The Stony Creek Golf club is a moderate length nine-hole country layout. The small undulating greens are well bunkered but the main hazard protecting the course is the creek, by which it gets its name, that wends its way in and around the course.
Shall We Dance?
It was towards the end of the evening as Dexter Dibble surveyed the dance floor. To his eyes there seemed to be a multitude of happy couples swirling around the hall in a sea of contentment. Each one of them having met their perfect dance partner, quite possibly their perfect life partner. Dexter watched as they spun this way and that in perfect harmony. He was fascinated. How had each couple come to be? How had they paired off? Dexter had absolutely no idea how the process worked, but two things were certain. Firstly, at present he was not a paid-up member of the love club and secondly, at twenty-seven, he’d better get a wriggle on and join or he might end stepping through life as a solo performer.
Still, there was always golf thought Dexter.
An alarmingly athletic platinum blonde and her partner whizzed past. As her partner dipped her, the light caught her hair and Dexter was reminded of the white sand in the bunker in front of the third green. The one he’d taken four shots to get out of the day before. Dexter made a mental note to triple his bunker practice, having already made a mental note the previous day to double it.
A melodious voice interrupted his reverie.
“You play up at Stony Creek, don’t you, weren’t you there practicing before the dance tonight?”
Dexter turned to see the owner of this pleasant instrument and as he did so time appeared to stand still. Sitting next to him was quite possibly the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. As he took in her features, he reviewed his first impression and struck it from the register, deciding instead she was the most beautiful girl anyone had ever seen.
Her hair had the same wavy texture as the rough on the ninth. Her nose the same uniform gradient of the slope up to the fourth green and her eyes the same bright green of the putting surface at the first after it had been double cut at sunrise. She had the most perfect yet unassumingly friendly face Dexter had ever encountered. And right at that moment thought Dexter, she had a smile on it that could have lit up the world had the sun decided not to rise next day. To say that Dexter Dibble was smitten would have been to under club the situation somewhat.
Dexter attempted to answer but found that cruelly, the power of speech had been taken away from him.
“I don’t know anyone here, and everyone else seems to already have a dance partner,” the girl said looking at him wide eyed and expectantly, a technique which had worked for her in the past.
All Dexter could manage to do was nod, and since this seemed his only source of communication, he repeated it about ten times for emphasis.
The girl looked at him quizzically.
“I’m Mary Musgrove, I’ve come up from Melbourne, I’m staying with my aunt until the end of summer,” The girl ventured, unsure if her recent acquaintance was in fact a mute.
Dexter took a deep breath and attempted to share with her the feelings that had overwhelmed him,
“You’re, you’re…”
Suddenly all the lights went out, there was a drum roll and the ceiling of the hall was illuminated by hundreds of fairy lights.
“Ok lovebirds, out come the stars for the last dance of the night,” announced the band leader as the musicians struck up a slow number.
‘Oh golly,” said Mary, “how beautiful and just utterly romantic.”
Seizing the moment, she grabbed Dexter by the shoulders and stood him up. Conversation or not, she was going to have at least one dance that evening.
Good golf requires balance, footwork, and a sense of rhythm. Strangely enough, although Dexter was one of the worst golfers at Stony Creek, he was actually quite a good dancer. He may not be a master linguist, but he sure seems to know his way around the floorboards thought Mary, as Dexter piloted her adroitly this way and that through the swaying couples.
Unlike golf, dancing came easily to Dexter.
From that moment on every Friday and Saturday night Dexter and Mary went to every dance in the district. What’s more, during the week they attended dance classes at Madame Bouvier’s Studio of Movement and when they couldn’t do that, they played records and spun around the creaky floorboards of Mary’s aunts back porch.
The Madame was actually Charlotte Bouvier who grown up just outside Stony Creek, when her parents had emigrated from France and started up a small cheese farm. In her twenties, she’d gone back to Paris for a year and studied dance. It was rumored she’d had her heart broken by a painter on the Left Bank. But Paris’s loss was Stony Creek’s gain, and now she spent her nights imparting the finer points of what she called the Nouveau Parisian School. None of her charges new exactly what this meant but the middle-aged housewives thought it sounded awfully sophisticated and the youngsters new it meant getting a couple more chances during the week to give the objects of their desires a good squeeze.
Mary loved dancing and could get around the floor quite proficiently. Dexter was in a different class. Madame Bouvier would move around the class pushing and prodding to correct the clumsy out of time steps of a young farmer here and the flailing arms of a plump post office worker there. But when she was in Dexter’s vicinity it was a different story. She would only smile serenely as she encouraged him to extend a movement to its full artistic sensibility, or tip his chin slightly upward as he dipped Mary. To the Madame, Dexter exhibited the full expression of the Nouveau Parisian School.
You might have thought all this would have gone to Dexter’s head, but it was quite the opposite. As good as he made Mary look on the dance floor, he never once mentioned any point on which he thought she might improve. And after a few weeks it was just this kind of modesty, along with the small cowlick of hair that would occasionally fall across his forehead, that warmed Mary’s heart to Dexter.
Dexter’s heart didn’t really need any additional warming. It felt like it had been tipping the thermometer at about nine hundred degrees since the first night they’d met. Even now, after weeks, every time she looked at him, he felt like he’d just holed a chip shot.
Speaking of golf, the strangest things were happening to Dexter in that department as well. I think I have previously mentioned that Dexter was not high on the honor roll of Stony Creeks golfing elite. To put it more plainly, he stunk. Thirty-five handicappers would shy away from him for fear that their game might deteriorate. Parents steered their junior charges in his opposite direction should he infect them with his scooping release, or overly pronating wrists on the backswing. Even Stony Creek’s pro, Dick Worthing, felt guilty taking his money for lessons, which didn’t of course stop him giving Dexter four plus of them a week.
The tragedy was, as bad as he was, it was not lack of enthusiasm or dedication to the game that held Dexter back, these traits were present in abundant supply. When Mary mentioned she’d seen him practicing up at Stony Creek, it would not have been an out of the ordinary observation for any of the town’s population. She might just as easily have said she’d seen grass on the fairways or water in the creek. For like those elements Dexter was at the golf club every day, and what’s more he went back every evening directly after dinner. And when he wasn’t practicing, he was playing in the club’s competitions, with anyone brave enough to accompany him.
Recently, on account of Mary, he’d knocked the golf stuff back a bit. He did still play on Saturday’s in the main competition. But due to escorting Mary to and from every dancing opportunity they could find, that was the extent of it. No five am putting sessions, no midnight chipping in his pajamas. Even on the Saturdays he’d play in a sort of daze, thinking mostly of Mary, the steps they’d learned together the night before and which dance they might go to that night.
He no longer really tried at golf, just wandered along and played his shots, generally humming some catchy tune from the previous evening as he went. Not a technical thought entered his head as he swung and little by little and as you might imagine he began to improve. At first Dexter with pretty much one thing, or rather one person on his mind, scarcely noticed. But over the course of the summer his scores improved and his handicap plummeted.
“That’s an eighty-four off the stick Dex! You’ve made it into the first flight,” said Bill Knightly, the towns green grocer one Saturday, handing Dexter’s back his card after the second round of qualifying for the club championships had been completed.
“Righto,” said Dexter hardly noticing and impatient to get home and change his shoes ahead of the night’s entertainments with Mary.
In the past Dexter had sometimes indulged his golfing fantasy in that if he could somehow raise the standard of his game to heights yet unknown, he might one day get through to the last sixteen of the D Grade flight. Two scores in qualifying somewhere around a hundred and thirty each might be sufficient to accomplish this. If he did one day make it through, he conjectured, he would likely face tough opposition in the form of octogenarians, some of which unable to stand unaided, hit their shots whilst half seated on modified scooters. Or nine-year -old Sub Junior’s, the lowest form of life at the club, who chewed gum and hit shots in between their mothers wiping their noses.
The First Flight of the Club Championships, Bill Knightly had referred to, was the leading sixteen stroke play scores after two rounds. These chaps were the best of the best, hardened twelve handicappers amongst which no quarter was given and none asked. These players would fight it out mano a mano in match play for the right to be called the Stony Creek Club Champion.
If D grade had previously been considered rarified air by Dexter, the First Flight was akin to approaching the summit of Everest without an oxygen tank.
But qualified he had and Dexter’s opponent in the round of sixteen was Will Smedley the town’s Blacksmith. Immensely strong, Will was famous around Stony Creek for two things: Having the heaviest clubs anyone had ever seen and, hitting every drive as if he was trying to compress the ball to the width of rice paper. Dexter beat him six and five with a birdie at the last.
In the quarter finals he came up against Roger Headley, Stony Creek’s leading real estate agent. In between Roger winning the toss on the first tee and teeing off, he offered his opponent a full market appraisal of Dexter’s bungalow behind the fourth green, Dexter’s parent’s semi-detached, Mary’s aunts cottage and showed Dexter photo portfolios of four properties in town that, should Dexter be thinking in anyway of settling down with someone, he would be more than happy to zip him around to in his MG that afternoon. Roger was about to retrieve nursery wallpaper samples from his golf bag when the starter told him that if he didn’t tee-off post haste he was going to forfeit the match. Roger promptly offered a valuation of the starters hut, dependent upon market fluctuations of course, handed the starter his card and hit a three wood smartly down the middle. Dexter beat him seven up with six to play.
What marked Dexter’s golf in these first matches was partly his improved shot making but more so the ruthless speed with which he disposed of his victims. No sooner had they had time to warm up with a few easy bogies than they found themselves three holes to the wind. Dexter’s strategy and rationale were simple, the faster he got them out of the way, the faster he could get off the links, over to Mary’s aunts place and squire her off for a night’s toe tapping.
When he explained this to Joe Fullham, the club’s number one Pennant player as they walked off the fourteenth green in the semi-final, Dexter having just beaten him. Joe didn’t feel quite so bad about losing five and four to a man who, a year before he wouldn’t have let caddy for him.
“It seems I’m in the final,” said Dexter to Mary that night as he spun her away from him until just their fingertips touched before reeling her back into his arms as you might reel in a salmon that wants to be reeled in.
Such was their obsession; they’d been attending a Tuesday night dance at a senior citizens center two hour’s drive from Stony Creek and were the youngest attendees by about forty years. None of which perturbed them for it seemed as long as they were together, they could’ve hot shoe shuffled their way across the Gibson dessert.
“I’ve also got some news,” said Mary. “my aunts decided to go on a cruise to the Mediterranean, and I’ll be going back to Melbourne week after next.”
Dexter felt like he’d just missed a straight uphill three-footer for a half. It had been six weeks of bliss, escorting this sublime creature around the domicile and now she was to be taken away from him. He could still remember the landscape without her around, and it was a pretty barren one. He much preferred to keep inhabiting this nightly garden of Eden with her than return to further exploration of his desert of loneliness. The previous night he could’ve sworn that her lips lightly brushed his when they danced cheek to cheek at the Country Fire Associations annual ball. That night Dexter decided he was going to ask her—he felt compelled to. He had no idea what the answer might be, but he was going to ask her anyway.
The night before the final of the club championship they were sitting out on Mary’s Aunts back verandah having tea before Dexter headed back home. Mary was feeding a possum she’d tamed some crumbs from an Anzac biscuit and the whole scene was one of general contentment.
“Mary?’
“Yes Dexter?’
“These last few weeks have been the happiest weeks of my life.”
“For me too Dex, we’ve had such a fun time haven’t we.”
For a while silence overtook them, saved for the sound of the possum industriously getting on the outside of half the Anzac biscuit Mary was feeding it.
“I say, do you think that’s good for the little bugger?” Said Dexter
“No idea darling, said Mary.”
“Right, well… thing is,” said Dexter.
There was another long silence and then all of a sudden Dexter knelt in front of Mary and clasped her right hand, the left being occupied with the possum.
“Jeepers Dexter, what are you doing down there?” she said, her eyes bigger than the marsupials.
“Well it’s like this,” continued Dexter, not willing to be put off, “we get on really well.”
“We do,” Said Mary.
“And I’ve really gotten used to having you around, you’re sort of the fifteen club in my bag if you know what I mean.”
“I thought here was a limit of fourteen?” said Mary.
“Please Mary, this is important.”
“Right Dex, sorry.”
“Well the thing is… I mean what I wondering was…”
“Yes Dex?”
“It’s been something I’ve been thinking of asking you for a while now really.”
“Oh yes Dex.’
Dexter switched knees as the one he’d been on was beginning to go to sleep.
“Mary, I know you don’t have any real experience in this sort of thing and goodness knows I don’t have much either really, probably because I’ve never really met anyone that inspired me the way you do, but I feel like we make such a good team…”
Mary felt she was getting the gist of where this was heading.
“Yes Dex?”
“Will you...’
“Yes Dex?”
“Mary will you do me the honor of caddying for me in the final of the club championship this Saturday?”
For a long moment Mary considered Dexter as one might consider a fellow sailor just before one sets out together in a small boat across a vast ocean. But Mary had gotten used to Dexter’s particular way of being in the last few weeks. He did things at his own pace and she felt this was unlikely to change.
The possum finished the Anzac and scampered away.
“Dexter, it would be my pleasure to tote your bag.”
Dexter’s opponent in the final was Reginald Dwight, of R Dwight and Sons Funeral Services. Reggie had won the Club Championships on four previous occasions and had a reputation for burying his opponents with the same methodical regularity as he buried his clients.
After seeing Dexter’s demolition path to the final, Reggie was clearly worried and in a moment of desperation had engaged the services of Musgrove, Stony Creeks most experienced caddy. Musgrove had given up full time caddying twenty years ago and was now a permanent fixture of the Golfers Arms, where he held court at the window table. It had cost Reggie fifty dollars, four pints of bitter ale and an hour of his life to convince Musgrove to come out of retirement, but he felt it would be worth it if Musgrove could help him halt the Dibble juggernaut.
The morning of the thirty-six-hole final dawned bright and clear with just the faintest whisper of a breeze. Conditions were perfect. Mary to her credit had done her research by way of a visit to the Golfers Arms the previous evening in search of some caddying tips from Musgrove. Upon her request he stated flatly that his employer the next day was Dexter’s opponent Reginal Dwight and that professional confidence, and the Caddies Code, forbade him from assisting her in any way. Mary said not to worry she completely understood, but if they could not do business together would he at least like to try some of her aunt’s pork pie that she had brought for him. Musgrove said he didn’t see why not, had the pie, then a custard tart a three chocolate profiteroles Mary also just happened to have handy. Mary observed he looked thirsty and wondered if the pie had been too salty. Musgrove said that although very good, possibly it had been a smidge too salty yes. Mary said she knew just the remedy, a pint of bitter. Musgrove agreed this might help.
Over the next two hours Musgrove benefitted to the tune of five more pints of bitter ale and five large scotches. During the time he spend consuming them he related every caddying story of note to Mary. The famous players he’d looped for, the championships he’d helped them win, how to read the wind, club uphill and downhill and measure the slope of a green just by walking on it. By closing time Mary was the full bottle on the art of caddying and felt she might be of some use to Dexter the next day.
If Dexter had payed well in the matches leading up to the final it was nothing to what he produced in the first nine holes of the final. Dexter started off with four birdies in a row. No one could remember anyone ever starting with four birdies in a row at Stony Creek and certainly not in the final of the club championships. He parred the fifth and sixth holes which allowed Reggie to get pride restoring halves. But then was at it again with birdies at the seventh and eighth. Reggie felt like he was playing in a different match. His opponent seemed to be completely oblivious to him, or to the fact that he’d been hitherto the worst golfer in the club, or to the gravitas of the situation. He seemed to be more or less involved in some sort of all-out war against Old Man Par, a conflict in which currently Dexter was definitely in the ascendency.
When he parred the ninth Dexter was eight holes up on Reggie, and taking into account the two putts inside the leather Reggie had given him would have been the equivalent of six under par for the front nine.
Now generally the gallery for the club championship was a dozen or so interested parties. But after the front nine, when word of Dexter’s record-breaking scoring became known, Stony Creeks population was flocking from far and wide.
“Hey Mary,” Dexter said as they walked onto the tenth tee, “where would you like to go dancing tonight, I hear there’s a Jitter Bug competition over in Egerton?”
“Sounds great Dex, but shouldn’t you be concentrating on your golf, I think you can win this thing if you keep going the way you are.”
Now as many amongst you will know there is nothing more potentially damaging to a golfer’s psyche than expectation. Up to this point Dexter had been playing in what’s known as “The Moment”. There was no past or future to his golf, he played every shot on its merit, and consequently was playing the golf of his life. However, this seeming innocuous statement from Mary had two immediate effects. In the next moment Dexter saw himself holding the trophy and making an acceptance speech. He also realised that not only did he want to win, but he wanted to win for Mary.
There was a slight delay at the tenth while Musgrove availed himself of a cooling beverage from the bar and in that time the gallery, which had grown to around thirty on the ninth hole, added another hundred or so to their ranks. Everyone likes to witness a good massacre and the residents of Stony Creek were no exception, they were flocking to the course like Romans to the Colosseum.
As Dexter readied himself to drive, he felt the oddest sensation, one he hadn’t felt on the links for months, it was tension, it started in his fingertips and moved steadily throughout his entire body. Next, he felt fear. What if he didn’t win, he told himself? After being six up at the turn? He’d be the laughing stock of the club. What would Mary think if he failed?
As he stood over the ball, these thoughts rushed through his mind. He waggled, but instead of it being the brisk authoritative waggle it had been, it now had a feeble limpness to it. The swing that followed it seemed to be in many segmented parts, with none of them relating to each other in any discernable way. Dexter hit the ball so far out of the toe he almost missed it. The ball in turn just missed the noses of the gallery lining the fairway on the right before finishing in the trees some thirty yards only from the tee. Dexter’s head slumped and he retreated meekly to the side of the tee. There was general silence.
Players like Reginald Dwight don’t win four club championships without being able to read their opponents emotional state. It took Reggie Dwight precisely three seconds to realise that some bottle had gone out of the Dibble game. He strode to the tee and thrust his wooden tee peg into the ground as Brutus might have thrush his dagger into Julius Caesar. Moments later he swung and hit a solid drive one -ninety, down the middle.
You’re hole Reggie, Dexter was saying a few minutes later emerging from the trees covered in foliage after hacking out in seven. And on it went, in the next few holes Dexter went from near infallibility to once again being a bunny. Mary attempted to put some of the tips Musgrove had given her into practice but it was like trying to spoon water out of the Titanic with a teaspoon after it had been introduced to the iceberg. Dexter was sinking fast. He lost the first four holes of the back nine, but somehow managed a half on the par three fourteenth, after his third, a pitch which he caught full in the teeth, and was screaming over the green, somehow collided with the pin and dropped two feet away.
Reggie then won the next four holes in a row playing little better than bogey golf and by the end of the morning eighteen, the match was once again all square.
“Lunch,” Musgrove announced in a booming voice, striding with purpose towards the bar.
Over lunch, Dexter rescued the croutons in his minestrone soup one by one as if they were balls that had found their way into Stony Creek. Mary watched him eat with a sinking heart.
When play resumed it had the air of a funeral in progress. A situation that Reggie understandably felt quite comfortable in. Any hope that lunch might have broken the spell of bad form for Dexter was obliterated when he topped his opening tee shot of the second eighteen straight into the creek.
Seven holes later Dexter was seven down and a seemingly broken man. He was wondering what could possibly make his situation worse and was promptly provided with the answer on the par five eighth. After four indifferent tops up the fairway he got the shanks. And after his six shank in a row saw him finish hard up against a course boundary fence on the right, Dexter picked up his ball and called meekly across the fairway to his opponent who was lying greenside in a competent six.
“Your hole Reggie.”
Reginald Dwight had been seated next to the green on a blanket Musgrove had laid out for him while Dexter’s travails with the shanks unfolded. He held up a hard-boiled egg he was eating by way of acknowledging the concession, downed the glass of port he was imbibing and proceeded to the next tee.
Reggie felt only a couple more tacks were needed to hold the lid of Dexter’s casket of defeat firmly in place and he intended to hammer these in over the next two holes. He liked Dexter, but business was business. As he strode up the hill to the tee, he mentally shifted his existing trophies around in his display cabinet to make space for a fifth.
Dexter slunk off at a low pace towards the tee behind Reggie, trailing his offending five iron behind him by its heel. He was eight down with ten to go. He thought maybe he should send someone up to the clubhouse, get them to open some champagne and start pouring a glass for Reggie. Mary watched in dismay. She didn’t think she’d seen a more defeated soul since her younger brother Michael had dropped the top off his ice cream at the Stony Creek Fair when he was six. At least Michael had bounced back when he’d seen the merry-go-round. No such recovery seemed imminent for Dexter.
Speaking of juveniles. It was at this moment that just such an apparition caught her eye. By the side of the green there was a young girl, who couldn’t have been more than five, watching the match with her parents. Not wholly focused on the contest, she seemed much more interested in practicing an old-time dance move she’d recently picked up. The girl would stand with her feet together and send her knees away from and back towards each other, while crisscrossing her hands in front of them from knee to knee. When she got the rhythm right, she was delighted and let out a squeal.
What an adorable child thought Mary. The sort off offspring she might have imagined having with a fellow one day. But before such a fellow would be able to focus on that he’d have to knock off at least one club championship and at the moment there seemed little chance of her meeting such a fellow. She watched the charming dancing five-year old for a few more moments.
If you’d set Mary in front of one of those medieval catapults, put a giant golf ball in it, pulled it back and let it go square at her forehead, the effect could would not have been more immediate than what hit her in the next moment.
“My God, that’s it!” she cried before grabbing Dexter’s weapons and heading after him resolutely.
As she got to the tee Reggie Dwight had just unleashed one of his patented hundred-and-eighty-yard low heel fades, now circuitously making its way back towards the middle of the fairway, with all the dynamism of a heavily laden bus on full right wheel turn.
“Great drive,” said Musgrove either sarcastically or genuinely, it was impossible to tell.
Dexter prepared to drive. Having lost all confidence in his driver he’d retreated back to a club he’d nicknamed “Bunty”. With a seven-wood loft and a shortened shaft it went about a hundred and forty and straightish, on most occasions.
Mary strode over, pulled Bunty out of Dexter’s hands and handed him his driver.
“You’ve got to dance your way back to it,” she whispered in his ear.
“Huh?” said Dexter, never really quick on the uptake at the best of times.
She dragged him off to the side of the tee and spelt it out.
“Listen Dex, when you were playing really well, you had the most beautiful flowing rhythm, it was like watching a ball room dancer in full flight. Just imagine you’re on the dance floor when you swing and let it go.”
As he listened Dexter raised one eyebrow like someone who’d just seen their share prices on the rise. Musgrove, tipped his hat to Mary and nodded sagely as if it all made sense to him.
Even Reggie was moved, “Might as well give it a go old boy, you couldn’t play much worse?”
Dexter took his driver and approached his teed ball. His head seemed to sway slightly from side to side as if hearing some internal song. Before taking his stance, he bowed to it as one might to a partner at the commencement of a formal dance. He positioned the head of his club against the back of the ball as one might put their hand against the small of their partners back and settled his feet into position in an unrushed waltz time. The club moved away from the ball effortlessly and the resulting swing was a perfect symphony of body, arms and club. The ball whizzed off the tee as if someone had attached a New Year’s Eve firework to it and lit the fuse. Finally coming to rest a good two hundred and sixty yards down the fairway. It was the longest drive Dexter Dibble had ever hit by about fifty yards.
“Wow,” said Mary.
“Golly,” Said Reggie.
Musgrove said nothing, but did take his cap off, which no one had seen him do for years.
What ensued over the next seven holes brought from the gallery, in equal quantities, oohs and aahs for the quality of Dexter’s shot making, but also giggles and at times outright mirth for the way he went about it. For in those seven holes Dexter brought out every dance step in his repertoire. For his approach shot on the second he foxtrotted up to his ball, and whisked it away to the green without breaking stride.
His chipping incorporated a Samba move in his pre-shot routine, bunker shots were played to an up-tempo rhumba beat and fairway woods were swung with a rotation equivalent of Nureyev’s pirouette’s in Swan Lake.
As he won hole after hole with sublime shot making Dexter’s dancing golf became infectious and people in the gallery were seen to partner up and waltz their way along the fairways. After Dexter holed a flop shop from off the green to win the seventh, even Musgrove and Reggie Dwight did an impromptu Morris Dancing routine.
When they reached the ninth tee, the thirty sixth of their match, Dexter had won eight holes in a row and they were back to all square.
Now as many of you who have played Stony Creek would be aware, the eighteenth presents an almost unique rubric to the golfing mind. It’s a par four of three hundred and ninety yards from the back tees. It has a two-tier fairway with a barranca running through the middle, the creek running through the middle of the barranca.
A choice has to be made on the tee. Take the higher, tighter fairway to the right, carry over the rise and your ball can run down the slope leaving a shorter, better line in to the green angled right to left as you approach it. The pin being always cut tight back left for the final of the Club Championships. Alternatively, take the easier wider, lower left fairway and you have a longer shot in to a green angled away from you.
Dexter, having now fully recovered his confidence, predictably opted for the higher right side and hit a beautiful high draw that crested the hill, ran down the other side and would leave a short-iron in. Reggie opted for the safe route hitting his fade down the lower left fairway, leaving himself with a fairway wood in.
As Reggie arrived at his ball the situation was clear. He was a good one eighty out and the pin position hard left didn’t suit the normal left to right orbit of his shots. He would normally have hit a five iron to the right, short of the green and hoped to chip and putt. Reggie looked at Musgrove. Musgrove looked back at him. Not a word was spoken. Musgrove handed Reggie his three-wood. Then the strangest thing happened, before Reggie swung, he did a couple of high kicks like a Moulin Rouge Can-Can dancer, swung and hit his three-wood right on the button. The gallery was not sure whether he’d done it in an attempt to capture some on the magic that had imbued Dexter, or as a homage to the master that had come from eight down to level the match. Nonetheless two things that had never happened to Reggie before. He hit a perfect right to left draw and he hit the eighteenth green in two. There were cries of “Great shot Reginald,” and “Hope you didn’t do your hammy mate.”
Dexter approached his second shot with some Charleston steps he’d obviously been saving for a pressure situation, and hit a sizzling seven iron to twenty feet. Reggie was away on the green and stroked his first putt up to four feet short, the crowd groaned and Reggie winced as he realised he’d left himself ‘one of those’ that he may need to make to extend the match.
The gallery was completely silent.
“Pick it up,” said Dexter, “that’s good.”
It’s often been said that golf is the supreme test of a person’s character. And it’s in the most pressured moments that the very core of a competitors being is often revealed. Many have failed at this hurdle and been ungracious, but in this moment, Dexter shone and in no one’s eyes were this light reflected more than in Mary’s.
There was a round of applause from the gallery for the sportsmanlike gesture, Reggie wiped his brow and Musgrove tipped his hat to Dexter.
The gallery moved in closer and formed a tight circle some six deep around the green. In the middle of the arena was the solitary figure of Dexter. He crouched behind his ball surveying the break rose, then moved back a few feet. Next, holding his putter high above his head like a burnished sword in his right hand he pointed it at the ball and slowly stalked in like a flamenco dancer portraying a matador moving in for the final death blow. Ordinarily this would’ve been deemed an overly dramatic display for the final of the Stony Creek Club Championship but most present felt it was appropriate and in keeping with what had been displayed thus far.
The resulting stroke was executed without sympathy or hesitation and the ball traced its way to the very heart of the cup. The crowd erupted, Reggie moved in to pat Dexter on the back and shake his hand, and Musgrove called for three cheers. As the crowd broke into a spontaneous rendition of ‘For he’s a very good fellow’, Dexter put his arms around Mary and waltzed her around the encircled green.
A few minutes later after the happy crowd has begun to disperse, Mary and Dexter stood by the eighteenth green savoring his victory for a moment longer.
“I know exactly what sort of house we’ll live in,” said Dexter “and we can build it right here behind the sixth green by the edge of the creek. I’m going to put a parquetry dancefloor right in the middle of the lounge room, I’ve already done the blue prints in my head.”
“Sounds perfect darling, now, come with me I want to show you some general blue prints for a project I’ve also got in mind,” said Mary, leading Dexter over towards the delightful dancing five-year-old.
Sam Letourneau | About the Author
I'm a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. I think the industry term for me would be "emerging writer', if it's possible to still be emerging at 55! Long time in the cocoon me thinks! I've always had a love of reading, language and ideas. But it's only in the last few years I've started to make ta transition to being a fulltime writer.
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