When he walked down to the green, he heard a man saying, “Sliced like it had a string on it. Looked like it was going over into the road over there and then it came back. See, it bounced just short of this trap, rolled across the green and barely stuck on the far edge. What luck that old guy’s got!”
It was a wandering, uphill putt. He stopped and took a long look at it. Two sideways slopes to watch. That one will pull it to the right and then that other one will pull it back to the left. Try it dead on the cup. They both look the same size.
He stood very still, and felt the sweat make his grip on the putter uncertain. He put the club down, calmly wiped his hands, stuffed the handkerchief away. Then he stroked the ball crisply. It swung to the right, then back to the left, seemed to be going too fast for the uphill slope. But it hit against the far side of the cup, bounced a few inches into the air, and fell in.
The silent gallery exploded into sound. He heard the low tone of an announcer and wondered why they had put a in the gallery.
It was only when he walked back to the big board that he saw why. The deadly tournament play had shaken the leaders. Don Jeryde had taken a 70. Finn Makinson had taken 71 to put him two strokes behind Jeryde’s total. And Jock Drew’s 66 had tied the course record and had tied him with Makinson for second place. Both of them were just two strokes behind Jeryde.
Kelly had been eliminated along with many others in the Crest Club Open rule that the leading eight men go into the final round on the afternoon of the third day of play.
It was after a very light lunch and an hour of rest that Jock Drew found he was matched with Jeryde for the final round.
Jeryde was a man who, from a distance, gave a deceptive impression of youth. His tan face, slim body, and corn-yellow hair made him the delight of the amateur color photographers.
Yet, from close by, the tan skin was covered with a network of fine wrinkles, and there was a jaded look about his grey eyes. He looked as brittle as a dried twig. But the law of his life was competition. It just happened that he had learned golf. It could have been billiards, tennis, bowling — almost anything where it is man against man, skill against skill. Time had put a veneer over his ugly wrath at losing, and he could smile and shake a friendly hand with the best of them. Time had mellowed his ecstatic glee at winning. But nothing would ever mellow the tight, hard competitive quality of his play — the give-nothing, take-everything style of play that made respected and feared in the field.
The vast crowds in the afternoon made the morning crowds look slim. They came in their sleek cars, and. by bus and even on foot from the city. They paid the fee and swarmed over the course, and the mark of their passing was a rash of gum wrappers, cigarette butts, crumpled cigarette packages and heel prints.
When Jock stood on the first tee, they stretched in an unbroken line on both sides of the fairway. The officials pushed them back with bamboo poles, but still the aisle they left was not over fifty feet wide from tee to green.
Jeryde was treating Jock with an exaggerated courtesy, an eager-young-man manner in which there was nothing objectionable, and yet Jock knew that Jeryde, though he would deny it even to himself, sought in that way to anger Jock Drew and thus crack his game.
Jock’s drive was crisp and average in length. Jeryde was thirty yards beyond him. As they walked down toward the two balls glistening against the green grass, Jock felt that he was past exhaustion, that some strange numb nerves taken over his limp body and were forcing it to go through the motions of play.
He pitched on, missed his putt, saw Jeryde smugly confident as he increased the lead to three strokes.
The second hole was even, as was the third, the fourth and the fifth. The ache in Jock’s shoulder muscles made him want to cry out with each swing. Jeryde played tough, daring, competent golf, and Jock knew that the burden of proof was on himself, not on Don Jeryde. If he played Jeryde even, he couldn’t be sure of second place, not knowing how well Makinson might be doing. So he had to play better than even. He had to outplay Jeryde, using a body that was tired and old, but using golf knowledge that had been painfully gathered while Donald Jeryde was pedaling a tricycle.
On the eighth hole, Jock was given his first break. A silly woman tried to run across to the other side of the fairway while the crisp sound of Jeryde’s drive still resounded in the air.
The ball bounded, hit her in the face and knocked her down. She scrambled up, screaming, and they took her away, blood dotting her handkerchief. Jeryde’s bounded into the rough, into an almost unplayable lie.
His recovery was almost good enough, but faded off into a trap, and his explosion dropped him inches from the pin. Jock picked up one stroke.
On the ninth, a five hundred and twenty yard hole, Jock got a second break. Jeryde had a downhill lie for his second shot. He used a number two wood. A fraction of a second before the club head hit the ball, the ball moved slightly down the slope. As a result the ball was semi-topped, and it bounded off with a great deal of over-spin, coming to rest a bare hundred and fifty yards away, still a good eighty yards from the green. Jock saw his chance and changed clubs, pushing himself dangerously, and managed to put one on the edge of the green. It was a lovely shot.
Jeryde put this third shot on, five feet from the pin for a certain par four. Jock could feel himself tightening up. He stroked the ball crisply and it came to almost a dead stop just shy of the hole, but turned, ever so slowly, and plopped in. Jeryde threw a look of annoyance at the crowd, and the officials made threatening sounds to quiet them.
He holed his putt firmly, and Jock Drew was one stroke down — and ten to go. It was on the fourteenth, still one down, that Jock, out of pure weariness, pulled a beginner’s trick, something he hadn’t done for more years than he could remember.
Faced with a forty foot pitch onto the green, he looked up like any dub. The edge of the seven iron cut into the ball and it scampered off at an angle. The gallery tried to surge out of the way, but it hit somebody’s heel, glancing off, running up the brink of the green, trickling nicely down toward the hole to stop not more than nine inches from the pin.
Jeryde’s lips were white, and the grin he gave Jock Drew was so forced as to appear more of a grimace. Jeryde’s ball was ten feet from the pin, as he had leaned a bit too much on his own approach. His careful putt stopped dead a bare two inches to the left of the cup. Jock putted his own in, and the match and the tournament were even.
The gallery was almost unmanageable. The fifteenth was halved, and the sixteenth, and the seventeenth.
Jock stood for a long time on the eighteenth tee, looking down to the small patch three hundred and ten yards away where the dogleg curve began.
He glanced down at the ball and it took his tired eyes several seconds to focus properly. The sun was dropping, and it slanted across the course. He thought of Molly and thought of the radio at her bedside.
What were they saying about Jock Drew? Were they wondering how long it could last? How long the old man from the past could keep up his challenge? How soon he would break?
He addressed the ball. What had Molly’s words always been? Of course! Good luck, and a long roll, and magic on the greens.
But that patch of green was so far. So far.
The clubhead went back into that smooth backswing, looping smoothly at the top of it, slashing down with a dean, whip-like sound. When the club head was six inches from the ball, he uncocked his wrists with a sure, hard snap. The impact like a pistol shot. Never had he hit a ball harder. Or truer.