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Overview
Del Bonnet, a teaching pro at an obscure Florida golf resort, needs a change and needs it badly. Having crossed an ominous threshold--his fiftieth birthday--Bonnet receives frequent communiques from the AARP people. He gazes into the future and sees the prospect of assisted living growing larger by the day.
Serendipity intervenes. A sales rep working out of his station wagon leaves a handmade driver in Bonnet's modest golf shop. The pro privately auditions the driver with astounding results. Bonnet--celebrated for thirty years as the only touring pro to be arrested on the course during a PGA event--is quickly convinced that he has secured possession of no mere golf club, but a sword of salvation. So armed, he decides to embark on the PGA Seniors Tour.
Thus the formation of a strange triumvirate known as Team Del, consisting of the pro, the golf club that soon becomes dubbed "Big Luther," and a caddie, Doublewide McBride. Bonnet soon learns that the caddie is long on off-the-wall intuitions, short on behavioral graces recommended by Emily Post.
While the misadventures of Team Del might not serve as a tribute to the memories Hagen and Hogan, the events detailed in Michael Shropshire's The Pro stand out as perhaps the most hilarious odyssey in the modern annals of sports fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466872011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 494 KB |
About the Author
Mike Shropshire is a longtime journalist who has written for numerous newspapers and magazines such as Sports Illustrated. Author of three nonfiction books, including Seasons in Hell, he lives in Dallas, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
The PRO
By Mike Shropshire
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Mike ShropshireAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7201-1
CHAPTER 1
My greenskeeper presented himself as many things to many people. According to the personalized license plates on his burnt orange 1977 GMC pickup truck, he was "Ol' Sarge." To me and most of the members of this golf club, he was Doublewide McBride, aka the Old Scotsman. In the peculiar town of Immokalee, where the phantom apparitions of Seminole warriors prowled the streets at night, they called him the Snake Man.
No man could uphold such various identities unless he maintained an early-to-rise, early-to-work ethic. So when the pelicans began to squawk just before sunrise, Doublewide had been up and at it for about an hour and a half. First stop, always, was the police station where, thanks to connections, Doublewide would buy a thermos of coffee powerfully enriched with a secret energy-boosting agent.
By the time I arrived at the club around seven, Doublewide would have already toured the course and captured various species of the serpent family that crawled out of the rough and into the sand traps. Some alligators the size of submarines occupied the lagoons that abutted the 14th and 15th fairways, but even a man of Doublewide's tenacity left those guys alone. "This place gives you a pretty good idea of what it's like to play golf at Jurassic Park," Doublewide declared one morning. He spewed out an endless barrage of profundities like that, revved to the gills on that cop-shop coffee. After his daily pre-dawn snake patrol, Doublewide went to war against the forces of Indonesian root rot and Nicaraguan screw worms, the unseen co-conspirators that threatened to annihilate our fairways.
Caloosahatchee Pines graced the outskirts of Punta Gorda, Florida, and it had to rank as the oldest golf course in the United States. That would be my educated guess. In the category of oldest, I am talking about the average age of the club members who played there. Most of my players — I was the club pro — were older than the League of Nations. Nobody would have ever confused the pink stucco clubhouse there with the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrew's, although the course itself was not entirely void of a kind of idiosyncratic charm. In order to reach the third green, you had to hook your approach shot around a long-abandoned lighthouse. Nobody knew why the lighthouse was out there, since this golf course was seven miles inland from the coast. "That at least explains why it's abandoned," reasoned Doublewide McBride.
In his relentless curiosity, Doublewide was the only person who ever asked me about my full name: Franklin Delano Bonnet. My mother named me after FDR because I was born the day he died. I do not recall why I became known as Del in junior high school. But Del Bonnet sounded like one of those singers on American Bandstand, and I didn't resist the change.
By the time Doublewide McBride ventured off on his tractor to spray the grass, the first foursomes had already arrived, ready to tee off. By noon, from the window of the pro shop, I noticed that Maureen Henry's approach shot to the 18th green had rolled past the hole, down a small embankment and nestled into a poor lie next to the cart path. I confidently predicted that Mrs. Henry, who had the bone structure of a parakeet, would chip up to within one foot of the hole. I was familiar with her game. I was familiar with all their games.
I also knew that Mrs. Henry, a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, was the first woman ever to skydive in that state. That was before she met Mr. Henry. She never related any of that to me personally. But when you work at a golf course every day, you hear all kinds of things. There is something about a golf course that brings out the conversationalist in most people.
Maureen Henry tapped in the short putt, finished with a round of 81. That was a damn good score for a couple of reasons. First off, that 81 was only five shots over this woman's age. Second, she played in conditions that were hardly ideal. With one of those tropical disturbances that churned through the Gulf to the southwest and winds on the golf course that gusted to 40 mph, the flags on all the pins were horizontal. For me, that was a harbinger of unrest.
Most of my life, the winds of destiny had carried me to various locations and circumstances. Customarily, these were turbulent breezes. I came to take it for granted that things would always be that way. Then one day I drifted ashore, so to speak, here at Caloosahatchee Pines, and the wind suddenly died down.
That was nine years before. I am not going to imply that those years had been hugely productive. Part of my employment package at Caloosahatchee Pines was to have included bonuses from the sales of Max-Fli golfballs and Foot Joy shoes and all the rest of that stuff at the pro shop. The members there were hardly destitute. Most of my male membership were comfortable because they belonged to the junior levels of the "Maybe I can't cut the mustard, but I can still lick the jar" generation.
They maintained that fixed income mentality and bought most of their golf essentials at places like Wal-Mart, and who could blame them? And apparently I wasn't excessively endowed when it came to powers of persuasion. As my ex-stepfather used to say, I couldn't sell pussy in a lumber camp. So I wasn't getting rich there. But I was anonymous and, to maintain that status, one must often sacrifice lofty financial goals. It could not accurately be said that I was running from my past. But the fact that my past kept lurking around was a source of constant annoyance.
A couple of career lowlights, insignificant ones that had been magnified through the passage of years, followed me around at Caloosahatchee Pines. The membership remained under the impression that the trouble had been more egregious than what actually happened. They thought I had held up a drug store. Not me. But in 1970, I became the first and only contestant in a PGA tour event to be led off the course in handcuffs. Prior to that, I'd demonstrated what somebody might have called a "natural affliction" for the game of championship golf and was one of about a dozen and a half young tour hotshots who rated at the next tier down from Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Casper, and one or two others. I beat Ray Floyd in a playoff at the Cleveland Open and finished in the top five at the U.S. Open at Rochester in 1968, the one that Lee Trevino won to become an instant superstar.
Then came New Orleans. We have confirmed that the House of the Rising Sun wasn't the only place in that town where young fools could land in embarrassing circumstances. After the third round of the New Orleans Open, I was just two shots off the lead and decided to celebrate prematurely at Arnauld's Restaurant on Bienville Street in the French Quarter. It was at that place I was introduced to a friend of a friend with brown eyes the size of hubcaps. Her name was Miranda, which was appropriate as later events would demonstrate.
After the restaurant, Miranda decided that she wanted me to drive her car back to her place because, by then, she could barely stand but neither, unfortunately, could I. And her goddamn Cadillac Coupe de Ville had an alignment problem and refused to stay on the road and then, well — I got distracted by something that was happening in the front seat and drove into the little Trosclair grocery store off Magazine Street. By into the store, I mean right through a plate glass window and back into the produce area.
The place was closed, thank God. It was after midnight. I made a quick decision. "Miranda," I said, "I've gotta take a leak." So I climbed out of the wrecked Caddy, picked my way through the rubble and out of the store and, once on the street, started running like Seabiscuit until I waved down the cab that took me back to the hotel.
It was by the dawn's early light that Naomi Trosclair, the woman who owned that grocery store, turned out to be something other than a turn-the-other-cheek Christian. Let me tell you something about those Louisiana people. They are impetuous. Dead set on retribution, they are quick to attempt to right the things that they perceive as wrongs.
Miranda didn't remember my name, only that I played in the New Orleans Open golf tournament at the Lakewood Country Club. Too bad for me that I was conspicuous among the other golfers on that unforgettable Sunday morning because, with all the little shards of broken windshield glass still stuck in my hair, I glistened like fake diamonds in the bright bayou sunshine. On the third fairway, I lined up a 6-iron to the green when this cop crawled through the ropes and told me all about my right to remain silent.
The PGA demands, of course, that the contestants on its tour maintain an ambassadorial posture when it comes to behavior on and off the golf course. So, naturally, they handed me my ass in a bag. According to the certified letter they sent me, "Abandoning the scene of an accident can only be deemed as conduct unbecoming to a PGA representative."
An incident like that customarily might have qualified as minor league trivia, at the maximum, and soon forgotten. In the eyes of First Amendment libel law specialists, I would have barely qualified for "public figure" status. Unfortunately, that New Orleans episode got amplified and dramatized into a posture of absurdity, way out of hand, because of something Miranda said. This total stranger, Miranda, given her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to talk to a reporter, said that the wreck happened because she had performed what the newspapers of that era termed "oral copulation" that distracted me enough to drive into a goddamn grocery store.
I could have stood, holding a bullhorn on the courthouse steps, and truthfully announced, "Miranda, you handed that reporter a pack of lies." But I was defenseless. Why? Because the people of this country maintain a historic and longstanding fascination with blow jobs. In some distant time, far into the future, perhaps anthropologists will be able to explain the reasons why so many Americans become so mesmerized about blow job stories, particularly when a semi-celebrity and a moving automobile also become part of the plot.
They kicked me off the tour for a year, and when I came back, the needle that I took from my touring colleagues was longer and sharper than I could stomach. "The Skullmeister," they called me. I teed off at the Bing Crosby Pebble Beach tournament, playing with a guy who had won some Grand Slam events and was therefore well known, and I heard this golfer tell the gallery, "I also hit one of Del's balls by mistake the other day, but then I recognized it. Had lipstick all over it. Haw-haw-haw." That crap became relentless. When you were drawing laughter instead of cheers from the galleries, the professional athlete should perceive that he or she suffers from a skewed image. Eventually, I did what any sane person would have done under the circumstances and quit the tour forever.
An episode that we would label Public Fiasco II happened years later when the University of Illinois at Cicero, where I was coaching, became the first and only golf team ever to get an NCAA death penalty. This happened during the height of all of those savings and loan scandals so when Henry Dugan, the columnist from the Chicago Sun Times, called and asked me to explain how in the hell something like that could happen to a golf program, I knew how to say, "My only crime is that, deep in my heart, I care about people and sometimes I trust them too much."
So then the sportswriter wrote this column where he said, "When Del Bonnet wasn't arranging payoffs for his players, he was busy offering private lessons to the coeds. Some of those lessons even included golf." The part about the coeds was pure fable. The coeds at Illinois (Cicero) didn't need lessons in anything. So when it came to ink, I could have still lived without it, and that was why the anonymity of long hours at Caloosahatchee Pines maintained its appeal. Last winter, Greg Norman passed through to play an exhibition sponsored by some shoe company he represented. Somebody mentioned to Norman, "The club pro here, Del Bonnet, used to play on the tour."
"Really?" said the Great White Shark. "Never 'erd of 'im."
For the first time since that Black Sabbath in New Orleans, the stigma seemed to have gone away.
* * *
The good people at Caloosahatchee Pines largely agreed that I was a pretty good teacher when it came to the basics of setting up a golf swing. The employment of word pictures worked pretty well, particularly with the beginners. A big problem with the mediocre players, the predominant one really, was that they came off the ball, or looked up, just as their club head met the golf ball. "So concentrate on this on every shot: Pretend that there is a string attached to your nose and at the other end of the string there's a fishhook, and that's stuck ever-so-slightly into your nut sack. So if you yank your head up in the middle of your swing, visualize what will happen." That's what I told them, and it was a teaching device that worked well. So what did I tell the women beginners? Well, I didn't tell them anything because women usually tended to stay down on the ball.
But in the modern world, the simple ability to communicate no longer remains sufficient. That lesson came with the unexpected arrival of Tyler LaGrange. Tyler was elected president of the board at Caloosahatchee Pines six months before, and he thought the golf pro needed to provide monthly projection charts for all of the golfing members. Like if Arlene Portwood, age eighty-eight, was shooting 130, Tyler wanted me to get her down to 127 whether Arlene wanted to or not and, if she didn't, then Tyler LaGrange wanted me to appear before the board and explain why. LaGrange was a young guy, not a day over sixty, and still active as the regional marketing director for some brewery, and that partially explained his fetish with sales projections.
LaGrange disagreed with my marketing strategy, that consisted of a sign in the pro shop that read, THERE'S NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT OUR GOLF BAGS, BUT YOU CAN'T LICK OUR BALLS. He wanted to get rid of the sign. In fact, Tyler LaGrange wanted to get rid of me. How come? Because he thought I had a "thing" for his wife, Jerri, that's why. Or even worse, LaGrange thought that Jerri might have had a "thing" for me. The club president pictured me as somebody who appeared in his wife's masturbation fantasies. The fact was that Jerri, while gifted with a cheerful personality and fine soprano voice, had the torso and legs of Sam Huff. I wished that somebody would tell Tyler LaGrange that according to the teaching professional's code of ethics, fooling around with the female clients or patients or whatever the hell you call them ranked as a cardinal transgression. We were like preachers in that regard and, yes, sometimes we strayed, although I never did. Now tennis pros, they were different.
Those guys would hit on their own grandmothers. A classic example of this tennis pro syndrome pranced in my very presence at Caloosahatchee Pines. Antonio Paez. Somebody ought to have writen a song about Antonio: "You Light Up My Wife."
Another thing I wished somebody would tell Tyler LaGrange was that I was a self-declared nonsexual. That was different from being asexual in that there was still an arousal factor lurking around down there in the ash pit of my emotions. But after a couple of busted marriages and some other partnerships that wound up like my evening with Miranda, which was to say not on the best of terms, I thought I might have been better suited for noble isolation. If I was not any good at something, then why bother?
OK. I lied. I was not nonsexual, but at that time was between opportunities and, when a single male of the species reached my age, a hiatus in the area of the love life loomed as something of indeterminate longevity. Within the previous three months, I had considered entry into a matrimonial compact with Carla. Owned her own travel agency. Young widow, but hardly famished for companionship. Was active in the Presbyterian Sunday school. Gifted with a body like that of a little rubber monkey. It was nine-year-old Crockett, the fellow who was then scheduled to become my red-headed stepson, who capsized that deal. Crockett liked to conceal himself in Carla's big hibiscus plant with a pellet gun and wait for the postman. "One of these days, you're going to put somebody's eye out with that thing," I told Crockett one August morning. I'd waited forty years to use that line on somebody and, not four seconds after I'd uttered it, I felt a deep and fiery sting in the back of my neck.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The PRO by Mike Shropshire. Copyright © 2001 Mike Shropshire. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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