Ten and Eight

Vance Whitaker was going to win the 1973 Maine State Amateur.

I know there are no sure things in sports, especially golf. It’s a game full of bad breaks. Bad bounces, lip outs, weather that turns on you. Match play only makes it worse. Five rounds over four days can turn anything sideways. Maine golf was no joke in the seventies. Every year it came down to a handful of guys who could all hit the same shots. The winner was the one who could hit them when it mattered.

That year, everyone thought it would be Vance.

He’d come into his own that past season, his last at Stearns High School. He was long off the tee, 275 yards down the middle, which was a lot back then playing with wooden clubs. He could hit every shot in the book. Low fade, high draw, a hellacious seed of a two-iron that never got more than five feet off the ground and always found the fairway.

By the time the Amateur rolled around, Vance was the one man in the field hitting his peak at the right time. People talked about him like this was just the start. Like this was the chapter you’d point back to one day, when he was playing in the Masters. He was only eighteen in 1973, but he was the favorite. He’d come in fifth when he was sixteen, then finished runner-up last year.

“Your time will come,” they said.

This was his time. Our year. The moment he made a name for himself.

I knew it better than anyone. He had something the other guys didn’t. I could see it when he stepped onto the tee, when he stood over the ball and never rushed a swing.

He expected to win.

Everyone in Millinocket expected him to win, too. He was the one thing people had left to root for. The paper mill was on its last legs and everyone knew it. When it finally went under, Vance was supposed to be the town’s next claim to fame. You couldn’t go anywhere without his name coming up. At the diner. In the barbershop. Standing in line at the IGA where his mom bagged groceries. It was always the same thing. This kid’s different.

Stearns had a shit baseball team, barely enough bodies to field a football team, and basketball never mattered much in Maine back then. But golf? Everyone came out for the golf matches. I was his biggest fan. And he knew it.

I was ten that summer, the youngest caddie at Hillcrest Golf Club, and I carried his bag whenever he’d let me.

Millinocket had the best team in the state. A squad of one.

The whole town came out to watch Vance play matches every Saturday at Hillcrest. It was a social event, like meeting at church or a farmers’ market. People brought thermoses of coffee and packed sandwiches, walking along the fairways my dad and his grounds crew worked so hard to maintain.

Dad was the pro at Hillcrest. When people saw Vance play for the first time, they’d approach him in the pro shop and ask if he was responsible for Vance’s swing.

“You can’t teach what that boy has,” Dad would always say. “Wish I could take credit, but he showed up one day at ten years old and pounded a bucket swinging just like that.”

Sometimes I think Dad was prouder of Vance’s swing than his own.

Vance wasn’t a native Mainer. Truth was, he wasn’t really from anywhere. His dad had been in the military, and they’d moved around most of his childhood before his parents split and his mom ended up in Millinocket. Vance never talked about his dad, and his mom was always working.

So most days, he was at Hillcrest.

If he wasn’t on the course, he was on the range. If he wasn’t on the range, he was sitting in the pro shop with Dad talking golf. And sometimes he stayed with us.

His mom liked to stop at the bar after work. When she came home looking for a fight, Vance knew better than to stick around. Dad would make up the couch for him and in the morning, they’d be out on the range before the sun was up, hitting balls like nothing had happened.

By the time I came along, Vance was already part of the place.

A few weeks before the ‘73 Amateur, I tried to imitate his swing on the range. I addressed the ball the way Vance did and gave it a rip.

Feet slightly open, shoulder-width apart.

Slight choke down on the club.

No glove. No practice swing. No hesitation.

Steep takeaway, stopping just short of parallel, then everything firing in the blink of an eye. Legs first. Hips surging forward with enough force to nearly buck him out of his shoes. It was violent. That’s where I tripped over myself at the range.

I knew his swing better than anybody, and I still don’t know how he ever hit the ball swinging that hard.

***

The ‘73 Amateur was being played at Riverside Golf Club in Portland. Another star aligning in our favor. Vance had gone wire to wire three months earlier there in the Maine High School Championship, shooting 65-62 and whooping the field by twenty strokes. He made seventeen birdies in two days, almost one every other hole. He only missed two fairways and never found a sand trap. It was the easiest caddying gig in the world.

No one had ever won the Maine High School Championship and the Maine State Amateur in the same year. Vance was halfway there.

“It’s a lock,” he said to me the night before we left for Portland.

I remember it had been unusually warm that July in the days leading up to the tournament. Good golfing weather, but the black flies were murder in the fairways. I never complained. There was no place I’d rather be. Vance was getting in thirty-six a day in the lead-up to the Amateur, and I was on the bag for every one of them. He was my responsibility.

“It’s you and me, Georgie,” he’d say. “You and me.”

It was the most important I ever felt.

Vance offered me $10 a round, plus another $10 if he won the whole thing, which I knew he would. A full $60 for a week’s worth of work, more than I’d ever earned. But I didn’t want to take it. I would have carried his bag for free, just to have the best seat in the house. But Vance insisted.

“I owe your Dad for about fifty thousand balls over the years,” he said. “I won’t owe you, too.”

Vance always seemed to have cash in his pocket, but it never came from home.

Out-of-town players drifted through Hillcrest all summer looking for a game. A few decent golfers, but mostly loudmouths who thought they were better than they were. Vance never turned down a match. Stroke play, match play, skins, whatever they wanted. Vance never cared about the format. He never named the bet either. He’d just shrug and ask them what they had in mind. Sometimes he’d give them a few strokes just to make it interesting.

Didn’t matter what they played. Vance always won.

***

When Dad and I pulled up the morning of the first round to pick him up in Dad’s ’65 Impala, we weren’t the only car waiting outside his house. Dozens of people had shown up to see Vance off and wish him well. He stepped outside at the crack of dawn to raucous applause and shook every hand before getting in the car.

Vance loved the crowd. He played for them.

Golf support like that was usually reserved for well-to-do kids from Kennebunkport or Cumberland. But Vance was poor, just like us. The Amateur was technically open to anyone with a six handicap or better, but that wasn’t how it worked. Golf in Maine belonged to the coast, to  the WASP-y country clubs where no one from Millinocket was welcome.

Vance didn’t belong to that world. That’s why we rooted for him so hard. We didn’t just want him to win. We needed him to show everyone that poor people could play golf, too.

Vance’s mom didn’t have a car, and although anyone in town would have gladly driven him to Portland for the tournament, he always rode with Dad and me. The three of us had driven down together a few weeks earlier for the High School Championship. In a few more weeks, we’d be driving him south again, this time to Clemson.

Dad had played golf there before he met my mom, a lifelong Mainer, and followed her home after graduation. But he stayed in touch with the coach.

“I’ve got a kid I want you to come have a look at,” Dad said one day on the phone. “Worth the trip, I promise.”

The day Coach Newhouse came up to watch Vance play, he set a course record at Hillcrest and won himself a full ride.

Everyone knew what that meant. Vance was leaving. That’s why the whole town had shown up to see him off. Why a caravan of cars followed us from Millinocket to Portland. We all knew Vance would never play competitively in Maine again.

I couldn’t sit still during the car ride, bouncing back and forth across the back seat, trying to expel my nervous energy. Vance, meanwhile, was calm and wanted to talk. He loved bouncing ideas off Dad. Talking strategy. What shots he’d play from certain spots on the course. I tried to pay attention to everything, to commit every nugget of advice to memory. Anything that might help later.

We weren’t teeing off until 1:18, and Vance never liked going crazy with his warm-ups. He never putted. Didn’t believe in practicing feel shots. He wore all black, like he did for every tournament. It could have been a hundred degrees out, and Vance would still be playing in black.

“Like Johnny Cash,” he’d told me once when I asked him why. “Keeps the eyes on you.”

Golfers didn’t think much about that stuff back then. But Vance did. He played the mental game.

Vance shook a few hands, signed a few balls for eager kids who’d seen him play before. He always signed for kids. No matter what. A couple of reporters drifted over, notebooks already out, hoping to get a word before the round. Vance waved them off without breaking stride.

“After,” he said, sounding older than eighteen when he said it.

We headed to the range and went to work. Same as always. Nine swings with each club. Nine different directions and ball flights. It was a drill he’d learned from Dad.

“Play me in Tic-Tac-Toe,” Dad would say, calling out shots and bending the ball around our driving range.

The sound off Vance’s club was different. Sharper. Like the ball didn’t compress so much as disappear. A few of the other players stopped what they were doing to watch him swing. He loved it. He loved putting on a show.

You didn’t know who you were playing until you got to the first tee back then. Everyone was good. Most of the field hovered around a three. Vance didn’t carry a handicap. He was scratch.

When they called Vance to the tee box, I handed him a five-iron. He always finished with one towering five-iron. It was his favorite club. He never missed with it, and he didn’t that day.

I shouldered his bag, took a deep breath, and followed him to the first tee. I tried to keep my head down. I was still a kid, and all those eyes made me nervous. But that day, I noticed the crowd. Dozens of spectators. More than any of the other groups I’d watched tee off. I saw Dad standing beside the starter just beyond the ropes, his face sterner than it had been on the drive down.

When Vance stepped toward the first tee, I realized not everyone was watching him. More than half the crowd was fixed on the man stretching on the far side of the tee box. I figured he must have been someone important. Maybe the defending champion. Maybe someone from one of those coastal clubs Dad talked about.

There was no other caddy in sight, but there was no doubt this was who Vance would be playing against. The man stood beside a bag, this electric shade of blue, extending a club over his massive shoulders, stretching muscles I didn’t know you could stretch.

Vance stepped forward, and the man turned to face us.

“Vance Whitaker,” Vance said, extending a hand, which I watched get swallowed up by the fingers of the man on the tee box.

“Sandy Koufax,” he said, barely above a whisper.

Then he turned to me and smiled. My palms were slick, and without thinking I reached out my left hand instead of my right. I never shook left-handed, but he took it anyway. My hand vanished inside his.

I didn’t want to let go of the Left Arm of God.

***

Even though he’d stopped pitching years earlier, when I was still little, I still knew who Sandy Koufax was. Everyone did. For my generation, he was the face of NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week, a voice coming from the television in the pro shop while Dad kept one eye on the Red Sox. But for Dad’s generation, Koufax wasn’t a broadcaster. He was the Left Arm of God.

“The only pitcher who could probably throw a no-hitter every time he toed the rubber,” Dad once told me.

He didn’t, of course, but he threw four of them and won three unanimous Cy Youngs before quitting baseball at thirty because his arm couldn’t take it anymore. His career was like Halley’s Comet. For a brief, brief moment he burned brighter than anything else in the sky. You couldn’t take your eyes off of him. And then, he was gone. Quick as he came.

Out of all the games he pitched, though, he was probably best known for the one he didn’t.

Months before the ‘73 Amateur, I woke up one Monday in October and found out we didn’t have school.

“Did it snow?” I asked, running to the window.

“No,” Dad said from the kitchen table. “It’s Yom Kippur.”

I’d never heard of it. “What’s Yom Kippur?”

Dad lowered his paper and said, “It’s the day Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in the World Series.”

Before Koufax, Jewish holidays weren’t days off in Millinocket. As far as we knew, they weren’t days off anywhere else either. But when the best pitcher in the country sits out the biggest game of the year, people notice. In places like ours, Koufax was the only Jew most of us could name. Because of him, Yom Kippur became more than a word in the paper. It became a day on the calendar. The first time any of us learned that not every holiday was about Jesus, America, or turkey.

And now here he was on the first tee in the ‘73 Amateur, stretching that left arm, waiting to play Vance.

***

Koufax was only twenty years older than Vance. He looked tan, like he’d been carved out of bronze. He wore an off-white linen shirt and khakis. His jet black hair was cropped close, flecked with gray at the temples. He still looked like he could take the mound tomorrow. He’d been inducted into the Hall of Fame the year before, the youngest man ever honored in Cooperstown.

But Vance didn’t flinch.

This was Riverside Golf Club, not Dodger Stadium.

I stayed put while Vance and Koufax approached the starter to draw for the honor. I never took my eyes off them, though I could feel more and more spectators pressing in for a look at the Left Arm of God and the soon-to-be 1973 Maine State Amateur Champion.

The first tee went quiet. Not normal quiet. Different. Nobody said it out loud, but you could feel everyone thinking the same thing.

What was Sandy Koufax doing in Maine?

“Even,” Vance said.

The starter reached into his pocket and held out three tees.

“Odd,” he said. “Mr. Koufax has the honor. Play well, gentlemen.”

Vance turned and walked back toward me, steady, like this was just another match at Hillcrest.

The starter raised his microphone. “Fore please. Now on the tee, Mr. Sandy Koufax.”

The sound carried across the course, and I swear the hair on my arms stood up. I looked at Dad. He was staring straight ahead, the same stern look on his face.

There was a smattering of applause as Koufax pulled a driver from his bag and bent to tee his ball. It looked like a marble in his fingers. He gave the crowd a polite nod, almost shyly. For a moment I thought he might be nervous, but then I remembered he’d pitched to Mantle, Aaron, and Mays in front of 70,000 people. A few dozen Mainers weren’t going to shake him.

The first hole was the easiest on the course, a short par 5, straight as an arrow with a wide fairway from an elevated tee.

The crowd quieted as Koufax addressed the ball.

I’d only seen a handful of replays of him pitching, but the word that stuck was smooth. It never looked like he was throwing hard, but the hitters were always late.

His golf swing looked the same. No practice swing. Just a slow takeaway, right on plane, and a wide backswing that paused at the top. Nothing violent about it. His hips didn’t fire like Vance’s. They just moved through.

Whoosh!

The ball came off low and hard, cutting through the afternoon air. It chased out past a group of crows and settled in the middle of the fairway, about 240 yards out. A perfect drive.

I’d watched Dad give a thousand lessons, and Koufax’s swing was as clean as any I’d seen. Except for his left arm. It stayed bent through impact. Rigid. He couldn’t extend it.

Another round of applause. No nod this time.

“Fore please. Now on the tee, Mr. Vance Whitaker,” the starter bellowed into the microphone.

A pocket of applause broke out immediately, louder than it had been for Koufax. The Millinocket crowd. I could hear a few whistles mixed in.

I handed Vance the driver without him asking. On the car ride up, Dad and Vance didn’t have much to say about the opening tee shot. “Lay into one,” was all Dad had said.

A few people in the crowd shifted, pressing in a little closer. They’d seen Koufax. Now they wanted to see Vance.

I remember thinking, just be Vance.

Vance addressed the ball, same as always. Feet slightly open, shoulder-width apart. Slight choke-down on the club. No glove. No practice swing, no hesitation.

Whoosh!

The ball took off high and clean, climbing into a cloudless sky before dropping twenty yards past Koufax’s, dead center of the fairway. Vance didn’t watch it for long. He never did.

For a second there was silence, like everyone was tracking it together.

Then the applause came, louder this time.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

We were off.

***

I stared down at Vance’s ball, at least thirty yards past Koufax. It was caked in mud and sat in a divot, the first sign that things might not go our way that day. I had never seen it happen to Vance before and couldn’t believe the bad luck. Hundreds of yards of wide-open fairway and Vance’s ball landed in a spot of dirt no bigger than a dollar bill.

Vance didn’t say anything. He simply stood beside me like this was just a part of the plan and watched Koufax pace to the nearby 200-yard marker.

Most of the crowd that had packed the first tee had followed us down the fairway. When I looked back, the next group was shaking hands on the tee with barely a dozen people watching.

Koufax pulled a wood from his bag and took a few smooth practice swings beside the ball. The flag was just over the rise, moving gently in the breeze. Koufax addressed the ball and swung. Heads turned as it climbed the hill. Vance and I watched it land just over the crest.

A moment later the applause came rolling back down the fairway.

Vance was next. I left him beside the ball and paced off the yardage to the same 200-yard marker, counting silently in my head.

“187,” I said.

I could see Vance working it out behind his eyes. “Probably playing closer to 195 with the elevation.”

195 was a stock five-iron for Vance, but with the muddy ball and the lie, I didn’t think he could get it there.

“I think it’s a four, Vance.”

“No. I’ll hit the five.”

I hesitated. Vance and I rarely disagreed, but Dad always said the best caddies were the ones who spoke up when something didn’t feel right.

“Aren’t you—”

“No,” Vance cut in. “The divot doesn’t bother me. I’ll pick it clean.”

That was that. I handed him the five and stepped a few paces back.

Vance stood over the ball longer than usual, the club hovering above the grass like he wasn’t quite sure where the ground was. The crowd had gone quiet again. Somewhere behind us a crow cawed from the tree line. Vance wiggled the club once in his hands and settled his feet.

I tried to keep my eyes on him, but I could feel Koufax behind me. I turned my head just a little. He was standing a few steps away, watching quietly. Calm as could be.

Vance took the club back and lashed at the ball.

He didn’t pick it clean.

The club dug into the turf and tore up a slab of earth bigger than any divot I’d ever seen. Dirt sprayed into Vance’s eyes and he recoiled in his follow-through. The ball never had a chance of climbing the hill. It skidded forward and came down sixty yards short of the green. No one clapped. Vance turned to hand me the club without a word, and the two of us walked up the fairway with Koufax a few steps behind.

Golf teaches you to forget bad shots. By the time you reach the ball, you’re supposed to be thinking about the next one. But I had never seen Vance chunk a shot like that. It left a strange feeling in my stomach.

Koufax kept walking up the hill toward the green while Vance stood over his next shot.

“Run up and check the pin from the front, Georgie,” Vance said, pulling a wedge from his bag.

I jogged ahead. As the hill leveled off, the flagstick seemed to grow straight out of the ground. My heart sank when I reached the top. Koufax’s ball sat six inches from the cup. A gimme eagle. I tried not to look at it. Tried to count the steps in my head and keep my mind on the yardage, but I couldn’t. My eyes kept drifting back to the ball.

“Do you want me to put a marker down?” a voice asked.

I jumped a little.

It was Koufax, standing a few paces away.

For a second I couldn’t remember what he’d asked me.

“Y-yes,” I mumbled.

Koufax reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. I watched his hands as he bent down and set it carefully behind the ball, then lifted the ball from the green and rolled it once between his fingers before slipping it into his pocket.

I realized I was still standing there staring. I started pacing off the distance from the front of the green to the pin, counting in my head, but the numbers kept slipping away from me. I could feel him standing there while I did it, quiet as a statue.

When I finished, I turned and jogged back down the hill.

“Four yards from the front,” I called.

“What did he say to you?”

Again, I hesitated. “He asked if I wanted him to mark his ball.”

“How close is he?”

Vance rarely asked about another player’s shot. Not on the first hole, anyway. That wasn’t how he played.

“Six inches.”

Vance didn’t say anything. He just picked up his wedge and addressed the ball.

The crowd had followed us up the hill and settled along the rope line again. I could feel them leaning in.

Vance gave the club a short waggle and swung.

The strike sounded clean enough, but the ball came out low and never really climbed. It hopped once, twice, then died in the fringe just short of the green.

I couldn’t remember the last time Vance had to fight for par on the first hole.

A murmur moved through the crowd.

Vance turned and handed me the wedge. “Grab the putter,” he said.

We walked onto the green, and I took the flag while Vance crouched behind the ball. He never asked for advice on putts. This one wasn’t a long one. Fifteen feet, maybe a little more. His putter was like an extension of his arm, and no one had a better eye for breaks.

The crowd had gone quiet again.

Vance rolled it.

The ball came off the face a little dead, like it missed the sweet spot. It tracked toward the hole but slowed as it reached the cup and stopped a foot short. He stepped forward and tapped in for a disappointing par.

Polite applause followed, but nothing like the reaction on the tee.

Koufax walked toward his marker and reached into his pocket.

“Pick it up,” Vance said.

Koufax looked at him for a moment, then lifted the coin. Just like that, the hole was over.

The crowd began drifting toward the second tee, and Vance and I followed along behind them with Koufax up one.

I looked for Dad in the crowd, but he was nowhere to be seen.

***

Vance’s luck didn't change on the second hole, a short par 4 with a long row of pine trees on the left and a deep ravine on the right that was out of bounds. Koufax hit another perfect drive down the center of the fairway. He would have nothing more than an eight-iron to the green.

Vance had birdied this hole both days of the High School Championship a few months ago, and I was feeling good about his chances to get one back.

Until he called for the driver.

“Not the two?” I asked. Vance didn’t need driver to outdrive Koufax, and a two-iron would only leave him with a wedge into the green.

“Driver,” he said.

I handed it to him and stepped off to the side, a few feet from Koufax. Vance teed the ball up higher than usual, something he did when he really wanted to smack one.

He gave the club one loose waggle and took a violent rip at it.

The ball started straight enough, but it kept drifting right. The crowd leaned with it.

“Sit,” someone whispered.

It didn’t.

The ball sailed over the edge of the fairway and disappeared into the ravine. A few groans rose from the crowd, and I felt my heart sink. Vance didn’t react. He just watched the spot where the ball had gone down, then bent over and reached into his pocket for another.

He set the new ball on the tee and looked over at me.

“Want the two?” I whispered.

He nodded, and I handed it to him without another word passing between us.

This time the swing was different. Shorter and controlled. The two-iron came off low and hard, a bullet that chased its way down the fairway and rolled out a few feet past Koufax’s drive.

Koufax followed with his eight-iron and stuck it to twelve feet.

Vance fought his way onto the green in four and two-putted for a double bogey.

Koufax lagged his birdie putt to a foot, and Vance said, “That's good.”

Vance walked to the next tee without looking at anyone in the crowd.

Two down.

***

The third hole didn’t go any better.

Koufax hit the middle of the fairway again. The middle of the green, too. Nothing flashy. No big reactions from the crowd. Just another clean swing and another ball rolling to the safe part of the putting surface.

Vance swung harder, which was saying something, because nobody swung harder than Vance. His swing had always looked violent, like he was trying to drive the ball straight through the earth. But now it looked different. Not loose or confident, but forced.

He didn’t say much to me walking down the fairway, and I didn’t say much to him either. We’d been together on the course all summer, and for the first time, I didn’t know what to say. He started playing like someone else. For the first time since I’d known him, Vance looked unsure of himself.

He lost the third.

On the fourth, he drove it into a stand of birch trees and had to chip out sideways. Koufax two-putted from twenty feet and picked up another hole without much trouble.

Four down.

After that the holes started to blur together. Lip-out. Bunker. Nothing going Vance’s way. Koufax never missing a fairway or giving anything back. The gallery had grown quieter. The people who had followed us from Millinocket still clapped when Vance hit a good shot, but the rest of the crowd had started to shift their attention.

By the time we reached the eighth tee, Vance had lost four more holes.

Eight down.

The ninth was a short par three over water. Koufax struck a smooth iron that landed on the middle of the putting surface and rolled out to ten feet. Vance came up a few feet short of the green, the ball checking up in the fringe.

He chipped close, but Koufax rolled the putt in anyway.

Nine down.

On the tenth tee, nobody was talking much anymore. The gallery had grown bigger with every hole, but the noise had faded. People walked quietly behind us now, like they were following a funeral procession. That’s when it hit me.

If Koufax won this hole, the match would be over.

I scanned the crowd and finally found Dad along the rope line. His arms were folded across his chest, and he was staring out toward the fairway like he was trying to solve a problem no one else could see. He didn’t look at me.

I followed Vance onto the tee box and set his bag beside the markers. Nine holes down meant a new side. A new nine. That’s what golfers always say.

For a moment I tried to believe it. If Vance could just win a hole, get something going, maybe the match would turn. Heroes are supposed to do things like that. But then I realized that before today, I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Vance lose two holes in a row.

He’d just lost nine.

He looked the same as he always did. Same black shirt. Same calm face. If you hadn’t been keeping score, you might have thought nothing unusual was happening. But standing beside him, I knew it wasn’t the same.

I’d spent too many hours walking fairways with Vance not to notice. The stillness in him wasn’t confidence anymore. It was something tighter. He wasn’t worried about losing. He was worried about embarrassing himself. Even without looking up, I could feel it coming off him.

Panic.

***

For the tenth time that day, Koufax teed his ball first. Like Vance, he was unreadable. He had to know how strange the match had been, that he was a good player having the round of his life. But he never hurried. Never looked rattled. He didn’t celebrate the holes he won, and he didn’t seem to notice the crowd growing behind us. He just kept playing golf.

But I still believed Vance was better. The Vance I’d watched all summer wasn’t the man standing beside me. I kept waiting for the real Vance to show up.

Koufax sent another drive straight down the middle. He hadn’t missed a fairway all day.

Vance swung harder and blew his past it again, but the ball found a fairway bunker.

Koufax knocked his approach to twenty-five feet.

I felt the match slipping away.

Vance splashed at the bunker shot, but the ball caught the lip and popped out weakly into the rough ten yards away. He stared after it a moment longer than usual. For the first time all day, it looked like he might lose his temper.

But he didn’t.

He walked a few steps toward the ball, stopped, and looked over at Koufax.

“I concede.”

For a moment, no one said anything. Then the starter’s voice carried across the fairway.

“Match, Mr. Koufax. Ten and eight.”

Koufax met him halfway up the fairway, smiling in a way that was almost too kind.

“Nice playing with you.”

They shook hands, and God as my witness, I was so stunned I can’t remember if Vance said anything back.

Koufax took my hand for the second time that day. It disappeared inside his again as he mouthed, “Thanks,” before shouldering his bag and slipping off into the crowd. A few people started toward him with programs and scorecards, but within seconds he was gone.

Then I saw Dad.

He stepped in beside Vance and put an arm around his shoulders, almost like he was shielding him from the crowd gathering along the rope line. I started toward them too, but halfway there I remembered something.

Vance’s ball was still sitting in the rough.

I ran back and picked it up. For some reason, I felt like I needed to keep it.

***

I remember the car ride home better than anything else from that day. The shock of what had happened slowly settling into the certainty that it had. For a while none of us said much. Just the hum of the road under Dad’s Impala and the trees sliding past the windows. Finally, Dad told us what he’d pieced together from people in the crowd.

“Koufax moved out here after he retired. Bought three hundred acres up in North Ellsworth. Living off the grid, apparently. Chopping his own wood. Fly fishing. Playing golf.”

“Why would he play the Maine Amateur?” I asked.

Dad shrugged.

“Because he can. Because he misses competition.”

Vance didn’t say much on the ride home. He didn’t want to dissect the round. Didn’t want to relive it. We dropped him off like always, and this time, thankfully, no other cars were waiting outside. Dad said he’d swing by tomorrow to check in on him, and Vance offered me a weak smile before disappearing inside.

When it was just Dad and me in the car again, we didn’t talk about the match. I didn’t ask if he thought Vance would be okay. Saying something like that out loud felt dangerous.

So I lied to myself.

I told myself Vance would still be Vance tomorrow.

But something between us broke that day.

His match was the lead story in the sports section the next morning. A photograph of him and Koufax shaking hands on the tenth hole sat above a play-by-play of the round.

The first time in tournament history a player had been eliminated on the tenth hole.

When Dad stopped by his place the next day to check on him, he wasn’t home. Same thing the day after that.

He stopped showing up at Hillcrest.

Stopped playing golf altogether.

He just…disappeared.

The course felt different without him. I wasn’t carrying a bag anymore. Most days I just wandered around the range, shagging balls for Dad or watching the regulars hack their way through buckets. Every now and then someone would catch one clean and the sound would snap my head around. For a split second I’d expect to see Vance standing there.

But it was never him.

A few of the members asked Dad where he’d gone, but after a while even that stopped.

Dad even went down to the IGA to ask his mom if she’d seen him. She was bagging groceries like always. “Comes and goes as he pleases, that one,” she said, like it didn’t concern her much either way.

People started coming into the pro shop with sightings. Someone swore they’d seen him sitting by the train tracks with a cigarette in his hand. I didn’t want to believe that. Vance didn’t smoke. But then again, I realized I didn’t really know this version of Vance anymore.

Koufax ended up losing in the semifinals, and there was a nice write-up about him the week after. Vance’s name wasn’t mentioned, and it wouldn’t ever be mentioned again.

***

Three weeks later, I was in the living room watching television when I heard a car’s brakes squeak out front. We lived on a dead-end street, and cars didn’t usually stop at our place unless someone was coming for Dad, so I got up and looked out the window. Someone was walking up the driveway.

Then I realized who it was.

“Dad!” I yelled. “Vance is here!”

Dad came out of the kitchen so fast he nearly bumped into me in the hallway. For a second, we both just stood there watching him through the screen door like we were seeing a ghost.

He looked different. His hair was unkempt and hung loose around his ears. A patch of light stubble covered his jaw, like he hadn’t bothered shaving in a while.

Dad opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

“Vance,” he said, the relief in his voice impossible to miss.

Vance stood there with his hands buried in his pockets. He shifted his weight like he wasn’t sure where to put himself. It was strange seeing him look uncomfortable on a porch he’d spent half his life standing on.

Dad invited him inside, but Vance shook his head.

“Can’t stay long,” he said. His voice sounded flatter than I remembered. “Just wanted to say goodbye.”

He told Dad he was leaving earlier than expected for Clemson. Dad looked surprised.

“How are you getting there?”

Vance hesitated. “I’ve got a ride,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder.

I looked past him and saw a beat-up Ford idling at the curb, an older man behind the wheel I’d never seen before, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

I felt my stomach drop. Dad and I were supposed to drive him down to Clemson. One last trip. Just the three of us.

Vance turned back to Dad.

“I really appreciate everything,” he said quietly. “It…it meant a lot.”

Dad nodded. “There’s always a place for you here, Vance.”

For a moment, no one said anything. The porch went quiet, just the hum of bugs out in the yard.

“If you need anything down there, Coach Newhouse is a good man.”

Vance looked at him. For a second it seemed like he might say something. His mouth opened, then closed again, and he nodded.

Vance looked over at me. I wanted him to say something like he used to on the range. But he didn’t. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled bill.

“I owe you this,” he said, holding it out.

I looked down at it. Ten dollars. I hadn’t thought about the money in weeks.

“You don’t have to—” I started.

“You earned it,” Vance said, his voice quiet, almost distant. “Fair’s fair.”

I didn’t want to take it. But he kept holding it there until I finally reached out and took it. Then he stuck out his hand to shake.

“Take care, Georgie.”

We shook, and then he turned and started down the walk.

That’s when I remembered.

I ran upstairs, opened my nightstand, and grabbed the ball from the match. I took the stairs two at a time and snatched a pen from the kitchen table on the way out.

“Vance!” I yelled.

He had just opened the passenger door of the Ford and turned back when he heard me. I ran up and held out the ball.

“Can I have your autograph?”

For a moment he looked surprised. Then he smiled, the first real smile I’d seen from him since the tournament. He took the pen and wrote his name across the scuffed cover. When he handed it back, he ruffled my hair the way he always used to.

“See you around, Georgie.”

Then he climbed into the car, and I watched the Ford disappear down our road.

I kept the ball he left in the rough. It’s scuffed and brown with Maine dirt, but it’s the only thing I have left of Vance now.

Sometimes I take it out and roll it between my fingers, the way Koufax did on the first green.

And I still wonder what might have happened if Vance had picked that five-iron clean on the first hole.