The Auld Man

I cannot now recall when I first became aware of the old man.  What I do recall is that he was always sitting under the shade of a drooping evergreen tree in a white Adirondack chair with his legs stretched in front of him and his head propped up by an enormous hand and wrist.  The tree was located just 15 feet or so from the first tee and he always faced so that he could look down the fairway.  It seemed his dress never changed.  An old pair of spiked shoes probably originally white but now well worn and discolored, gray slacks, a white golf shirt and a forest green cardigan sweater. He was never without a tan peaked cap and sunglasses with the largest, darkest lenses I have ever seen.  It was impossible to look into his eyes but one always had the feeling that he was looking directly at you.  Most often he would hold a golf club across his lap but I have never seen him swing it or even stand up in an address position. His sweater, which he wore even on the warmest days, was usually miss-buttoned so that the bottom lay uneven across his waist.

I cannot tell you his age, although his calloused and tanned hands and the wisps of white hair reaching out from under his cap suggested the mid-70’s or even later.  He was a slight but athletic figure and obviously had spent much of his life in the sun.  What one could see of his face was deeply browned.  Above all he radiated a quiet dignity.

I do not believe he had any sort of an official position with the club nor did it appear that he was a member.  Yet over the many years that I continued to see him no one ever said he was out of place when he sat in his accustomed location.  Members always referred to him as either the old man or the old pro but I never saw him give a lesson or for that matter speak to any of the golfers as they completed their tee shots other than for a good morning or a good afternoon. I came to learn that he took his daytime meals in a corner table in the men’s grillroom by himself.  The members studiously avoided intruding into his private moments and he never took part in the usual banter which is characteristic of such premises.  I never saw him take an alcoholic drink for that matter.

There was always some small talk of his background and of his astonishing achievements as a golfer somewhere in the past. It was not, however, until many years after I first joined the club and began to notice the old man that I finally learned his name.  It is not a name you will recognize unless you are a truly devoted student of the game.  His origins were, of course, Scottish but he had been in this country for at least 50 years when I first saw him.  None of my friends at the club knew anything more about him than I did.  There seemed little interest among the members in exploring his history or indeed, how he came to be a permanent fixture on our golf course.  The resident pro, a much younger man, busy with lessons and the sale of equipment and clothing rarely approached the old man and when he did their conversations were brief and very private.  Chris Brown, the starter who was also stationed at the first tee throughout the day, always spoke with reverence of the old man but never to the best of my knowledge, directly to him. I once asked Chris Brown to tell me about the old man but all he would say was that the old man had been a legend in Europe when very young and had made his mark when he came to the United States in some major tournaments.  Chris once spoke of some mysterious event in the old man’s mid-life which caused him to leave competition forever. I never learned anything about that even or if indeed it had actually happened.  I did learn, however, from other older employees at the club that the old man had been there for almost 40 years.