Written by Stephen F. Moloney
In the hour or so they’d been above in the LaFleur Suite, Maggie was pleasantly surprised to find the weather had changed for the better when she and Ray stepped back through the front door and out onto the porch of the clubhouse. It was still hot, of course, but there was now a most welcome breeze after picking up to help cut through the humidity and clear out some of the stale air which felt as though it had been sitting over the Creek all day. Someone who was still clearly feeling the heat despite the freshly arrived breeze, however, was Lola.
“You still too warm, huh?” asked Maggie, looking over at where they’d left her balmed out next to the wooden chair sitting on the porch.
Woken from her slumber by the sound of Maggie’s voice, Lola opened her deep brown eyes and threw a glance in her direction. Seeing that she and Ray had re-emerged from the clubhouse, Lola pushed herself back up onto her paws and trotted perkily across the porch to where Maggie was standing, her claws tapping rhythmically off the wooden planks which made up the floor.
“You’ll be spoiled with all these rubs, Miss,” joked Ray, as he finished locking up the front door of the clubhouse and turned around to find Lola thoroughly enjoying the elite ear scratching Maggie was giving her.
“Oh she deserves it!” said Maggie, unable to fight off the urge to ‘baby talk’ as she petted Lola. “Don’t you?! Yeah! Of course, you do!”
“Well, all I’ll say is, you’re just lucky you didn’t arrive a couple of days ago,” smiled Ray as he walked down the steps of the porch and out into the sunshine. “Cause when I came up here to feed her? She was only after goin’ and rollin’ around in … what would be the polite way of puttin’ this? … ‘gator fecal matter’.”
“Ugh! Seriously?!” said Maggie, her face screwing up in amused disgust. “And what does that smell like?”
“Well, let’s just say …” answered Ray, turning around and looking back up at Maggie. “If she were covered in it right now? You wouldn’t be so eager to be pettin’ her and leave it at that – ain’t that right, Lol?!”
Having heard her name, Lola temporarily reopened one of her eyes and peered down at Ray, before quickly reclosing it – she was enjoying herself far too much to care about any possible slights being aimed in her direction.
“So, what’s the plan now?” asked Maggie, shifting her attention off of Lola’s ears and taking to just gently stroking the top of her head – which, going on the look on Lola’s face, was another just-as-acceptable choice on Maggie’s part.
“Well, given the nice weather, I was thinkin’ you’d maybe like to get a more ‘up close and personal’ look at the course?” proposed Ray, pulling his baseball cap out of his back pocket and popping it onto his head.
“Really?! Yeah, wow, that would be great!” replied Maggie enthusiastically.
“Cool. Then let’s head over to the workshop and pick up one of the UTVs or something, yeah?” said Ray, laying out his plan in a relaxed manner. “It’ll help us cover more ground.”
“Sounds good to me,” agreed Maggie, secretly delighted at the prospect of having her legs saved from another long walk in the heat.
“Well, alright then; come on, Lola …” said Ray, letting out a short, sharp whistle. “Let’s get movin’, girl.”
Having received her instructions, Lola, reluctantly, pulled herself away from Maggie’s hand and popped down the steps of the porch to take up her usual position at Ray’s heel.
“At a girl,” he praised warmly, reaching down and giving her a rougher, though no less appreciated, rub on the head and down around her chin. Ray looked back at Maggie, who’d already followed Lola’s lead in descending the steps and emerging back out into the warm embrace of the sun. “And, hey, on the way to the workshop I can tell ya what happened after we left the restaurant.”
“Yeah, I’m intrigued to get a feel on what exactly that was like,” said Maggie, falling into step with Ray, who’d just turned and begun to start walking away from the clubhouse. “Cause that must have been pretty crazy, right?”
“Yeah, ‘crazy’ just about covers it,” smiled Ray wearily, the mere memory of that night enough to nearly bring him out in a cold sweat despite the 82-degree heat they were walking through. “I mean, in the army, they prepare you to be pretty good at multi-taskin’, you know? Well, I can honestly say – and this ain’t me exaggeratin’ for effect neither – that up until then? That night was probably one of the most complicated logistical endeavours I’d ever had to contend with – and, bear in mind, I once navigated two squads, four of whom were injured, back through hostile territory at night with limited ammo and zero night-vision equipment after our truck got a double blowout in the middle of the Iraqi desert.”
“Wow – and what made it so complicated?” asked Maggie, her intrigue, as she’d become accustomed to happening whenever Ray started speaking, growing even further.
“Well, first things first …” began Ray, taking in something of a deep breath as if to suitably prepare himself for recounting all of the details of that night. “I had to actually get Mustang a spot in the field – somethin’ which, lookin’ back now, we were actually quite lucky to get. See, normally, the sixteen slots in the field were usually booked out months in advance of the actual weekend, right? Cause, let’s face it, there aren’t many people with the means to drop ten grand on a game of golf like it’s ten bucks on a Saturday Nassau with their buddies from work. That year, though, one of the usual players, Julian Robotham, had pulled out a month before the tournament and no one had taken up his spot.”
“Oh no, was he injured or something?”
“No, he wasn’t injured,” replied Ray, matter-of-factly. “Turned out the IRS had begun an investigation into his finances for possible tax evasion and money laundering, so he figured dropping ten grand in cash on a high stakes golf tournament probably wouldn’t be the smartest of moves.”
“I should think not,” winced Maggie, grimacing at the mere thought of finding a stern-looking IRS investigator knocking on her apartment door back in New York. “So, if Mr. Robotham’s spot in the field was never filled, how was the Memorial going to go ahead that year if there were uneven numbers?”
“Well, ‘uneven numbers’ was a problem that, though rare, did have a precedent in place for how to be handled if it ever arose,” answered Ray, as they stepped down off the gritty, exposed ground fronting the clubhouse and onto a grass path. “Now, the way it used to work in the past, was that a ‘bye’ into the next round would be put up for ‘auction’ amongst the players and the highest bidder would snag their place in the second round without ever swingin’ a club.”
“So, you had people not only paying ten grand to enter the Memorial but then actually bidding on byes as well?!” said Maggie, her mind, once again, being blown by the exploits of the uber-wealthy who used to frequent the Matchplay every Memorial Day weekend. “How much did they go for?!”
“Well, that was the thing with the auctions,” said Ray, after quietly telling Lola she could run ahead of him and Maggie. “They were always done in secret. So, everyone in the field for that particular Matchplay would gather in the Members’ Bar downstairs with the Head Pro of the club and a representative of the LaFleur Family – and they were the only people allowed in the room. The biddin’ process would then take place, they’d come back out and whoever got the bye would have their name moved into the second round on the big scoreboard that used to be placed outside the clubhouse by 18. No talkin’ about the auction. No talkin’ about who bid what. And certainly no talk about what the winnin’ bid wound up actually bein’. Ironically, though, it’s all that secrecy around the biddin’ process that actually led to the LaFleur’s decidin’ to do away with the auction in 1995.”
“How come?” asked Maggie, as she watched Lola vigorously sniff the edge of the treeline on their right-hand side and hoped she hadn’t found some more ‘alligator leftovers’ to roll around in.
“Well, with the amount of money the Memorial was already generatin’ for the club,” replied Ray, he, too, quietly hopeful Lola hadn’t found something that would require him to break out the hose again in order to clean her down. “The LaFleurs didn’t want the members to start thinkin’ they were gettin’ greedy or, you know, lookin’ to line their own pockets with the proceeds from the auction. So, after ’95, they put a proposal to a vote among the members and the long-term staff of the club, that in the future if the Memorial had an uneven number of players, the Head Professional would fill the empty spot, the LaFleurs would put up ten thousand dollars on their behalf, and if the Head Pro won, the winnings would then be divided among the membership – excluding any members who’d actually played in that edition of the Memorial, obviously.”
“And I’m assuming it passed?”
“By a landslide, yeah” confirmed Ray. “It just made the most sense. Plus, a big thought among the membership and staff at the time was that if the Head Pro were to wind up playin’, it would make it even more excitin’ for them to watch.”
“Cause they’d have a ‘dog in the fight’,” said Maggie, knowingly.
“Exactly.”
“And did they ever get to see it happen?” asked Maggie. “The Head Pro playing in the Memorial, I mean?”
“Funnily enough, no – just down here,” said Ray, as he led Maggie through an open gateway and down a neatly trimmed, grass-covered laneway with old rut marks from two tractor wheels carved into it. “Every year from ‘95 on the Memorial had all even numbers – much to Denby’s relief.”
“Oh yeah!” exclaimed Maggie, as Lola, having finally grown bored of smelling what she had been earlier, came sprinting down the laneway to catch up to her and Ray. “He was the Head Pro, so he’d have to have played! Was he not too keen on that idea, no?”
“God, no!” replied Ray, near laughing. “I mean, maybe in his younger days back in the 90s, he might have been ok if called upon to tee it up. But as the 90s leaked into the 00s, and then they crept into the 2010s? Well, to put it kindly, Denby’s nerves had started to get a little … ‘delicate’ by then.”
“He must have been delighted when you called to see if Mustang could take up his spot in the field then, right?” asked Maggie, noting internally that Lola had already disappeared from view once again after diving back into the undergrowth somewhere on either side of the laneway. “That is if I’m correctly assuming he was, indeed, the person you called about getting Mustang into the Memorial?”
“No, you’re right, he was who I had to call,” said Ray, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a ring of keys that could go toe-to-toe with that of any jail warden’s. “Though, when I ran what I was lookin’ to do past him, to say he was ‘less-than-enthused’ about the idea would be an understatement.”
“Why? What was his problem with Mustang playing?” queried a confused-sounding Maggie, unable to work out any logical reasoning behind Mr. Denby’s reluctance.
“Oh well he came out with all the reasons I’d already game-planned for him to pull out of the playbook…” sighed Ray, replaying the tiresome back-and-forth he’d had to endure with Mr. Denby that night back in his head. “You know, the ‘it not bein’ a place for children’ argument and that ‘as the Head Professional of Crescent Creek he had been entrusted with a duty of care by the LaFleurs to ensure the reputation of the club wasn’t tarnished’ – somethin’ which, he claimed, havin’ a child ‘gettin’ whooped 10&8 in the first round’ would do.”
“To be fair, valid arguments on his part,” replied Maggie, trying her best to play the role of a neutral arbitrator.
“Undoubtedly so,” said Ray, genuinely agreeing with her.
“So what did you do to get him to come round to letting Mustang play?”
“The only thing I could do …” replied Ray, flatly. “I appealed to his wallet.”
“Oh no, what did you do?” said Maggie, almost afraid to ask the question.
“Nothing too reckless,” answered Ray unconvincingly. “I just made a … ‘friendly wager’ with him that if he let Mustang play he’d get through to the second round.”
“For how much?” asked a now smiling Maggie because she could sense the answer would be scandalously interesting.
With a smile on his face uncannily similar to that which Maggie was sporting, Ray fell silent for a moment as he attempted to concoct a means through which to change the subject.
“Interestin’ fact ‘bout this part of the course, actually …” he finally said, though unable to wipe the smile from his face as he spoke. “When François LaFleur was first designin’ it he-…”
“No! No distracting me with interesting historical trivia!” cried a practically laughing Maggie, cutting across Ray, who was already chuckling to himself. “How much?!”
“Well, at first, I said a hundred bucks … but Denby said he wasn’t interested,” replied Ray, doing his utmost to continue skirting around the answer. “So then I said a hundred and fifty bucks – but, again, he said he wasn’t interested. So then I said, ‘well, how ‘bout two-hundred bucks?’ – to which he said … ‘No’, actually. So then I said -…”
Before he could relay the next stage in his negotiations with Mr. Denby, Maggie reached out and hit Ray with a playful, though no less stinging, slap into the arm.
“Owww!” he winced, recoiling out of Maggie’s reach and rubbing the back of his left arm. “What was that for?!”
“You know what it was for!” said Maggie, pointing threateningly at Ray with a big smile on her face. “You’re trying to dodge the question! So, come on – out with it!”
“Alright, fine!” laughed Ray, still half-keeping his guard up just in case another slap came flying in his direction. “In the end? We settled on … five hundred.”
“Are you serious?!” cried Maggie, whipping around to look at Ray out of sheer disbelief and making him flinch slightly in the process. “But didn’t you say in the restaurant that if you paid Greely off you’d only have like … a hundred bucks of your savings left?!”
“I did.”
“So, even if you were gonna be spending that ten grand on the entrance fee into the Memorial, instead, wouldn’t you still not only have had a hundred dollars left?!” asked Maggie, her disbelief not sounding as if it would be dissipating anytime soon.
“Um-hum,” replied Ray, casually.
“So, just so I’ve got this right …” said Maggie, needing a second to get things straight. “To get Mustang into the Memorial, you were going to have to spend ten thousand dollars of your own money, plus gamble five-hundred dollars that you didn’t actually have?!”
Ray came to a stop with Maggie following suit. He looked off to the side as if he were carefully running through every detail of her question. After a second or two, he turned back to look at her and said dryly, “Yes.”
With that, Ray smiled cheekily at Maggie before setting off walking back down the laneway once again, leaving her just standing in place – the insanity of his high-stakes gamble keeping her rooted to the spot.
“Please tell me the rest of that night isn’t likely to bring on another residual panic attack?!” called out Maggie, jokingly, after Ray.
“Nah, I don’t think so!” he replied casually.
“Good!” replied Maggie, sounding genuinely relieved.
“Yeah …” said Ray, continuing to just throw the words off back behind him. “I’ll just be sure to leave out the part where I let Mustang drive for an hour on the way back from Florida so I could get some sleep in the back of the car!”
“WHAT?!” shouted Maggie, her voice loud enough to echo around the trees and draw Lola back out from the undergrowth she’d been steadfastly sniffing around in all the while to see what was going on. “Tell me you’re kidding! … Ray?! … You’re kidding, right?!”
But no answer came from Ray.
He was too busy laughing.
*
“Hey, kid … time to wake up, man.”
With Ray’s voice pulling him from his sleep, Mustang groggily opened his eyes and pulled himself back up from where he’d been slouched down in the backseat of the car. Whilst still in the initial stages of fully waking up, Mustang peered out through the passenger window alongside Travis with tired, narrowed eyes to try and get a bearing on where they were. From what he could remember, when he was last awake it had been around four in the morning and they’d just been pulling out of a 24-hour gas station in DeFuniak Springs.
After filling up the car, Ray had emerged from the store with two cups of coffee for himself and Travis, along with an arsenal of other energy drinks packed with questionable amounts of caffeine in order to keep the pair of them awake until they got back to Marais des Voleurs. “You just sit back and try to get some rest, kid,” Ray had said to him as he peered into the rearview mirror after taking a long drink from his coffee. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
And as he watched the sunshine-drenched surrounds of the drive into Crescent Creek slipping past the window, Mustang knew Ray had been true to his word.
“What time is it?” he asked, his voice a little croaky-sounding as he lifted up his hand and pulled down his hood from over his head.
“Just gone seven,” answered Ray, reaching up and wearily rubbing the back of his neck. “So, we cut it a little tight, but we’ll have you there for the draw at eight and that’s all that matters. How’d ya sleep?”
“Yeah, surprisingly well, actually,” replied Mustang, sounding genuinely surprised as he maneuvered himself into position in-between the two front seats and leaned his elbows up on top of them. “Did you hear anything more from Greely, Grandpa?”
“No, and don’t you be wastin’ your time thinkin’ ‘bout that snake neither, ya hear?” said Travis, turning enough in his chair so that he could look at Mustang. “You just focus on what you gotta do today, alright? Speakin’ of which …”. At that, Travis reached down and pulled a takeout bag up from his feet. “Here …” he said, handing the bag back to Mustang. “We got you some breakfast.”
“Aw nice!” replied Mustang, as he enthusiastically unfurled the top of the bag and plunged his arm down into it.
“Now, it ain’t much,” added Ray, as Mustang pulled out the neatly wrapped breakfast sandwich they’d grabbed for him in the one fast food place they’d been able to find open before six in the morning. “But it should keep ya going for a few hours. There’s a bottle of water in there too, so try and get as much of that into ya as ya can – you’ll be needin’ that more than food.”
“On it …” said Mustang, his voice garbled by the mouthful of sandwich he’d already taken as he opened the aforementioned bottle of water and took a drink from it. After successfully swallowing that first monstrous bite down without choking – and whilst already eyeing up where his next one was going to come from – Mustang asked, “So what’s the plan once we get to the clubhouse?”
“Well, as soon we arrive, Bill should be waitin’ for us with your clubs, along with some clothes and shoes for you to change into as well.”
“What’s wrong with the clothes and shoes I have on?” queried a confused Mustang, again, through a mouthful of sandwich.
“There’s nothin’ wrong with ‘em – and if we were just headin’ out for a few holes by ourselves, they’d be fine,” answered Ray, opening his window down a crack. The cool, refreshing air filtering in through it carried with it the smell of freshly mown grass and the faint sound of a far-off engine whirring away as one of the greenkeeping staff, obviously, completed some last-minute preening on the course. “But with a tournament like this, there’s a dress code you have to adhere to.”
“And what is the dress code?” asked Mustang, his wariness growing at what abomination of an outfit might be waiting for him up at the clubhouse.
“Aw, it’s nothin’ too crazy,” said Ray, trying his best to assuage Mustang’s obvious reservations. “Just a polo shirt and some shorts, that’s all; pair of golf shoes then for extra grip and you’ll be golden – maybe throw in a glove too, just in case, but I can pick that up off Mike and Becca in the pro-shop.”
“Aw, ok – fair enough. As long as I get to play, I guess,” said Mustang, before taking another healthy bite out of his sandwich. “And what’s up with this ‘draw’? I know you explained it to me last night but … well, honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Well, sidestepping the fact that you’re already not listening to me,” joked Ray, dryly, and pulling a small laugh from Travis in the process. “The draw is like the ‘ceremonial beginning’ of the whole weekend. So, at 8 a.m. on the dot, all the players – including you – will gather on the porch in front of the clubhouse. Denby will then welcome everybody – ‘cause there’ll be a small crowd there to watch – and then he’ll go about drawing out each of your names at random from this special hat to decide who’ll play who and in what order.”
“What’s special about the hat?” asked Travis, looking over at Ray.
“It belonged to the guy who built this place,” answered Ray, waving his hand above the steering wheel and gesturing out through the windshield at where they were driving. “François LaFleur. And when his descendants, Beau and Henri, held the first proper version of this tournament, they used that hat to make the draw to see who everyone would play – and, after that, it kinda just became one of those things that morphed into a tradition.”
“And someone decided that Denby would be the best person to be in charge of it?” asked Mustang in disbelief, as his brief encounters with the cantankerous Head Pro of Crescent Creek hadn’t exactly painted him in a light that screamed ‘affable tournament host’.
“Well, the way it worked before,” said Ray, smiling to himself at how quickly Mr. Denby could make just the worst impression possible on people. “Is that Beau and Henri would actually be here on the first mornin’ like this and they’d be the ones to make the draw. But when Henri died unexpectedly five years ago, Beau passed the duties over to Denby and he’s been doin’ it ever since.”
“Too difficult for him to show up?” asked Travis, his voice automatically tinged with the sympathetic tone of someone who’d experienced more than their fair share of losing a loved one.
“I think so, yeah,” replied Ray, glancing quickly over at Travis, before returning his eyes to the road in front of him. “And it’s not just the Memorial he hasn’t shown up for either – like, he hasn’t been in through the gates since Henri passed, period.”
“Poor guy,” said Travis, with a shake of his head. “I know that feelin’.”
Before a contemplative silence could descend on the interior of the car, the sound of Ray’s phone suddenly beginning to ring caught everyone’s attention. After grabbing it from off the dash – because, unsurprisingly, a car built in 1965 wasn’t designed with a whole load of storage space in mind for smartphones – Ray looked quickly down at the screen to see who was calling. “It’s Bill …” he said, before handing the phone back towards Mustang. “Here, kid, you answer it – looks like we got some traffic ahead I need to deal with.”
Mustang took the phone off Ray and promptly slid his finger across the screen to answer it. “Hey, Bill …” he said, as he polished off the bite from his sandwich he’d taken just before answering the phone. “Yeah, it’s Mustang … He’s just driving … Yeah, we’re coming up the drive right now … What? Why? …”
Having not been able to hear what Bill was saying, Ray – with his sole clue to go on being the confused expression currently plastered across Mustang’s face – could only guess that whatever it had been, had come somewhat out of left field.
“Oh, ok …” said Mustang, now nodding his head in understanding after hearing the extra details Bill had, obviously, offered in the meantime. “Alright, well I’ll tell him now then … ok, see you soon.”
With that, Mustang hurriedly hung up the phone and looked at Ray, “Bill says to park over at the workshop.”
“The workshop?” said Ray, sounding as confused as Mustang had looked only a few seconds earlier. “Why?”
“He said the clubhouse is like a zoo,” replied Mustang, holding off on popping the final piece of his sandwich into his mouth. “All the spaces for cars have been filled since 6:30 and the line of cars parking on the grass outside the avenue walls is stretching right the ways down the drive – on both sides.”
“Are you serious?” questioned Ray, his disbelief at what he was hearing forcing him to look back over his shoulder at Mustang.
“Yeah, it’s crazy up there, apparently” he replied, his mouth, once again, full after devouring the final piece of his sandwich. “They’ve even got some of the greenkeeping staff directing cars – is it usually this busy?”
“Not really, no …” answered Ray, truthfully, as he focused his attention back onto the road and flicked on his turn signal for the staff entrance into the yard area just up ahead. “Still, you know what it means, though, right, kid?”
“No, what?” replied Mustang, looking completely lost as to what Ray was trying to suggest.
“It’s just more people for you to blow away when they finally see you play,” said Ray confidently, as he shot a wide smile into the rearview mirror at Mustang.
*
“Was that you already slipping into ‘caddie-mode’?” asked Maggie, a wry smile on her face as Ray set the large, automatic roller-door fronting the workshop rolling upwards at the behest of the two motors perched at the top of it.
“So you twigged that, huh?” he replied, shifting his eyes off the top of the door long enough to shoot a smile of his own at Maggie.
“You’re not the only caddie I’ve interviewed,” she smiled, as the pair of them ducked in under the door and into the workshop. “After a while, you start to recognize the tricks.”
Once it was safe for her to stand back up straight, Maggie came to a stop and let her eyes roam around the lofty interior of the workshop. An old tractor and fairway mower took up most of the space in the front part of the workshop and were, undoubtedly, the main suspects for why the cracked concrete floor was covered in dried-out clods of grass. There were some workbenches lining the walls on either side of the space, each of them laden-down with tools and other paraphernalia needed to help maintain the fleet of machinery required to manage a course the size of Crescent Creek. Further towards the back of the workshop, off behind where the tractor and fairway mower were parked, Maggie could just about make out the row of battered and rusting lockers she remembered Ray mentioning earlier in the day when describing the caddies’ area. And then further back beyond that again, where Ray was already wandering off towards, was yet more floor space for, what Maggie assumed, was the various means of transportation they’d come to the workshop in order to use.
“So that was your way of trying to keep Mustang relaxed then, right?” asked Maggie, her focus returning to the task at hand as she sent her voice bouncing around the bare, cement block walls of the workshop.
“Oh yeah, for sure,” replied Ray, the soles of his boots scuffing slightly against the dusty and gritty floor as he passed in-between the tractor and fairway mower. “At the time, I wasn’t sure why such a big crowd had shown up, but what I did know is that while I wanted Mustang to be prepared for a lot of people to be possibly watchin’ him, I wanted him to be excited about it, not nervous.”
“And did it work?” said Maggie, following Ray in-between the tractor and fairway mower; the pungent – yet reassuringly familiar – smell of oil and cold engine grease filling her nostrils as she moved.
“I think it did, yeah,” answered Ray, as Lola zipped past his legs and carried on her way towards where the UTV was parked at the rear of the workshop – she knew they were going for a ride. “I mean, from then on, from him gettin’ changed right over there …” He pointed at the lockers in the caddies’ area which were now directly off to their right-hand side. “All the way to him gettin’ in place with the other players up at the clubhouse for the draw, he just seemed completely unfazed – at least, outwardly, at any rate.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Were you nervous?” said Maggie, clarifying her question, as they finally reached the rear of the workshop.
“You know, it’s crazy …” replied Ray, after taking a second to go back to that slightly chilly May morning that promised a scorcher of an afternoon was but a few hours away. “Right up until the draw was literally about to start? I’d been fine. I think between tryna’ organize everythin’ to actually get Mustang a spot in the tournament and … you know … hightailin’ it across the country for ten-plus hours to make sure he then made it on time, I’d been too distracted to really think about what was happenin’. But when everythin’ was done? And I was just stood there with all the other caddies waitin’ to see who our guy would be goin’ up against first?”
“It’s when reality hit?” offered Maggie.
“Like a kick in the teeth, yeah” smiled Ray, leaning his hand against the dusty UTV he’d, obviously, spied as being his preferred choice of steed for their jaunt around the course. “I mean, think about it: there he was, this skinny, little kid – wearing a Crescent Creek polo shirt a size too big for him that Bill had bought in the pro-shop; shorts that didn’t fit any better; and a pair of battered, old golf shoes he’d raided from the ‘Lost & Found’ bin – standing alongside, not only fifteen talented golfers, but fifteen sharks seasoned in the art of playing high-stakes golf where there could be, easily, a couple of grand on the line every time they teed it up … and he was about to go toe-to-toe with them.”
*
“Therefore, without any further ado …” announced Mr. Denby, still affecting the same vaguely posh lilt to his accent he always employed for his annual moment in the spotlight. “To the draw itself!”
With that, Mr. Denby placed his hand into François LaFleur’s hat – a wide-brimmed Fedora-style hat covered in worn, brown felt – and began to swirl his hand around the slips of paper sitting inside.
“And in the first match out …” teased Mr. Denby, looking to milk all the attention that he could out of the bulging crowd crammed in front of the clubhouse as he pulled out the first slip of paper. “Is … number seven, Wilford Kretschko!”
Ray’s eyes, immediately, darted to the aforementioned Wilford. Whilst one of the more overweight and ‘heavyset’ of the fifteen participants gathered on the porch of the clubhouse, Ray had seen enough of Wilford’s performances over the years in the Memorial to know he had serious game.
Though his short, snappy swing wasn’t exactly the most aesthetically pleasing to look at – nor the recipe to produce a lot of length off-the-tee – it was incredibly efficient and, therefore, made him one of the most accurate players Ray had ever seen in the Matchplay. And when he got to within 120 yards and closer of the green? Wilford was a magician with the shorter clubs in hand, always giving himself a decent look at the hole.
The one glaring weakness in the third-generation steel magnate’s artillery, however, was his putting. Whether it be a lag putt from thirty feet away or a three-foot tiddler for par, Wilford struggled with them all. And, like every golfer with struggles on the green, Wilford had tried to remedy this problem over the years by embarking on a ‘Holy Grail-type’ quest to find the perfect putter that would finally end his woes with the flat stick and get him over that line from frequent ‘Memorial Semi-Finalist’ to ‘Memorial Finalist’; but, as of yet – just like the Holy Grail itself – said ‘perfect putter’ had proven frustratingly elusive for Wilford to find.
And, from taking a quick peek down at his bag – which was standing in front of his long-time caddie for the Memorial, Marvin Kretschko, his lookalike of a brother – Ray could see not one, but two different putters sticking out of it: a broom handle with, going on the headcover, a mallet head design; and then a regular-sized, blade-headed one. ‘He must still be struggling on the greens,’ thought Ray, banking that particular piece of reconnaissance as Mr. Denby continued the draw.
“And his opponent will be …” he said, each word falling deliberately from his mouth as he pulled another slip of paper out of the hat.
When he read what was written on it, though, Mr. Denby couldn’t help but pause as he stared down at the piece of paper in his hand with a look of almost quiet annoyance on his face.
“Number sixteen …” he announced, noticeably less dramatically, as he snapped himself out of his momentary malaise and looked back out at the waiting crowd. “Mustang Peyton …”.
A hushed tremor of excitement reverberated through the crowd as Mustang, unsure as to what exactly he should do with himself, lifted up his hand in front of his chest and waved sheepishly out at them. When he’d finished doing that, he then looked off to the side of the porch where Ray was standing with the other caddies. With wide, glinting eyes Mustang smiled excitedly over at him.
‘Alright, kid …’ thought Ray, as he returned Mustang’s smile with one just as excited-looking. “Let’s go.”