I used to play golf with a regular foursome almost every weekend at Galloway. However, due to injuries, age, and a general lack of desire on our parts to wallow in the Memphis summer heat for four hours, we fell out of the habit. As a result, my clubs have been sitting in my garage all summer, gathering dust.
But last week, when a friend asked me to join a foursome to play nine late-afternoon holes at Mirimichi, the splendid course near Millington that was once owned by Justin Timberlake, I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my clubs and shoes and hosed off the dust — in the process, upsetting a gecko that had taken up residence in my left golf shoe. I drove out to Mirimichi well before our tee time, so I could hit some balls on the practice range. After 15 minutes of hacking, my creaky body finally began finding its way into some semblance of my old swing. This could be ugly, I thought.
It helped that we played from the “old man” white tees, something we used to scoff about, but I was happy to take any advantage offered. A fine time was had by all, and I hit enough decent shots to keep from getting too discouraged — and even made a couple of pars.
At the end of the round, we pulled our carts up to an outdoor bar area for a beer. An older man and his son arrived soon thereafter, and we chatted amiably for a couple minutes about general things — the weather, the course, etc. After a bit, the son said he had to go, but the older fellow (let’s call him Bill) said he was going to hang around a while. “I love you,” they said to each other, as the son walked away.
Bill told us that he didn’t play much anymore and that he just enjoyed riding around the course with his son. Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. Bill let us know that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was going regularly to MD Anderson Hospital for treatment. I’m no doctor but I know that prognosis is not a good one. We all offered our sincere wishes for good luck in dealing with his condition, but Bill casually moved on to other subjects: Where do you fellas live? What do you do for a living? That kind of stuff. Then, somehow, the conversation got around to how generally “crazy” things were in the country today, and I started to get a little nervous.
This is precarious conversational turf among strangers these days. You never know who’s going to pull a MAGA rant out of their butts. In fact, earlier in the week, I’d been subjected to a surprise diatribe about how the war in Ukraine was “fake” and was being promoted by the Democrats to help President Biden. This cockamamie spiel, I might add, came from a man whose name every Memphian would recognize. The crazy can come from anywhere, and I certainly had no interest in getting into a political argument with a possibly dying stranger at a golf course bar.
But one of my friends (thanks, Sam) said something to the effect of, “Well, Bruce writes about that stuff every week for the Flyer, you should ask him what he thinks.” I was stuck. And Bill didn’t mess around. “You write for the Flyer?” he asked. “Well, what do you think about Trump?”
I took a sip of my beer and said: “Well, I think he’s a crook and a conman. And I think it’s obvious he stole top-secret government documents and he should be prosecuted for a federal crime, like anyone else would be.”
There was a brief pause, then Bill said, “My son works over there at the naval base in Millington, so I asked him what would happen if he took any documents home. He said they’d arrest him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him.”
“Well, I think that’s what should happen to anybody who does that,” I said.
Bill didn’t say anything, but he nodded his head a little. I got the feeling he’d been a Trump supporter, but that we were now playing from the same tees.
