I Asked My Brother for Just One Hole (He Kept All Eighteen, Gently)

I didn’t need to beat Pete. I want to be clear about that. Nobody beats Pete. Pete is the most experienced golfer among the brothers, the best athlete, and the steadiest man I know.

I just wanted one hole. One hole, out of eighteen, where my number was smaller than his.

I told him this on the first tee at Santa Anita, a county course in Arcadia with the San Gabriel Mountains standing behind it like they’d bought tickets. Pete nodded seriously, uncapped his pen, and printed JIM vs. PETE across the top of the card in capital letters. Our brother Pat, who is new to the game and delighted by all of it, asked if he was allowed to watch.

“It’s a public course,” I said. “History should have witnesses.”

There is real history here. The course was built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, and the full eighteen opened on October 12, 1938, which made tomorrow its eighty-eighth birthday. For years it hosted the Santa Anita Open every October. I mentioned this to Pete so he’d understand the stakes. He said that sounded nice and hit his drive down the middle.

The boomerang

The first green bends like a boomerang. I had never putted on a boomerang. I studied it, saw the obvious line, and committed to the obvious line, which went straight across the bend, through the fringe, and out the other side, like a man cutting through a parking lot.

Four putts. Pete two-putted around the curve, the way the green was clearly asking.

“Hole one, Pete,” he said, not unkindly.

The balloon school

The fourth hole sits where a U.S. Army balloon school had its hangars during World War I. I found this out before the round, and I thought about it on the tee, and I think that was my mistake.

I made a big, honest swing with The Regret, my 2011 driver, and I got so far under the ball that it went almost straight up. It hung there against the blue, high above the old balloon field, in no hurry at all.

Pat watched it the whole time with his hand over his eyes. “That,” he said, warmly, “was really, really high.”

“It was a tribute,” I said.

It came down about ninety yards away. Pete made par. I made seven and saluted.

The mounds

I had pictured flat ground in Arcadia as a pool table. I was wrong. The land here was shaped into rolling mounds and swales on purpose, back in the thirties, by someone who clearly wanted every ball to have a journey.

Mine had several. I’d land on the front of a mound and roll back to my feet like a dog bringing back a stick. I’d land on the back of one and disappear into a little valley where it was very peaceful and nobody could see me. Pat hit a lovely fairway wood on eleven and beat me on that hole too, which wasn’t technically part of the competition, but I felt it.

The crow

On the fourteenth, the green sits up above you, and the short second shot up there is harder than it looks. I hit mine to fifteen feet, my best approach of the day. I strode up the slope, took out my lucky ball marker, an old shiny coin I have used for years, and set it down behind my ball with ceremony.

A crow landed on the green.

It looked at me. It looked at the coin. It walked over, at the pace of someone who has done this before, picked up my lucky coin in its beak, and strolled off across the green toward a tree.

“Sir,” I said. I don’t know why I called it sir.

The crow did not stop. It flew up into a branch and sat there holding my coin, looking out over the mountains, owning it now.

I marked my ball with a tee. I three-putted. Somewhere above me, a crow was having the best day of anyone on the course.

Pete gave me a sympathetic look, which was somehow worse than the crow.

Eighteen

By the eighteenth tee I hadn’t won a single hole. Eighteen asks you to carry a set of mounds off the tee, which, given my relationship with mounds that day, felt like a personal invitation to a fight.

I took the club back slowly. And right at the top of my backswing, for no reason at all, I remembered the calendar invite from the boss. Monday, 8 AM. No agenda. Just the title: “Quick sync.”

I was so busy wondering what “quick sync” meant that I forgot to try. My whole body relaxed. The ball carried the mounds and bounced into the fairway like it had always lived there.

I made bogey. Pete, for the first time all day, made the same number I did.

He looked at the card for a long moment. Then, very neatly, he put down one word: Tie.

So I didn’t win a hole. But I did not lose the eighteenth at Santa Anita, on the day before its eighty-eighth birthday, against the best golfer in my family. In some sports, a draw on the road is a big deal.

One hundred nine strokes. Zero holes won. One tie, which I will be bringing up at every family gathering until that crow gives back my coin.