Loose Impediments

Somewhere over the Rainbow

I have a conference for travel writers in Belfast. So naturally, I took the opportunity to arrive a couple of days early and get in some golf. Today's round was at Rosapenna. On the 17th hole, I saw the biggest, most vivid rainbow I have ever seen. Alas, there was no pot of gold at the end of it, but the pint of Guinness after the round was treasure enough.

Seeing Green

Golf is an honorable game. We play by the rules, calling penalties on ourselves if necessary. More importantly, we treat other golfers with a kind of respect and civility rarely found in the world at large. That kind of ethos is lacking in certain corners of the golf publishing industry, apparently.

Now, you may have heard of a book called A Course Called Ireland, written by Tom Coyne. It is Coyne's account of circumnavigating the Emerald Isle on foot, stopping to play many of the courses along the way. It is a fabulous premise for a book, which is precisely what I thought when I first heard about the project two years ago, several months before Coyne was set to embark on his epic journey.

So I contacted him and in addition to feeling him out on several "Great Courses of Britain and Ireland" features for LINKS on his return, I proposed that he write a weekly update from the road (sometimes literally, I imagine) for our Web site. Coyne seemed very receptive to the idea, and suggested I contact his agent, Dan Mandel.

"I Don't Like Mondays"

Dustin Johnson is a happy man. The cancellation of today's final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am gave Johnson a three-round win, his second on the PGA Tour.

My guess is the only people at Pebble whose happiness level ranks up there with Johnson's are the press, who were spared the stresses and aggravations of a Monday finish like the one that took place at the 2000 AT&T.

In that year's weather-delayed event, Matt Gogel led on Monday morning by one shot over Vijay Singh and by five over Tiger Woods, who was going for his sixth consecutive win. As the golf writer for the Orlando Sentinel, I was chronicling the historic run by our biggest hometown golfer. His streak had gotten me to Hawaii and now Pebble, so I wasn't complaining too much about the Monday finish, a phrase that usually strikes the same chord in golf writers as do the words "emergency dental procedure."

Originally, I had planned on spending Monday in San Francisco, where my sister lived, before flying out Tuesday morning. The weather precipitated a change of plans, but after my initial disappointment, I was looking ahead to salvaging part of the day, especially after Gogel built a seven-stroke lead over Tiger with seven holes remaining. I was already planning a tidily written story about the end of the streak, and imagined myself in San Francisco in time for a relaxing dinner.

Apparently, I had forgotten to inform Gogel and Tiger of my plans. Gogel made a couple of bogeys, Tiger a couple of birdies, and as he stood over his second shot on the 15th hole, Tiger was four shots back.

I was having lunch with Alan Shipnuck of Sports Illustrated, Craig Bestrom of the San Jose Mercury News and T.R. Reinman of the San Diego Union-Tribune while watching on the monitor. We saw Tiger's wedge shot land to the right of the flagstick before spinning into the hole. When they say there's no cheering in the press room, they're right. There was grim silence as we all got up—meal unfinished—and headed for our laptops. At that point, none of us had any doubts Tiger would win, and the stories we had concocted in our heads were useless. Instead, we were all facing the same long day of chronicling yet another incredible feat by Tiger.

I not only had to write the game story, but had to put the whole thing in perspective for A1, the newspaper's front page. Later, I found out that there was an outcry back in Orlando because the CBS affiliate had not shown the tournament (opting for the usual fare of soap operas), which meant my front-page article carried added significance, a fact that I was glad not to have known at the time because I no doubt would have choked the way I did during my first chance at an A1 article—Payne Stewart's plane accident.

I finally got to my sister's at nearly midnight and instead of flying home, I spent the next day in her apartment writing a three-part feature on Tiger before heading down to Torrey Pines for the next event, where a media circus of hundreds chasing Tiger's streak descended on a space meant for a couple dozen.

Mercifully, Phil Mickelson won, and I was finally able to go home. But whenever I hear about a Monday finish, I can't help but flash to one of the longest days of my life.

John Updike Remembered

I was saddened to hear about the passing of John Updike today of lung cancer. Golf comprised a small part of his body of work—including a collection of stories in Golf Dreams and a lesser-known volume called In Love with a Wanton—and one of the highlights of my editing career was getting Updike to write an essay about Tiger Woods.

The essay, which appeared in the April 2007 issue, was quite possibly the last words he wrote about the game that he so enjoyed playing. (He was a longtime member of the Myopia Hunt Club outside Boston.) I was impressed by how much Updike knew about golf and about Woods, despite his protests to the contrary when I first approached him about the piece.

Communicating with Updike strictly via the mail. I would write a letter, and he would respond with a postcard on which he typed his reply. For someone used to communicating with writers via e-mail, I found this old-school approach charming and entirely appropriate, since Updike was a timeless writer whose works would transcend his time.

Updike's draft was remarkably clean. (You'd be amazed by how sloppy—grammatical mistakes and misspellings—the drafts of some famous writer can be.) We talked on the phone once, to go over the manuscript, and it was the most nervous I have ever been in the business, and Tiger Woods once challenged me to hit a ball during a photo shoot—with his driver. I felt the way Ved Mehta did when he described talking on the phone with New Yorker editor William Shawn as they went over Mehta's writing, line by line.

Updike went over the changes he wanted to make clearly and crisply—no indecision or uncertainty of purpose. At one point he wanted to add the word "epochal" to the text, and I just flat out choked.

"Do you mean apocryphal?" I asked.

"No," was his chopped reply.

"Apocalyptic?"

"Not even close."

Finally, he just sighed (and no doubt rolled his eyes while regretting taking the assignment in the first place) and spelled it out, in the manner of a kindergarten teacher: "E-P-O-C-H-A-L."

But he remained gracious and even thanked me for the assignment, all the while I was considering joining the French Legion.

Later, after months of therapy, I summoned the courage to invite Updike to join me for a round of golf near his home, hoping that he remembered the assignment as a whole and not my bumbling at the end. He declined, but with this note. Even on a postcard, John Updike's prose shines.

The Write Stuff

The title on my business card reads "editor" but at heart I really consider myself a writer. And being a writer is a funny thing, because it is one of the few professions based on a skill set that is nearly universal (in the U.S. anyway—according to the CIA World Factbook, we have a 99 percent literacy rate; in Eritrea, where the literacy rate is 59, the pool of potential professional writers is considerably smaller).