Intromission

Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Aug 15, 2004

I stood bent at the waist over a tiny white ball, wiggling my feet, waggling my weathered 3-iron, trying to ignore the mosquito buzzing in my ear—trying to succeed at the most difficult of all man’s endeavors: namely golf.

A screaming came across the sky… at least that’s what came to mind when I heard it: the woosh of a Gulfstream jet punching through the heavy air on its initial ascent. I glanced up briefly to watch the airplane disappear into the low-slung clouds and then had to start over again with the wiggling and waggling.

Over the horizon came the baritone thup-thup-thup of opposing rotor blades: the menacing wingbeat of a giant hummingbird. I diverted my eyes once more from the dimpled ball and frowned at the treetops, watching as the machine came into view.

“A Chinook,” I said to my father, recalling tactical information gleaned from an adolescence spent hunched over ragged copies of Aviation Week & Space Technology. I half expected a crack team of low-handicap duffers to rappel down the sides. The bird circled the golf course, over Bermuda grass cut neat and flat—an immaculate green carpet winding through a palimpsest of ancient swampland and tattered pine trees. “They’re watching us.”

And then something furry bounded across the fairway, one of nature’s experiments gone awry. A squirrel? A raccoon? A lemur? I lack familiarity with the exotic fauna of the South. The thing drew up on its hind legs and sat there looking at me, as if to say: “Swing already!”

Golf’s a mind game and mine refused to cooperate. I addressed the ball for the third time: easy now… don’t shank it… parallel on the backswing… open your stance a bit. Each revelation tightened my grip.

And then, with a smile, I remembered that I do in fact know how to put it in the hole.

I wound up and let fly, machined steel whipping around in a violent arc, struck the ball with a satisfying thwack that reverberated in my bones, sent it hurtling high and fast into the hoary Carolina sky. I stood there, pivoted about my right toe, iron dangling over my left shoulder, and watched the white dot tumble onto the green, coming to rest a few feet from the pin.

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