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I managed to play with most of the FOB’s, even though Hunter S. Thompson
did his best to sabotage me. One of the rounds was with Webster Hubbell,
who would later be indicted for bilking the Rose Law Firm, which Hilary
was a partner of, out of a couple of hundred thousand. But no one knew
that he was doing this yet, and ol’ Web seemed the soul of integrity. I
have to say that I didn’t pick this up from his golf game, either,
which throws dirt in the face of another premise of investigative golf
: that the game strips you naked. So the column from Little Rock, I turned
in was a little gimmicky and just as shy on hard goods as the one from
Rio. The editor ran it, but then he killed the column, and a few months
later, he himself was sent packing.
I took my idea to Golf Digest, and they signed me up to do a piece about
the O.J.Simpson case. O.J. was in the middle of his trial. What light could
his golf game shed light on his guilt or innocence ? This was the assignment.
The one that was finally going to put investigative golf on the map.
I golfed with his buddies at the Riviera Country Club and this time I scored
some tangible goods. “We’ve all wanted to kill our wives at one time
or another. I don’t see what the problem is,” one of his buddies told me.
When the article came out, I was invited to go on Entertainment Tonight,
where I said—the trial was still going on, and it was in the part where
all this DNA evidence was being introduced-- “Has anybody thought
of checking the lawn at Rockland for divots ? [O.J.’s alibi was that he
was home, practicing chips with his three-wood]. What this trial really
needs is a forensic divotologist. You realize, of course, that a person’s
divot is nearly as distinctive as his DNA.”
The piece completely validated investigative golf. I could see the day
when colleges would be offering a major in investigative golf with
a minor in forensic divotology, or vice versa. But Golf Digest got so many
angry letters that the magazine decided that investigative golf was
too hot, too controversial a concept for it to take on at the moment. Best
to stick with the instructional stuff.
It
was amazing how many old friends I hadn’t heard from in years caught my
minute of fame on Entertainment Tonight, with me in a bowtie,
peering over half-glasses and trying to look as professorial as possible,
like the professor of forensic divotology from the University of
Barcelona. For the next few days, I was deluged with calls and everybody
thought I was great.
A few years
after the O.J. piece, I was back in L.A. for Vanity Fair The magazine wanted
a piece on the private golf clubs where the stars play for its Hollywood
issue.
At Sherwood, the latest and most
expensive and hottest of the clubs, Jack Nicholson and Sean Connery’s stockbroker
introduced me to a golf guru from Hot Springs, Arkansas, whom he was promoting,
and guru explained to me the secret of the swing, which I may be
willing to share on some future occasion. Actually, the stockbroker did
a much better job of putting it into words than the guru did.
Since then, now that I have this knowledge, now that I understand the swing,
every time I go out, I can pretty much count on shooting in the low eighties,
and I hardly play any more, because I don’t have to play, I don’t feel
the need to play the way I used to when I was desperately struggling with
my swing. I play once, twice a year max. After the golf boom took off
four or five years ago, and every blooming boomer in bloomers started to
play, I just kind of lost interest. It lost its distinctiveness. Plus now
we have three little boys, and it’s hard to get away. But the oldest,
the eight-year-old, is starting to show an interest in the game, so maybe
I’ll get back out there this summer. Maybe I’ll even get back into
writing investigative-golf. The concept has kind of been in mothballs.
But it’s definitely a sound one. That round at Gavea, for instance,
provided a powerful snapshot of the Brazilian reality, the Brazilian disparity,
and validated another central premise of investigative golf : that every
course is a microcosm of the culture in which it is embedded.
This
spring I took the fam to Brazil for the boys’s spring break. This time
I didn’t stay at the Windsor Palace. Copacana has become a little too Fellinian.
You can’t swim in the water because the foam of the cresting waves is brown
with shit from the sewers that pour into the sea, mostly from the hilltop
favelas. Every so often a severed arm or leg from some gang war washes
up on the beach. So we spent at few days the Hotel Intercontinental in
Sao Conrado. There was a spectacular view of the Gavea golf course
from our balcony, but I didn’t feel the slightest urge to play it. Not
only because there was an epidemic of dengue fever in Rio and it wasn’t
a good idea to be outside for any length of time, but where I’m at now,
golf is just not what I want to be doing. A quick game of squash or tennis—yes.
But five hours on a golf course ? I can’t justify it.
One of the waiter’s at the Intercontinental’s pool turned out to have worked
for years at the Gavea Country Club. I asked him if he remembered the lady’s
champion ten years back-- a gorgeous-looking woman named Adriana.
“How could I forget,” he said.
The latest news about Color is that after rusticating himself in Paris
for a few years in his splendid apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, he
is back in politics, running for governor of Maceio, his home state, and
is probably going to win. As Antonio Carlos Jobim put it, Brazil is not
for beginners.
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