The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life Read online

  The Legend of Bagger Vance

  A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life

  Steven Pressfield

  Lt. William James Torpie, U.S. Army

  October 20, 1943–March 25, 1969

  For you, Billy,

  and other friends who fell

  on other fields

  Tell me, Sanjaya, of the warriors’ deeds

  On that day when my sons faced the sons of Pandu,

  Eager to do battle on the field of Kuru,

  On the field of valor.

  —Bhagavad-Gita

  Contents

  Epigraph

  A Note to the Reader

  One

  HAVE YOU EVER had blackjack tea, Michael?

  Two

  IT SEEMS ODD NOW, but in the Twenties, business people…

  Three

  I WAS PRESENT for the next scene in this saga,…

  Four

  THE AERIE, JUNAH’S PLANTATION, lay four miles down the Skidaway…

  Five

  I ADVANCED TENTATIVELY INTO THE GLOOM. Three or four colored…

  Six

  I HAVE PUZZLED FOR YEARS and lain awake many nights,…

  Seven

  JUNAH WAS IN.

  Eight

  TO UNDERSTAND BOBBY JONES’ STATURE in the South at that…

  Nine

  THAT AFTERNOON PASSED as the most excruciating hell I had…

  Ten

  IT WAS PAST ONE O’CLOCK and by no means warm.

  Eleven

  “HAVE YOU EVER SEEN identical twins take up golf? Their…

  Twelve

  I WOKE UP LYING IN THE BACK SEAT of the…

  Thirteen

  THE CHALMERS PULLED UP ON A SAND RIDGE beyond the…

  Fourteen

  MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS HAVE PASSED since that day, yet…

  Fifteen

  AN ATHLETE OF YOUR CALIBER, Michael, can well imagine Junah’s…

  Sixteen

  JUNAH BIRDIED TEN, eleven and twelve. I can’t overstate the…

  Seventeen

  IN THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES, gallery ropes were rarely in…

  Eighteen

  THE STORM HAD BROKEN, wind was lashing the medical tent;…

  Nineteen

  AT THIS POINT in the telling of the story, Michael…

  Twenty

  JUNAH AND VANCE headed for the first tee again.

  Twenty-One

  VANCE UTTERED NO WORD. He simply motioned to me to…

  Twenty-Two

  IN THE DOZENS OF ACCOUNTS that appeared in the press…

  Twenty-Three

  IN AN INSTANT Vance had vanished, stepping into the gallery,…

  Twenty-Four

  I FINISHED THE TALE. The clock on Irene’s mantel read…

  Twenty-Five

  WE WERE ON OUR WAY to Krewe Island.

  Twenty-Six

  “WHEN JUNAH WAS KILLED I was nineteen, in my second…

  Twenty-Seven

  “YEAH SURE, PAL.” Michael paced angrily along the truck rail.

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Note to the Reader

  IN MAY OF 1931 an exhibition match was held over 36 holes between the two greatest golfers of their day, Walter Hagen and Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones, Jr. The match was the second and last between the two immortals (Hagen shelled Jones, 12 and 11 over 72 holes, at the first in Sarasota, Florida, in 1926). This second match was held at what was, at the time, the most costly and ambitious golf layout ever built in America, the Links at Krewe Island, Georgia.

  Much has been written about the rather odd events of that long day. We have Grantland Rice’s dispatches to the New York Tribune, which were published at that time. The notes and diaries of O. B. Keeler devote several quite absorbing pages to the match. And of course the reports from the dozens of newspapers and sporting journals that covered the event.

  One aspect of that day, however, has been largely overlooked, or rather treated as a footnote, an oddity or sideshow. I refer to the inclusion in the competition, at the insistence of the citizens of Savannah, of a local champion, who in fact held his own quite honorably with the two golfing titans.

  I was fortunate enough to witness that match, aged ten, from the privileged and intimate vantage of assisting the local champion’s caddie. I was present for many of the events leading up to the day, for the match itself, as well as certain previously unrecorded adventures in its aftermath.

  For many years, it has been my intention to commit my memory of these events to paper. However, a long and crowded career as a physician, husband and father of six has prevented me from finding the time I felt the effort deserved.

  In candor, another factor has made me reluctant to make public these recollections. That is the rather fantastical aspect of a number of the events of that day. I was afraid that a true accounting would be misinterpreted or, worse, disbelieved. The facts, I feared, would either be discounted as the product of a ten-year-old’s overactive imagination or, when perceived as the recollections of a man past seventy, be dismissed as burnished and embellished reminiscences whose truth has been lost over time in the telling and retelling.

  The fact is, I have never told this story. Portions I have recounted to my wife in private; fragments have been imparted on specific occasion to my children. But I have never retold the story, to others or even to myself, in its entirety.

  Until recently, that is. Attempting to counsel a troubled young friend, for whom I felt the tale might have significance, I passed an entire night, till sunrise, recounting the story verbally. It made such a profound impression on my young friend that I decided at last to try my hand at putting it down in written form.

  This volume is that attempt.

  I have chosen, for reasons which will become apparent, to tell the tale much as I recounted it that night. It is a story of a type of golfer, and a type of golf, which I fear have long since vanished from the scene. But I intend this record not merely as an exercise in reminiscence or nostalgia. For the events of that day had profound and far-reaching consequences on me and on others who participated, particularly the local champion referred to above.

  His name was Rannulph Junah, and Bagger Vance was his caddie.

  —HARDISON L. GREAVES, M.D.

  Savannah, Georgia

  March 1995

  One

  HAVE YOU EVER had blackjack tea, Michael?

  The real stuff, I mean. One of my patients gave me these, cured sassafras root from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana. Something mysterious and potent about it. Clears the head. You can stay up all night with your brain so lucid it almost feels transparent. Smell the earth in it? Something about tea from roots, as opposed to leaves. Something deeper, more connected to the source. I remember that rooty, woodsy smell from winter mornings as a boy. My mother said only a Yankee or a fool sweetened blackjack tea with sugar. It had to be molasses. And no milk. The farthest afield she’d stray was to serve it au citron, like the Creoles. But I’m wandering already, and you’ve barely even sat down.

  How are you, young man? No doubt you’re expecting a lecture, but I promise that’s the last thing I intend. Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely. I can even understand and sympathize. Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in your bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like an exercise in expedience and venality. I understand that brand of despair better than I wish. But it’s a
different decision you’ve made that troubles me more deeply.

  I mean your choice to give up golf.

  When I heard, Michael, I knew something was wrong. Seriously wrong. That’s why I’ve asked you here tonight.

  Will you stay and listen to an old man?

  You see, I know you better than you think. Not just from those forlorn “interviews” you endured once a year with the Scholarship Committee. In fact I made up my mind about you years earlier.

  Do you remember when you used to caddie for me, in your “rabbit” days, when you were ten or eleven? You used to swing clubs on the tee like the other boys, but there was something that struck me particularly about you. You had an instinct. You saw through to the soul of the game.

  Frank the caddiemaster told me once how, at ten years old, you asked to be sent out only with the best players, just so you could watch and learn. Frank showed me the list you gave him. Do you remember? The list of your approved players. I was flattered to find my own name on it.

  I used to watch you sometimes when you weren’t looking. What struck me particularly was your interest in the grip. You knew, like every real expert, that a true player can be recognized by his grip alone. The way a man sets his hands on a club will inform you infallibly as to how deeply he’s thought about the game, how profoundly he’s entered into its mysteries.

  The grip, a remarkable fellow named Bagger Vance once told me, when I was about the same age you were then, is man’s connection to the world outside himself. The hands, he said, are where the subjective meets the objective. Where we “in here” meet the world “out there.” True intelligence, Vance declared, does not reside in the brain, but in the hands.

  You had a wonderful grip. Even as a little boy, when your hands were barely big enough to wrap around a shaft. I suppose to me you represented golfing purity. Youth. Instinct. The untutored, pure love of the game.

  No one who loved the game like you, no one who can play like you, should be allowed to quit. That’s a law, you know? And if it isn’t, it should be.

  I know your disease, son. Thank God it’s mental, but then, in the final analysis, aren’t all our diseases mental?

  The ancient Hermetists had a principle, the First Principle they called it, that the universe itself was mental. They taught that All That Was existed purely as a thought in the Mind of God, or the All as they called it. Even we human beings with all our complexities had no substantial existence as matter, but were merely thoughts in the mind of our Creator, much like Micawber arising with his fellows from the mind of Dickens.

  The Hermetists claimed you could change the universe, or your own at any rate, by transmuting it mentally.

  Alchemy. Lead into gold. All in the mind.

  Am I rambling on? Yes, I see your eye wandering. To what? Oh yes…

  Go ahead. Take it down, it won’t break.

  It’s not the original, you know. That, the holder is obliged to return to the Georgia G.A. after his year. This is a half-size replica that Jeannie had made up for me. It has a certain grace, I think. Lord knows it’s the only thing I’ve ever won.

  GEORGIA STATE GOLF ASSOCIATION

  AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP

  1946

  WINNER

  DR. HARDISON GREAVES

  I’ll confess a secret to you, Michael. Might as well, since before this night is over I will have bared to you the innermost holdings of my soul.

  There were nights, after Jeannie died, when I would creep into this room, alone, in those black hours beyond the stroke of two, and steal a glance at that one word.

  Winner.

  Does that sound superficial? Perhaps it was a rather slender straw to grasp at. And yet there is something profound and mysterious about the vastness of the gulf between “winner” and “runner-up.” Even one time, just once at any level, to prevail. To be, for one fragile moment, the best. It’s not to be scoffed at, Michael. It helped me to do it, and it helped me to witness it, one day long ago in 1931.

  Yes, I know your illness, son. I’m going to try to cure it this evening with a story. Will you stay and listen?

  It may take all night. I’ll stay up if you will.

  Good. Are you comfortable? That tea should be just about ready now….

  Two

  IT SEEMS ODD NOW, but in the Twenties, business people and even a good number of families took their meals—not just lunch, but dinner and breakfast as well—at cafeterias.

  Particularly in the South, these teeming emporia were the absolute rage. There were Burr’s and Dawson’s in Virginia and the Carolinas, Whistling Pig in Alabama and Mississippi, Roberdaux’s, Tyrell House, and The Griddle. But the biggest and best of all was a chain called Invergordon’s. There were five in Birmingham alone. Jackson had three or four, Nashville and Memphis the same. Richmond had ten.

  Invergordon’s were not the depressing impersonal factories that the word cafeteria evokes today. Each had a manager, usually a clean-scrubbed bachelor or widower, who lived on the premises in an immaculate suite upstairs. These mandarins prowled the tables dispensing goodwill and tending instantly to their customers’ whims. One of them, a fellow named Adoor Moot, became Mayor of Charleston. That was how popular he was.

  All the chains had hostesses, not just one at the door to seat the arriving guests, but a regular fleet of belles to serve the endless iced teas, Coca-Colas and coffees without which no Southerner could navigate from one end of a meal to the other. Invergordon Girls were the elite. They wouldn’t deign even to speak to Burr’s girls or Dawson’s, so total was their disdain for these competing plebeian establishments. Invergordon Girls dressed in Scottish tartans and brought drinks, flatware and condiments with a smile and special twirl that they learned at the Invergordon finishing schools. Young boys would just gawk with their jaws slack, and girls couldn’t wait to grow up and twirl at some newer and even more glamorous Invergordon’s.

  There was a Mr. Invergordon of course. A Scotsman from Sutherland, in the North Country by Dornoch Firth. A golfer.

  Mr. Invergordon had money, buckets of it from his cafeterias and in the Twenties bales more from Wall Street. He wanted to build a golf course. Not just any golf course, but the grandest, most spectacular championship venue these shores had ever seen.

  Remember, this was ten years before Augusta National. Other than Pinehurst, which was all but inaccessible geographically, the South lacked a true world-class layout. Invergordon set out to remedy that.

  He owned twenty-five hundred acres of prime duneland off Wassaw Sound, east of Savannah, Linksland. There was a true sand beach on the south and east, and tidal flats on the mainland side that could be spanned by causeway. Drainage was excellent; there were snowy egrets, kites and petrels soaring in off the Atlantic. The breeze was fresh enough off the Point to keep the mosquitoes on their best behavior, not to mention give a round a smack of seaside interest.

  Invergordon decided to build his links there.

  He paid Alister Mackenzie $50,000 to design the course and oversee construction. I can’t tell you what a fortune that was in those days. I don’t believe Mackenzie earned half that for Augusta National and Cypress Point put together.

  But Invergordon didn’t stop at a championship layout. He brought in Charles Roy Whitney from Philadelphia to build a 500-room hotel, complete with physical culture pavilion, natatorium, an enclosed botanical garden, and artificial hot springs fired by underground steam furnaces.

  He named it Krewe Island after his birthplace in Scotland.

  For sheer scope and grandeur I would rank Krewe Island with the Hearst Ranch in California and the Vanderbilt estate in Asheville—and Krewe Island was, or would be upon completion, open to the public.

  I know you’re ahead of me, Michael. You’ve read of the Great Atlantic Storm of 1938. It was a hurricane, before they gave names to hurricanes. It blew for 54 straight hours with winds that hit 190 miles per hour. When it was over, Invergordon’s dream was reduced to matchsticks.

&nbs
p; The very land itself had been annihilated. The six outward holes that ran south along the Point were literally washed into the sea. There was nothing left. The last four, the home holes, with the exception of eighteen, were likewise obliterated. Everything was underwater and stayed that way for days. Salt water. When the sea finally withdrew, the South’s most famous golf links was nothing but a salt marsh choked with debris.

  Curious, and much remarked upon ever since, was the fact that the eighteenth hole was spared. It was actually playable the day after the storm. The green had drained, bunkers were dry, even the fairway had not a pinch of salt on it.

  But I’ve gotten ahead of my story. For by the time this catastrophe struck, Invergordon himself was dead, and had been for almost nine years. Blew his brains out with a British Enfield .303 in his office on the top floor of the Cotton Mart in New Orleans.

  Crash of ’29.

  The Depression hit the South hard, and hit Invergordon’s empire harder. Who could afford to eat out? Cafeterias withered where they stood. Invergordon’s four sons didn’t have the brains among them to make one decent businessman. It fell to Invergordon’s socialite daughter, Adele, to salvage the family’s fortunes.

  Adele clung to Krewe Island, which at that point was still a year short of completion, perhaps believing as many did in the Crash’s immediate aftermath that the dark times would soon pass, the economy right itself and money flow freely again. Or maybe just because she knew it was her father’s jewel, the one creation that might outlive and even memorialize them all.