Page 91 of Putting Out
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“Odie this is crazy. You’ve destroyed this putting green.” Reilly stared down at the nearly brown putting surface and grimaced. “Pete is not going to be happy with you.”
“Pete has seen you practicing for the last few weeks and knows he’s about to watch history. He won’t mind me sacrif-ficing a green. We want to get this puppy as high on the stint meter as it will go. Drop one, Kenny.”
Kenny stood on the side of the green and let the ball between his fingers drop. The green was slanted down and to the left, the most challenging undulating green on the course. Odie made it faster by not letting Pete water it for days. All the while he was cutting it shorter.
The ball sped down the sloping hill, veering right toward the pond that was snuggled up to
the back of the green. It tried to hold on to the fringe before it took one more roll and dropped into the dark water.
“Perfect. Maybe not a nine, but at least an eight. Reilly, take your irons. We’ll go from eighty yards away, to a hundred, to a hundred and fifty. Then we’ll do chips and bunker shots.”
Reilly selected her lob wedge first and started walking the exaggerated steps she needed to do to mark off yardage. She stopped at around eighty yards and switched on the walkie-talkie that was clipped to her pants.
“All right. Now swing with your normal motion,” Odie crackled.
She took a ball out of her pocket and dropped it on the short grass of the fairway. She brought her club back and used a three-quarter swing to pop the ball into the air in the hopes that it would settle just on the surface of the green and track down to the hole.
It did, in fact, pop up on the air. It did hit the surface of the green just as she’d commanded it to. It was what it did after that was the problem. The ball hit the green, bounced and started rolling like a snowball on top of Mt. Everest, picking up speed as it traveled over the short grass past the hole and into the pond.
“Oops.” She approached the hole just in time to see her ball descend into the murky depths. “Oops, she says. Oops. You hear that, Kenny?”
“I did. Oops, what a ridiculous thing to say. You just hit it into the water.”
“I would like to see you do better,” Reilly charged.
“I’m not the one playing in the American,” Kenny countered. “What good is hitting the ball a mile if you can’t get it close to the hole on your second shot?”
Reilly grumbled all the way back to the eighty-yard spot she’d previously hit from.
“All right,” she gritted into the toy. “What do you want me to do?”
“The key is height. As high as it will go. The higher, the better.”
Reilly listened to Odie, but she had concerns. “What if it’s windy? Wind makes a ball unpredictable. If I hit it up into the atmosphere it becomes more susceptible to movement I can’t control.”
“The American isn’t known for being a wind tunnel. You need to trust me. You hit it high and let it drop close to the hole. Take off some of the energy the ball is carrying when it hits the green and it won’t roll into the water. Now, you can do this. We’ve already practiced this. Full swing.”
Reilly dropped the walkie-talkie in the grass next to her and checked the hole location. The yellow flag was clear from this distance and wasn’t moving at all. There was a slight breeze coming from the west. She knew enough about the nature of wind, having been its student for over ten years, that what she felt on the ground and what was happening a hundred feet in the air could be two different things.
Bringing her wedge back, she used the swing she’d learned to incorporate into her arsenal. She heard the difference before she saw the ball climbing higher than she was accustomed to watching. The pop indicated good solid contact and the ball soared up and rolled over in the air until it hit the green four feet away from the target and trickled to a stop just beyond the flag.
Birdie opportunity. Nice.
Reilly heard the crackle from the walkie-talkie and knew Odie was getting ready to brag. She switched it off and walked back to the green figuring she would let him gloat in person.
“I am a golf-fing gen-nius,” he declared.
There was nothing to do but tolerate the Texan twang that always seemed to get more pronounced the prouder he was of himself. Reilly made Kenny pull the flag and lined up her short, two-foot putt. She tapped it and watched it move faster than she predicted until it rolled over the hole and stopped on the other side.
Birdie opportunity lost. Shit.
“Don’t worry about that,” Odie declared.
“Don’t worry about it?” Kenny charged. “She just missed the putt. We’ve only got two weeks left. How the hell is she going to master high iron shots, and putting, and...”
“Relax,” Odie ordered. “The putting will come. Reilly’s the best-known green reader in the free world. Once she gets accust-tomed to the speed, she’ll be fine. I was more concerned with holding the green after the iron shot. Say what you want. You can hit the ball as far as you need with your driver, but there will be doglegs where you’ll have to go to your three wood, and other times maybe a low iron. You’ll be hitting from behind and you need to make sure you can still get your ball on the green and make it stay there.”
