premise for such a feeling, that a ball is safer when hit uphill, as if the earth itself will catch it in its warm mitt. How mistaken I was. It may have been thoughts of jangling skeletons, or the wet noses of wolves, or the thought of two people playing doctors and patients that upset my already shaky biorhythms, but I blasted my ball, having teed it up higher than usual (to account for the uphill topography, I guess—who knows?) and it flew at a perfect 45-degree angle to the line of the tee itself. It was the longest, straightest (albeit 45-degree angle) drive I had hit in several years, and it sailed over the willows, over the pines, over the pandanus and over the cyclone fence that separated the course from the outside world. ‘Oh,’ was all I could think of saying. ‘Look at your feet, Matty, look at the position of your feet,’ said Farquharson, who had suddenly become the renowned golf teacher, lecturer and author of several worldwide bestselling golf manuals. I looked at him as one might look at a very large pile of sticky dog effluent on the bottom of my shoe. A new, very expensive shoe. A new, very expensive shoe just about to carry me into a formal function at the Sydney Opera House, or to a first date at the Rockpool restaurant. The Dog shook his head, but said nothing. Farquharson then guided his ball short of the first fairway bunker with a drive that might have won a prize for ‘longest off the tee’ at an annual charity event contested by one-armed pensioners. ‘I’ve coughed phlegm further,’ The Dog whispered to me. ‘Pardon?’ said Farquharson, and we moved on. 106

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With that, the threesome again shifted configuration. There was really only one combination left—me and The Dog. As Farquharson strode towards his safe ball, The Dog accompanied me to the fence line and the last known sighting of my best drive in memory. ‘The little shit,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘“Look at your feet, Matty, look at your feet!” I’d like to shove his feet where the sun don’t shine, although I suspect someone would’ve been there before me.’ ‘Yeah?’ I said, gripping the cyclone wire, a golf refugee, with my ball nowhere in sight. ‘On account of The Great Gay Bar Fiasco. You heard about that, of course.’ ‘The what?’ If I had heard of something dubbed The Great Gay Bar Fiasco I would have remembered it. Especially in relation to Farquharson who, as he repeatedly reminded us, had had more female companions ‘than hot breakfasts’, but was also known in grubbier circles as a salsa dancer par excellence. His rhythmic gyrations—which we had occasionally glimpsed when he let his guard down, just as an old aunt might accidentally reveal a rolled-up stocking—were what The Dog referred to as ‘leaning towards the effeminate’. The Dog had mentioned this more than once to Farquharson at the end of late, drunken nights and had been dismissed as an uncultured philistine. ‘Culture’s got nothing to do with the way you wiggle your arse,’ The Dog would retaliate. ‘Well you’re the one looking at it,’ Farquharson would reply. The Great Gay Bar Fiasco, however, sounded serious. ‘I’m serious,’ The Dog confirmed. We looked over to Farquharson, fussing over his shoelaces and socks next to the bunker. ‘It was just another day at the races for me and Temple, 107

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a quiet outing on a Saturday afternoon, when we decided to prolong our bonhomie and head over to Oxford Street for a curry.’ Why did I feel I was being drawn into an old episode of Dragnet or The Rockford Files? The Dog was using his ‘storyteller’ diction. ‘Whilst supping on a very fine cabbage thoran, our thirst was accentuated and we decided, quite late that evening, to partake in a nightcap. Temple had mineral water of course. Stranded in Oxford Street, with regulation pubs closing their doors, we somehow found ourselves marooned in ‘Gilligan’s’, the notorious cocktail bar for our brothers of the other persuasion.’ ‘The gay bar.’ ‘Correct. Inside, we secured a nice corner table with a view of the entire establishment, and I enjoyed a very well-mixed whisky sour. Then, as we were just about to leave, who should we see springing through the club entrance but our dear Farquharson, replete in little torn denim shorts and a fetching fitted T-shirt, the colour of which I can no longer remember.’ ‘What? Are you sure, at least, about the torn denim shorts? Nobody wears torn denim shorts unless they’re a 1970s rock star or . . .’ ‘Gay?’ ‘Let’s not revert to cliché.’ ‘But you brought it up.’ ‘So what happened?’ ‘Well, once Temple and I had recovered from the shock, we stood and waved him over. Of course, he did not flinch. He walked straight over to us, put his hands on his hips in a masculine way, or as masculine as one can be in torn and frayed denim shorts and a fitted T-shirt, and said, “I knew I’d find you here!”’ 108

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‘He said that? “I knew I’d find you here”?’ ‘“I knew I’d find you here”.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘What is there to say to that?* Not a lot, I guess,’ said The Dog. ‘It has not been mentioned to this day.’ ‘Until today.’ ‘Until today.’ I decided to take a drop beyond the line of spindly casuarinas and had an open shot to the green more than 200 metres away. I brought down the blade of my trusty three iron, its grip more worn than any club in my bag, and felt that satisfying connection between club face and ball, where the ball feels like thick layers of velvet against the steel of the club, and the resultant energy and propulsion generated by hitting the sweet spot reverberates gently and deeply up the club shaft. The ball fell just short of the front of the green, and trickled back twenty metres to a line of more stubbled grass. I should have been pleased, but as the shag on the rock here, the odd leg in the rickety tripod that our golfing friendship had become, I didn’t know what to think. I was playing golf with a skeletonrattling fornicator and a tartan-clad, bisexual smart-arse. It was a trifle unsettling. ‘Good shot, Matty,’ said The Dog, returning to his ball. In the distance I could see Farquharson silently applauding my handiwork. As I took the lonely walk towards my ball I realised I had been used by both of them in their mind war, and that the surfeit of gossip and secrets could very well derail my own game, not that I had, at that stage, much of a game to speak of. Still, on a resort course of some renown I had yet to have a * Both of us had somehow slipped into the clichéd, high-camp lexicon of the type perfected by Mr Humphrey on Are You Being Served? Much was italicised. 109

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blow-out hole that would send my game into deep, chilly outer space, and to be used as a pawn like this by my playing partners was, potentially, disastrous. I had to try to get out of the mental crossfire. But how? The Dog and Farquharson hit their balls simultaneously, despite Farquharson clearly having right of way over The Dog, 70 metres further up the fairway. Both shot each other a cold glance which lasted for some seconds. ‘Great,’ I sighed. It was a relief, then, finally, to arrive, via the vine-covered underpass and a long, pleasant stroll beside a long, unpleasant water hazard, at the ninth tee. It was a slithery looking hole, with water left and right, and again Robert Trent Jones Jr’s tricky, perspective illusion. Everything about this hole shifted and slid in one direction—the water. In the distance was the cool of the clubhouse. ‘You’ve had such a good round, old mate,’ The Dog said, addressing Farquharson. ‘Why don’t you take the honours?’ It would be Farquharson’s third honour in one day. The Dog was baiting him. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Farquharson. ‘Please, be my guest. It would be an honour, if you took the honour.’ Farquharson shook his head. I was getting a little peeved. ‘We do have a restaurant booked for 8 p.m.,’ I said. The Dog smirked and hit a gunshot ball that fell just short of the green itself. He was primed and loaded for the back nine. It was going to get ugly for Farquharson. I returned to the safety of the three iron, and dribbled into a hollow. Farquharson followed me in. ‘Phew, it’s hot enough for short shorts,’ The Dog said loudly, winking at me as we crossed the bridge to the fairway. 110

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‘Hot enough to bleach bones,’ Farquharson said just as loudly, winking at me. In the end, The Dog lipped out a fifteen-foot birdie attempt. Farquharson and I carded surprisingly confident bogeys. Looking behind me, I could see no sign of the Rushmores. Walking towards the clubhouse I still had no idea who might hold aloft the inaugural Coolum Cup. I think I was levelpegging with Farquharson. The Dog was clearly in front, though not by much. It was pretty well up for grabs, if we all adhered to the gentlemanly rules of the game on the back nine. We had reached the halfway point fuelled by the usual gruel of competitiveness, bitterness, bile, limp jokes, warm Gatorade, secrets, slander and dollops of healthy mistrust. Just another nine holes, really.

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The Clubhouse Dialogues (IV)

DOG: Caddyshack? Caddyshack? You can’t be serious. FARK: Hands down the best golf movie ever made. ME: Why does that make perfect sense to me, Farquharson? Bergman. Fellini. Lean. Leone. Caddyshack. FARK: Sometimes populist comic cinema can disguise universal truths. There is much to be found in the lowbrow, as long as one is willing to traverse the spectrum of art. The arbiters of taste are self-delusional constructs. In short, snobs and wankers. Culture transcends such nonsense. DOG: This, from a guy with a poster of VAN GOGH’S SUNFLOWERS on his lounge room wall. ME: If Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner was about golf, then I would have to call it the greatest golf movie of all time. But it’s not about golf, it’s about baseball. DOG: Bay-ball. ME: Pardon? 112

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DOG: Bay-ball. It’s how Robert Duvall’s character in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway pronounces baseball. He’s Cuban. FARK: Robert Duvall is not Cuban. He’s American. DOG: In the film, you goose. He’s an elderly gentleman who likes bacon sandwiches and doing crossword puzzles. ME: But there’s no golf in the movie. DOG: There’s no golf in the movie. ME: So Field of Dreams is out, unfortunately. DOG: It’s out. ME: Let’s face the awful truth. There are no great golf movies. Why? It is impossible to reproduce golf in a fictional sense. The complexities are far too numerous. The subtleties are untranslatable. The nuances are unreproducible. It is as much a game of the mind as a physical game. As a filmic subject, it is like mercury. FARK: A stream of consciousness. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses. DOG: Have you ever read it? FARK: Well, I’ve . . . DOG: No, I didn’t think so. Besides, there is a Ulysses golf resort, in the States I think. And a brand of golf ball called Ulysses. So, as usual, you are speaking a load of claptrap and nonsense just to present an intelligence infused with extensive reading and artistic and cultural appreciation. If your IQ was a work of art, it would have written across the bottom—FARQUHARSON’S INTELLECTUAL MIMICRY. You are a ruse. A sleight-of-hand artist. An illusionist with a single rabbit in your hat. 113

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FARK: This, from someone who flies to Dubbo to compete in children’s go-kart races. ME: There is an Irish short film called Pitch ’n’ Putt with Beckett and Joyce. Beckett spends the whole time staring at the ball. It’s only a few minutes long. God bless the Irish. There was a very early movie called Golf Widow. The 1920s I think. Starring Harrison Ford. FARK: I knew he was old but I didn’t think he was that old. ME: Another Harrison Ford. FARK: There are two Harrison Fords? ME: Apparently. And there was a film a few years ago, believe it or not, called Mulligan. DOG: I’ve heard of that film. I heard it was crap. ME: I think it was the director’s first movie. FARK: Maybe he needed a mulligan, and did better on the second. ME: Television is a different matter altogether. FARK: Did you hear me? I said maybe he needed a mulligan, and did better on the second. DOG: So true, Matty. The Sopranos. Golf is very important in The Sopranos. There’s a lot of serious plot work done on the golf course. There’s the episode where Uncle Junior is teased about his taste for oral sex, you remember that? ME: Of course. It’s a trigger that leads to a bloodbath. Then there’s Tony’s excursions to the links. It’s on the course he deals with the doctor who has snubbed his mother. Then there’s Carmine’s heart attack, a superb scene. He tumbles backwards, with a mouth full of egg sandwich. 114

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DOG: I love that scene. They’re planning to whack him and he drops dead on the golf course. It’s a great place for a gangster to kick the bucket. In the arms of nature. FARK: A mulligan, so the director of Mulligan can do better on the second . . . ME: Surprisingly, there is very little golf in The West Wing. In fact, I do not recall a single incidence of President Bartlet playing golf, which is unusual for a modern American president. If there is a flaw in The West Wing, that would have to be it. No golf. In the comedy stakes, I vote for Seinfeld. No contest. DOG: Absolutely no contest. I could never see Jerry or George on a golf course. But Kramer, yes. I have seen many Kramers out there hacking away. ME: Oh my goodness, yes. Of all the characters in the series, it has to be Kramer who plays golf. He is devil-may-care, he takes risks, he’s willing to throw himself against the wall of an indifferent universe. Of course he loves golf. DOG: Not just love it. He’s an addict. ME: The best, most identifiable hack moment? When he enters Jerry’s apartment, drops the bag, and kicks it. ‘You want these?’ He says, and kicks them again. ‘I don’t want them.’ DOG: Yes. It’s all the clubs’ fault. ME: Which leaves, as best golf film made to date? FARK: The Legend of Bagger Vance. DOG: Oh dear. ME: Oh dear. FARK: What? 115

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DOG: Sentimental pap. ME: It leaves only one contender. Tin Cup. DOG: Tin Cup. FARK: Tin Cup. ME: It’s got Roy—Kevin Costner—broke and boozed up on a remote driving range. The classic fallen hero. Forgotten. Stuck in the middle of nowhere. DOG: It’s got armadillos. ME: It’s got armadillos. It’s got the complexity of mateship and golf with the Cheech character. DOG: Romeo. ME: Romeo. It’s got a beautiful woman, Rene Russo. DOG: Mama. FARK: Not Pap. DOG: Shut up. ME: It’s got the old pro now hitting like a hack who rediscovers his form and qualifies for the US Open. Right there, it’s your everyman classic story. It’s a hack’s dream. Throw in the villain—Don Johnson—and a climax at one of the biggest tournaments in the world. And it’s got your allimportant moral, as Roy hits ball after ball into the drink until he finally lands one on the green on that final hole. What is he saying, boys and girls? That there’s more to life than winning. That it’s not how you win, but how you play the game. Simple. Beautiful. What have you got? The best golf movie made thus far. DOG: Hear hear. 116

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ME: And boy gets girl. DOG: Boy gets girl. It’s perfect. That we, all of us, may unite as hacks to aspire to that elusive tin cup. The tin cup within. May it runneth over . . . FARK: I think we get it. DOG: Forget the Holy Grail of golf, it is the tin cup we all move towards, inevitably, irrevocably . . . ME: Another great Seinfeld moment . . . DOG: The sad, tarnished tin cup that is the end of life . . . FARK: Oh cork it!

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12. Interval

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aking refreshments on the patio of the Hyatt Coolum clubhouse at the halfway mark of our grand tournament, our trio fell conspicuously silent. It was as if we had all been on board a light aircraft, enjoying the rodeo ride of an adventure, when a huge, yawning air pocket had opened up beneath the plane. I was enjoying the respite from both the game and mounting pressure of the contest between Farquharson and The Dog. Both ears were a touch rubbed up and ringing from their verbal slanging of the last few holes. We sat, then, at an outside table, and sucked at our soft drinks like three sun-kissed children. Some of us more kissed than others—by the sun, certainly not each other. There was no sign down the ninth hole of the Rushmores. I had been getting concerned for them, in the absence of the usual occasional laugh or call of ‘Fore!’ from a party at the rear, and had begun imagining all those old jokes about golfers and heart attacks coming true, so was greatly relieved when I saw them way back at the tee at last, all fuddling about and 118

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hoiking up their old men’s trousers and fussing about for an eternity, debating the fairway ahead of them. There was no pressure for us to proceed to the tenth tee just yet—they’d be half an hour negotiating the water, the trees, the architectural nightmare of Jones Junior’s nasty little par four, as jarring and prickly as one of his rhyming couplets. The Dog was furiously tapping out text messages on his mobile phone and sending them through the universe. He would snicker or smile and shake his head at the content of the incoming responses, and it was left to us to imagine the source of the humour. A woman? A naughty photograph perhaps? A young woman’s breasts, pink and warm, snapped only seconds before in a sunny room back in Sydney, and sent from mobile phone tower to tower, leapfrogging their way to The Dog and into his palm? This irked Farquharson, and he drew long and loudly on his soft drink straw. He surreptitiously craned a little to the right to try and see the screen of The Dog’s phone. Farquharson was the sort of man who hated missing out on anything, who hated being excluded from the business of life. And if you were Farquharson’s friend, your life was his life too. ‘One for the road?’ I said to him, indicating his empty can of soda pop. He was in no mood for a witty riposte. I knew he would have liked a beer, but none of us were ‘beer on the course’ men. Considering we were, in our day, ‘beer just about everywhere else but the course men’, it did strike me as unusual that we had never considered mixing alcohol and golf. In fact, there’s never really been a game more conducive to alcohol than golf. It is a game awash with booze. As Dave Kindred wrote in an article about the game’s ‘unholy alliance’:* * GolfDigest.com, accessed December 2000. 119

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It is only a joke to say the Scots invented golf so they could sell their national beverage by the barrel. Still, can you name another sport that institutionalises drinking as fully as golf does, from 10th-tee halfway houses to roaming beverage carts to the 19th hole?’ Kindred quotes grip-and-rip golfing everyman John Daly who ‘testifies to golf’s drinking problem’: ‘Everywhere you turn on tour, there’s alcohol. It’s the country-club scene with drinking before, during and after rounds, and at sponsor’s parties and pro-am cocktail parties, just everywhere.’* As hacks, we all admired John Daly. John Daly is the hack’s pin-up. He is a study in opposing forces, a marvel of physics. He is hugely overweight, he drinks too much and smokes on the course. Yet he is a graceful, powerful professional golfer with a delightful and often delicate touch. It is almost impossible to marry his physical self and the game that self produces. There are innumerable tales of professional golfers and drinking and smoking, but they all seemed to dry up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then the words political and correctness were married, and the stories of excess seemed to vanish forever. I had certainly seen Farquharson intoxicated on an opening hole, but only with the residue of the night before. Not a fresh swig. Sometimes it was, admittedly, a very powerful and * In May 2006, Daly, the testament to golf’s drinking problems, launched The John Daly Wine Selection, which was, according to his official website, ‘a specially crafted range, conceived and blended to reflect unique and different aspects of one of the world’s most thrilling and big-hearted golfers. The range consists of three distinctive labels—each with its own unique character and style. The Fairway Range is light and sunny, like a Sunday game of golf, easy, well-made and very drinkable. The Lion’s Range pays tribute to the strength and natural power of the man and his work. The Perfect Round … is always a limited release red blend of exceptional quality, created to celebrate the effort, the concentration and the achievement that ultimately makes a worthy winner, a “great”.’ www.johndaly.com, accessed June 2006. 120

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substantial residue. I had, occasionally, been in a similar state. But while the vestiges of alcohol seemed to correct many of Farquharson’s stylistic inadequacies and wayward skills, they almost always exacerbated mine. He had strung some meticulous pars together with a vat of Maker’s Mark in the tank. I had seen it with my own eyes. The Dog, curiously, was not of our ‘drinking’ generation, and only rarely had I seen him out-and-out drunk. His was the chemical generation, and I had no idea how this might impact on a golf game. The world of his recreation was all powders and vapours and pills manufactured in backyard sheds by groups of large, motorcycle-riding chemists. Ours was quaintly old-fashioned, almost antique, by comparison—tumblers of amber spirits and cigarettes, as opposed to pharmaceuticals with little smiley faces and names like pornographic movies. At ease outside the clubhouse, with The Dog continually chuckling at his handheld device, Farquharson and I watched the Rushmores struggle up the ninth. We could have been looking at ourselves in 40 years’ time—the outdated, duckbillcollared check shirts, the cream trousers all bunched from waist to crotch, home perhaps to some accident-proof adult diaper, the spotted hands and faces, the creaking joints and fragile swing, the final rickety remnants of a one-time powerful construction. I knew what Farquharson was thinking because I was thinking it too—here, at the halfway mark of the round, we were also, as men, at some sort of interval in our own game. The Big Game. Our lingering melancholy was a by-product of the beer and hard liquor generation, as opposed to the pill poppers like The Dog, who were always hurtling towards the stars. Besides, they had no truck with melancholy. Melancholy required a serious investment of time. 121

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‘Did we miss the boat?’ Farquharson asked, out of nowhere. ‘What boat?’ I asked. ‘You know. The boat. Wife. Kids. All that.’ ‘I’ve been married once.’ ‘So have I. I don’t mean that. You can get on the wrong boat, but then you get off and hop on to the right one, don’t you? It’s got to be out there, the right boat.’ ‘Why does it have to be? Who says what’s right and wrong? Things just happen.’ I knew only too well, however, that trusting in the philosophy that ‘things just happen’ had consumed many valuable years of my life and resulted in me not just missing the boat but failing to turn up at the right wharf. ‘Where have I heard that before?’ ‘From me, probably,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re running out of story?’ ‘It’s a distinct possibility.’ ‘We’ll be all right. Things just happen, then we’ll have something to talk about again.’ ‘All right, all right.’ The Dog was happily in his own world: ‘She didn’t! Bullshit!’ Farquharson grimaced, as if he’d bitten down on a cracked molar. It was the widening fissure of his own lost youth. ‘Listen to him, early thirties and still allowed to bang on like a teenager,’ said Farquharson. ‘It’s different for us. We’ve crossed the great divide. All that forties is the new twenties, and fifties is the new thirties. There ain’t nothing new about nothing. Forties is still the same old forties.’ I knew Farquharson was upset when he started talking like an old whisky-soaked cowpoke hanging around the end of the bar in the saloon, his horse hitched out the front and asleep at the rail. 122

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‘The great divide, eh?’ ‘That’s it. Now, the women who give you a nudge and a wink are your own age. That happens only when you’re in primary school, and then there’s a huge gap until you’re in your forties. Either that, or older women.’ ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with older women,’ I said, metaphorically leaning against the bar beside him in the saloon, uncorking the label-less whisky bottle with my teeth and pouring him another shot. ‘Everyone around you has got kids,’ he continued. ‘It raises an eyebrow, you know, when you don’t have kids at our age. You get the ‘bachelor uncle’ thing. I never wanted to be the weird bachelor uncle. Your sexuality is thrown into question. Ohhhh yes, he’s a bachelor isn’t he? And divorced, to boot. You don’t get that in your thirties. Only when you cross the great divide, into your forties. If you’re very, very wealthy, or famous, you don’t get the bachelor uncle scenario. It doesn’t apply. Then again, if you’re very, very rich or famous, or both, you never really have occasion to be a bachelor. I don’t even want to be a bachelor. I hate the sound of the word. Bachelor.’ ‘But,’ I said, holding up an index finger, ‘you did once say, quite famously, that whenever you were settled with a partner, your “inner-bachelor” started to scratch his way out.’ ‘I would never have said such a thing in a sober state.’ ‘From memory that’s true, you have always said it while not sober.’ ‘Yet there is an element of truth in it. So I am solely to blame for my current predicament. I am the captain of my own boat.’ ‘I’m getting confused about the boats now.’ ‘He’s a soft cock!’ bellowed The Dog. The Rushmores were bending their already hunched backs over their putters. Somehow their canvas floppy-brimmed hats stayed affixed to their heads. 123

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‘Forget about the boats. Forget about everything I said. It’s all horseshit and nonsense. I don’t know what I’m saying.’ He slapped his brow with one open palm. ‘I thought it’d go on forever,’ he said quietly. ‘What?’ He toyed with the straw in his drink. ‘The fun.’ I could see another aircraft rising away from the horizon, and moments later the sound of the screaming engines caught up with us. I recalled my flight out of San Antonio, Texas, when the air restrictions across the United States were finally lifted shortly after September 11. On the last leg of my escape— Chicago to London—passengers applauded as the plane lifted into the sky. It strikes me, now, as an extraordinary thing to do—to be collectively thrilled to leave a country. It was a strange time. It was strange, too, to be thinking again of September 11 that day on the Sunshine Coast, entangling a leisurely pastime with a complex turning point in history, but it put me in mind yet again—observing Farquharson and The Dog—of how our personalities and approach to life are reflected in the game. Golf reveals our attitudes, philosophies and idiosyncrasies just as, in the old days, one would slip a piece of photographic paper into a tub of chemicals, rock the paper gently, and see images come to the surface. Part of the appeal of golf is that in this respect it makes no distinction between three hacks from a country at the bottom of the world and, say, the President of the United States. I read with interest Dana Milbank and Mike Allen’s report published in The Washington Post in April 2004 about President George W. Bush’s demeanour in the month prior to the September 11 attacks, warned as he was of impending terrorist activity by Al Qaeda. 124

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President Bush was in an expansive mood on Aug. 7, 2001, when he ran into reporters while playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Tex. The day before, the president had received an intelligence briefing—the contents of which were declassified by the White House Saturday night—warning ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US’. But Bush seemed carefree as he spoke about the books he was reading, the work he was doing on his nearby ranch, his love of hotweather jogging, his golf game and his 55th birthday. ‘No mulligans, except on the first tee,’ he said to laughter. ‘That’s just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I’m walking out here, I’m fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy—I hit the speed limit on July 6th.’ I had never heard anyone, anywhere, use the phrase ‘tight back’, but it somehow seemed to make sense in relation to Bush. It told me a lot about how he might approach his golf game. Tight back. Buckle your seat belt. In some respects, however, Bush refutes the theory of ‘golf reflecting life’, or the parity between one’s golf game and how one attacks the real or outside world. He plays fast, is a bull at a gate and puts no reflection into much of his game. He is grip and rip, which puts him in the same basket as our beloved John Daly, another man of opposing forces. Yet in matters that require urgent national and international attention—which is the crux of his job brief—he is famously slow to react. The 43rd President’s father confirmed to Dan Jenkins of Golf Digest in October 2005: ‘Forty-three could be a single digit man if he had the luxury to play more and practice. He hits a long tee ball. He plays very fast—maybe he needs to take more time, but who am I to suggest that? I expect he’s about a 125

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15 or 16 today, but if the windmill and the dragon’s mouth are out of sync, it might be closer to 18.’* What did all this have to do—three years after September 11—with our contest for the Coolum Cup? Just as the world had changed, our lives had changed at about the same time. Not just our lives, but our mateship as well. And this was, without question, reflected in our game, as the opening nine holes at Coolum, in fact, demonstrated. Everything was there. The early sketches of the blueprints of our lives from this point onward. I hadn’t expected this kind of revelation during the last round of our golfing week. I’d thought simply that we’d revel in each other’s blokey company, drink too much and enjoy some golf. But on the day we contested the Coolum Cup several lines converged—the presence of the Rushmores, remembrances of September 11 and the way the round itself was unfolding—that reflected our exact emotional and physical stations in life at that moment. ‘Who’d want to bring a child into this anyway,’ Farquharson said. He could have been talking to himself. ‘Come on,’ I said, encouragingly. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Into golf? Into Queensland? ‘It’s not that bad.’ ‘It’s not? For at least the next generation, our children’s generation, there will be the possibility of death by terrorism at any given moment, yet there may not be children in our specific cases, which is probably a blessing, because the women who give us a wink and a nudge are too old to have them, and the * Another phrase I had never come across before. Apparently it stems from miniature golf courses, or putt-putt facilities, and refers to the silly ways the holes are dressed up to entertain patrons. There is, apparently, a ‘medieval theme’ miniature golf course in the San Francisco area that has, among other things, a windmill to putt under and a dragon’s mouth to putt into. It is impossible to think of George W. Bush playing a miniature golf course complete with windmill, and not think of Don Quixote. 126

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women with whom we should be procreating, have forgotten to have children, or have pursued careers that have precluded children, or have not been able to find decent men with which to have children, which is understandable, because we used to be those decent men, that was us, but we and men like us thought we could have it all and fool around and float fancyfree and still have the devoted partner and children at the other end. Now that I’m closer to the other end, I see it doesn’t work that way, because there is no neat and functional other end, just a train wreck of dashed dreams, children never born and raised, emotions not matured and obligations not fulfilled.’ Farquharson stopped to draw breath and dropped his head. ‘She what?’ The Dog roared with delight into his handset. The Rushmores were close enough now for me to see the deeply etched wrinkles in their necks. They creaked and coughed and a couple sucked on their pocket inhalers as they began moving off the ninth green. It was time for us to hit the tenth. It was close to noon. We walked our buggies to the tee. The Dog finally snapped his clamshell phone shut and pulled out the Big Dog. ‘Yeah baby,’ he whispered, gently kissing its shiny head. Farquharson had that glazed look, still numbed by his own descent into infinity back at the clubhouse. He was gazing down the hazy fairway. It was alive and clicking with insect life. It hadn’t occurred to me before but now, standing on the tenth, I could have used a drink.

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13. An Aside On the Intricacies of Amateur Golf

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any years ago I wrote a sequence of short stories, the primary protagonist of which was based not a little on our inestimable Farquharson. For a writer of fiction, Farquharson, as a character, is one of those brilliant macaws that unexpectedly drops out of the sky and pecks for crumbs amid the dun-coloured pigeons of one’s acquaintance.* I harvested both the flattering and perverse elements of his character, made his nose a little bigger, his size a little smaller (if that’s possible) and, naturally, accentuated the bad bits. When the stories were published I was a trifle anxious about his reaction. Would it be the end of our friendship? Would he embark on a strategy of retribution? Would he be so ashamed that he would hide from the world? Farquharson vowed to read the book in its entirety one weekend and deliver his verdict the following Monday night, at our usual corner in the ‘London Hotel’. I arrived early and * To paraphrase Nobel laureate Patrick White on writer David Malouf. 128

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A N A S I D E O N T H E I N T R I C A C I E S O F A M AT E U R G O L F

watched him carefully as he entered the pub, looking for any signs, any change in demeanour. I had a beer waiting for him. After taking a long draught, he smacked his lips. ‘Well?’ I asked. He paused. He had worn his houndstooth jacket with the leather lapels. I hated that jacket, especially the lapels which had, some time in the past, decided to die well before the rest of the garment, and sat there hanging over his shoulders like two wizened flaps of skin. It was his ‘literary’ jacket, the one he used to wear to any book launches or readings I took him to. ‘That annoying little man, in the short stories,’ he said carefully, his gaze fixed on some distant landscape, some sparkling salon or Algonquin-style table around which bright witticisms and epigrams whizzed like fireflies. ‘Mmmm hmmm,’ I said, sipping. ‘I’m proud to report that he is, hands down, the best character you’ve ever created.’ And with that, he lifted his glass, clinked mine, took a long pull on his beer and banged the glass on the bar towel, a creamy moustache hanging on the precipice of his top lip. To this day I’m unsure if Farquharson really did see himself in the diminutive jockey who rides chaotically through those short stories, and was being very grown-up about it all, or if there was something about him, about his brain, that switched off at the fumes of familiarity. Still, his blessing was a relief, one which opened the gate even further to my examination of his character. When he witnessed me taking notes on one thing or another out in the world, he would glance at my notebook and pen and nod with his knowing little smile—the one in which the right-hand corner of his mouth cricked upwards just a fraction—as proud as a father quietly observing his child win a spelling bee, or an egg-and-spoon race. My work now was 129

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somehow an enchanted walled garden to which he had one of the few keys, a privilege which he guarded ferociously. I often took notes out on the golf course. For no specific purpose, other than the fact that I like taking notes and a golf course can be very conducive to the taking of notes. There’s a lot of time to ponder, and a combination of dialogue and human activity that can be found nowhere else. The very nature of golf brings its players’ virtues and foibles into stark relief. Whenever he saw my notebook, The Dog, of course, thought I was jotting reflections on him. Often, he played up to it as if it were a camera.* ‘Of course you’ve noticed my altered backswing, the shorter, sharper angle of the downward movement,’ he would say, watching me, the notebook, me, the notebook. ‘Duly noted,’ I’d say, and with that he’d nod and move up the fairway. But it was Farquharson who, after many years and many rounds, unexpectedly said, ‘Those golf notes of yours. What will you do with them?’ ‘What do you mean, what will I do with them?’ ‘I mean, will they become a book?’ ‘I don’t know if they’ll become a book.’ ‘I would suggest they become a book.’ ‘You would.’ ‘I would. I would suggest, and I do this without a need for satiating my own ego, that it was time you made me a character in one of your books.’ ‘Do you?’ ‘I do. I think, as a character, I have a lot to offer.’ ‘Is that right?’ * Another thing that annoyed Farquharson. ‘This generation,’ he often said, snootily, of The Dog. ‘They think life’s a movie and they’re all the stars. Pfffft.’ 130

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‘I’m much more interesting than most people, linguistically I’m quite colourful, even if I do say so myself, and the bedrock of the character that is me is sufficiently complex.’ ‘You have a complex bedrock.’ ‘In my humble opinion, yes. I am the antithesis of The Dog who, if I were a literary critic, I would describe as insubstantial.’ For a moment he reminded me of Gertrude Stein and her critique of Ernest Hemingway’s short story Up in Michigan. The young Hemingway had sat at Stein’s substantial feet in Paris in the early years of his career in the 1920s, and had sought her expert opinion on his work, and she had described Up in Michigan as ‘inaccroachable’. ‘It is inaccroachable, Hemingway.’ I’ve always loved this word, all scratchy and prickly like a barbed-wire fence. But this was Hemingway’s version of the incident, and his reporting always had to be viewed with suspicion. Just as Farquharson’s reasoning always had to be viewed with suspicion. ‘You’re a very harsh critic,’ I said, wrestling with a vision of Stein in her voluminous peasant’s dress, paddling Farquharson’s diminutive bottom with a stale baguette. ‘I call ’em as I see ’em.’* ‘You certainly do that.’ ‘In the right hands, I am critically untouchable. I am endearing. I am lovable. Yet there is something of substance there.’ ‘A bedrock.’ ‘A bedrock. Precisely. And above all, I am so painfully human. Besides, I think it’s unfair you’ve never put me in one of your books and now’s the time, possibly with the golf notes which, I can see, could become a book which in turn might be * Another of his narrative flaws, I had always thought, was his reversion to Louis L’Amour-style Western cowpoke dialogue which, in this instance, weakened his argument. 131

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the ideal stage for my debut. Witty. Dashing. Unlike that little grub in your previous collection.’ I noted him looking at me hopefully out of the corner of his eye. ‘I have to warn you,’ I said, ‘that you would ultimately be exposed, bare and naked, to the slings and arrows of critics.’ He flicked his hand. ‘Critics shmitics.’ ‘Be left defenceless against their learned judgements, indeed the canon of literature, and their fusillade of extensive reading. That’s a lot of weight for someone so painfully human.’ ‘Who are they?’ he said. ‘You remember what Eugene O’Neill once said? “Critics, I love every bone in their heads”.’ ‘I’m just preparing you.’ ‘Why don’t you just go and write the thing. It’s what you do, isn’t it? Go and do it.’ So it was Farquharson who rode a lonely horse around the giant herd of notes I had collated on our golfing threesome, cracking his whip and whistling away, occasionally lifting his buttock from the saddle, now and then waving off the flies, steering everything towards the shape of a narrative. And, ultimately, it was Farquharson’s expert, albeit egocentric, droving that forced me down some strange and wonderful paths, to discover some great golf writing and reporting, thoughts and reflections on hackdom and why the game of golf is so frighteningly addictive. I was not at all surprised to find that, in the end, pretty much all ruminations on the game come back to Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), considered by many the greatest golf writer, possibly the greatest sports writer, who ever lived. He was, after all, the grandson of the author of The Origin of Species, that little pamphlet that changed our relationships to ourselves, God and the universe. Of course a blood relative of the man who proposed the theory of evolution would end up 132

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writing about golf. They are subjects that seem, somehow, inextricably linked, and of equal gravity. On 7 June 1976, The New Yorker magazine published a wonderful profile of Bernard Darwin by that other Titan of golf reporting, Herbert Warren Wind. Fifteen years after Darwin’s death, Warren Wind had been prompted by the occasion of the US Masters to offer some reflections on the maestro, whom he himself had known when he was a young man. Darwin had loved the game since childhood, but took the expected path of Darwinian excellence by qualifying as a barrister before a friend recommended him as a golf columnist for London’s Evening Standard newspaper. The moment ‘Tee Shots’ was published he knew he had found his true vocation, and as Warren Wind writes, ‘he [Darwin) sold his wig and, as he later said, “walked out of the Temple a free man”’. Darwin was no hack. He could be accurately classified as standing just a cut below the players who win championships. He had been brought up in the days of the gutta-percha ball,* and his effortful method reflected this. It was initiated by a backswing in which, his body bristling with tension, he took the club back well beyond the ideal position in which the shaft is parallel to the ground. Then, with something less than a relaxed, (Sam) Sneadian lyricism, he uncorked his downswing and hurled the club violently at the ball.† However, as I say, he was a very good golfer.‡ * Gutta-percha is a rubber-like material that comes from the dried sap of sapodilla trees of East Asia and the earliest solid gutta balls were formed from pieces of guttapercha heated in water and softened. † This is a beautiful description of a golf swing, one which is eerily similar to that of Farquharson. The ‘uncorking’ of the swing is entirely appropriate in the latter case. ‡ The New Yorker, 7 June 1976, pp. 89–90. 133

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If there are echoes of our own Farquharson in Darwin’s physical approach to the game, there is also a spooky correlation with The Dog. As Warren Wind wrote of his demeanour on the links: The game meant the world to him. He threw every last grain of concentration and willpower into his tournament play, and, being a man with an extremely high-strung temperament and a very short fuse, he sometimes simply could not control his frustration when things went wrong. His eruptions were often so spectacular and, from a safe distance, so hilarious that even today, years after they took place, it remains a regular pastime of his old friends to sit around of an evening retelling Darwin stories.* This, to me, is the essence of the game of golf, and excuses my incessant note-taking on and off the links. It is a game that nurtures storytelling. It grows stories because it is rich with human folly, embarrassment, courage, metaphor, valour, temperament, beauty and ugliness. There is virtually no delay between action and story. Each stroke, each fumble, each utterance, is a part of the narrative of the game. Some stories are duller than others, or meaningful only to the actual participants, and so are sapped of interest in the retelling. Most are appreciated or, at least, understood only by fellow hacks. With this in mind, I decided to go back to my notes, and look at some of the profound issues of being a hack: * Ibid. This instantly brings to mind an eruption by The Dog not on the golf course, but in the upstairs pool room of the ‘London Hotel’ where, if you look closely above the skirting board on the street-facing wall near the bar, you will see an indentation in the plaster, a depression we subsequently named ‘the Farquharson divot’. It was caused by the back of the aforementioned Farquharson’s head, after he was thrown across the room late one evening by the aforementioned Dog. 134

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CHILDREN WHO PLAY BETTER THAN YOU

Once upon a time, when I lived in Paris, I was always dumbstruck by the perfect (or so it seemed to me) French of Parisian children. Whether in a supermarket, restaurant or café, or at the little lake in the Luxembourg Gardens where they sailed their toy skiffs on a Saturday afternoon, their grasp of the language always hit me in the solar plexus. Why? Because I myself had so little grasp of that infuriating language, and struggled day to day trying to make myself understood. Once, ordering a croque-monsieur—a delicious, toasted sandwichstyle concoction with grilled cheese and ham—I was rendered speechless when the waiter delivered a crepe suzette. It was a struggle to order a loaf of bread. To seek directions. To live. You realise the true importance of language when you don’t have it. What frustrated me even more than French-speaking children, just out of nappies and barely able to walk properly, yet linguistically more accomplished than myself, were the Parisian dogs. Even French dogs understood more French than I did. It was somehow against the natural order of things. So too are children who play better golf than adults. As adults, we should, both mentally and physically, be superior in most matters to children, even gifted children. But with golf, there is a mysterious portal in the game that allows the warping of the laws of nature, one that blows a monstrous raspberry at size and experience, and flips comfortable perceptions on their head. I have three nephews. All of them showed a precocious talent for all things sport. And at one stage, during a formative period in their collective childhood (they are each a couple of years apart in age) they lived in a house that backed on to a 135

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golf course. Almost overnight they progressed from not even having touched a golf club to becoming three aspiring, albeit diminutive, Arnold Palmers. They became the Golden Bears of the Lilliputian golf world. I liked playing with them before they became embryonic Tiger Woodses. They ran around like real children, and squealed and argued and had fun. Then the game took hold, and within a few short years they were hitting 200m drives and sailing nine irons to the heart of the green. This seemingly overnight improvement, this quantum leap forward in skill, is baffling to the adult hack. Year after year we labour to shave a few strokes off our handicap, and yet some children can knock off ten or more in a matter of months. It is more than baffling—it is obscene. It is as obscene as seeing a young girl, her bedroom walls still lined with blank-eyed dolls, being allowed out in public wearing one of those SEX KITTEN or PORN STAR T-shirts, adorned in heavy make-up and teetering on high heels. It is as obscene as those child eggheads who can do impossible mathematical calculations in a millisecond with the numerical results falling out of their mouths like wet marbles. Within a few meagre years my nephews, who played only on a casual basis, had overtaken their hacking, thrashing, water-prone, sand-trapped uncle with absolute ease, my Model-T left shaken and rattled in the slipstream of their Formula One mega-machines. I don’t play with them anymore. They have big new golf bags and shiny clubs, they wear caps and clothes that are colour-coordinated and very neat and they look like a million dollars and might, just might, have a private jet waiting on the tarmac at the local airport. It’s not a nice feeling when everyone around you, even dogs, know the language, and you don’t. 136

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WHAT MEN TALK ABOUT ON THE GOLF COURSE

This is difficult to quantify, given the infinite number of combinations of golfing playing partners that, in turn, decides the level of conversation. A foursome of strangers will rarely dredge the sludge of life. Nor will two separate pairs of golfing buddies. Business- or job-related groupings, too, will elicit a certain type of non-intimate conversation that would not be out of place in the confines of the office. There is, it has to be said, an inescapable point of commonality and discussion among hacks, no matter who they are— that is the fact of being a golf hack. The worse you are at the game, the more you are compelled to talk about it. Hackers around the world have their ineptitude in common. This marries with my theory that the golf hack has a view of himself and his own game that is disproportionate, indeed sometimes bears no relation at all to his actual game. We talk about clubs and shots and the lie of fairways when we have no real idea of what we’re talking about. We discuss what we should have done and what the result would have been if only this and that little problem had been tweaked, when we don’t really have a clue. We think as if we are professionals, yet we are incapable of translating those thoughts into physical reality. We play a dream game in our heads, and are left with a filthy, deflated, raggedy, incompetent and pitiful nightmare on the actual tees, fairways and greens. We kick our game around, year after year, like a muddied and deflated football bladder. It is this, the gulf between thought and action, that drives hacks to despair, and in fact contributes to our game’s permanent state of disrepair. You can see, then, why some of us reach not to philosophers or psychologists for mental balm, but ethereal, airy-fairy golf gurus, shamans and self-proclaimed prophets. 137

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The twosome, of course, is the most fertile soil for intimate discussion on the golf course. And, as we have seen, a threesome can enjoy a similarly nurturing atmosphere, as long as the tripod does not have legs of vastly different strengths and lengths. Are nitty-gritty intimacies shared on the golf course? Absolutely. More so, on average, than in the pub, club, or around the 44-gallon drum or the Beefmeister two-plater. It is my belief that the actual rhythm of golf—hit, mull over, walk to ball, hit, mull over, etc.—is very close to the rhythm of excellent discussion. The way the game is played is in itself a giant conversation. There is time to think and ponder the construction of sentences between shots. The serenity of nature, too, is more conducive to considered thought than the assault of the bing-bong bells of poker machines, brawling pool players and crash of beer glasses. Doing the mathematics, a hack with a maximum handicap can have a hundred or so little intervals in the course of a round over a three- to four-hour period. This to me seems a nice, gentle, sensible mix of thought-time and words, all wrapped in the tweetering of native birds, the whisper of wind through willows and the neat sigh of sand.* Exactly what is talked about? Our rickety tripod has discussed everything from sexually transmitted diseases to wireless Internet connections, from nipples to nachos. We have spent an entire round discussing the pros and cons of The Dog leaving one job and being headhunted for another. Another 18 holes, each of which was a chapter of the novel that was Farquharson’s wild weekend a few days earlier. Hack golf is a huge piece of blotting paper.

* There is, of course, the corollary—the faster the golfer, the more manic the round, the less time between shots and the greater the likelihood of crazed, nonsensical conversation. A rant. A mad soliloquy. This is why The Dog as conversationalist is very different from Farquharson. 138

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URINATION AND OTHER UNSAVOURY BODILY FUNCTIONS ON THE GOLF COURSE

Let’s just say there is not a hack on the planet who has not succumbed to the call of nature, in nature, at least once in their golfing careers. The need to urinate is as catching as a yawn or a cough, and the sight of one man hunting for an appropriately discreet eucalypt or shrub often sets off the bladder bells of other men in the vicinity, so it is not uncommon for several men to be urinating at once, their bags and buggies left abandoned on the fairway, a club or two cast adrift in the grass. Farquharson says there has not been enough attention paid to toilets in golf course design. On most courses, the water closets are located in the clubhouse. On resort courses, you sometimes find additional facilities between the middle holes of each nine. Farquharson argues that a game of golf, especially as you get older, is ‘an act of bladder faith’. In the excitement of playing a round of golf, with eighteen glorious holes unfolding before you, the last thoughts you have, ordinarily, are of the urinal. Then again, in the wider, Darwinian scheme of things, nature is man’s urinal. So why worry? Farquharson argues that putting them at the halfway mark of the front and back nines is worse than not having them there at all, because just knowing they’re there, a few holes ahead or behind, makes the ticklish call of nature even worse, just as an old horse will sense when it’s close to its stable, and make its own way home. I tell Farquharson I see absolutely no correlation between himself, a urinal and an old nag clip-clopping back to the stable. Men will pass wind, as our grandmothers used to call it, on a golf course. They do this because men will pass wind anywhere. 139

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GOLF JOKES

I have never heard, or read, a really great golf joke. Golf jokes are invariably variations on the same theme. The cast of characters includes hacks, priests and pastors, God, Jesus, Moses and other assorted prophets, secretaries, husbands and wives, castaways and old men. The scenarios always involve golfers having affairs with their secretaries, funerals, the death of the aforementioned wives or very old male golfers, the power of God over the game, freak occurrences of nature, obsession with the game above and beyond all else in life, and wordplays and puns on ‘balls’. Despite these limitations, golf jokes are often extremely funny to golfers. I have heard men howl with laughter and seen them brush tears from their eyes at a joke that would not make an intelligent child crack a grin. It is, I think, part of the private-clubbish bonhomie that most golfers share. These are their jokes, invented by them, for them and understood by them. Only a golfer can get it. Outside of this context, golf jokes are tired, childish, often unintelligible and frequently sexist. The most common golf joke, told with infinite little garnishes, is about the two golfers who are playing a hole that abuts a cemetery, where an interment is taking place. One of the golfers removes his hat, places it over his heart, and stands silently in respect. His partner asks why he is doing such a thing. The golfer says she was a good wife over 40 years of marriage, and it’s the least he could do. Boom boom. Our threesome has never exchanged golf jokes, as distinct from telling jokes on the golf course. The way we play, golf is at once a huge cosmic joke, and no joke at all. Neither is a laughing matter. 140

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14. The Black Rat with the Gold Tooth, The Shark, The Pope, The Hustler, the Mushroom Farm and the Unbearable Weight of Memories

W

hen Farquharson hit the longest and most perfect drive I’ve ever seen from him at the 10th tee, the sound of club face striking ball, that deep, satisfying crack that sends a pleasurable fissure not just through your hands and wrists but back, into the history of the golfer you always could have been but never were, the hang time so long, so gloriously endless that beneath it, around it, about it, birds get on with their business and fulfil whole tasks, people have a complete thought, glaciers move a fraction, and you have time enough to wonder—Did I actually hit that? Did it come from me? Just as new fathers hold their newborn children, still caked with the fine clay of birth, in awe and ask of themselves—Is this a part of me? This is my child? The ball flight is so precise, so millimetre-perfect, that it thumbs its nose at the course designer, at Mr Trent Jones Jr 141

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and all his rhyming couplets that babble as mad as a country stream, at the weather conditions and nature, and possibly changes the configuration of matter, space and time. Farquharson’s brilliant drive punched a hole through something, opened a secret door and frightened The Dog. Just as we learn in school science, for every action there is a reaction, and The Dog’s reaction to Farquharson’s once-in-a-lifetime ball was to try and hit the actual cover off his Precept. His shot that would be a once-in-two-lifetimes ball. You already know the outcome, don’t you? In the eerie vacuum that followed Fark’s magic drive, The Dog teed up, swung so hard he actually lifted himself into the air an inch, before topping a ball so hard that there was a double crack—the bottom of his club hitting the ball, and the ball itself hitting the earth—apparently a discharged rifle bullet makes the same double thud as it breaks the speed barrier. Bang bang. The Dog’s ball plopped apologetically into the creek not a hundred metres away. Indeed, it only just made the creek. It dribbled in. Dribble is not a word you want to associate with a golf shot. I, in turn, suffered as part of this inexplicable chain reaction. It was as if Farquharson’s monster drive and The Dog’s dribbly top had sucked the energy out of the air. My arms felt heavy. I felt old all over. I drew the club back and could hear in the back of my head a long, muddy groan, as if the audio tape of life had been slowed to almost nothing, and my octogenarian swing produced a pathetic muffled ping on contact. The ball barely had the energy to roll through grass, stopping just 25 metres from the men’s tee, twelve metres from the ladies’ tee, and at a 45-degree angle from the tee perpendicular. We all stood there, silent, dumbfounded, at the collapse of molecules. Everything folded in on itself or, as psychologists and Hollywood scriptwriters like to say these days, our stories were unpacked in an instant. Ancient memories rushed in to try 142

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THE BLACK RAT WITH THE GOLD TOOTH

and fill the void. At that very moment I thought of our dear friend Lebanese Jennifer, the mushroom farmer, and the day she took all of us to see the Australian Open. Why should I have suddenly thought of Lebanese Jennifer at such a glorious moment in Farquharson’s round? Why had I fallen down a rabbit hole in our golfing trio’s collective memory, with the inaugural Coolum Cup not exactly hanging in the balance but still to be decided (though neither Farquharson nor The Dog knew that anything at all was in the balance apart from their precarious friendship)? They were similar, Jennifer and the Coolum—expensive, beautifully presented, seductive and alluring, challenging and funny, with hidden traps. If people were golf courses, Lebanese Jennifer was the Hyatt Coolum or Bonville at Coffs Harbour. I had known and loved quite a few Bonvilles, a couple of tricky Australian Golf Courses in Sydney, a handful of nicely turned out and old-fashioned Royal Queenslands and Sydneys and, from memory, several well-intentioned but unstimulating public courses and even the odd putt-putt. Farquharson was a putt-putt, if only in terms of his stature, albeit a putt-putt with more than the usual bells and whistles. The Dog was a resort course in Las Vegas, an indoor practice range in New York, or the latest golf video game. I was the Ashgrove Golf Course of my youth. A bit hilly, a bit flat. A challenge one minute, dreary and straightforward the next. And I had a creek that meandered through me, delivering unexpected paper boats and bottles with messages and people in them, some of whom I extended a tree branch and others I let sail on by, a creek which at the same time took away Time itself, and people I loved and couldn’t hold against the flow, and the whole damn thing giggled and gurgled away like a dream. We first met Lebanese Jennifer in the mid-1990s, when we held court in the upstairs pool lounge of the ‘London Hotel’. It 143

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was a peculiar time in the history of pool and billiards in Sydney. For some reason, pool was the ‘cool’ thing to be doing, and tables were popping up right across the city. Even trendy bars had pool tables and as many women as men were bitten by the trend. Out of the mania stepped some very good stick players, one of whom was Lebanese Jennifer. We happened to know lots of Jennifers, and as Lebanese Jennifer was proud of her Lebanese heritage, she agreed to be Lebanese Jennifer. As opposed to, say, Pommy Jennifer. In fact there were two Pommy Jennifers who were best friends, so it was Pommy Jen 1 and Pommy Jen 2. There was a Newtown Jenny and a Darlinghurst Jen. But there was only one Lebanese Jennifer. It was a Saturday afternoon around lunchtime, when we first saw Lebanese Jennifer walk into the pool lounge at the ‘London’. A small, neat, immaculately groomed and attractive young woman, she was wearing a white tracksuit, her long black hair held back in a ponytail. She had expensive gold necklaces and bracelets and rings. Her make-up was perfect. She smelled like spring flowers. And she carried a hinged leather pool cue carry case. I had never seen anyone outside The Hustler with their own leather pool cue carry case. It was lined, inside, with crushed orange velvet. I remember the case glowed from within when opened. On that Saturday afternoon Lebanese Jennifer pulled out the two halves of her private cue and screwed them together like an assassin screwing a silencer on to a rifle barrel. She smiled in our direction. ‘Would anyone care for a game?’ she asked, smiling, an angel with a deadly weapon. The room went quiet, as quiet as Fast Eddie Felson’s ‘church of the good hustler’. (More like a 144

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morgue, says his sidekick Charlie, with them tables the slabs for the stiffs.) I couldn’t work out if Lebanese Jennifer was a hustler or not. I was unbalanced by the juxtaposition of her innocent demeanour and the villainous pool cue holster. It didn’t matter what I thought at that moment. Farquharson was knocking over chairs, tables, glasses and anything else not nailed down in that room to get to the pool table and volunteer his services as playing partner. He had that slightly glazed, slightly stupid look in his eyes that we had seen before, to wit—I may have just met my future bride.* It pains me to say this, and The Dog too, but Farquharson is a very fine pool player. He knows we know how good he is. That’s what makes it all the more excruciating to be around a pool table when he has his ‘eye in’ unless, of course, he’s on your doubles team. Farquharson’s estranged father, you see, was a NSW snooker champion. He was one of the best. That lost father of the Nambucca oyster beds. Snooker, billiards and eight ball— this was the genetic inheritance father gifted to son. He was a hereditary pool hall shark. I think Farquharson might have preferred to have been born with the skills of a neurosurgeon or global merchant banker, the hands of a great artist or the feet of a legendary football striker. Alas, he was merely handy around a pool table. He did become a legend in those years, but his fame was restricted to * This was quite often followed by that short, slurred, but entirely expected statement which naturally followed Farquharson being ‘bride struck’, as I liked to put it. ‘Arrm gonna marry that woman.’ I’m not sure if he said that about his first wife, whom he had married on a South American charter boat largely populated with German insect collectors on their annual field trip. They were formally joined under the gaze of God by the Captain who, it turned out, was not a legally registered or trained captain at all, so his marriage may not have been legally binding. It is how he prefers to see it, now that they have gone their separate ways. 145

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the beautiful hand-cut sandstone surrounds of the ‘London’. It was at the ‘London’ that he felt most comfortable exercising the complex and often beautiful range of his skills, and in the ‘London’ he was most appreciated. So it was on that Saturday that he lined up against Lebanese Jennifer, permitted her the honour of breaking, sat down quietly, and didn’t get up again. She wiped him clean, as easily and thoroughly as a starving man polishing a tin plate with piece of stale bread. It was a continuous stream of marvellous shot-making. Farquharson sat in his chair like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the same embarrassed grin on his face from opening ball to last. He had never been beaten by a single break. He appeared to shrink in front of our eyes, his little wooden dummy legs dangling over the lip of the chair. Lebanese Jennifer was our new hero. Over years of friendship I would have the chance to analyse her pool game, to study its intricacies, to learn how she orchestrated some truly remarkable victories. It was like unfolding an origami crane to appreciate the skill hidden in its beauty. But on that first Saturday afternoon the brilliance of Lebanese Jennifer’s shot-making was instantly apparent and carried a peculiar force on account of her size. She produced huge shots for someone so dainty. It was as if a lady’s pearl-handled purse pistol was firing cannon balls. In short, she wiped the floor with Farquharson, leaving him stunned, a fish knocked unconscious and floating top side by the shock waves of a stick of dynamite, just as he dumbfounded us that day with his stupendous drive on the tenth at the Hyatt Coolum. I studied Farquharson after the drive of his life. He was just as surprised as we were, perhaps even aghast at his own power and precision. For a millisecond he may even have been a trifle 146

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embarrassed. The Dog walked towards his duffed ball, all scrunched up, pulled in, trying to make himself smaller, inconspicuous, trying to vanish. I took the few steps required to reach my dribbler. I could hear the coughing, creaking and wheezing of the Rushmores gathering at the tee behind me. Another Trent Jones Jr illusion unfolded ahead. His hillocks slipped and slid left to right and joined like the chubby fingers of a preacher playing steeples. Farquharson had fired his rocket clean down the centre and his ball, out of sight, nibbled at the edge of the green. I was content for my trusty seven iron to throw the ball over the little creek. ‘Nice and safe,’ said Farquharson, nodding and smacking his lips for no reason, suddenly one of the game’s leading strategists, golfing mentors and rule purveyors. The Dog again attacked his ball like a mad woodsman, hurling an island of grass and clover and earth spinning up against the sky, and sent his ball skittering like a dog with a burned backside into the pond that hugged the left side of the fairway. His club followed, twirling and winking through space. The honk of a Rushmore blowing his nose sent the water fowl into flight. Farquharson and I walked together. He was keeping a lid on his excitement. He could see a three- or four-shot turnaround with The Dog here, maybe more, and sniffed an upset. He was suddenly very mature and attentive and reasonable. ‘You remember Lebanese Jennifer?’ ‘How could I forget Lebanese Jennifer? One of the best shooters I’ve ever seen. I should have married her, you know.’ ‘What happened to Lebanese Jennifer?’ ‘She got married, to someone else.’ ‘What a shame.’ ‘You’re telling me,’ he said. ‘Beautiful. Funny. Intelligent. And a pool genius. What more could you ask for?’ 147

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I do not remember Lebanese Jennifer ever having anything to do with golf, either as a player or spectator, which was why it seemed so peculiar when, about six months after we first met her, she asked us all to come along with her to watch the Australian Open being played at Royal Sydney. I asked Farquharson what the story was. ‘She knows the Shark,’ he said, nonchalantly. ‘She knows the Shark? The Shark?’ ‘Yeah, she met the Shark last week, and he gave her the tickets.’ Several things tumbled through my mind, not the least being how a pool-playing, Catholic Lebanese girl who worked on the family mushroom farm came to be friends with one of the legends of world golf. Then again, she did have a picture of herself kissing the Pontiff’s hand. As it turned out, Lebanese Jennifer had been strolling through Double Bay with friends when she passed the Shark and his party and somehow caught the Shark’s eye. By chance, they were lunching later in the same restaurant, got to talking and, golf ambassador that he was, the Shark gave Lebanese Jennifer a clutch of tickets to the Open. ‘You remember when we went with her to see the Shark play?’ I asked, lining up my ball. The Dog had disappeared from view over the ridge, spitting, hissing and swearing at himself. He was imploding spectacularly. I hit an average straight three iron that still pulled up short of Farquharson’s magic drive. The Dog, with penalties, must have been on his fifth shot. I had already taken three and still had a 50-metre chip to the flag. Farquharson’s ball sat there on the trimmed green stubble not a half-metre from the putting surface like the golden egg of his entire golfing career. And for the very first time he was proud to have been the goose that laid it. 148

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‘He winked at her,’ Farquharson said. ‘The Shark. He saw her in the gallery and boom, gave her a wink.’ ‘He did. I never saw the Shark as a winker, but there you go. We were there. Witnessed it with our own eyes.’ We’d witnessed a lot more. I had never before been to a professional golf tournament, although as a cadet reporter in Brisbane I had interviewed the future PGA winner, Queenslander Wayne Grady.* It’s impossible to describe the gulf between professional and non-professional golfers, even very good nonprofessionals. It was the same bottomless cavern that existed between professional tennis players and weekend whackers. I came to understand this seeing Andre Agassi play at Wimbledon in 1991. Television cannot tell the story of the ground speed those tennis balls move at. The lightning reactions. The timing. It was the same at the Open that day with Lebanese Jennifer. It’s a jaw-dropping marvel to see great golfers playing in the flesh, as it was to see the Shark. Of course he hit it long. Of course he hit it sweetly. Of course he produced a few shots that took your breath away, particularly around the greens. But what impressed me the most about these men was the quiet, Swiss-watch consistency of their games. Their margin for error was extremely small. Just as we flail away and hope to hit the fairway or the green, our margin being everything, the wide world itself, theirs is a game of inches, of trajectories and * The Courier-Mail, Thursday, 20 December 1984: ‘A Brisbane high school teacher once told a 14-year-old pupil he would never make a living out of golf and should concentrate on his studies. ‘The pupil was Wayne Grady. Now, aged 27, he is one of only three Australians to earn his player’s ticket for the US Professional Golfers Association circuit. He will join Greg Norman and David Graham on golf’s richest circuit, which begins on January 9. “I was never at school, I was always at the golf course,” Wayne said yesterday when he returned to Brisbane. ‘‘I’ve seen that teacher a couple of times down at the Virginia course, and she wanted some golf lessons.”’ Not exactly Herbert Warren Wind. 149

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distances mapped in the head and shots deployed along precise lines. And it is all done in almost absolute silence. I was shocked at how quiet a professional golf tournament can be. It is funereal. It has to be the eeriest popular sport in the world for its huge pockets of silence and concentration. Thankfully, in Australia, there is none of the whooping and howling of American galleries—Yaaaiiiirrrrrrrrrrr, In the Hoooooooole, Awwrrrrrrighttyarrrr. That day at the Royal Sydney, it seemed like every grandfather in Sydney, all with thinning hair and a little grey World War II fighter pilot’s moustache, dressed in khaki pants and a navy cardigan, and carrying an umbrella and a red-checked picnic blanket, had been deposited at the golf. So the response to shots was demure, the atmosphere gentlemanly and reverent. Thrown into the mix, wearing a cream jumpsuit and lustrous gold rings and smelling of Chanel No. 5, was our very own Lebanese Jennifer. ‘What’s he doing now?’ she’d whisper, poking me, as the Shark lined up his ball at the tee and waggled his club. ‘He’s waggling.’ ‘Waggling? Noooo, you are teasing me again. Waggling? Is it rude? Are you pulling my leg? Okay. Waggling. I have to remember that.’ She took mental notes with a jewel-encrusted mental pen on a gold-lined mental note pad. Then came the wink. And by the ninth hole we had lost Lebanese Jennifer somewhere. Perhaps she was bored. Who knows? ‘Farrrrrk!’ It wasn’t the bush turkey, it was The Dog, entangled in the willows and shrubbery behind the north-eastern corner of the hole. We couldn’t see him, but we could certainly hear him. His shouted obscenities had gone from steely and angry to whiny. A lilt of despair had crept into the tail of his ‘Farrrrks’. 150

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I pulled out my much-loved seven iron once again and chipped my ball to a decent three metres from the pin. Farquharson also employed the old Texas wedge, and nailed it a foot from the hole. I’m glad The Dog was not there to see it. ‘Well done young man,’ said I, pulling out my putter. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Farquharson. I finished the hole with a two-putt and walked away happily with a six. If I had not distracted myself with thoughts of the past and Lebanese Jennifer and the winking Shark I may have snuck off with a bogey. Farquharson hammered home the most perfect birdie he would ever make, now or in the future. And he knew it. When The Dog’s ball finally landed on the green, trailing a shower of slashed willow leaves, Farquharson replaced the pin and grinned at me and for a second he was the original black rat with a gold tooth. How sweet his moment was. The Dog two-putted and still could not get the ball down. He had encountered the dreaded unsinkable ball which will sometimes sneak into your bag and wreak havoc. We gifted him a generous 10. It looked hideous on the scorecard. It looked gigantic. The single stick ‘1’ and the obese ‘0’. In a single hole, the black rat clawed back seven strokes. The Dog settled marginally over the next few holes—the sneaky par-three 11th, the long, blind-off-the-tee dogleg 12th and its doppelgänger, the adjacent 13th—but he was still reeling under the weight of the ten on his card and, somewhere along the way, possibly as he walked the little boulevard of paperbark trees, all flaky and shredded, the leaden ten broke something inside The Dog. Everything about him was quiet. Farquharson, to his credit, sensed an opportunity. He held firm with three straight bogeys. He matched The Dog stroke for stroke. I was out of this contest, both on the scorecard and mentally. But I was loving the tortoise and hare drama of it all. 151

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The Dog was pretending that he didn’t care. I knew this wasn’t true. He would never, ever, succumb to being beaten by Farquharson. At the tee on the 13th I realised what he was doing—he was playing possum. We will never know if this strategy would have worked. For behind us, slicing like a hot butter knife through the groups of golfers—the twosomes, the foursomes—was The Yank. And when The Yank made it past the Rushmores, he struck our peculiar threesome. And there he came to rest. A shag landing on our rock. And it was The Yank who blew the Coolum Cup wide open.

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ME: I know you’re a keen waver-througher, I’ve seen you do it several times. I would venture to say that you are addicted to waving people through, if that’s possible. FARK: It’s good old-fashioned manners. It’s how I was brought up. ME: You’re like a human windmill. The hint of movement in the corner of your eye, even if you’re about to drive a ball or tap in a putt, and you’re spinning those arms like propellers. Come through! Come through! FARK: I refuse to apologise for good manners. DOG: Arse. You have a pathological need to be loved. FARK: I beg your pardon? DOG: Nothing to do with manners and the way you was brought up, as you put it. I’ve seen you in a car. You’re flapping and waving and letting people in and begging them to slot in ahead of you. You’re a crazy flapping Samaritan. 153

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FARK: What’s wrong with that? DOG: What’s wrong with that is it takes you two hours to get from Balmain to the GPO. Secondly, an addiction to the ‘thank you’ wave is, in the end, still an addiction. FARK: (Snorting) Oh for heaven’s sake. ME: The hack only waves through when he believes there are players of superior quality wishing to move ahead at their natural pace, that being one greater than his. It is not manners, it is golf etiquette. DOG: Correct. ME: It is, in fact, an unspoken capitulation, an agreement that you are a hack and a lesser-quality player than the ones you are waving through. DOG: In theory. ME: In theory. In reality, one is, as a consequence of the wave through, left in the wake of superior players. This could be psychologically damaging, if one allowed oneself to dwell on it. But one doesn’t. DOG: One does not. And why is that? Because in the great community of golf there is no judgement, no lookingdown upon. We are joined by the game. We all start somewhere. We all develop to varying degrees due to an incomprehensible myriad of circumstances. We are all different. It is just as life is. It is the metaphor that embraces us all. FARK: Codswallop. ME: I’m happy to wave through The Dog’s conclusions. Here I am, Dog, waving you through. 154

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DOG: Thank you, Matty. A scholar and a gentleman. FARK: I would hardly say I’m addicted to the ‘thank you’ wave. And even if I was, I fail to see how you would be aware of it. I don’t make it a habit of chauffeuring you around. DOG: Oh yes, how I beg to be driven about in Kevvie the Kingswood. How is Kevvie? Been stolen again, has he? ME: Ah yes, the case of the stolen Kevvie. Not where you parked it after a night on the turps. And found, weeks later, exactly where it had been parked, and with the club lock secure to boot. FARK: So I forgot where I parked it, so what? DOG: Weeks of buses to work, hire cars on the weekend for dirty sojourns in the Hunter Valley, telephone calls to the police—have you found my poor Kevvie with Vivaldi the wooden duck on the dash? No? Thank you, officer. Thank you. Thank you. Here, let me wave you through, officer. FARK: Boring. DOG: Wave after wave after wave. Like the ocean. FARK: Is this going anywhere? DOG: Not particularly. FARK: Oh bugger, because it was so intellectually stimulating, so culturally necessary, so darned exciting to think your dialogue might have got to the point of the double syllable. I always look forward to a chat with a man whose favourite book is the unabridged compendium on adult go-kart racing. That really tickles my grey matter. ME: Alright, alright. This seems like a very stale and familiar 155

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path. We were talking about the etiquette of waving through. Sometimes, though, the judgement is misplaced. You wave through. You wait for them to lob a ball onto the green. There’s nothing. There’s a crash in the bush, a plop in the lake, several calls of ‘Fore!’ They’re worse than you. You’ve waved through hacks. Now you’re stuck behind them. FARK: The logical thing to do, obviously, is only ever wave through on a par four or five. Never on a par three. ME: Why is that? FARK: The four or five requires a drive or a ball hit from the fairway. You can roughly gauge the quality of the golfer. You at least have a single shot to measure. It’s impossible on the par three. It’s a leap of faith. A matter of blind trust. ME: You’ve got a point there. Isn’t that right, Dog? DOG: Yes he does. He’s certainly got a point there. FARK: Thank you. ME: When, then, on a crowded course, is it permissible to hit with golfers in front of you? How far away should they be? DOG: One of the classic hack flaws. The hack always thinks he or she can hit further than they can actually hit. ME: Oh how true. DOG: How far away is that player? Three hundred metres? Oh heavens no, I best wait, don’t want to hit him you know. FARK: Do your imaginary narrators always sound like Prince Charles? 156

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ME: Does it always have to end this way? Our conversations? DOG: Not always. ME: No? DOG: Sometimes they end with a little wave, from Farquharson. Like this. There you go. Wooo hooo. Little waveys. FARK: Very mature. ME: I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone wave with a reversed hand and with just their middle finger.

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15. The Penskie Problem

I

’m not exactly sure at what point I decided Peter Penskie from Montclair, New Jersey, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency—perhaps around the 16th hole—but it was not unusual for me to think that most, if not all, Americans were employed by the CIA, on a full, part-time or even casual basis from a very young age. When we were kids we cut people’s lawns or pumped petrol for pocket money; Americans gathered information for the CIA. The Coolum Cup was being played out at the end of a short and ill-conceived year I’d spent living on the Gold Coast. I had been finishing a novel and buffing up on my boogie-boarding skills, and through my local and favourite restaurateur, Scotty, I’d met an assortment of the strange types that passed through the Gold Coast. Some came and went. Others caught in the strainer like grubby boiled vegetables. It was what the Gold Coast was very good at, and what its legion of itinerants expected—to be sieved out as you passed through. The oddities left behind were eye-popping. There was a very confused young man who had just returned from a retreat in the Arizona 158

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desert. He assured me he was now a fully qualified ‘priest’ of some sort. There were petty gangsters and sexually ambiguous chefs, gamblers, drug dealers, bombed out former tennis stars and, quite literally, a constantly drunken sailor, à la ‘What shall we do with . . ., etc.’, who had moored himself at Scotty’s quaint bar. Then there was the American husband-and-wife team of motivational speakers who, I became convinced, were CIA operatives. The Americans lived in a high-rise apartment at Main Beach and had initially made their money ‘selling Amway’, before they moved into motivational speaking, again very much in the American way of things. The gentleman claimed he was a ‘double diamonder’ with Amway, which I gathered was an impressive achievement in the world of selling laundry detergents and toothpaste. His wife was very young and they reminded me of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands. They ate out every night and drove a new car and all the while they put together their hand-made motivational CDs and booklets, as unimpressive as high school projects. Then they vanished, leaving the high-rise apartment, the car and a clutch of voice recordings on how to be a diamond amid the cubic zirconias of the human race. Definitely CIA. Peter Penskie, the Yank who attached himself to our threesome that day at Coolum, had the same upbeat, shiny, inviolable air about him. Farquharson liked him instantly. It is the thing I sometimes loathed about Farquharson, his ability to give all strangers the benefit of the doubt, his painful do-gooder attitude that all people were equal. He would bound up to them like an un-desexed puppy and sniff away at their backsides, all happy panting and flared nostrils. It was nauseating. Farquharson attached himself to Penskie, and for a couple of holes they became a twosome. 159

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We would discover later from Farquharson that Penskie’s line of business was ‘in satellites’, and that he was having some R&R after a visit to Pine Gap. As far as I was concerned he might as well have had ‘CIA’ tattooed on his forehead. As we approached my favourite hole at Coolum—the picturesque par-four 16th (297m)—there was an opportunity to make small talk. ‘You a member of any club back home?’ The Dog asked. ‘Yaiiirrr,’ said Penskie. ‘The Chelsea Pier Golf Club.’ ‘The Chelsea Pier? Never heard of it.’ ‘It’s in Chelsea,’ said Penskie. The Dog’s eyes narrowed. He was sure the American was taking the piss. ‘New York City. On the Hudson.’ ‘Wouldn’t be a big course, would it? In New York City?’ ‘You’re right there. It’s just the pier. They’ve turned it into a big driving range, sticking out over the water, with giant nets to catch the balls.’ ‘Ahhhh,’ said Farquharson, in his most annoying sing-song voice. ‘Only in America.’ ‘No grass?’ asked The Dog. ‘Astro turf.’ ‘Of course,’ said The Dog. ‘Why bother with grass when you can have Astro turf?’ ‘Pardon?’ asked Penskie. ‘Nothing.’ Whatever his pedigree, Penskie hit a solid ball. Straight as a die. He held his club for a long, long time after he struck the ball. He held the pose for so long it became unnerving. We were 50 metres down the fairway and Penskie was still there, forged in brass like the soldiers hoisting the American flag at the top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. ‘That’s one hell of a post-shot analysis,’ said The Dog. 160

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‘It must be the way they do it over at the Chelsea Pier Golf Club,’ I said.* ‘Hell of a nice guy that Penskie,’ said Farquharson, shaking his head. ‘You’ve known him for twenty minutes,’ said The Dog. ‘I gotta sense about people.’ ‘Why are you suddenly sounding like someone who grew up on the rough, tough streets of Brooklyn?’ ‘Must be fascinating,’ Farquharson continued, unfazed, ‘to work in satellites. The things some people do. Amazing. It’s an astonishing world, boys.’ ‘Thank you, dad,’ said The Dog. ‘I’ll always remember that.’ For a moment on the 16th, with Penskie finally thawing out on the tee, and Farquharson hanging back a little waiting for his New Best Friend, oblivious it seemed to his very ordinary tee shot which had skittered off to the left of the fairway and settled beneath a spectacular bird’s nest fern at the base of a paperbark tree, and The Dog relaxed at last, with just two and a half holes to go, and striding towards a perfectly placed drive that had quietly and deliberately run up to the lip of the green, there was happiness and contentment in the air. It was almost tangible. Penskie, however, unwittingly reinstigated the natural world order of our golfing games. Farquharson instantly reverted to * Bizarrely, two years later I would be standing on the third-floor driving range of the Chelsea Pier Golf Club in NYC watching a supermodel hit a few dozen balls with her Callaway clubs in +40 degree heat. The model—Kristy Hinze—whom I would be in town to interview for a magazine, would know Greg Norman who, when he was in Coolum, would stop by Kristy’s parents’ place for a barbecue. I looked out for Penskie. I should have investigated whether Penskie was actually a legitimate member of the Chelsea Pier Golf Club with its sepia photographs of Walter Hagan and Bobby Jones. I doubt it. The members I did see were moneyed New York types, not the louche suburban Penskie type from across the muddy Hudson. 161

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being if not plain awful, only a whisker above it. His resurgence in the early stages of the back nine proved, once again, to be an illusion. For a while there, the Mini Moke of his game had coughed, spluttered and misfired itself into something resembling if not a BMW, at least a top-of-the-line Toyota. Golf has a way of creating these mirages. It lures and teases you into playing better than you can actually play. And for the briefest of moments it gives you a taste of that pure mountain water, that sweet highland grass and air. Then bang, you’re back on the valley floor. By his second shot on the 16th—a stupendous air swing crowned in sliced and diced fern leaves and shattered bark—Farquharson’s leaden game cloaked him once again. His shoulders immediately hunched. His stance became uneven. He tried to hit the ball out of the bird’s nest fern with his hands and wrists, as if they had no connection to his shoulders or, indeed, his brain. Again, he kicked up an inordinate volume of dirt, fern leaf and spore, before the ball duffed and dribbled out just a few feet on to the fairway. Penskie had been waiting patiently. ‘Sharrrt,’ he said. Was this the polite generosity of a new friend, or the deep, deep sarcasm of a CIA satellite expert? Farquharson hurried to his sad ball and quickly hit his next shot. He never took his eyes from the ground. I knew this modus operandi. If he kept his head down then nobody could see the great lumbering, loping, heaving ordinariness of his real game. It was disguised, a snail tucked tightly in its shell. It was as close as I’d ever seen to an adult playing ‘Peekaboo’. By avoiding eye contact with the rest of us, his awful golf game disappeared. Of course, he rushed his next shot, sending it hopping into the deep, kidney-shaped bunker at the front right of the green. The ball landed in the shade of a nearby paperbark, as if the ball wanted to draw the little cloak of shadow over itself. Penskie hit a towering ball, so high it seemed he might have 162

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been aiming for one of his own satellites. It was a stupendous arched shot (perhaps he was from St Louis), and we waited forever for it to come to earth. ‘If you stretched it out,’ The Dog said, ‘that shot would have been a 350-metre drive.’ ‘You think?’ ‘Ohh yeah.’ The ball in fact progressed, as the crow flies, only about 100 metres, having hit the putting surface and spun back with almost comical speed. ‘That’s some hang time,’ said The Dog, shaking his head. ‘Everything about this guy is suspended, like he’s playing golf in outer space. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ While Penskie’s ball was dangling on high, Farquharson went about his business, scuttling around like a black crab on the floor of the ocean. A black crab that was up to something. During the American’s obscenely long hang time, Farquharson took a couple of shovelled shots at his bunkered ball, but still couldn’t get it clear of the sand. Miraculously, however, when we returned our concentration to the green, there was the little man’s ball, just a few metres from the pin. There was no telltale line of sand from the bunker. Just the ball, clean and guilty. Had there been foul play? We could only suspect, not prove. I had managed to scramble to within seven metres of the pin, and had only a putt for a bogey. Meanwhile, The Dog, sensing a shift in the configuration of our game, as keenly as a retriever catches the scent of a tired mallard on the breeze, knocked a beautiful seven iron towards the flag. He trailed the club after the ball in his left hand, as some golfers do when they’re sure of the ball going in the hole. It’s a nice skill to have, that backhand sweep, so long as the ball falls true. I am reminded of it on the very rare occasion I go to fine restaurants, and the waiter has a little crumb sweeper that he uses between 163

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courses. The Dog’s ball hit the pin with a lovely, decisive clang, and hopped back half a foot, the fibreglass flag poll vibrating. It put a very big smile on The Dog’s face, that clang. It was a clang that could be heard across the world, or at least by Farquharson. It was the start of tinnitus for Farquharson. The death knell of his hopes. Penskie carded a very tidy two-putt. I, too, two-putted but I was beyond caring. I was thinking of some fresh sand and spanner crabs for dinner. A crisp beer. A lovely cold white wine from the Clare Valley or Margaret River. A little foray into the nightlife of the Sunshine Coast. Some laughs. Some pool. The bonhomie of old mates. A double bogey seemed very acceptable at that moment. The Dog shot his best par of the day. He was getting better with each hole, warming up, loosening, finding the zone, right at the end of the round. He knew it. He loved it. He glowed like freshly minted gold. Farquharson three-putted. He was all hunched, tightly coiled, pinched and bound up. If you could imagine a person being slowly relieved of their own intestines via, as a rude bachelor uncle of mine used to say, the ‘backdoor’, then that was Farquharson. He scratched a score on his card that could have been anything. It might have been a three, or a twelve. It was another of Farquharson’s tricks, the equivalent of a verbal mumble. At the final count, a twelve might just be misconstrued as a three, and bing bam boom, there’s nine strokes that vanish into the golfing ether. Strangely, Penskie scooted ahead with a simple ‘Have a nice day,’ struck a solo ball off the seventeenth tee, halved his frozen swing time, and strode up the fairway like a wind-up toy. ‘If I’m not mistaken, we just had an American pass through us,’ I said. ‘Like a dose of salts,’ said The Dog. ‘Obviously a busy man,’ said Farquharson. He had the snoots. 164

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He fiddled around in his bag, readjusted his clubs, checked his tee pocket. When everything goes wrong, and the game leaves us, there’s always the bag to tweak and twiddle. ‘Let her rip, Dog,’ I said. And he did, belting a blinder up the uphill par-four 17th and nearly hitting the mechanical Penskie. The Dog’s ball had to be less than 30 metres from the pin. He was in sparkling form. He twirled his driver like a big, hairy-legged American cheerleader. Poor Farquharson had lost all his zip and zest. It was as if it had been stolen by Penskie, who was now skipping about on the green. Farquharson tried to match The Dog. Big mistake. He went in too fast and too hard, and his grubby Maxfli hooked into the trees on the right. As he hurriedly retrieved his tee, we distinctly heard the sound of shattering glass. ‘Was that what I think it was?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ said The Dog. ‘The last window in the house of his ego, broken. The little frosted pane in the dunny, I’m afraid.’ Farquharson had, in fact, sent his $2 ball through the downstairs sliding door of an as yet unfinished $1.56 million townhouse that overlooked the fairway. Unbelievably, he hopped the fence and retrieved his ball. ‘Is that a one-stroke penalty?’ he asked, feebly. ‘Whatever,’ said The Dog. ‘Whatever,’ I said, flicking my hand at the gnat of his question. I had simply lost all interest in the game for that day, and as any hack will tell you, when the love for a game of golf goes, it really and truly goes very quickly. It is perhaps because you are left with nothing—no score to admire, no terrific shots to discuss, no recollections to tuck under the arm and carry into the future. Instead, all the real and practical things that surround amateur golf begin to step forward—the obscenely early starting time, the long walk, the elements, the blister on 165

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the heel of your hand, the accumulated cost of a resort course, drinks, sandwiches, lost balls, car fuel. Significantly, too, the sheer effort to remain civil, even among mates, when you know deep in your soul your game is not all it could be. Golf is one of the cruellest games on earth in this respect. It will cut you, then throw grit into the wound. Just when you think you’re on the mend, the sore will open up again. Golf knows where your weak spots are, when and where to hit you the hardest. Then hit you again. In the end it will leave you alone just long enough for you to rationalise that it’s not the game at all. It can’t be. How can a game commit such human offences? It’s all in your own head. It’s your fault. It’s you striking blows against yourself. And round and round we go. Golf. It could very easily sit alongside several of the world’s run-of-the-mill, common-or-garden variety sado-masochistic, mind-screwing and life-damaging conventional religions. The Dog carded as perfect a birdie as I’d seen him play. ‘Beeeeyooootiful, Dog,’ I said. I was getting delirious. Farquharson claimed a bogey, even with the shattered glass. ‘Make mine a double,’ I said. I think I had mild sunstroke. Walking to the final tee, I was struck dumb by the streetlamps that bordered the cul-de-sac of townhouses we had to walk through to get to the 18th. The black lamps looked like the crosses of the crucifixion. I kept silent. Were they omens? We could see the miniature figure of Penskie the CIA agent marching towards the lovely eighteenth green, tucked neatly above a little lake to the left. ‘This is it,’ said The Dog. ‘Here we go,’ said Farquharson. I looked down the fairway from the elevated tee. A little bitumen path wiggled down the hill. The long, narrow lake shone like a mirror. Everything seemed normal. Oh, the innocence of fools. 166

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FARK: I am thinking of starting up another little business on the side. ME: This is a separate business, I am assuming, to your idea for a series of nationwide takeaway pesto outlets. And separate again, I imagine, to your fast food–dance lesson combo chain—Selsa Salsa—where people can come in for a quick taco and learn how to dance in between bites. FARK: I am still working up the proposal for Selsa Salsa. It has legs. DOG: I just hope it has good clean lavatories. FARK: It’s always back to lavatories with you, isn’t it? DOG: I mean, combine hot tacos and selsa with some vigorous salsa and I don’t care who you are . . . maybe some of your pesto clients could use the same facilities. You could have a little sewage recycling business on the side. Or, more accurately, out the back of the Selsa Salsa outlets. Straight into the pipes, va voom. 167

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ME: I am reminded of Big Dallas’ famous story of the Chicken on the Hillside in Tibet. DOG: The Chicken on the Hillside in Tibet? ME: Farquharson, you have the honour. FARK: I was talking about something else. But anyway, yes, Big Dallas was on a trek throughout Tibet. The prayer flags. Enlightenment. Getting in touch with his inner-Buddhist. You know, the usual ‘Find Yourself’ Teenage Trek, although Big Dallas happened to be in his early thirties. Nevertheless, at the end of a day’s hiking he and his companion lurched into a little mountain village. They were tired, hungry and in urgent need of a lavatory. The lavatory, it turned out, was simply a little shed with a hole cut into the floor. The shed itself, not unusually in this mountainous region, was perched precariously on the edge of a rather steep hillside. According to Big Dallas, the distance from hole to earth was a hundred feet or more, a defecation freefall of the type he had never witnessed. Being the curious type, Big Dallas, once he’d finished his business, looked down into the hole and saw, down the bottom of the poo drop, several chickens feasting on countless piles of human detritus. DOG: Is this story going to make me feel sick? You know I have a delicate stomach. FARK: Poor diddums. Anyway, that night, Big Dallas and his travelling companion went to a local place to eat. They had the usual delicious momos and thukpas, and they had a special chicken dish for foreigners. Tibetans rarely eat chicken. It is the Buddhist way. The smaller the animal, the more that have to be slaughtered to feed the populace. So Big Dallas had the chicken. It turns out the owner of the eatery was also the owner of the cliff-dangling 168

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lavatory. And the owner of the cliff-dangling lavatory was the owner of the hungry chickens down below. DOG: No. FARK: Yes. Big Dallas was eating a chicken that had bulked up on his very own excrement. Which, when you think about it, means . . . DOG: The chickens, through the excrement, are cannibalising themselves . . . FARK: Precisely. DOG: And round and round it goes. FARK: The cycle of life. DOG: I feel giddy. And sick. I feel both. FARK: May I continue? ME: You may. FARK: Thank you. I was recently reading that excellent golfing journal, Golf Digest, out of the United States, and they have a little section they’ve been running for years called. ‘What’s In My Bag?’ ME: Don’t even go there, Dog. DOG: I didn’t say a thing. FARK: In short, the column details the contents of a top player’s bag, from clubs to food to ball markers to superstitious little items. For example, did you know that Rich Beem carries a little bottle of Pepto-Bismol with him, for a nervous stomach? DOG: I could use some of that now, thanks to the Chicken on the Hillside in Tibet. 169

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FARK: K.J. Choi likes to use orange tees on the final day of a tournament. Sergio Garcia carries in his bag a pair of fake teeth. DOG: Sergio Garcia has false teeth? FARK: Fake teeth. For a joke. DOG: What about Tiger? FARK: He has his little Tiger wood’s cover, given to him every year by his mother. On the top of it is written ‘Love, from Mom,’ in Thai. DOG: How lovely. FARK: And Nick Price carries safety pins, just in case he splits his pants. ME: What a very old fashioned thing to think about—‘What if I split my pants in public?’ People no longer really think about splitting their pants, do they? DOG: This is the one generation that needs seriously to think about splitting their pants, they’re so fat. FARK: Have you finished? Anyway, my business idea was to become the first golf-bag psychoanalyst. To study what professional golfers carry around with them and see how it reflects their character and mental state, then take it a step further and see if a few tweaks and twiddles might improve their game. DOG: Did you say twiddles? FARK: Either that, or I go the full-on clairvoyant route. ME: You’ve got to be kidding. FARK: Read their bags. Like tea-leaves in a cup. 170

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DOG: You could read tea bags and leave it at that. FARK: What do you think? ME: Interesting. DOG: He means—bloody ridiculous. FARK: I don’t think he means that. Do you mean that? ME: Yes I do. FARK: Oh. DOG: Howdy, what do you do for a living? I read men’s bags. FARK: Women too. DOG: Read my bag. What would my bag say, oh wise one? FARK: You’re not ready. You can’t handle the truth. DOG: Be my guest. Go ahead. I can take it. FARK: Narcissist. Loves winning more than competing. Perfectionist. Petulant. Has to be loved but when loved turns his back on it, or detonates it. Frightened. Strikes first to avoid being struck. Rides through life on a cushion of hot air. Terrified of being found out there is nothing in the centre. But sentimental. Selectively generous. Can be loyal. Future? A leaf in the wind. DOG: No premature death or suicide in there, Madame Zorba? ME: What about me? FARK: Egotistical. Been hurt and frightened of it happening again. Professes to not care about the game, golf, life, whatever, but cares in a deep conservative way. Obsessive. Extremely sensitive. Loyal. Cynical. Suspicious. Never grows up. But wants to. Always says he’s wanted children. 171

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But had none. Lives too much in the mind, not enough in the world. ME: What about you? FARK: All of the above. DOG: And us? The three musketeers? FARK: Future uncertain.

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here is a moment in the life of every hack where you strike what I like to call The Grass Ceiling. This is, of course, a derivative of the catchphrase allegedly originated by female Hewlett Packard executives in the 1970s, regarding the invisible barrier or ceiling that impeded their rise through the corporate ranks, by and large dominated by men. The ‘glass ceiling’ now represents any non-gender-specific barrier that exists in society against, say, people of a certain race or religion. In golf, the phrase has been used sporadically by female golfers to dispute and debate entrenched male behaviour and infrastructure in relation to the game—different starting times for men and women, male-only members’ rounds, male-only bars, lounges and other facilities that form part of the mechanisms and machinations of a male-dominated sport. There has also been a book—Breaking the Grass Ceiling: The Businesswoman’s Guide to Golf by Cheryl Leonhardt— that instructs women on how to incorporate golf successfully into their professional working lives. 173

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I wish to re-appropriate the phrase to embrace all struggling hacks, weekend golfers, early morning amateurs and resort course battlers. I see the Grass Ceiling as both as beautiful and horrid as Truman Capote’s wistful recounting of his childhood and his memories of The Grass Harp. Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes colour with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices. Do you hear? That is the grass harp, always telling a story—it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too. So it was at Coolum—late September, not fall but spring, the season of new life, yet the trees of our friendship were not budding, and the grass harp was singing . . . ‘Oh, pulll-EEase,’ said Farquharson, when I read to him Capote’s eloquent passage and discussed my theory of amateur golfers and the grass ceiling. ‘Capote?’ sniffed The Dog. ‘He had a very eloquent passage, didn’t he? If you get my drift.’ ‘Is that supposed to be funny? Your homophobia is exasperating.’ ‘Oh boo hoo.’ ‘I don’t think Truman ever went near a golf course,’ I said. Still, I contend his grass harp, if it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, and all the people who ever lived, then it must know the stories of all the poor, hapless saps that ever picked up a golf club and became addicted to a game that, like 174

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only the best narcotics, would always win, would always emerge the victor over the frail human soul. When you strike the grass ceiling you know one thing with absolute certainty—no matter how often you play, or change or tweak your game, or how much you spend on equipment, lessons, and books, your level of skill will never, ever, go beyond a certain level of competency. That is the grass ceiling. There can be two reactions to this—insufferable and potentially harmful frustration, or an acceptance that leads to solace. The latter is very Zen. It is the suggested path. It is comforting, in golf and indeed in life, to know your place and make the most of it. It can be a rich, deep and satisfying strategy, but it takes a long time to learn this. It correlates with all the oldest, hairiest, corniest chestnuts and adages there are: make the most of what you’ve got; love the one you’re with; etc., etc. It just so happened that at the exact moment of the Great Hyatt Coolum Golf Championship, the friendship of three men similarly hit the ceiling. It wasn’t the game itself. Its beauty and allure never changed. And there was nothing obviously different about that final round at Coolum. It had all the features of the hundreds of games we had played together over the years— The Dog’s insufferable cockiness, his big shot play, and his psychological war against Farquharson; Farquharson’s deliciously erratic play, goofball shots, occasional miracles, incessant cheating, insufferable tics and idiosyncrasies, and his mercurial rat cunning; and my even-steven, dour, unspectacular trudge from one hole to the next, my wavering concentration levels, my destructive ability to read too much into things—people, circumstances, words, shots and, definitely, greens—and my perennial role as gopher, comic foil or literal physical foil between The Dog and Farquharson. No, it wasn’t the game. It was just the time. And that was never more evident than on our last night when, golf 175

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behind us, we hit the town and saw off our week of mateship in style. It was neither stylish nor matey. We started on the balcony, under the startled gaze of the towering giraffe. From our chairs we could see the Wal-Dorf apartments, the singed palm tree and the Rive Royale manager’s bald patch. Screaming kids plunged into the downstairs pool. The white wine wasn’t cold enough. We discussed the round at the Hyatt Coolum. Farquharson loved the complimentary bath soaps and the pressure of the complimentary shower. It was better, he said, than any complimentary shower he had had anywhere in the world. The Dog groaned. We discussed the warrior Coolum, whose prostrate trunk we could see in the murky sea spray distance. Then we talked of the Rushmores. The American Penskie and his postshot statue manoeuvre. The state of the world, post-September 11, our female partners back home, my dog Charley, The Dog’s dog Tory and Farquharson’s loathing of pets. Farquharson tried to ramp up our enthusiasm for a long journey into night. He was beginning to drink quickly. He had a trick whereby he could open his throat and literally pour liquid directly down it. It required a little click of the jaw, and a special folding away of the tongue. I had only seen him do it twice before but on this last night he did it again. Then he started salsa dancing in the lounge room, around the giraffe’s backside and the African spears and stands of feathery imitation savannah grasses. ‘Selsa,’ said The Dog. ‘Salsa,’ said I. ‘Selsa salsa.’ ‘Salsa selsa.’ ‘Fire up!’ Farquharson shouted. It was a call from our youth. 176

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We started across the road, at the Bowls Club. We were the only people under 70. We took our beers and sat in the plastic chairs that faced the bowling green. The grass was dark. It was like staring into a starless night through a very, very large window pane. ‘Is it just me, or is this depressing?’ said The Dog. ‘This is depressing.’ Farquharson was shadow-boxing an invisible opponent. ‘Can I have some of what you’re having?’ asked a bored Dog. ‘You wouldn’t know how to handle it, my friend,’ said Farquharson. Oh boy. Here it came. One of Farquharson’s ‘life is short, get out there and grab it, live every moment as if it was your last’ lectures, and it was so early in the evening. ‘When you waltz with another man,’ The Dog asked Farquharson, ‘who takes the lead?’ I looked out over the black bowling lawn and thought of the last hole at the Hyatt Coolum. The great shiny slope of the clubhouse roof, sitting there like a monstrous beetle from a distance, the curve of the fairway around the lake, the slice of green on the water. Farquharson clicked his jaw and his schooner disappeared. ‘Let’s go to Nooooooooooosa,’ said Farquharson. ‘To the Noooooooh Yark Bar.’ So we caught a taxi. We went all the way to Noosa, and New York. Farquharson wobbled and flailed and danced to an unending internal music loop. He was turning into Ken Kesey, leading the Merry Pranksters aboard his Harvester school bus to the world’s fair in Noooh Yark. We were too early for the New York Bar. It was small and empty. On the walls was wallpaper depicting the glittering high rises of New York. Farquharson ordered us fruity cocktails. He delivered them, still dancing. 177

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The Dog looked up at me. ‘Selsa,’ he said. ‘Salsa,’ I said. The Dog checked his watch. He checked his phone. He sent a text message. ‘Start shpreadin’ the nooooozz,’ said Farquharson, toasting nothing. He chinked our stationary glasses. The barman stared at us. He wore an oversized brown beret that dangled off the left side of his head like a failed soufflé. If he was New York, it was very basement of a bakery in Queens New York. ‘Fire uppppp!’ yelled Farquharson. I accidentally poked myself in the eye with a swizzle stick. The Dog abandoned his fruity cocktail and ordered a whiskey. ‘Where are the women?’ The Dog asked. ‘Apart from Carmen Miranda here?’ Farquharson played the finger drums on the edge of the table. ‘Maybe they’re in Mooloolaba,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to Mooloolaba,’ said The Dog, skulling his whiskey. We left New York, despite Farquharson’s protestations. At Mooloolaba we found an Irish pub. Farquharson fled instantly to the dance floor and somehow adapted his South American flamenco to some banjo and wooden flute music. ‘Salsa,’ I said. ‘Selsa,’ said The Dog. The Dog was very bored. He now spent much of his time text messaging on his mobile. It was The Dog’s way, but on this, our last night, I felt miffed. He did not want to be here. The golf was over. The week was done. This was a waste of his time. Farquharson, meanwhile, was buzzing like a Spanish bee in an empty Guinness bottle. 178

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‘This is boring,’ said The Dog. ‘Let’s try somewhere else.’ We extricated Farquharson and found another club over near the fish markets. We played some pool on blue-felt tables. There was some aggression in the air. Everyone was shouting. Pool table queue jumpers were starting fights. Farquharson was dancing a solo tango. ‘Matty,’ said The Dog. ‘I got an early plane to catch . . .’ I had been waiting for it. I’d had too much to drink. I stared at the reeling figure of Farquharson, ricocheting around the pink-lit steel dance floor. ‘It’s our last night,’ I said. ‘This is boring,’ he said, checking his phone again. ‘Mate,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to be here, then the solution is simple. Just fuck off.’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘You haven’t wanted to be here all night. So why don’t you just fuck off?’ By the time I turned towards The Dog he was gone. It was over. It was over before we’d even finished the last hole at Coolum. Before the Bowls Club, the New York Bar, the Blarney Stone. I lost Farquharson that night. I walked the long hour home to the Rive Royale. I had no key. The Dog had the key. I rang the buzzer. No answer. I rang Farquharson’s mobile. It was turned off. I buzzed the mad manager at 3.30 a.m. He was apoplectic with rage. We rode up in the lift to the African apartment. He was facing me, shouting, his mouth moving rapidly, his face red, his hands cutting the air, his comb-over unleashed, standing on end on the left side of his head like a broken wing. I heard nothing. I went into the apartment. Went straight to bed. The buzzer woke me about 9 a.m. It was Farquharson. He had straw and sand in his hair and was wearing a too-tight 179

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Hawaiian shirt, devoid of several buttons. It was not the shirt he had gone out in last night. He had only one shoe. ‘Selsa,’ I said to him. ‘Salsa,’ he moaned. I knocked quietly on The Dog’s bedroom door. I wanted to apologise, to dismiss my silly quip, but there was no answer. I opened the door. The room was empty. His bag and clubs were nowhere to be seen. The bed was made. The Dog had gone. Hours later, Farquharson emerged in his boxer shorts. He sat by me on the balcony. ‘Where’s The Dog?’ he asked. ‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Gone? Where?’ ‘Home.’ ‘Why?’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘The grass ceiling,’ I said.

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17. The Coolum Cup

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here was no fairytale ending. . Nobody hit a glorious, magical shot from an impossible position, the ball arching across the sky in slow motion, accompanied by soaring, inspirational orchestral music supposedly replicating the heights reached by the Indomitable Human Spirit. There were no public galleries staring expectantly up the fairway. Just three blokes finishing a round of golf. At stake, of course, was the Coolum Cup, which I had left back in the apartment, but neither Farquharson nor The Dog knew about the inaugural Cup with its wooden base and imitation gold grail with a tiny little golfer, mid-drive, shown in halfrelief on the side. I hadn’t wanted them to know about it for several reasons, not the least being the Lilliputian golfer on the side wore old-fashioned knickerbockers and Farquharson would say immediately that it looked just like him and would covet the trophy in a way that would affect adversely not only his game but the rest of us. Standing at the par-four 18th (363m) tee that day, I didn’t need to check the score card to know that Farquharson would 181

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not be taking home the trophy. He knew it too. The Penskie hole had broken something inside him, and even his bones seemed to have lost their rigidity. He was floppy. I had to give him credit. He usually went floppy around the 13th. The Dog, however, was in his trademark last-hole state of agitation. Psychologically, he had already finished the round, changed, popped his bag and gear in the boot of his car, and was speeding off to his next appointment. It was his way, to live an hour, two, sometimes more, ahead of himself. He was teed up and ready to go. I was in much the same state as Farquharson, sapped by the heat and the emotional wear and tear of a resort course. For hacks, the eighteenth hole means the opposite than it does to professionals. They work towards the 18th. Victory or defeat is often bound up in the eighteenth hole. The 18th, too, is the final grand stage on which they perform, the Carnegie Hall of the round. For the hack, the mere sight of the 18th can bring a feeling of relief. It marks the end of what could have been hours of acute suffering, humiliation and the battering of personal pride. It signifies, also, relief from the general physical weariness that comes from walking a resort course when one plays golf irregularly. That day The Dog teed off before we’d even joined him on the tee. It’s a very pretty fairway, the 18th at Coolum, a rightto-left dogleg that runs along a narrow lake. The green itself protrudes a short way into the lake, its edge cut sharply and neatly, so it looks like a slice of cake, lapped by the lake water. It’s a hole that invites you to flirt with danger. Go straight and you can then make the sharp left-hand turn and fire into the green, risking the water. Play safe for the right and rear of the green, away from the water hazard, and you can be on in three but unlikely to make par. Otherwise, try and cross the lake from the tee. This would then give you prime real estate from 182

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which to attack the hole more directly, with much of the water hazard taken out of play by the sheer nature of geometry. But you have to make it across the water first. The Dog sussed this hole beautifully. He realised it was another of Mr Trent Jones Jr’s optical illusions. It looked further across that water than it actually was, and The Dog cracked a three iron clean over it, pulling up on the regulation fairway. I whistled by way of applause. Farquharson was too busy flapping around the tee, itching to hit away. I could read his mind. He wanted to follow The Dog’s lead and challenge the water. He was set to do it, whacking two practice drives so hard they lifted his heels off the tee grass. But then something came over him—reality, his weariness, a blast of cold air from The Dog’s jet stream. He lost his nerve. You could actually feel it dissipating. He took a deep breath, adjusted his feet slightly, and knocked a safe shot down the right of the fairway. I followed suit. ‘Smart play,’ I said to him, slapping him lightly on the back as we walked towards our balls. ‘Yeah,’ he said, despondently. ‘You never would have made it. I wouldn’t make it. We don’t have the game.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. I realised, then, remarkably for the first time, that the reason I didn’t have a game like The Dog’s—or anyone else with a handicap better than mine—was because of having the attitude that I ‘didn’t have the game’. I regretted saying that to Farquharson. I would apologise to him later, perhaps in the evening when we got to the stage of drunkenly analysing our week and in particular the battle for the Coolum Cup. Wadda bout the shjjodd on the thirteenth . . . Farquharson topped his ball with a resounding thwack yet it hopped along happily past the mid-fairway bunker and in more a less a straight line towards the green. He still had more 183

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than a hundred metres to go, but he’d avoided danger and, more importantly, the proclivity for trouble that sat inside of him like a tape worm. ‘Good work, young man,’ I said. I took my trusty and reliable three iron, its rubber grip fraying at the shaft end, kept my arms straight and stiff and knocked a low ball towards the green. It started to swerve to the left, just beyond where The Dog waited to take his second shot. Oh no, I thought. No. My ball caught the longer grass off the fairway and came to rest six feet from the edge of the lake. The Dog waved the okay. He quickly hoisted a towering nine iron to within three metres of the flag. Farquharson then lofted a neat little seven iron onto the putting surface. I could see The Dog giving him a little round of applause, and a smile break out on Farquharson’s weary face. As for me, I had no choice but to chip over the intruding little tongue of lake to the green. I flew a super high ball that on the upward trajectory I thought was right as rain and yet on the downward turn I felt invisible strings pulling at and tightening my stomach and knew, immediately, the shot would fall short. It did, with a loud watery plonk. I shot again. I hit the green. Then watched the ball spin back and roll over the edge of the cake and into the lake. I took a third shot. ‘Hey, Tin Cup!’ The Dog shouted, hugging little Farquharson. The ball stuck to the surface of the green, and they cheered wildly. And that’s precisely the last thing I remember about that round. I stood there, at the edge of the water, the nine iron still in my hands, looking over at my two best mates in the world standing together on the green. There they were, arm in arm, with sunburned foreheads and cheeks, grinning broadly, and I can see myself, laughing too, looking back at them. 184

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A photograph couldn’t have captured it. It was far too complex, and there were angles and dimensions to it that not even the constituents of that final trigonometric equation understood at that exact moment in time. But the sensation I get, whenever I remember it, is of me being outside of something and looking in. Of me somehow having slipped out of the tripod of our friendship and understanding there was no way back in again. How do these things happen? How do friendships slip from your grasp when you don’t seem to do anything deliberate to force that change? Two years later I went back to the 18th at Coolum to try to reconstruct what happened on that day. I stood exactly where I found myself marooned, down by the water’s edge, trying to chip up on to the green. I looked at where The Dog and Farquharson stood, arm in arm, looking back at me. I would never see those two men the same way again. Already, they are younger than they are now, smiling at me across time. Many thousands of drives and strokes and putts had been sketched on the air around the 18th since we had our final round. Our moment had disappeared into history. It was the last round we ever played.

The Dog won the Coolum Cup by eight strokes from me and ten strokes from Farquharson. The day after, with The Dog already gone, Farquharson and I packed up. I drove him down the coast to the airport and dropped him at the Departures terminal. On the drive home I felt tired and empty and confused. I had a blister on my right thumb from where my old golfing glove had worn through. 185

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At a set of traffic lights I studied the blister and thought of the Coolum Cup. The Dog had not taken it with him and neither had I. I left it there, deliberately, in the centre of the dining room table, in the empty apartment full of African wall masks and the vacant eyes of badly painted zebras and the poor, kindly wooden giraffe, staring out forever at the cold volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Then the traffic lights turned to green.

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have tried to unravel the mystery and the tragedy of the great Sunshine Coast golfing week, as a detective might reflect on a particularly aggravating old murder, or what they like to call today a ‘cold case’, and two things keep affirming themselves— first, that the clues were there all along, in abundance, leading into that last round; and, second, that several milestones in my life had occurred at golf courses, so why shouldn’t there be another? My high school graduation ceremony took place at a golf club. We, the Class of ’79, formally farewelled a major part of our lives sitting at large round tables in the dining room of the old Southport Golf Club, the walls adorned with honour boards bearing names of club champions neatly inscribed in gold on panelled wood,* photographs of golfers and trophy cabinets heavy with old cups and curling pennants. What better send-off into an uncertain future? * My nephew Fraser Pope would one day be up there, champion at the tender age of 15, but on that night his birth was still almost a decade into the future. 187

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A few years later, my twin sister, Marsha, would have her wedding reception in another golf clubhouse, just a few kilometres away. There, on the balconies overlooking the shadowed fairways and greens, I would put my arm around the waist of my first girlfriend, Robyn, tipsy from the celebratory wine, with the incessant question from old aunts—so, when are you two going to tie the knot?—still hovering about like moths in the warm evening, and we would stare out into the dark course, with all its sand traps and creeks and perils hidden in the folds of the night. And here I was again, with a milestone moment playing itself out on the tableau of a golf course. How did it happen? How did the three men who hit off on that crisp, clear morning at the Hyatt Coolum, come home to the 18th a different group of men? Was the answer entangled somewhere in the game itself, or was it to be found elsewhere? I had no idea how to penetrate this mystery. It might pass, just as golfers catch, out of nowhere, the putting yips, the shanks, the diseased short game pitted with errors of judgement. These things come and go, like the ’flu. Maybe friendships, too, could fall sick and return to full strength, over time or courtesy of a surprise tonic. We human beings can be very good at building resistance. But I had my doubts. There were larger forces at work here. Which is saying something, considering that the basis of our friendship was a game with the largest inherent forces of any game. Large forces working within larger forces seemed perilous. So I did what I was trained to do. To try and understand this problem, this catastrophe, I returned to the source. I took my reporter’s notebook and pencil and I went back to the origins of my father’s love of golf. Back to the landscape of my own interest in the game. I had to investigate the font of all the great 188

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golfing nursery rhymes of my childhood, the wellspring of so many characters, anecdotes, tales of life and death. I had to feel the soil beneath my feet, breathe in the air of the actual place where the game of golf and all its rickety architecture came into view for me, Brigadoon-like, through the mist. For the first time in more than thirty years, I visited the humble Ashgrove Golf Club in suburban Brisbane. In terms of golfing antecedents, this was the Condon family’s St Andrews. This is where a lifelong addiction began. I figured that something about golf and life might be revealed to me here, even after all those years, and give me a key to the end of our playing trio. It was here my father established his own golfing friendships when he was just in his early thirties, and some of those bonds lasted for decades. So one sunny winter afternoon I returned, and the moment I walked gingerly through those front doors I collided with myself as a boy, my father as a young man, and a host of other men and women I had not heard of or remembered since the late 1960s. Yet the picture in my head from that time did not immediately match what was before my eyes. The modern clubhouse had automatic doors and poker machines and entry was made from the Waterworks Road side. I seemed to remember a main doorway on the right-hand side of the clubhouse. I imagined a smaller clubhouse, set closer to the ground, with a huge pool table and a single long bar from which the barman might have a view, through low-set windows, of the first few holes of the course. The new clubhouse confused me. It was all glass and light, and it was filled with the music of the Red Barron and the Star Drifter cowboy poker machines in the gaming area. I sat quietly in a plastic chair at a plastic table in the clubhouse and tried to will myself back in time. I concentrated on the view of the course from the clubhouse. That, at least, 189

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seemed very, very familiar. It was a long, narrow course that threw itself towards the back of the Taylor Range. The landscape, indeed the course itself, was dominated by two hills that sat there like fringed breasts. The breasts were a part of the club logo, a symbolic rendering of the hills, the creek, and a pine tree. The logos were stuck to the club’s sliding glass doors, as pale as watermarks. There were great blocks of granite out there, too, just as there were smaller blocks, less than a kilometre away, in the backyard of the little colonial-style house of my childhood with its veranda and view of the course. I had been fascinated by these buried monoliths, their pale grainy heads breaking through the suburban grass and clover. They were rough and full of little glinting stars when the light caught them at the right angle, and they captured the heat of the day in summer or the cold of the night in winter. I liked the symmetry of the granite blocks being on the course and in my childhood backyard, and across the hill, too, at the old Stirling Granite Quarry. From the bitumen playground of the Mater Dei Primary School, I used to look over to the distant quarry at lunchtime and watch first the plume of smoke against the salmon pink quarry face, followed seconds later by the sound of the explosion. It was sunny and warm the afternoon I visited, and a group of teenage boys were hitting off the first tee. Men drank beer with their elderly fathers on the veranda. I could see a grandfather with his grandson on the practice green. Mr Greg Glass (‘As in beer,’ he said when we met), the club’s general manager, gave me a little booklet celebrating the club’s Diamond Jubilee in 1999. The 28 yellow-edged pages of this little history told me that the original clubhouse had been extensively renovated in 1976, a few years after our family left the area. 190

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Not far from my seat was a large whiteboard and on it the names and scores for a mixed competition in progress. I thought nothing of it until a couple of the names caught my eye. There were Ann and Jack Keir. There was Irene Quan. Did I know these people? Why were their names ringing a bell with me? In the car park on my way out I phoned my parents. ‘Yes, Ann and Jack Keir,’ my mother said. ‘We knew them very well. We went on a holiday with them and their children. Do you remember the year of the great cyclone on the Gold Coast, when we all huddled together and held onto the central pole of the tent? The Keirs were with us then.’ I could remember a storm and the tent poles we had painted bright blue before our annual holiday and that seemed to never dry, leaving lines and blotches of blue paint on skin and clothes and catching the dog’s hairs. I remember holding the sticky blue pole and feeling nature thumping the canvas tent up and down, trying to rip it off the face of the earth. But I don’t see any Keirs in the picture. ‘And Irene Quan,’ my mother continued. ‘She used to live in the street behind us. You don’t remember her? Her daughter? They were our neighbours.’ I sit in the car in the car park and seriously study the old maps reproduced in the little club history. I’m trying to find these lost faces in the simple, hand-sketched maps of the course and its surrounds. I’m looking for Mr Green, the Grocery Man who came every other day, in his old Bedford with its stiff, flat plastic indicator hand off the driver’s door and the canvas covered flatbed at the back. I’m trying to see the battered tin bowl sitting on the hanging scales at the rear of the truck, and old Mr Green’s huge cane sun hat, and my mother walking down the steep concrete driveway in her scuffs, holding my hand on 191

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one side and my sister’s on the other, and my mother foraging for coins in her purse as we carried the hands of bananas and fresh corn cobs and custard apples up to the house. I’m trying to see the radio on the kitchen windowsill, spilling songs like ‘L.A. International Airport’ and ‘Penny Lane’ out into the cool air at the side of the house and over the dark green clover and the clawed white flowers that pulled at the feet of passing bees. I’m trying to see the granite boulders that my father and other men in the suburb cracked with fire and prised out with crow bars. I’m trying to see the warm kitchen lights of the Quans’ house from my bedroom window at the back of the house, beyond the knives of cannas leaves. I’m trying to see my father’s golf clubs under the house, sitting in their spindly pipe metal buggy. The wooden tees my mother rested on the sill of the laundry when she washed his golf clothes. I’m trying to see the bent scorecard lying beside the telephone, beside the bills and other important papers that needed my father’s attention. Or my father practising his putting across the purple carpet in the lounge and dining room, aiming for a glass tumbler turned on its side, with the ‘special’ dining suite chairs shepherded out of harm’s way into the corner. I can almost see the tangle of swing correction equipment and other assorted golf aids he bought over the years to try and shave a couple of strokes off his handicap. Each Saturday my mother would send him off to the course, all ironed and crisp, his face full of optimism, and by the day’s end he would return, his shoulders stooped, his clothing soiled, his face stoic but defeated, as if he had spent the day fighting off wild animals, which had finally got the better of him. There, sitting in the car, overlooking the creek and the course, and in the exhaustive lull between mental time travel, all manner of other things tumble in, a kitchen drawer pulled out and dropped and spilling its cutlery, its peelers, its corks 192

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and eyedroppers and pens and paper clips and bottle openers across a shiny floor. The bicycle accident where my sister fell hard and grazed her palms and knees and elbows, and me walking her home, a brave, weeping soldier with her damaged bike. The cat which burned its paws clean off on top of the hot water system, and was nursed back to health and even months later, fully healed, you could still smell singed skin about her. The great floods of 1974 and my grandmother’s defiance. She would never abandon her home. Then, when the water came within a foot of the floorboards, she was first in the little aluminium motor boat, holding aloft her green budgerigar Tweety in its cage. The haunting faces of lost relatives. The smell of incense at funerals. Lips kissed that vanished into time. Hands clasped, a grip that nothing could break, that eventually found other hands. An uncle’s antiques store filled with stuffed eagles and owls, their rich, perfectly arranged feathers coloured as dark and warm as mahogany, soldier’s helmets, swords with handles stained with the sweat of Japanese warriors, books with colonies of insects in their spines, and hundreds of time pieces—cuckoo clocks, fob watches, nurses’ pocket watches, wrist watches, wall clocks, mantelpiece clocks, grandfather clocks—and not one of them working. I felt sad that day, sifting through time. As a child I possessed the not uncommon belief that I could hold on to Time’s tail and, if not pull it back, at least slow it down. I have never let go of that ambition, and Time’s passing frequently overwhelms me, sometimes to the point of me actually losing my breath, or taking an involuntary gasp at the pace of life and loss and yearning, as if Time itself sucked the air from my lungs. I learned a lot going back to Ashgrove. I kept thinking of the creek that cuts through the golf course. We moved to another house, again not far from the course, when I was 12, and the 193

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same creek flowed past the bottom of the street. It had high reeds on one side, large, wet granite boulders along the length of its bed and the water was cool and clean and clear. We often saw colonies of penny turtles being buffeted and swirled around in the rock pools and alcoves. It never occurred to me back then that it was the same creek that sliced through the golf course, less than a kilometre west across the hill. Yet it was. It was the same creek that ran through my life before and now, and it carried me, my stories and reflections of my life. That day, when I returned to Ashgrove after decades, it was still my creek, and it was as if I stood in the centre of it, the water to my waist, and all the forgotten memories and feelings of my earlier years flowed around and past me. It was a simple lesson that did not just belong to golf. People came and went in your life. If you were lucky, you could hang onto them for a while, but they were all being carried along by the same flow. It was like hitting a single gigantic drive that spent the length of your entire life in the air, in an arc, until it came back to earth at the end. And spinning in and around that arc were memories and history and nature and people and animals and everything you ever saw and did and experienced. Farquharson, The Dog and I had gone our separate ways. There was no one specific moment when this happened. It was not preplanned. It was not a cross on a calendar. Sometimes, things just gave way, and before you knew it they were gone. A few months after the Coolum Cup my wife Kate and I and our Boxer-Labrador-Rottweiler cross Charley took a road trip together, and spent the week between Christmas and New Year at a farmhouse in the hills behind Byron Bay. And in February Kate sat me down and said, ‘I have something to tell you. We’re pregnant.’ And at 7.45 p.m. on October 10 of that year I met my own son who, one day, will see his father coming home after a 194

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rough day on the links, and want to take lessons and play a round with his old man. He will see his father getting older, and these will become his memories, tangled around the great arc of that single monstrous drive we each make and which comes, inevitably, to an end.

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Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to Grant Jones and Matt Collier for all the laughs, tears, bonhomie and camaraderie on and off the golf course over many years. And for just being a couple of great blokes. Please excuse any artistic licence and multiple literary mulligans employed in Mulligan. I would also like to thank my father, Ron Condon, for introducing me to the curious game of golf and for the many memorable rounds. Dad, your gentle approach to the game was a grand lesson. Sincere gratitude, also, to Patrick Gallagher (an honourable non-taker of mulligans) and to senior editor Angela Handley and all at Allen & Unwin, who took a hack’s round and bestowed upon it the magic of professionals. And cheers to the inspirational Richard Walsh. Thanks also to Dallas Kilponen, Jennifer Lahood and John (Temple) Lennon. I am grateful, too, to the staff of the Hyatt Regency Coolum Championship Golf Course, who let a hack revisit and wander about on foot for the purposes of research.

Mulligan: On being a hack golfer

Mulligan Stew

On being a therapist

On Being a Cat

On Being a Teacher

Hack

Hack

Mulligan Stew

Hack

Gerry Mulligan - Classics

On Being A Dog With A Bone

On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide

On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide

Alle jagen John Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan - Favorites

On Time and Being

On Being Blue

On Being and Essence

Aquinas on being

On Time and Being

Aquinas on Being

On Being Intelligent

Aquinas on Being

On Being Ill

On Being Conservative

On Time and Being

Symposium on Being Known

Essays on Being

Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner

On being blue: a philosophical inquiry

On Being a Scientist (Third Edition)

Mulligan: On being a hack golfer

Mulligan Stew

On being a therapist

On Being a Cat

On Being a Teacher

Hack

Hack

Mulligan Stew

Hack

Gerry Mulligan - Classics

On Being A Dog With A Bone

On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide

On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide

Alle jagen John Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan - Favorites

On Time and Being

On Being Blue

On Being and Essence

Aquinas on being

On Time and Being

Aquinas on Being

On Being Intelligent

Aquinas on Being

On Being Ill

On Being Conservative

On Time and Being

Symposium on Being Known

Essays on Being

Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner

On being blue: a philosophical inquiry

On Being a Scientist (Third Edition)

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