I Gave That Ball Sixteen Holes of My Life (and It Moved Into a Tree)

My golf bag is secondhand. It came with somebody else’s tees in the front pocket, and every few months it gives up another secret, like an old house with a loose floorboard.

This week, on the range at Whittier Narrows, I unzipped a little side pocket I had honestly never noticed and found a golf ball.

It was faded to the color of weak tea, with a tiny hand-drawn star on it in ink that had mostly given up. It had clearly been waiting in there for years for the right golfer to come along.

“It’s a sign,” I said.

“It’s a ball,” said Chris.

“It’s a sign that’s also a ball,” I said, and that settled it. I announced my goal for the day: I would play all eighteen holes with this one ball. No losing it. No swapping it. It would finish the round it had clearly been saving itself for.

Pete, filling in our names on the card in pen, drew a small star next to mine. I chose to take that as support.

The plan

Whittier Narrows is a county course in Rosemead with twenty-seven holes, and we were playing the River/Pine eighteen, a par 72 that has been around since 1955. The fairways are wide and they undulate, which is a beautiful word for ground that gently moves your ball somewhere you didn’t send it. And along those fairways stand large trees, the big, settled, old kind that look like they have watched a lot of golf and quietly kept score.

My plan was simple. I would protect the ball.

That meant The Regret, my 2011 driver, stayed in the bag. I patted its headcover on the first tee and told it to sit this one out. It said nothing, which is how it sulks.

I hit a six-iron off the first tee. It went about as far as a good bunt. But it was in the fairway, and the ball with the star on it was safe.

Chris appointed himself head of security. Every time I swung, he tracked the ball like a visiting dignitary. “Package is down,” he’d say. “Package is in the short grass.”

The strange thing was that it worked. Playing scared turned out to be the best golf I’ve ever played. Bogey, bogey, double, bogey. Nothing heroic. Nothing lost. I made the turn at forty-eight, which, for me, is the kind of number you text people about.

The ladder

The back nine tested the relationship.

On the twelfth, the ball took a lazy hop off a rise in the fairway and trickled under the low branches of one of those big trees. I found it sitting on a root, looking up at me like it was disappointed in my choices.

I chipped out sideways, which was fine, but on the way to the green I needed to explain what had happened, so I started at the bottom.

“It’s these shoes,” I said. “The spikes are too optimistic.”

Chris nodded.

“And the glove. It’s a medium, and today I’m a medium-large.”

Pete nodded.

“I teed it too low. Then the ball, which, okay, the ball is perfect, we’re not blaming the ball, skip that one. And then honestly the wind.”

There was no wind. A leaf near my foot had not moved in an hour.

“And maybe,” I said, and stopped, because the next rung on that ladder is me, and nobody wants to stand up there in front of his brothers.

Seventeen

By the seventeenth tee the ball and I had been together for sixteen holes. I trusted it. I felt like it trusted me. And that’s when the confidence crept in.

“I think it’s ready,” I said, and pulled The Regret out of the bag.

Pete looked at the club. Then at me. Then he looked down at the card, as if he wanted to remember exactly how good things had been.

I made a big, free, joyful swing for the first time all day. The Regret and the old ball met with a sound I can only describe as a reunion. It went high. It went long. It sliced, gracefully, into the biggest tree on the hole, and it did not come down.

We all walked over and stood underneath it, three grown men looking up into the branches like we were waiting for a cat. And there it was, way up on a limb, resting comfortably. You could just make out the little star.

I held The Regret up toward it, as if it might want to climb down the shaft.

It did not. It looked very settled. Honestly, it looked like it had found what it was looking for.

Pete made a small, gentle mark on the card. “So that’s one lost,” he said.

The scorecard

I finished with a new ball, a plain white one with no history at all, and made a quiet bogey on eighteen.

Pete totaled the card twice. Ninety-eight. My best round ever, by a lot, on a course that was a lot nicer to me than I’d earned, all because a faded ball made me too nervous to try anything.

On the drive home I unzipped that little side pocket and put a brand-new ball inside, with a small star drawn on it in pen.

Whoever owns this bag next is going to have a great sixteen holes.