Our Green Ghetto

Golf Digest, May, 2002 by Mark Singer

ONE OF MY FATHER'S BEST FRIENDS, A physician named Murray, a dapper 12-handicapper in his prime, used to say that when his time came he wanted to be buried 250 yards off the tee in the center of the ninth fairway at Meadowbrook Country Club, in Tulsa, Okla. Why? "Because I've never been there before."

When I heard about this ambition, at some point during adolescence, it burrowed into my imagination more profoundly than the usual bon mots of Dad's sidekicks. (As a rule, these were pragmatic men. For instance, Lester, the meatpacking mogul, once said of a par 4 that even on a windless day played like a legitimate par 5, "I'd like to buy material from the guy who measured this hole.") Across the years, I've thought often of Murray's death wish (of sorts), admiring its metaphorical and metaphysical richness. The ninth hole at Meadowbrook was a middling par 4 with a cleverly placed fairway bunker about 200 yards out and, beyond that, as it faintly doglegged right, a copse of ball-eating oaks and hemlocks. Clearly, Murray believed in the possibility of immortal grace: a final resting spot from which one might launch a precisely calibrated wedge shot that would arc through the silver twilight and then bounce through the portal of eternal bliss. Murray knew all along, I assume, that in the end his wife and children--never mind the greens committee at Meadowbrook--would fail to take seriously his request. Indeed, his earthly remains wound up in the regular cemetery, almost 15 miles from the golf course.

As an occasional consumer of what I've come to think of as the Menendez Brothers School of Memoir Writing--the literary subgenre in which a self-exculpatory author justifies his vile behavior as an inevitable consequence of a lifetime's worth of unreasonably early curfews and pitiless credit-card spending limits--I've pondered how I might render an uplifting variation on the theme. Such a narrative would trace the unfolding miracle of how, despite the hardships I confronted while growing up in Oklahoma during the '50s and '60s, I managed not to become a habitual felon. Exhibit A: The reason Murray wanted to be buried beneath the ninth fairway rather than the 18th was because, until the late '60s--even now I shudder at the memory of this privation--Meadowbrook had only nine holes! Plus, from May through September the heat was beastly. Plus, we were Jews.

During those endless sun-fried summers, my fellow country club urchins and I made what we could of our cultural disadvantages. Weekdays (except Mondays, when the course was closed) our station wagon-driving moms dropped us off early at the club, which in those days was, relatively speaking, far out in the country, beyond cornfields and cattle pastures that have since become housing developments and shopping centers. Typically, we arrived as the last bit of dew was evaporating from the fairways and the asphalt surface of the parking lot was beginning to soften. We laced up our spikes in the men's locker room, retrieved our golf bags from their cubby holes in the back of the golf shop (a flat-roofed brick structure that also included a bungalow where the club pro lived with his family), banged a bucket or two on the practice range, then pitched and putted until the coast was clear on the first tee.

By the age of 9 or 10, I was playing Meadowbrook not only in the daylight but in my sleep, and 40 years later I occasionally still do. Implausible juxtapositions--the stuff that golf, dreams, and certainly golf dreams are made of: the birdie sandwiched between triple bogeys, the surreal segue from the poison-ivy-and-snake-infested ravine (the price of a duck-hooked tee shot on No. 7) to the pendulously ripe mulberry tree (overhanging the tee on No. 8, where I once witnessed my father make a hole-in-one). Not only do I see it all again in my unconscious, I smell it and hear it: the spicy perfume of fresh-cut Bermuda grass, the funk of a stagnant water hazard, the looping background harmonies of meadowlarks and whippoorwills and cicadas. Always in these reveries, the fairways and putting surfaces are lush and true--the Meadowbrook greenkeeper was a bona fide artist--and always I am a short, skinny kid with a fatally unreliable short game.

In August, the club pro, Jack, and his wife, Faye, would loosely chaperone eight or 10 of us on a pilgrimage to the state junior tournament. (Only now does it occur to me that this was one of Jack's duties rather than a voluntary gesture of self-sacrifice.) We would check into a cinder-block motel, Jack would see to it that we got dinner, and then, as night fell, he would disappear and we would get busy testing our dad-emulation aptitudes: playing poker and gin rummy for real dollars, smoking menthol cigarettes and rum-soaked cigars, disparaging each other's incipient manhood. Come morning, Jack and Faye would deliver us to our competitive encounters with boys who had actually slept the previous night, with predictable results.

Among us there was one genuine prodigy--Jay Friedman, who won the club junior championship at the age of 12, defeating Bernard Robinowitz, who was 17. Eight years later, Friedman won the first of two consecutive Oklahoma men's amateur championships, bolstering our faith in him as a homegrown Great Jewish Hope, our Sandy Koufax of the links. But there he peaked, in his early 20s, and his attempts to qualify for a PGA touring card always came up a little short. When I paid him a visit a while back at the suburban Philadelphia club where he had spent almost 20 years as the resident pro, he obligingly and concisely answered the following impertinent question: So, what happened? "I hit a lot of golf balls," he said. "It's not that I didn't practice or work at the game. It's just that I wasn't mentally prepared. I didn't pursue it the way I should have. When I was 22 or 23 years old, I wanted to go to bars, meet women, have a good time."