When we finally stood up to stagger back to the hotel room, the bartender stopped George and said, "Wait! You have to tell me your name." In his most graceful, dulcet tone, the Bogey Man leaned forward and said, "George Plimpton."
A blank came over the bartender's face as he tried to process this information. We were almost to the door and picking up speed when we heard the bartender call out loudly, "Who the hell is George Plimpton?"
Over seventy years old at the time - and with twin two-year-olds at home - all the margaritas and whiskeys might have been a bit much even for George. The next morning, he showed up at the golf course with one eye about three inches lower on his face than the other, though that may have been the result of my vision, for I wasn't in much better shape.
Played on Z Boaz golf course - named one of "America's Worst Twenty Courses" - the Jenkins tournament is a celebration of Jenkins's 1965 Sports Illustrated story, "The Glory Game at Goat Hills," which told the hilarious tale of Dan's well-wasted youth on a hardscrabble course in South Fort Worth. Populating his story with characters like Cecil the Parachute (who swung so hard he fell down), Weldon the Oath (a swearing postman), Grease Repellent (a mechanic), and Foot the Free ("short for Big Foot the Freeloader"), Jenkins was only proving the old adage that truth is funnier than fiction. May the writer with the best memories win.
Through the decades, it's amazing how little Fort Worth has changed. Many of these characters still play golf with Jenkins and the golf course at Z Boaz is no less colorful than the long-since bulldozed Goat Hills track. The fourth at Z Boaz plays past a topless bar (in case you've forgotten what breasts look like) and the seventeenth overlooks a check-cashing liquor store (in case you've lost your own shirt). When I played in the tournament the previous year, a guy in the group in front of us found an elderly man's body floating facedown in a ditch on the course.
The only bodies Plimpton and I were in danger of stumbling over were each other's. After having a sleeve of new Titleists stolen out of our cart while we were warming up on the putting green, George and I played like old men who'd been drinking as if they were young men, and that was good enough for us.
Reminiscing about all this in the bar in New York, George told me he hadn't teed it up again since our outing in Fort Worth, and I asked him if he wanted to return to Texas the following fall and reteam for another shot at Goat Hills glory.
"I'd love that," George told me, though I think we both suspected that his golf days were behind him. Seventy-five years old, with the "Paris Review" to edit and his memoirs still to write, the last hole of golf he'd ever play would turn out to be number eighteen that day at Z Boaz.
In the usual assortment of crazy Dan Jenkins rules, on the final hole teams were allowed to buy a four-hundred-yard drive. Digging into his wallet for the first time all weekend, George pulled out ten of the fifteen dollars he'd arrived with and purchased the best golf shot of his life. Dropping a ball on the designated spot four hundred yards down the closing par five, George knocked a ball onto the green, then made the putt for an eagle.
And so, thirty years after "The Bogey Man," Plimpton finally beat the game.
Without a clue that George would not live another year, in a bar in New York, I raised my glass to him.
"To the Eagle Man," I toasted.
It's wasn't easy to trump Plimpton in the word game, but I could see he liked that one.
"Any advice?" I asked him as we stood to go.
"Play golf," he told me, "then write about it."
There was no bill from the bartender. I was with George Plimpton, and life was good.
Excerpted from THE OLD MAN AND THE TEE © Copyright 2004 by Turk Pipkin. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved.
