Steven Pressfield - The Authentic Swing: Notes From the Writing of a First Novel

PART ONE

W hen I was a kid growing in New York in the 50s, there was such a thing as working papers. You couldnt get a job without them. But you had to be sixteen years old to apply.

We were eleven.

We needed money.

My friend the Hawk said, Lets go caddying.

You didnt need working papers to be a caddie. All you had to do was show up.

My friend was not the real Hawk. That was his big brother Henry. Henry was the Big Hawk, the Original Hawk. My friend Phil was the Junior Hawk. His two younger brothers, twins, were the Sparrow Hawks.

The Big Hawk was the coolest guy in my hometown of Pleasantville. Yes, there really is such a place. The Hawk drove a convertible Corvette. He had a tattoo. He was going steady with Vivian Saglibene, the prettiest girl in high school. He was just cool.

The Hawk was a golfer. Not just any golfer, but the Westchester County caddie champion. In those days, when golfing legends like Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Gene Sarazen had arisen from the caddie ranks, a title like that really meant something.

The Hawk was ungodly long off the tee. He could set a ball on the concrete step of the pro shop and hit it 300 yards in the air without putting a scratch on the soleplate of his persimmon MacGregor Tourney driver (which was actually a 1 1/2 wood).

Sometimes the Hawk would take Phil and me to the Elmsford driving range after work. Within five minutes he had drawn a crowd. Night had fallen; the bright lights had come on. The Hawks balleven those dead-ass, dimple-free driving range clunkerscame off the clubface of his driver with such an explosive crack that players froze in mid-swing, left their own rubber mats and buckets of balls, and clustered in awe to watch him. I did too. I can still see those red-striped, stone-inert range balls rocketing into the darkness and vanishing somewhere beyond Pluto.

One day, the Hawk took Phil and me to the local diner. A burger was thirty cents, a cheeseburger thirty-five. I got up without leaving a tip. Suddenly, I felt talons seizing me by the scruff of the neck. These people, said the Hawk, depend for their living on the generosity of the customers they serve.

I tipped five dollars.

To this day, I leave ridiculous tips.

We started caddying, Phil and I, when we were eleven. Sometimes the Big Hawk gave us a ride, but mostly we hitchhiked. You could do it then. People would pick you up. The club was in Armonk, New Yorkbefore IBM moved its world headquarters thereup a gorgeous, oak- and maple-lined two-lane to the clear, sunlit summit, the highest point in Westchester County. It was called the Whippoorwill Club. Its still there. A great course, designed by Donald Ross, among others.

Before I went up to Whippoorwill, I had barely heard of golf. Baseball was my love. I only went up to the club to make money. But I was there one day and I fell in love with the game.

Growing up in a caddie shack is like growing up on a kibbutz or a cattle ranch, or maybe more accurately an orphanage or reform school. The caddie master was a sixtyyear-old guy named Frank. He was the one who called your name and sent you out on a loop.

Here is how you grow up in a caddie shack. The first summer, I was Shorty. Next year, I was Peanuts. At thirteen, I had a growth spurt: I became Legs, then Stretch. For a three-year interval, Frank called me, for no reason I could fathom, Oklahoma. Then I went to work in the pro shop. Because I was always swinging clubs, I became Samafter Sam Snead. I dont think Frank ever knew my real name.

The shack itself was a yard of denuded hardpan adjacent to the pro shop, open to the elements and screened off from the members eyes by a canvas-swathed chain link fence. Inside this palisade, waiting for their loops, lounged the scum of the earth. Black Jack Barnes, Stevie Coleslaw, Bimbo Elliott, Two-Tone John, and the Bisceglia brothers. They wore muscle shirts with Marlboro hard-packs rolled into one sleeve above a tattoo either of Jesus on the cross with a tear trickling down his cheek or the Harley-Davidson logo with Harley spelled Hardly. The Hawk and Danny Canizarro ruled the roost.

In the east and south corners of the yard stood two square green tables, at which high stakes poker games (with actual dollar bills in the pot) were in constant session. No chairs. Everyone sat on wooden soda crates, turned on end. You had to be a big kid to play poker. If you were little you could be a plucker. A plucker was a kind of parasite who hovered at the shoulder of a real player and was permitted from time to time to pluck a hole card, based on his own fervent self-attestations that he had the juju and could round out a flush or fill an inside straight.

We little kids played whist. Have you ever read the Horatio Hornblower books about the British navy in the Napoleonic Wars? Whist was the big game then. The officers and midshipmen played in the ward room of H.M.S. Whatever, while patrolling Gibraltar and Valparaiso. In the shack we were rabid whist players. Whist is like bridge without bidding.

The shack was like boarding school. Everything you knew about life, you learned there.

Sex.

You do what? She does what? Thats disgusting!

Try it, kid. You might like it.

Love.

When you wake up with a girl the morning after, and you would brush your teeth with her toothbrush... thats the girl for you.

You learned about money and loyalty and generosity and how you always picked up the tab when it was your turn and never welshed or played stoolpigeon or let your mouth go writing checks your ass couldnt cash.

The caddie population at Whippoorwill drew from two talent poolsthe local Westchester towns (these were the clean-cut kids, bound for college) and Yonkers, where everyone was on his way to Sing Sing or the Marine Corps.

If you were a clean-cut kid like me, you wore T-shirts, Ivy League chinos (meaning with a little belt in the back above the pockets), and sneakersKeds or PF-Flyers. On competition days the Foot-Joys came out. You cant get that quality golf shoe anymore. Nobody makes them. A pair of Foot-Joys cost $38 then, four days work. Today youd have to fly to London to Crockett & Jones to get shoes made with such care. All-leather, no synthetics, yet 100% waterproof. Comfortable? You could walk in em all day. You felt like a prince in those shoes. And they had spikes. Real steel spikes that made a delicious clatter when you ambled across a concrete walkway. And they didnt slip, even on the slickest wet grass.

Lunch in the shack was a roast-beef wedge that we stopped for each morning at Briccettis Deli in Armonk. A wedge is like a hoagie. We got the giant size, as big as your head, with a glass bottle of milk that we put Nestles Quik in and shook up to make chocolate milk. A wedge came with heavy mayo. You didnt have to ask. Mr. Briccetti would slit the loaf down the middle, then with three fingers scrape out all the bread in the center and slather the void full of mayo. Hey, Mister B, could ya put in a little more?

There was a cooler-type soda vending machine in the caddie shack against the pro shop wall. You lifted the lid and inside were steel runners between which were held the necks of bottles of Coke, Seven-Up, Nehi grape and so forth, with the bottle caps facing up. You put in a dime and a little gate, like a subway turnstile, opened. You slid your desired bottle between the runners and up out of the gate. Then one day someone discovered that, using an opener, you could snap off the bottle caps, without paying, while they were still inside the machinethen suck out the soda through a straw.

The next day a new machine appeared, upright, unbreachable.

The smartest guy in the shack was Bevo Martin. He went to Dartmouth and always carried a thumbworn existential paperback in his back pocket. Hey, Beev, whos this Camus guy?