Perfect

Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Fall-Wntr, 2007 by Greg Ahrenhoerster

Dave pulled his club back and, with his usual graceful downswing and follow-through, hit a 260-yard drive down the middle of the fairway. He didn't bother to watch the ball's flight. He obviously either already knew or didn't care where the ball was going to land. It was difficult to tell with Dave.

Dave walked off the tee and handed me his driver while the ball was still in the air. Even though this shot looked almost exactly like his previous drives of the day, I still couldn't help but marvel at its beauty. I stood still with the club grasped in my left hand, as I watched the ball's majestic flight and gentle landing in the perfectly manicured fairway grass before quickly stuffing the driver into Dave's bag and scrambling to catch up with my employer and friend of almost ten years who had already started his steady march towards the ball.

As we made our way down the 18th fairway, Dave glanced over at his playing partner for the day, a heavy-set man in his mid 50s with a gray mustache. Dave chuckled. "He looks a little like a walrus."

It was the third time he had made this observation in the last hour. Such comments usually made me a bit nervous, but the last time he said it, on the 11th hole, he proceeded to hit a beautiful, 190-yard four iron that stopped three and a half feet from the hole. Besides, I certainly couldn't disagree with Dave. The man, Craig Stadler, did look quite a bit like a walrus, which is, one can only assume, why he picked up the nickname, "The Walrus," when he played on the PGA tour.

Stadler had out-driven Dave by thirty yards, but his ball had faded into the heavy rough on the right, so he would have to try to carry his second shot over a sand trap that guarded the green on the right side. Dave had left himself a simple seven iron and could go right at the flagstick with no worries. I had pulled his seven out of the bag before we even reached his ball and slipped it in his hand discreetly as he marched on. He would have swung whatever club I handed him--a three wood, a putter, whatever--but I wouldn't do that to him. A seven iron was the right choice.

He took his usual stance over the ball, showing no visible surprise at the club that had appeared in his hand, and let it rip. Another clean swing left him with a manageable eight-foot putt for birdie.

Stadler put his second shot into the sand, as I suspected he would, which meant that we had to wait for him to shoot again before Dave could putt. I knew I would have to keep Dave distracted or he might lose his edge. l started in with one of my usual tactics: "This sure beats a monthly staff meeting, eh?"

As fate would have it, I first met Dave on a golf course. It was the summer after my senior year of high school. I was supposed to be attending a new-student orientation at the local junior college that my morn had signed me up for, but the day was too gorgeous to spend inside so I drove to the golf course instead. I was a "single," so the lady told me to hurry out to the first tee and join up with the threesome about to tee off, three guys in polo shirts with the logo of a local computer-consulting company. One of the men was Dave, a senior programmer.

Though I wasn't much of a student when it came to tests and papers, 1 had gotten decent grades in high school based mostly on class participation and charm. My mom called it "people skills" and said I had it in spades. At any rate, I could work the small talk, even with a group of computer geeks twice my age. As it turned out, the course was crowded and play was slow that day so there was plenty of time for chit-chat.

I told them how I was skipping my college orientation--what did I care if they knew? Dave was intrigued. Unlike most of his colleagues, he hadn't been to college either. After a stint in the military after high school, he taught himself to program computers on a Commodore 64 that he bought at a garage sale. He got a programming job soon afterwards and never looked back. "Good for you, kid," he said, and he slapped me on the back. By the time we got to the sixth hole, he had stopped talking to his co-workers all together and was engrossed in the story of my life--not that it was much of a story.

They were all decent golfers and good sports. After we putted out on the last hole, I went over to shake their hands and thank them for the game. Dave pulled me in close as he shook my hand and said, "Listen, kid, for some God-forsaken reason I'm being promoted to management. I'm supposed to hire a secretary or assistant or whatever. How would you like the job?"

I told him I was flattered but confessed that I didn't know how to take shorthand and I didn't type very well. He told me that didn't matter; he mostly needed someone to answer the phone and keep track of his schedule for him. So, I figured what the heck, beats going to college, and it would keep my mom off my back for a while. Who was I to ignore Opportunity's knock?

As it turns out, Dave was a fantastic manager. Most of the other executives were business types, who understood marketing and five-year plans and that crap but didn't know squat about computers. Dave's legendary programming skills gave him "street cred" with the younger employees (not that any of these dweebs would have lasted a minute on the street). In fact, Dave's programming abilities were the focal point of the company's folklore. Dave never mentioned it himself, but at least once a week some long-timer would beguile the newbies with a coffee-break tale of Dave's wonders. He'd go into a sort of trance, they'd explain, his head leaning way back against the chair, while his fingers flew in a blurry wave across the keyboard. Sometimes, he'd stay in the trance for hours. Once, he completed a programming job that the company had bid at forty hours in only five and a half hours.