Miracle at Augusta Read Free Page B

game.”

8
    EASIER SAID THAN DONE, when this particular cracker has been living in my head rent-free for three decades. Trevino plants his tee, doffs his cap, and busts his iconic open-stanced move. His flat, abrupt chop—somewhere between martial arts and grunt labor—produces the same low, hard fade it has a million times before and ends up smack in the middle of the fairway.
    “I hit that sunnabitch quail high,” he says to his adoring gallery. “But I guess there aren’t a lot of quail on Oahu.”
    After ejecting a brown stream of tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup, Peters knocks it ten yards past Trevino, who at fifty-eight has lost some distance. Appropriately enough, I’m up last, and as I go through my routine, I can sense how anxious the gallery is for me to get it over with so they can hustle down the fairway and watch Trevino and Peters hit again.
    Nevertheless, I catch it solid and roll it past them both. Having hit the longest drive, I’m last to hit again, and this time the gallery doesn’t even pretend to wait. Halfway through my backswing, the scenery shifts like the furniture between acts of a play. I yank an easy wedge ten yards left, and when I fail to get up and down, I walk off the first green with a bogey.
    “Only the first hole,” says Johnny A. “Plenty of golf to be played.”
    True enough. And on the par-three 2nd, I hit my 6-iron to fourteen feet. Knock it in, I’m back to where I started and it’s all good. Unfortunately, I’m so eager to undo my opening bogey, I charge my birdie putt five feet past and miss the comeback for another bogey, and on three, I’m so pissed about one and two, I bogey that as well.
    Bogey. Bogey. Bogey. Not exactly the start I had in mind, and while I’m barfing on my FootJoys, Peters and Trevino are keeping theirs nice and clean, carding two birdies each. The round is barely fifteen minutes old, and I’m five strokes behind and well on my way to another traumatic defeat at the hands of my outdoorsy, tobacco-juice-spittin’ nemesis.
    At this point, I should summon my inner Lombardi and dig deep, but God knows what I’d dredge up. Instead, I relax and watch Trevino. For all I know, I’ll never get a chance to tee it up with Super Mex again, and if I can’t enjoy it, maybe I can learn a thing or two.
    The first thing that stands out is the way Trevino parcels his concentration. Yesterday, Irwin and Morgan never peeked from behind their game faces. From the handshakes at the first till they signed the scorecards in the trailer, they never stopped grinding. Trevino has a different MO. For the thirty seconds it takes to plan and execute his shot, he and Herman are as focused as assassins, but once the ball stops rolling, they go right back to shooting the breeze, picking up the conversational thread—dogs, Vegas, barbecue—wherever they left it, as if trying to win a golf tournament is a minor distraction from an otherwise carefree afternoon.
    And if the conversation lags, or we’re waiting for a green to clear, as happens on 5, Trevino walks to the edge of the nearest hazard and fishes out balls with his 7-iron. He reminds me of my cheap buddies back home, except that Trevino tosses his plunder to the kids in his gallery.
    I’m so captivated by the rare opportunity to observe Trevino in his natural habitat, I barely notice my own birdies on 7 and 8, and when I’m looking over my eagle putt on 10, the prospect of sinking it is such a nonevent, I roll it dead center from forty-five feet. Now I’m back in the hunt—two behind Peters and one behind Trevino—and the thought of evicting Peters from my brain is so tantalizing, I immediately start pressing again.
    On the next seven holes, I give myself legitimate birdie looks on five and never scare the hole. Surprisingly, Peters and Trevino can’t make anything either. Over the same stretch, Peters misses three putts shorter than mine—I guess legends and assholes aren’t immune to pressure