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Skeet didn't lose his temper easily, but he'd been on a bender that had lasted nearly two weeks, and he wasn't in the best of moods. Straightening up, he pulled back his fist and took two unsteady steps forward, determined to add to the damage already done by Jaycee Beaudine. The kid braced himself, but before Skeet could strike, the rotgut whiskey he'd been drinking got the best of him and he felt the dirty concrete floor give way beneath his wobbly knees.
When he woke up, he found himself in the back seat of a ‘56 Studebaker with a bad muffler. The kid was at the wheel, heading west on U.S. 180, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other hanging from the window, beating out the rhythm of “Surf City” on the side of the car with his palm.
“You kidnappin’ me, boy?” he growled, pulling himself up on the back of the seat.
“The guy pumpin’ super at the Texaco was getting ready to call the cops on you. Since you didn't seem to have a legitimate means of transportation, I couldn't do much else but bring you along.”
Skeet thought about that for a few minutes and then said, “Name's Cooper. Skeet Cooper.”
“Dallas Beaudine. Folks call me Dallie.”
“You old enough to be drivin’ this car legal?”
Dallie shrugged. “I stole the car from my old man and I'm fifteen. You want me to let you out?”
Skeet thought about his parole officer, who was guaranteed certain to frown on just exactly this kind of thing, and then looked at the feisty kid driving down the sun-baked Texas road like he owned the mineral rights underneath it. Making up his mind, Skeet leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. “Guess I might stick around for a few more miles,” he said.
Ten years later, he was still around.
Skeet looked over at Dallie sitting behind the wheel of the ‘73 Buick he now drove and wondered how all those years had flown by so quickly. They'd played a lot of golf courses since the day they'd met at the Texaco station. He chuckled softly to himself as he remembered the first golf course.
The two of them hadn't traveled for more than a few hours that first day when it became evident that they didn't have much more than the price of a full tank of gas between them. However, fleeing the wrath of Jaycee Beaudine hadn't made Dallie forget to toss a few battered clubs into the trunk before he hotfooted it out of Houston, so he began looking around for signs that would lead them to the next country club.
As he turned into a tree-lined drive, Skeet glanced over at him. “Does it occur to you that we don't exactly look like country club material, what with this stolen Studebaker and your busted-up face?”
Dallie's swollen mouth twisted in à cocky grin. “That kind of stuff don't count for shit when you can hit a five-iron two hundred twenty yards into the wind and land the ball on a nickel.”
He made Skeet empty out his pockets, took their total assets of twelve dollars and sixty-four cents, walked up to three charter members, and suggested they play a friendly little game at ten dollars a hole. The charter members, Dallie declared magnanimously, could take their electric carts and their oversize leather bags stuffed full of Wilson irons and MacGregor woods. Dallie announced that he'd be happy as a clam walking along with only his five-iron and his second-best Titleist ball.
The members looked at the scruffy-handsome kid who had three inches of bony ankle showing above his sneaker tops and shook their heads.
Dallie grinned, told them they were yellow-bellied, shit-stompin', worthless excuses for women and suggested they raise the stakes to twenty dollars a hole, exactly seven dollars and thirty-six cents more than he had in his back pocket.
The members pushed him toward the first tee and told him they'd stomp his smart ass right across the border into Oklahoma.
Dallie and Skeet ate T-bones that night and slept at the Holiday Inn.
They reached Jacksonville with thirty minutes to spare before Dallie had to tee off for the qualifying round of the 1974 Orange Blossom Open. That same afternoon, a Jacksonville sportswriter out to make a name for himself unearthed the staggering fact that Dallas Beaudine, with his country-boy grammar and redneck politics, held a bachelor's degree in English literature. Two evenings later the sportswriter finally managed to track Dallie to Luella's, a dirty concrete structure with peeling pink paint and plastic flamingos located not far from the Gator Bowl, and confronted him with the information as if he'd just uncovered political graft.
Dallie looked up from his glass of Stroh's, shrugged, and said that since his degree came from Texas A&M, he guessed it didn't really count for much.
It was exactly this kind of irreverence that had kept sports reporters coming back for more ever since Dallie had begun to play on the pro tour two years before. Dallie could keep them entertained for hours with generally unquotable quotes about the state of the Union, athletes who sold out to Hollywood, and women's “ass-stompin’” liberation. He was a new generation of good ol’ boy—movie star handsome, self-deprecating, and a lot smarter than he wanted to let on. Dallie Beaudine was about as close as you could get to perfect magazine copy, except for one thing.
He blew the big ones.
After having been declared the pro tour's new golden boy, he had committed the nearly unpardonable sin of not winning a single important tournament. If he played a two-bit tournament on the outskirts of Apopka, Florida, or Irving, Texas, he would win it at eighteen under par, but at the Bob Hope or the Kemper Open, he might not even make the cut. The sportswriters kept asking their readers the same question: When was Dallas Beaudine going to live up to his potential as a pro golfer?
Dallie had made up his mind to win the Orange Blossom Open this year and put an end to his string of bad luck. For one thing, he liked Jacksonville—it was the only Florida city in his opinion that hadn't tried to turn itself into a theme park—and he liked the course where the Orange Blossom was being played. Despite his lack of sleep, he'd made a solid showing in Monday's qualifying round and then, fully rested, he'd played brilliantly in the Wednesday Pro-Am. Success had bolstered his self-confidence—success and the fact that the Golden Bear, from Columbus, Ohio, had come down with a bad case of the flu and been forced to withdraw.
Charlie Conner, the Jacksonville sportswriter, took a sip from his own glass of Stroh's and tried to slouch back in his chair with the same easy grace he observed in Dallie Beaudine. “Do you think Jack Nicklaus's withdrawal will affect the Orange Blossom this week?” he asked.
In Dallie's mind tha
t was one of the world's stupidest questions, right up there with “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” but he pretended to think it over anyway. “Well, now, Charlie, when you take into consideration the fact that Jack Nicklaus is on his way to becoming the greatest player in the history of golf, I'd say there's a pretty fair chance we'll notice he's gone.”
The sportswriter looked at Dallie skeptically. “The greatest player? Aren't you forgetting a few people like Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer?” He paused reverentially before he uttered the next name, the holiest name in golf. “Aren't you forgetting Bobby Jones?”
“Nobody's ever played the game like Jack Nicklaus,” Dallie said firmly. “Not even Bobby Jones.”
