The Sweetest Spot

By Robert O’Clarity

He died on the fairway of the 15th hole, which wasn’t so bad, all things considered. It was a long par 4 with a u-shaped pond guarding the front of the green—a pond so infamous for grabbing well-struck golf balls that they called it “Lake Titelist.” The scorecard showed that he had started the back nine with two double bogies, but after recovering with two birdies on the 12th and 14th holes, he had a good shot at breaking par for the first time in his life. Dark storm clouds hovered over the course though. There was little chance of him two-putting the final three holes on newly wet greens, even if he managed to drive it straight into the wind and somehow reach those greens on the second shots. I liked to think that grandpa died in a state of great hope, never having had to face the inevitable despair that the elements had conspired to bring upon him.

They carried him into the clubhouse, to the shock of the Sunday brunchers, and placed him on a table. There was no shortage of doctors in the room, and three crowded around him checking his vitals and performing CPR while the hollandaise sauce cooled on their eggs Benedicts. Ladies in white tennis outfits gasped and remarked how they’d just played bridge with him the other day.

My father didn’t even have a chance to get me out of the room before the paramedics arrived. They pronounced him dead right there in the dinning room. Before they wheeled the gurney away though, my father permitted me to kiss him goodbye. Leaning over his gray and lifeless cheek, his jaw was still clenched like a man who’d just missed a tap-in birdie putt. But beyond the shock in his wide brown eyes showed some peace, as if at the last second he’d come to accept par as an adequate consolation in life.

Admittedly, it was more than a little inappropriate, but knowing grandpa’s lifelong dream to shoot a round under par, I couldn’t resist. As I pressed my lips to his cold cheek, I checked for the scorecard in his back right pocket. Finding only the nub of a pencil and some wooden tees, I knew immediately what I had to do.

As the ambulance disappeared down the gravel road, I headed straight down the 18th fairway knowing a valuable piece of family history was still blowing around in the wind. The rain had already been coming down for nearly an hour, but I managed to find it along with his 3-iron beside a deep clean divot just before the 200-yard marker on the 15th hole. With the water hazard, a man of 69 might have opted to lay-up, but judging by his club choice grandpa had decided to go for it. That’s one swing I would have liked to have seen, the culmination of 30 years worth of driving range practice coming down on the ball, the last swing he would ever make—one final earthly aspiration to send it flying just right.

The thing was that his ball was nowhere to be found. Grandpa was almost mathematical about his golf swing. The only way he would ever have let it go in the rough is if the stroke happened mid-swing and even if his arteries tightened on the back swing, I could be sure that grandpa, a textbook golfer, kept his eye on the ball till the very end. Surely, there’s no sadder last vision of this world than the sight of your golf ball hooking mercilessly toward the woods with no possibility, short of an afterlife, of ever getting it out again.

“I hate this game,” grandpa often said. “I’m out here 3 days a week and I hate this game.”

After seeing the frontlines of two wars, he wasn’t willing to give up on anything. We all knew he loved the game. What he hated was that it couldn’t be licked. And that was why he loved it.

“For a few hours on the course, we’re all archers and surveyors,” he told me once. “We measure trajectories and calculate the slope of the land, all with the single goal of closing the distance between the tee box and the pin.”

It is one of the few times that modern man needs to factor in all the elements, the wind, the thickness of the grass, even the amount of sunlight baking the greens and with all of that data weighing in our heads we say a little prayer and simply swing.

He had hacked up a great clump of grass with that final swing, the peel lay curled over 10 yards forward showing its brown wormy underbelly. It was reassuring to know that at least he had given the earth a good flesh wound before he went, as if to try and take planet with him in the fight. The divot wasn’t deep enough to be a duff, so I could only imagine the ball had gone airborne. Of course, it would have taken a Herculean 4-iron in the sweet spot to carry that pond into the wind.

Physics were against him though. Not only was there the wind and the rain, but a set of 69-year-old hips that gave bolts of pain when he picked up my little sister. The pond’s floor was lined with the balls of men half his age and twice his strength who had the same foolish hope of carrying it. The only thing that grandpa had going for him was heart, and it seemed that too gave out in the end.

I walked up the wet and windy fairway deeply saddened by the thought that grandpa might have left the world clutching his grip in defeat. It had to have gone into the drink. He wouldn’t have pulled out his score card if the ball was still in play. With the rain coming down, he must have been marking his stokes to drop another ball after the storm passed. Alas, it was a round destined never to be finished.

The clubhouse was in the other direction, but I felt it was my duty to go straight up to the green and have a moment of silence at the pin. As I bowed my head beside the wind rippling flag, I saw it there lying beside the pole in the little tin cup, grandpa’s ball with his initials on it. Who knows, maybe it was the shock of holing out from 210 yards away that brought on the heart attack. I like to think that once Grandpa made that shot, there was simply nothing left for him to do in this world. Either way, it was his legacy. Grandpa had scored an eagle.