After a hectic thirty-second spell wherein he’d barely had enough time to grab his driver from his bag, tell Ray that he’d be hitting the opening tee-shot, and slip on his glove, a slightly dizzy-feeling Mustang now found himself standing alongside Byron and the Riggs Brothers as they all looked into the television camera they’d been ushered in front of by an energetic producer ahead of their match officially starting.
Having seen Byron go through the exact same routine the previous morning with Blake, Mustang had thought there was nothing to it; just stand there and look at the camera – how hard could it be? Now that he actually found himself staring down the barrel of the sizeable lens pointing directly at him, however, Mustang wasn’t feeling quite as confident. Should he smile? Scowl? Rest his hands on top of his driver? Let it lean up against him while he clasped his hands behind his back? He had no idea.
Just as the producer began silently counting down from three off to the side of the tee-box to let them know that they were about to go live, a quietly panicking Mustang – as much it pained him to – decided to just copy what Charlie was doing and rested his hands up on top of his driver as well.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen …” began the starter, his voice coming crisp and clear through the speakers surrounding the tee. “And may I welcome you back to Seminole Golf Club, Florida, for this, the second day’s play of the 48th Walker Cup.”
A polite round of applause rippled through the crowd, but Mustang could tell that they were holding themselves back; purposefully containing their rowdiness.
They wanted to roar and shout. Needed to. But not yet.
Having received the acknowledgment he’d wanted, the starter lifted the microphone back up to his mouth and continued, his confidence audibly buoyed by the reaction he’d received.
“This morning’s matches will be foursomes,” he said, giving the announcement as much gravitas as he could muster without going too far over the top. “And this is match number one …”
Right on cue, just as he’d seen happen the day before, Mustang watched as the cameraman now began to focus specifically on Charlie and Reggie, the impressive rig he had his camera attached to making the process of getting the exact shot he wanted appear effortlessly smooth and simple.
“Representing Great Britain & Ireland …” said the starter, moving onto the main event of his announcement. “Charles and Reginald Riggs …”
Again, a polite – though noticeably subdued – round of applause rang around the tee from the mostly American crowd, with the odd pocket of Great Britain & Ireland supporters endeavouring to make themselves heard with a chorus of whoops and hollers. Once Charlie and Reggie had finished greeting the crowd on all three sides of the tee, tipping the bills of their caps like a pair of seasoned professionals as they did so, Mustang watched as the cameraman gracefully stepped to the side and took to pointing the camera straight at him and Byron.
And in that moment, those few fleeting seconds before the starter announced himself and Byron, a surreal thought suddenly popped into Mustang’s head. As well as the few hundred thousand people who were currently watching him stare back out at them through the screens on their televisions and laptops, Mustang knew that, at the very same time, he was also looking out at some far more familiar faces. The likes of his grandfather. Fr. Breen. Donny. Layla. The rest of the Pirates. Beau. All of them, no doubt, freaking out at the fact they were seeing him not only about to play in the Walker Cup, but hit the opening tee-shot of day two at that.
And, all of a sudden, those pesky nerves he thought he’d successfully banished just a few moments earlier, once again, began to rear their ugly heads. It was as though the scale and magnitude of the Walker Cup had snuck back up behind him and sucker-punched him straight into the stomach, reminding him of the cold, nauseating reality of the challenge he’d be staring down in but a few short minutes.
Mustang was hitting the opening tee-shot.
Him.
Not Byron.
Him.
And that’s when the questions came.
What if, when he went to hit his drive, he topped it? Or hit the ground first and scuffed it? Or hooked it? Or sliced it? Or, God forbid, hit the shot he’d come to learn as being the Voldemort of the golf world – a *shank*?!
Horrific scenarios he’d never once considered before hitting a shot in the past, each of them worse than the last, were now front and centre in Mustang’s mind, stubbornly refusing any and all attempts to be ignored.
They were going to have their say – whether Mustang liked it or not.
“And representing the United States of America …” said the starter, the sound of his voice snapping Mustang out of the daze he’d slipped into as he got carried away by his thoughts. “Byron Ballas and Mustang Peyton!”
Having heard the starter put far more pep into their introduction, the crowd surrounding the 1st-tee responded in kind by finally releasing their pent-up excitement in the shape of a thunderous roar of approval for their nominated champions; one so deafeningly loud and primal in nature that it, momentarily, stunned Mustang into inaction – freezing him to the spot. As soon as he saw Byron begin to acknowledge the crowd out of the corner of his eye, however, Mustang quickly regained his senses and began following his lead, turning around and addressing the crowd with small, subtle waves and closed mouth smiles as the chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” swelled back up and crashed across the tee.
With the crowd, clearly, having no intention of quieting back down anytime soon, the starter – realizing it was primarily his doing for whipping them up in the first place – decided to just continue with his introduction in spite of the noise.
“On the tee!” he said, noticeably raising the volume of his voice a few notches in the hope it would remind the crowd that it was still a golf event they were attending and, therefore, required a certain level of decorum. “Great Britain & Ireland!”
With that being their cue, Mustang eagerly followed Byron back off to the side of the tee, leaving the stage clear for Charlie to go about getting his ball teed-up.
“Here ya go, kid …” whispered Ray, holding out a bottle of water for Mustang to take as soon as he landed back alongside him. “Drink some of that.”
Despite his stomach now feeling as though someone was using it as a makeshift trampoline, Mustang took the bottle from Ray’s outstretched hand and began taking conservative sips from it, fearful that to ingest anymore would make him feel even sicker than he already did. With the water, admittedly, having brought some much-needed moisture back to his parched lips, Mustang lowered the bottle back down from his mouth and looked over at Charlie.
After seeing him going about getting ready to hit his drive, the crowd had gradually piped back down; their chants of “U-S-A!” now replaced with a hushed, anticipation-filled silence as all eyes turned to watching Charlie settle into his pre-shot routine. Unlike the casual, if not even slightly lackadaisical, efforts he’d been producing prior to the introductions being made, the practice swings Charlie was making now were far closer to the real deal. There was a sense of focus about them. A sense of purpose. Intent. And given the ferocious manner in which he was swinging his driver, that ‘intent’ was clear to see for everyone watching – never mind being happy with just finding the fairway, Charlie was gunning for the green.
Having moved the tee-box up so that it was sitting at 370-yards compared to the 405 it had been stretched out to the previous day, Seminole’s 1st-hole was now most definitely in range for Charlie, who, without question, was comfortably the biggest hitter across both teams. Of course, realistically, his chances of actually finding the putting surface with this particular drive were going to be slim as the cooler temperatures, softer turf, and complete lack of helping breeze were all actively working against him. But, regardless, even with those factors, Mustang knew not one of them was going to stop Charlie from still biting off a sizable chunk of the wide, gently cambering fairway and leaving Reggie with no more than a flick with a wedge for their second shot. It just felt oddly inevitable. From how he looked taking his practice swings? The confidence that was there as he stepped in and addressed his ball? Mustang could just tell Charlie had the look of a guy who was in complete and utter control of his emotions.
And that could only mean one thing.
His ball was about to be annihilated.
FWWWEEEEESSSSHHHH!!!
As expected, Charlie’s ball set off like a torpedo as it exploded off the face of his driver, scything its way through the air as it climbed higher and higher up into the morning sky. Recognizing straight away that it was carrying the necessary amount of draw to see it wind up safely in the fairway whenever it saw fit to actually land, Charlie quickly reached for his tee and moved back over towards where Reggie was standing with their respective caddies as the crowd applauded his superb drive.
“On the tee …” teased the starter, his voice, once again, filled with a touch more hype as soon as he saw Charlie fully vacate the tee. “The USA!”
Having received their prompt, the crowd surrounding the tee dutifully erupted; sharply cutting off the tail end of the round of applause for Charlie’s drive with a loud, boisterous cheer to welcome the ‘home team’ to the plate.
“Alright, kid, this is it …” said Ray, attempting to get a distracted-looking Mustang focused in on what he was doing. “You’re up,”
“Huh?” said Mustang, looking back at Ray once he’d seen Charlie’s ball finally land well over 300-yards away and roll to a standstill staring right down the length of the 1st green.
“Hey, I know you’re nervous,” said Ray, moving quickly to try and allay Mustang’s concerns as he could tell that perhaps the occasion was just beginning to get to him. “But you got this, ok? I know you do.”
“Even if my arms and legs are numb?” asked Mustang, just as the cheer from the crowd began to show the first signs of petering out.
Ray smiled. “Even if you were blindfolded and had one hand tied behind your back,” he said, reaching out his hand and taking the bottle of water from Mustang. “Now, go on – go find that short grass for me.”
Having successfully managed to draw the tiniest of smiles from him, Mustang turned and began to walk across the tee, each step feeling bizarrely alien as he moved – like he were a toddler taking his legs for their first-ever test drive.
Once in-between the two tee markers, and with the crowd now all but completely silent once again, Mustang reached into the pocket on his trousers and, after some momentary fumbling, pulled out the ball and tee he’d gone looking for. Choosing, as he had done all week, a spot favouring the right-hand side of the tee-box to give himself the best possible angle to work a fade around the dogleg and make the most of the generously-sized fairway, Mustang bent down and pierced the turf with his tee just a few feet away from the custom tee marker emblazoned with the Walker Cup logo.
As he went to actually place his ball on top of the tee, however, Mustang noticed a problem … his hand was shaking.
Not wanting anyone to see what was happening – especially the Riggs Brothers – Mustang, in an effort to hastily cover up the tremor in his hand, pulled his tee out of the ground and stood back up, feigning that he wasn’t quite happy with the original spot he’d chosen. After taking a moment to internally steel his nerves – or, at least, try to – he then bent back down for take number two at getting his ball teed-up, and, luckily, this time around, between a mixture of muscle memory and sheer willpower to keep his hand steady, Mustang managed to get his ball up on top of the tee and keep it there.
A small mercy.
With the fact he already felt mentally exhausted from merely teeing up his ball not boding well for what was still to come, Mustang stood up straight once more, moved his customary few steps back from his ball, and looked down the fairway, taking a deep breath in through his nose as he did so.
From the very first moment he’d seen this exact view early Monday morning, Mustang had liked the look of the hole. The fairway was wide and inviting. The palm trees on either side of the fairway framed the hole perfectly. Even the fairway bunkers, with their immaculately clean white sand and tightly cut borders, looked oddly inviting. It was just a dream of a par-4 that, right off the bat, left you in no doubt that you were somewhere special, and the experience you were about to have would be one you’d never forget.
As he took in the very same view now, however, Mustang couldn’t help feeling as though that dream had suddenly turned into more of a nightmare. Because that fairway? It now looked painfully narrow. The palm trees? They looked as though they were just waiting for their opportunity to snaffle up any wayward tee-shot that dared fly too close to their gently swaying fronds. And those very same fairway bunkers? Like shifting dunes in the desert, they seemed to have tripled in size; now more closely resembling gleaming white chasms as opposed to regular-sized bunkers.
Knowing, of course, that this was merely his mind playing tricks on him, Mustang closed his eyes in the hope that when he reopened them the hole would be after ‘resetting’ to how it was supposed to look. And, sure enough, when he did exactly that a second or two later, the hole had, indeed, reverted back to the view he remembered from earlier in the week – for the meantime, at any rate.
Thinking it prudent to act quickly before his brain decided to warp reality again, Mustang hurriedly stepped in and addressed his ball. As he settled into his stance, however, something just felt … ‘off’. He couldn’t get comfortable. He tried moving his feet up and down, the spikes on his shoes clawing at the turf like a cat looking to bed down on a blanket, but to no avail – no matter what he did, he just couldn’t get that ‘locked-in’ feeling he was searching for. It was like he’d, all of a sudden, found himself standing in someone else’s shoes.
And to make matters worse, they weren’t the only thing that felt wrong.
Normally, when Mustang had his driver in his hands, it had a reassuring familiarity to it – like sleeping in your own bed. But, just like his shoes, no matter how many times he gripped and re-gripped it, Mustang just couldn’t find those same spots on his driver where, on any other day, his fingers would just settle into place without even thinking. And it was distracting. Really distracting. In fact, it was all Mustang could think about. It consumed him. Sent him spiralling into a never-ending, self-destructive loop where the more he thought about how uncomfortable he was feeling, the more he tried to rectify it. And the more he tried to rectify it without succeeding, the more uncomfortable he got, and thus the whole cycle would start all over again.
And it wasn’t going unnoticed.
“Come on, kid …” urged Ray quietly, hoping that Mustang would somehow hear him. “Settle down …”
But Mustang couldn’t hear him. He’d slipped too far into the abyss. Become too lost in his thoughts; searching for a feeling that was only going to further elude him the more desperate he became to try and find it. And it was difficult to watch.
Seeing how badly he was struggling – and recognizing from the murmurs beginning to course through the crowd that they, too, had noticed something wasn’t quite right – Dallas was torn as to what he should do. Part of him wanted to just call a timeout and get Mustang to regroup by taking a step back and restarting his routine. On the other hand, though, were he to go out and actually do that, regardless of his heart being in the right place, Dallas reckoned there was a very good chance that it would only wind up doing Mustang’s confidence more harm than good.
So, he held his ground.
Whatever was going on with Mustang, Dallas was going to let him see it through all the way to the end. For better or worse – though, at this stage, the latter of the two was looking like the only realistic ending this particular story was going to be seeing.
It was not, however, for the lack of trying on Mustang’s part.
Because having been staring down at his ball for what felt like an eternity, Mustang was now begging himself to just hit it – after all, he wasn’t deaf. He could hear the crowd getting antsy, wondering what was going on. And they weren’t the only ones. In all the time he’d been standing there, hands and feet restlessly fidgeting, Mustang knew that this feeling couldn’t just be down to a case of nerves. This was something different. It had to be. The sweating? Hearing his heart beating in his ears? The pressure in his chest? The way the muscles in his body were all so tightly clenched it made him feel almost trapped? Paralyzed, even? No, this was more than just nerves. This was something far more serious.
Mustang was choking.
It was the only explanation. The only thing that made sense for why he hadn’t been able to get comfortable.
Yet, despite now knowing what was happening to him, it still didn’t change the fact that Mustang had absolutely no idea whatsoever how to fix it. What he did know, however, was that something had to give. He couldn’t afford to spend another thirty excruciating seconds looking like one of those living statues you see busking for change without incurring the potential embarrassment of him and Byron getting put on the clock as soon as they walked off the 1st-tee. He couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t.
So, Mustang decided to go rogue.
Given he’d become stuck staring at his ball, snagged in a hypnotic-like trance that had seen his body shut down and be left unable to move, it suddenly occurred to Mustang that there was really only one logical course of action he could take.
So, he took another deep breath.
Let it slowly back out.
Then whispered.
“Here goes nothing …”
With that, Mustang squeezed his eyes shut and immediately pulled the trigger on his swing, drawing back his driver with a full, unencumbered turn of his shoulders. As soon as he then felt the club reach parallel to the ground, Mustang popped his eyes back open before firing his hips and whipping his driver instinctively down around his body, launching it straight into the back of his ball that, in the split second he’d had before actually beginning his downswing, his eyes had sought out with all the ruthless efficiency of an eagle spying out its next meal.
FWWWEEEEESSSSHHHH!!!
Like everyone else on the tee, Mustang turned his gaze quickly skyward, desperately scouring the morning glow for his ball. With his right hand having slipped ever-so-slightly just as he’d made contact with it, Mustang had known straight away that while he hadn’t caught his ball exactly as he’d wanted, the damage hadn’t felt too critical. And, after an agonizing second or two of not seeing it in any of the windows he’d normally have expected to find the fade he’d attempted to play, that suspicion was proved right as a mightily relieved Mustang finally spotted his ball flying on the sort of low, peeling trajectory that pointed to it having come, as he’d felt, more off the bottom of the face towards the toe.
Truthfully, though, Mustang couldn’t care less about how it was flying, as the only thing that mattered to him was where it was flying. And having given it the quick once-over, subconsciously monitoring the speed and line it was travelling on, Mustang knew that once his ball landed – barring a very unfavourable bounce, of course – it was going to wind up settling somewhere up the left-hand side of the fairway, just short of one of the bunkers.
Seeing that he’d successfully followed Charlie in finding the fairway, the partisan crowd surrounding the tee, once again, found their voices and let out a loud cheer to signal their satisfaction with Mustang’s effort. As the cheering began to migrate back into another rhythmic, pulsating rendition of ‘U-S-A!’, however, Mustang suddenly found himself joined by a serious-looking Ray as the cohort of people who would be following their match began to filter off the tee.
“You alright, kid?” Ray asked, sounding concerned. “What happened there?”
“I’m not really sure …” answered Mustang, feeling somewhat disoriented as his body began the process of returning to its normal state. “Just froze up.”
“Yeah, I saw,” replied Ray, still carefully examining Mustang for any worrying signs as he reached out and took his driver from him. “How ‘bout now, though? You good?”
Having been so preoccupied with just making sure that his ball was ok, Mustang didn’t actually know the answer to that question. After taking a moment to find out, though, he was relatively happy with what he found. His heart rate had slowed down significantly. His muscles had now, gratefully, unclenched. His arms and legs felt as though they were fully his again. And the physical pressure he’d felt sitting in his chest, the one that had felt as though someone was clamping his lungs together and preventing them from fully expanding, had now almost completely dissipated.
In truth, he felt fine – or pretty close to it, at least.
“Yeah …” Mustang replied, his thoughts becoming clearer with each passing second. “I’m good.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, young man,” said Dallas, a relieved smile on his face as he joined Mustang and Ray out on the rapidly emptying tee. “Cause, I’m not gonna lie, you had me worried there for a second!”
“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that,” said Mustang, genuine remorse in his voice. “Maybe I should’ve let Byron take the tee-shot after all.”
“Why?” said Dallas, his face screwing up in confusion. “You hit the fairway, right?”
“Well, yeah …” replied Mustang, seeing Dallas’ point but still finding issue with it. “But you saw it. I mean, it wasn’t as good as it should have been. Not to mention how long it took me to actually hit it.”
Dallas lowered himself down so that he was as close to eye-level with Mustang as his notoriously fickle back would allow. “This game isn’t about being perfect, kid …” he said, his deep brown eyes staring sincerely into Mustang’s. “And it’s a good job it ain’t, ‘cause if it were? No one would play the damn thing!”
Mustang smiled.
“Instead, what it’s really about – all it’s ever been about …” continued Dallas, his eyes now twinkling almost nostalgically. “Is going out and tryna’ get a little white ball around 18-holes as best you can; whether you’re swingin’ it the best you ever have? Or your swing feels like it’s being held together with nothing more than scotch tape and some prayers.”
“Ok, but what if my best today isn’t good enough to help beat them?” asked Mustang, gesturing worriedly off at Charlie and Reggie, who were already marching confidently down the 1st fairway, with Byron and his caddie not far behind them.
“I wouldn’t worry ‘bout it,” said Dallas, suddenly sounding oddly relaxed at the thought of Mustang and Byron not beating the Riggs Brothers.
Having most definitely not been the answer either of them were expecting to hear to that question, Ray and Mustang exchanged a perplexed glance.
“Uh … and why’s that exactly?” asked Mustang, hoping to gain some much-needed clarity.
“Cause …” replied Dallas, that wry grin of his returning to his face. “Even on your worst day? You’re still more talented than both of those boys combined.” At that, Dallas, once again, placed his hand on Mustang’s shoulder, the weight of it pleasantly reassuring. “So, how ‘bout we go show ‘em, huh?”
GET THE FULL DIGITAL COPY OF THIS BOOK BY FOLLOWING THE LINK BELOW – THANK YOU:
https://mustangpeyton.bigcartel.com/product/mustang-ii-stormbreaker