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

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.

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.

I remember, even as a boy, the desperation that suffused the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Krewe Island at last was christened. She was grand, magnificent, spectacular. Not a single guest had slept a night on her virginal linen sheets, nor a golfer sunk his spikes into her immaculate bermuda fairways. And now it looked as if none ever would. The class of newly rich, the citizen millionaires, had been utterly wiped out by the Crash. All that remained of a possible Krewe Island clientele was the old rich and even they felt constrained, not so much by fear of the future as by an understandable reluctance to indulge themselves in luxury by the sea when so many of their countrymen were struggling so desperately just to survive.

Something had to be done.

Something to make Krewe Island transcend the current calamity. Something not just to lift it in the minds of the wealthy above the Greenbrier or the Homestead, but to make its extravagant existence palatable to the masses who would never be able to glimpse it, except in photos in the Society pages.

An event.

An occasion.

Something bold and dramatic, to capture the public imagination, lure the press, put Krewe Island before the eye of the world in a bright and even historic light. Money was no object, for if the Links and Hotel couldn’t leap instantly into the black, the whole colossal enterprise was doomed.

Adele’s brainstorm was this. A golf match. An exhibition for the unheard-of prize of $20,000. Between the two greatest golfers of the age, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.

Hagen the professional, if he won, would take the cash. If Jones the amateur prevailed, the prize would be donated to the Atlanta Athletic Club.

The prospective contestants were approached and, for whatever reasons professional or personal, agreed.

A date was set.

And, true to Adele’s dream, the story caught fire. Perhaps it was just what the country needed as it writhed in the tentacles of depression. A show. A circus. Something bright and patrician, on a sunny greensward by the sea, where two gallant knights would joust for a king’s ransom.

Babe Ruth came down from New York by rail. Dempsey took an ocean view suite. Scott and Zelda flew to Savannah, motored daily to Krewe Island from her cousin’s cottage on Poinsettia Street. Even Al Capone, rumor had it, was on his way to swell the gallery.

Savannah was beside itself with anticipation. The city tumbled headlong into the grip of madness.

Three

I WAS PRESENT for the next scene in this saga, but being ten years old and exhausted from a day of caddying, shagging and so forth was unfortunately sound asleep.

I must rely on the witness of my father, who had carried me along to the Hesperia Elementary School for the event. The Civic Auditorium would have been the appropriate venue for this colloquium, but that night was occupied by a Women’s Christian Temperance meeting. The town fathers gathered at the nearest reasonable alternative. This turned into something of a fiasco, as the only chairs available for Savannah’s loftiest personages were those designed for children aged eight and under. These were Lilliputian, to say the least. The dignitaries refused to sit upon them. They insisted on standing, which led, after five or six hours of heated, sweltering, smoke-choked debate, to a very real shortage of temper. But let me recall how my father told it:

It was Judge Neskaloosa River Anderson whose nose was out of joint from minute one. One of Invergordon’s ditcher operators had accidentally shot the Judge’s prize bitch, Jupiter. It wasn’t so much the dog’s death as the way Adele handled the apology; apparently she had no conception of how attached a Southerner could be to his best hunter. You could have shot the Judge’s firstborn and it wouldn’t have grieved him as much. Anyway, Old Neskaloosa took a stand opposing the golfing extravaganza, and his vote on the Council could put the bollocks to the whole damn shooting match.

The problem, as Judge Anderson saw it, was how much the city of Savannah was supposed to contribute to this exercise in private enterprise and greed. Our causeways would be used to transport spectators. Our streets would be employed for parking, our constabulary to maintain order, our homes to shelter the incoming hordes. Every office and business would be grievously inconvenienced for three days prior and God only knows how many days after. And the mess? Who would be responsible, who would clean it up, and most of all, who would pay for it? The judge felt that Adele Invergordon was taking advantage of Savannah’s good nature. Our city is the doormat, he declared, upon which the heiress wipes her feet!

At first no one took the old gentleman’s protestations too seriously. There was a great deal of shouting and declaiming to the effect that this golfing match was the economic boon the city was frantic for, that we desperately needed it in these dire times. Hotel rooms would fill, restaurants be packed, the average citizen could charge for parking, let rooms, perform services and in general line his needy pockets off the visiting Goths, who, thank the Lord, would in all probability be too-rich-for-their-own-good Yankees.

But Anderson would not be swayed. The hours crawled by and, as often happens when normally rational individuals are too long cooped in an oppressive environment, the seething throng began to transubstantiate into a mob. It started coming over to the Judge’s side.

If Adele Invergordon could offer $20,000 in prize money to two damn visiting golf players, by God she could come up with a matching sum for the civic coffers of Savannah, in whose bosom and by whose sufferance this self-aggrandizing stunt would take place!

A messenger was dispatched to Krewe Island and returned promptly with the heiress’s refusal. I recall vividly the phrases adamantine in my resistance and, more unfortunate, blackmail.

Shouting and countershouting resumed with a fury. Savannah’s pride had now been officially trodden upon. The Judge’s supporters swelled. The convocation divided into two equally rabid bands: those who saw the golf match, and the subsequent success of Krewe Island, as essential to Savannah’s economic survival, and those who declared that survival be damned, we had endured defeat in war with less of a blow to our honor and manhood!

The atmosphere was explosive. No matter how fevered the indignation at Adele Invergordon’s affront to the city, all knew that the match must go on, Savannah was desperate for it economically. But how could it, now that our civic noses had been rubbed so ingloriously in the dirt? Cigar and cigarette smoke hung so thick you couldn’t see from one side of the room to the other. Meanwhile many of the elders had yielded to gravity’s demands and were perched absurdly on the kindergarten-sized chairs. The air was dense, humidity hovering just shy of out-and-out liquidity. Pools of perspiration pocked the hardwood floors, backs of shirts clung black with sweat. To this day I don’t know whose voice finally called out the solution. What I do recall is the zeal and enthusiasm with which it was met.

The rafters shuddered with cheers; the little basketball backboards, only six feet high, nearly came off with the stomping of feet and clapping of backs.

Savannah would nominate its own champion golfer!

A third contestant, a local hero, to duel the great Jones and Hagen!

This was when, Hardy [my dad told me], you came to and began blinkingly to demand to know what was going on. The town solons were congratulating themselves furiously on this brainstorm that would save Savannah’s name, draw attention to her fine young manhood, and so on, when someone—I suspect it may even